Lamar W. Hankins : The Bowdlerizing of Huckleberry Finn

Posted on January 20, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

Huck and Jim. Image from Teachers.ash.org.

The bowdlerizing of Huckleberry Finn

By Lamar W. Hankins / The Rag Blog / January 19, 2011

A recent commentary by Leonard Pitts in the Miami Herald explained a significant problem with publication of a new edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. The new edition removes all use of the words “nigger” and “Injun,” substituting less offensive words.

In Pitts’s view, the scrubbing of these words robbed the novel of its authenticity by ignoring Twain’s purpose in using the language that he chose and ignoring the social, cultural, and historical context in which the novel takes place.

Pitts explains, “Huck Finn is a funny, subversive story about a runaway white boy who comes to locate the humanity in a runaway black man and, in the process, vindicates his own.” I’ve always had a similar view of the novel, but it never occurred to me until reading Pitts’s words that I had had an experience similar to Huck’s, of becoming aware of another’s humanity, an experience shared by many others and one that may be universal.

I lived in Vidor, Texas, a rural community with a well-deserved reputation for racism, until I was four years old, when my family moved to the oil refinery town of Port Arthur. When I was seven, my parents, both of whom worked at refineries (my father as a machinist, my mother as an RN), hired a black woman to look after me and my younger brother. During the summer that I was 10 years old, I had many serious discussions with her about the ways of the world, especially about race relations and how African-Americans had been treated throughout the South since the beginning of this country.

My guess is that Lutricia Valore was about 25 years old in 1955. We called her by her nickname, Lou. The culture at that time in the south permitted even young children to address black women by their first name or whatever other informal name might apply. Lou cooked our food, cleaned our house, supervised our play, and took care of us when we had an accident or were sick.

She was my first sociology and history teacher. She told me about slavery. About having to sit in the back of the bus. About “separate but equal” schools. About being mistreated and disrespected by many whites. About segregation. About the slums in which she and her two children and husband lived. About the frequent humiliation she felt.

After reading Leonard Pitts’s words, I realized that Lou had transformed herself in my child’s eyes from the hired help to a person with fears, concerns, problems, and joys common to all human beings. She was my caretaker and became my friend. When she told me about how she was treated, I reacted first with disbelief that such a kind, decent person would be treated so badly. Then it made me angry. I wanted to do something about it, not recognizing that 10-year-old children can’t rectify society’s wrongs. I started looking around to see if I could find any of the circumstances she had described. I did not have to look far.

When I observed the city buses going down the street, I saw that all the blacks were in the back and the whites were in the front. When I went to the Weingarten grocery store with my mother, I saw the water fountains, side by side, one marked “Whites only,” and the other marked “Colored.”

In my first public rebellion against the established order, I decided to drink from the “Colored” fountain to see if the water tasted different from that in the “Whites only” fountain. I knew that my action violated accepted custom, but I did it anyway, and no one complained. I continued drinking from that fountain as long as my family shopped at that store. Later, when I rode the city buses to junior high school, I purposely sat in the back.

As a result of what I had learned from Lou, I continued my rebellion through the years by arguing about the nature of slavery with a junior high school history teacher and about job discrimination with a Sunday school teacher who did not want blacks working at the refinery because they would compete with him for jobs, an unrecognized acknowledgment that blacks could be as qualified as he to do the same work.

Huck Finn recognized Jim as a person of value because he came to know him at a basic human level. He saw that Jim had to make decisions about right and wrong, good and bad, fair and unfair, just as he did.

Both Jim and Huck were seeking freedom. To each one, freedom meant something slightly different, just as it means different things for different people all over the globe. And the novel deals with other human problems as well, including lying, deceit, cruelty, moral values, the role of family in a person’s life (Did Huck and Jim become a family?), selfishness, and hypocrisy.

All of these human issues are important for both children and adults to figure out for themselves. If a novel set shortly before the Civil War can help us discuss these issues, it has to be of value. If we take away from it its context, we rob it of some of that value as an educational tool. If some people are offended by the words common to the period and those words are censored, what does that take from the novel? For one thing, it blunts the razor-sharp edge of Twain’s depiction of racism in America.

We haven’t been able to have a broad, serious discussion about race and race relations in the 125 years since Huckleberry Finn was published. After all, we are still arguing about the reasons for the Civil War, in the face of documentary evidence that slavery and race were at its heart.

Now, we learn that a production of the play Joe Turner’s Come and Gone by the late, widely respected African-American playwright August Wilson is being forbidden by the superintendent of schools in Waterbury, Connecticut, because it contains the word “nigger” in several places.

Removing offensive words from the pages of Huckleberry Finn or any other literary work will make that important discussion about race less likely, and if our children read such works in a bowdlerized form, there will be no reason for them to even confront what such language is all about.

[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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Ted McLaughlin : Haley Barbour’s ‘Eye for a Kidney’ Deal

Posted on January 19, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour: organ trafficker?

An eye for a kidney?
Haley Barbour’s terrible precedent

By Ted McLaughlin / The Rag Blog / January 19, 2011

See “Haley Barbour breaks the U.S. Organ Transplant Act,” Below.

Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour has received a lot of good press recently for commuting the life sentences of two sisters, Jamie and Gladys Scott (who had been convicted in 1994 of setting up a victim for an armed robbery that netted $11).

One of the sisters needed a kidney transplant, and the other had offered her kidney for the transplant. Barbour said, “The Mississippi Department of Corrections believes the sisters no longer pose a threat to society. Their incarceration is no longer necessary for public safety or rehabilitation, and Jamie Scott’s medical condition creates a substantial cost to the State of Mississippi.”

Let me be clear here — I do not oppose the commutation of the women’s prison sentences. There were many who believed the sentence had been too harsh to begin with, and the women had already served 16 years of that sentence. If the sisters did not pose a threat to society, and there was no need of further “rehabilitation,” then the governor did the right thing by commuting their sentences and freeing them.

And it is also within the powers of the governor to release them to save the state substantial medical bills, even if that seems a rather hard-hearted reason. It is even within the governor’s right to commute the sentences for political reasons — to repair some political damage he caused himself by downplaying the role of the White Citizen’s Councils in fighting against Civil Rights in the 1960s.

But there is something about the governor’s action in commuting these sentences that I find very troubling. He made a it requirement that one of the sisters give up her kidney — the commutation would not have happened without it (and they could be re-incarcerated if the donation failed to take place).

Now I don’t doubt that the sister was happy and very willing to donate a kidney to her sister. It is her right to do so (or not to do it). But she should not have been forced to do so with the threat of a continuing incarceration. By making it a requirement, in effect, the governor sold a commutation — and the price was one kidney. This sets a very bad precedent, and may violate the law. [See story below.]

Is it now a policy of the State of Mississippi that a prisoner can purchase his release by selling (donating) a kidney, or some other body part? It is not outside the realm of possibility that a future ethically-challenged governor (not uncommon for politicians of both parties) could repeat this action to get a kidney (or other body part) from a prisoner for a friend, family member, or high-profile person. After all, the precedent has now been set.

The governor had reasons to commute these sentences if that’s what he wanted to do, but it was just wrong for him to demand the payment of a kidney for the release. And I’m shocked that few people have noticed the ethical and moral problems of the governor’s decision.

Prison is for punishment and rehabilitation. It is not, and should never be, a source of organ donations.

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

Jamie and Gladys Scott.

Haley Barbour breaks the U.S. Organ Transplant Act

Gladys and Jaime Scott went to a Mississippi prison for life in 1994 after committing an armed burglary which netted the then teens $11. On December 30, 2010, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour suspended the life sentences, but one sister’s release is contingent on her giving a kidney to the other. [….]

While donating a kidney is extremely safe when donors are healthy and a rigorous evaluation has taken place, it does have a small risk of death. Requiring a prisoner to agree to take this risk in return for parole violates international transplant standards and human rights.

The idea that prisoners are able to consent to risky medical treatment in return for benefits is one that ethicists have long questioned. It’s one step removed from the Chinese government practice of selling the organs of executed prisoners and kidneys from live Falun Gong and others in jail. The Chinese have made the practice illegal in response to international pressure, although few experts think it has stopped.

Governor Barbour and the prison board seem unaware that under the 1984 National Organ Transplant Act (NOTA) (42 U.S.C. 274e) it is “unlawful for any person to knowingly acquire, receive, or otherwise transfer any human organ for valuable consideration for use in human transplantation.”

What could be more “valuable consideration” than a get out of jail card? And given the state’s concern about the cost of Jaime’s dialysis they too receive valuable consideration in dumping Jaime and Gladys on Florida for a possible transplant.

Now, according to NOTA, any person who violates the valuable consideration provision “shall be fined not more than $50,000 or imprisoned not more than five years, or both.” The State Attorney General in Mississippi should move immediately to bar the parole if the condition of transplantation is not rescinded.

And the U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder should uphold the National Organ Transplant Act and ensure that if the parole proceeds as planned with organ donation a requirement, it be made clear that any hospital, physician or other individual including Mississippi state officials who participated in the procurement and transplant of the organ will be charged under NOTA. [….]

— Frances Kissling / The Huffington Post

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Thorne Dreyer : Journalist, Author, and ‘Investigative Poet’ John Ross (1938-2011)

Posted on January 19, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

The late great John Ross.

Farewell to our great friend John Ross

See “Los Muertos,” a poem by John Ross, Below.

By Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog / January 18, 2011

Yesterday I received an email with the following message: “John Ross passed peacefully in the arms of his good friends Arminda and Kevin in Tzipijo, near Lake Patzcuaro, Michoacan, after a two-year lucha against liver cancer.” The message was sent from John’s email address and included the above photo.

John Ross, who styled himself an “investigative poet,” was a long-time contributor to and friend of The Rag Blog. He was a singular talent whose work was always enlightening and entertaining, every post a revelation. No one ever wrote about Mexico like John Ross did… or ever will again.

Ross, whose roots were in the old left politics of New York City and the beat poetry scene of San Francisco, visited Austin last March promoting his latest book, El Monstruo: Dread and Redemption in Mexico City, and reading his poetry at MonkeyWrench and Resistencia bookstores.

Our mutual friend Mike Davis, himself a noted author and educator, wrote about John and El Monstruo: “From a window of the aging Hotel Isabel, where he has lived for almost a quarter of a century, John Ross sings a lusty corrido about a great, betrayed city and its extraordinary procession of rulers, lovers and magicians.”

Indeed, everything John Ross ever wrote was a “lusty corrido,” a vivid grito of protest and celebration.

The Rag Blog last heard from John late last year when he informed us he would be suspending his writing indefinitely due to the rigors of the latest round of chemotherapy to treat his advancing cancer of the liver, which had been in remission but had returned with a vengeance.

In my copy of El Monstruo, John Ross wrote, “To Thorne: Desde el corazon del Monstruo sigues en la lucha!”

[Thorne Dreyer, a pioneering ’60s underground journalist, is a director of the New Journalism Project, Inc., editor of The Rag Blog, and host of Rag Radio.]

John Ross dies:
Opposing every war was his obsession

The American rebel journalist, poet, novelist and human shield, John Ross (New York, 1938), deacon of Mexico correspondents, died yesterday at 8:58 a.m. in Santiago Tzipijo, Michoacan, after battling for two years against liver cancer.

A wake is being held on the shores of Lake Patzcuaro. He will be cremated in Urapan and his ashes scattered in Mexico and in several cities in the U.S., according to his wishes.

Ross, whose last book is entitled El Monstruo: Dread and Redemption in Mexico City, arrived at Casa Santiago, on the shores of the lake, on Dec. 31 in a taxi, reports Kevin Quigley, who with his wife is owner of the guest house. Both were compadres of the New Yorker.

Two days earlier, friends of the journalist had retrieved his archives from the room he occupied in the hotel Isabel in Mexico City, where he had lived since the week following the earthquake of 1985. His files are to be temporarily stored at the Cemanahuac Educational Community in Cuernavaca.

John Ross was a man of the Left and one of his great obsessions was the struggle against wars of every type. His great labor as an independent journalist and correspondent was to participate in and cover the political and social events that happened here, to make them known in the United States. “He never quit telling the gringos what was happening in Mexico” …

— La Jornada / Mexico City / January 18, 2011
(Translated by Dick J. Reavis / The Rag Blog)


John Ross. Photo from Con Carlitos.


LOS MUERTOS

After they had waited on line

for nearly eight straight hours

to vote for the candidate of their choice,

The Dead were finally informed

that they were no longer inscribed

upon the precinct lists of the Republic.

But we have only come to exercise

our rights as responsible citizens

The Dead complained bitterly

for it seemed to them that the President

in the spirit of national unity

had called upon all the people

to cast their ballots

as is the democratic norm.

The official registrar

who was still quite alive

could only explain

the exclusion of the calacas

with platitudes about Morality.

Oh said The Dead and voted anyway.

But your votes are clearly illegal

winced the official Official,

they can’t be counted in this election.

You have a point The Dead replied,

maybe they won’t be counted now

but surely you will count them later.

© John Ross


When John Ross was 18, he was a young member of the Beat Generation, reading his poetry in Greenwich Village bars with the great bass player Charles Mingus. — Beatitude Poetry

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Frank Bardacke : John Ross Had All the Right Enemies

Posted on January 19, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

John Ross, 1938-2011. Photo by Marcia Perskie, courtesy of Michael James, Heartland Cafe, Chicago.

All the right enemies:
Farewell to the utterly unique John Ross

By Frank Bardacke / CounterPunch / January 18, 2011

John’s gone. John Ross. I doubt that we will ever see anyone remotely like him again.

The bare bones, as he would say, are remarkable enough. Born to show business Communists in New York City in 1938, he had minded Billie Holliday’s dog, sold dope to Dizzy Gillespie, and vigiled at the hour of the Rosenberg execution, all before he was 16 years old. An aspiring beat poet, driven by D.H. Lawrence’s images of Mexico, he arrived at the Tarascan highlands of Michoacan at the age of 20, returning to the U.S. six years later in 1964, there to be thrown in the Federal Penitentiary at San Pedro, for refusing induction into the army.

Back on the streets of San Francisco 18 months later, he joined the Progressive Labor Movement, then a combination of old ex-CPers fleeing the debased party and young poets and artists looking for revolutionary action. For a few years he called the hip, crazy, Latino 24th and Mission his “bio-region,” as he ran from the San Francisco police and threw dead rats at slumlords during street rallies of the once powerful Mission Coalition.

When the not so ex-Stalinists drove him and others out of PL (“break the poets’ pencils” was the slogan of the purge) he moved up north to Arcata where he became an early defender of the forest and the self-described town clown and poet in residence. From there it was Tangier and the Maghreb, the Basque country, anti-nuke rallies in Ireland, and then back to San Francisco, where he finally found his calling as a journalist.

“Investigative poet” was the title he preferred, and in 1984, he was dispatched by Pacific News Service to Latin America, where he walked with the Sendero Luminoso, broke bread with the Tupac Amaru, and hung out with cadres of the M-19.

In 1985, after the earthquake, he moved into the Hotel Isabel in the Centro Historico of Mexico City, where for the next 25 years he wrote the very best accounts in English (no one is even a close second) of the tumultuous adventures of Mexican politics.

During the Mexican years, he managed to write nine books in English, a couple more in Spanish, and a batch of poetry chapbooks, all the while he was often on the road, taking a bus to the scene of a peasant rebellion or visiting San Francisco or becoming a human shield in Baghdad, or protecting a Palestinian olive harvest from marauding Israeli settlers.

He died Monday morning, January 17, a victim of liver cancer, at the age of 73, just where he wanted to, in the village of Tepizo, Michoacan, in the care of his dear friends, Kevin and Arminda.

That’s the outline of the story. Then there was John. Even in his seventies, a tall imposing figure with a narrow face, a scruffy goatee and mustache, a Che T-shirt covered by a Mexican vest, a Palestinian battle scarf thrown around his neck, bags of misery and compassion under his eyes, offset by his wonderful toothless smile and the cackling laugh that punctuated his comical riffs on the miserable state of the universe.

He was among the last of the beats, master of the poetic rant, committed to the exemplary public act, always on the side of the poor and defeated. His tormentors defined him. A sadistic prison dentist pulled six of his teeth. The San Francisco Tac Squad twice bludgeoned his head, ruining one eye and damaging the other. The guards of Mexico’s vain, poet-potentate Octavio Paz beat him to the ground in a Mexico City airport, and continued to kick him while he was down. Israeli settlers pummeled him with clubs until he bled, and wrecked his back forever.

John Ross at Day of the Dead celebration. Photo from CounterPunch.

He had his prickly side. He hated pretense, pomposity, and unchecked power wherever he found it. Losing was important to him. Whatever is the dictionary opposite of an opportunist — that’s what John was. He never got along with an editor, and made it a matter of principle to bite the hand that fed him.

It got so bad, he left so few bridges unburnt, that in order to read his wonderful weekly dispatches in the pre-internet years, I had to subscribe to an obscure newsletter, a compilation of Latin American news, and then send more money to get the editors to send along John’s column.

He had his sweet side, too. He was intensely loyal to his friends, generous with all he had, proud of his children, grateful for Elizabeth’s support and collaboration, and wonderful, warm company at an evening meal. When my son, Ted, arrived in Mexico in 1990, John helped him get a job, find a place to live, introduced him around, and became his Sunday companion and confidant, as they huddled in front of John’s 11-inch TV watching the weekly broadcasts of NBA games.

He was a great, true sports fan, especially of basketball. One of the last times I saw him was at a friend’s house in San Francisco, in between radiation treatments, watching a Warriors game on a big screen TV, smoking what he still called the “killer weed.” Joe and I listened to him recount New York Knicks history, the origin of the jump shot, and Kareem’s last game, which somehow led to a long complaint about kidneys for sale in Mexico that had been harvested in China out of the still warm body of some poor, rural immigrant who had been legally executed for jaywalking in Beijing.

The very last time I had the pleasure of his company was at breakfast in Los Angeles when Ted and I saw him off on his last book tour, promoting El Monstruo, his loving history of Mexico City. He was in great form. His cancer was in remission — a “cancer resister,” he called himself — and he entertained us with a preview of his trip: long, tiresome Greyhound rides, uncomfortable couches, talks to tiny groups of the marginalized, the last defenders of lost causes without the money to buy his books. It would be a losing proposition, like so many of his others, all of which secure his place among the angels.

[Frank Bardacke taught at Watsonville Adult School, California’s Central Coast, for 25 years. His history of the United Farm Workers and Cesar Chavez, Trampled in the Vintage, is forthcoming from Verso. He can be reached at bardacke@sbcglobal.com. This article was written for and distributed by CounterPunch.]

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Joshua Brown : Life During Wartime: Data Overload

Posted on January 18, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

Political cartoon and verse by Joshua Brown / The Rag Blog / January 17, 2011.
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Ed Felien : Words Have Consequences

Posted on January 17, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer


Words have consequences:
Political rhetoric and the attempted
assassination of Gabrielle Giffords

By Ed Felien / The Rag Blog / January 17, 2011

Gabrielle Giffords had just won her reelection in a race so tight it took three days to count the votes. Her opponent, Jesse Kelly, a Republican candidate with Tea Party backing, assailed her on health care and immigration. He attacked her for supporting the stimulus package.

Jim Nintzel in the Tucson Weekly quoted him on Feb 18:

“It must stop now,” says Kelly, who promises to not seek any federal earmarks if he defeats Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in November. “This is bribery with taxpayer money, and it’s a disgrace.”

Kelly dismisses any notion that federal spending helps the economy.

“Government is not a job-creator,” Kelly said last week at a debate with his fellow Republican candidates, including state Sen. Jonathan Paton and political newcomers Brian Miller and Andy Goss. “It is a job-crusher.”

But for Don Kelly Construction, the firm where Kelly manages pipeline projects, government funding would appear to create quite a few jobs.

Kelly himself estimates that close to 90 percent of the firm’s work comes from government contracts worth tens of millions of dollars. And around the country, the firm — which is owned by Kelly’s father, Don Kelly — frequently bids on public-works projects funded by both stimulus dollars and federal earmarks.

Kelly was supported in his campaign by ALIPAC (Americans for Legal Immigration PAC). John McCain spokesman Brian Rogers said of the group, “It is backed by white supremacists, neo-Nazis and anti-Semites.”

He was also supported by Sarah Palin. She appeared with him on Fox News and said, “I don’t feel worthy to lace his combat boots.” Giffords’ Congressional District was one of 20 Democratic districts that McCain carried in 2008 where the incumbent voted for health care reform.

On her website Palin said, “We’ll aim for these races and many others. This is just the first salvo in a fight to elect people across the nation who will bring common sense to Washington.” Their districts were on a U. S. map located by crosshairs. After the shooting Palin’s campaign denied the crosshairs were meant to appear as targets, even though she had also said on March 23, “Don’t Retreat, Instead, RELOAD!”

The imagery and the rhetoric is clear, and it’s consistent with Republican rhetoric throughout the 2010 campaign:

Robert Lowry, Republican candidate in Florida, fired at a target with his opponent’s initials written on it.

Representative Allen West’s first choice for chief of staff, Joyce Kaufman, said, “If ballots don’t work, bullets will.”

Sharron Angle talked about 2nd Amendment remedies in her race against Harry Reid in Nevada. Michele Bachman said she wanted her supporters “armed and dangerous.”

John Boehner and Eric Cantor referred to health care reform as “Job Killing Obamacare.”

And Jesse Kelly held a fundraiser in June where he advertised: “Get on Target for Victory in November. Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office. Shoot a fully automatic M16 with Jesse Kelly.” Minimum donation: $50.

Just last April, former President Bill Clinton recommended that both the media and politicians be responsible with their rhetoric since it falls on the “serious and the delirious alike.”

Henry David Thoreau said, “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.” The appeal of war is the promise of glory and meaning in men’s eyes: one desperate act and the world crowns you a hero. How tempting then to run to the head of the mob and storm the barricades. All revolutionary camps are a haven for malcontents.

And the Tea Party pretends it is a revolution with earnest patriots dressed in 18th Century tri-cornered hats, manipulated so cleverly by the Koch brothers, the Bush family, and Dick Armey for the benefit of the rich and powerful. It is a fraud perpetrated on the poor.

And Jesse Kelly is a party to the fraud. He campaigns mightily against the Stimulus and the Government, and his family collects millions in federal contracts. He pretends he is a revolutionary at the barricades. According to the Jan. 11 New York Times: “These people who think they are better than us, they look down on us every single day and tell us what kind of health care to buy,” he said at a rally in October. “And if you dare to stand up to the government they call us a mob. We’re about to show them what a mob looks like.”

Jared Loughner was not a mob. He was one pathetic deranged individual, but, because of the heated rhetoric of Jesse Kelly, Sarah Palin, John Boehner, Eric Cantor, Michele Bachman, and others in the Republican Party, he could delude himself into thinking he was (for one shining moment) the leader of a revolution. There probably is a revolution going on out there, but it seems we’re all on the wrong side.

The grand nineteenth century capitalist, Jay Gould, once said, “I can hire one-half the working class to kill the other half.”

How did they succeed in getting us to take up arms against each other and not against them?

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

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Danny Schechter : Fascism, and the Past as Prologue

Posted on January 17, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

Image from The Silent Majority.

The past as prologue:
What would American fascism look like?

By Danny Schechter / The Rag Blog / January 17, 2011

Fascism is one of those words that sounds like it belongs in the past, conjuring up, as it does, marching jack boots in the streets, charismatic demagogues like Italy’s Mussolini or Spain’s Franco, and armed crackdowns on dissent and freedom of expression.

It is a term we are used to reading in histories about World War II — not in news stories from present day America.

And yet the word, and the dark reality behind it, are creeping into popular contemporary usage.

Radical activists on the left have never been hesitant to label their opponents with this “F word” whenever governments support laws that limit opposition or overdo national security or abuse human rights. Government paranoia turns critics paranoid.

One example is writer Naomi Wolf, who forecast fascism creeping into America during the Bush years accelerated by the erosion of democracy:

It is my argument that, beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open society. It is time for us to be willing to think the unthinkable — as the author and political journalist Joe Conason, has put it, that it can happen here.

Wolf feared Americans couldn’t see the warning signs:

Because Americans like me were born in freedom, we have a hard time even considering that it is possible for us to become as unfree — domestically — as many other nations. Because we no longer learn much about our rights or our system of government — the task of being aware of the constitution has been outsourced from citizens’ ownership to being the domain of professionals such as lawyers and professors — we scarcely recognize the checks and balances that the founders put in place, even as they are being systematically dismantled.

Because we don’t learn much about European history, the setting up of a department of “homeland” security — remember who else was keen on the word “homeland” — didn’t raise the alarm bells it might have.

Now, those bells are being rung by John Hall, an outgoing Democratic Congressman from upstate New York. His fear of fascism has less to do with repressive laws and militarism than the influx of corporate money into politics, swamping it with special interests that buy influence for right wing policies and politicians.

“I learned when I was in social studies class in school that corporate ownership or corporate control of government is called Fascism,” he told the New York Observer. “So that’s really the question — is that the destination if this court decision goes unchecked?”

Reports New York’s Observer,

The court decision he is referring to is Citizens United, the controversial Supreme Court ruling that led to greater corporate spending in the midterm elections, much of it anonymous. In the wake of the decision, Democrats tried to pass the DISCLOSE Act, which would have mandated that corporate donors identify themselves in their advertising, but the measure failed amid GOP opposition. Ads from groups with anonymous donors were particularly prone to misleading or false claims.

Hall said the influx of corporate money in the wake of Citizens United handed the House of Representatives to Republicans “Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of State and corporate power.”

Many in mainstream politics understand that big money can dominate elections although they do not necessarily share Hall’s fears. In California, two well-known female candidates from the corporate world raised millions but still went down in defeat.

So money alone is not the be all and end all of a shift towards a red, white, and blue brand of fascism. Other ingredients are needed and some may be on the way — like an economic collapse, defeat in foreign wars, rise in domestic terrorism and the emergence of a right-wing populist movement that puts order before justice and wants to crush its opponents

Some argue we have just such a movement in the Tea Party although other critics focus on the rise of the Christian right that promotes fundamentalist politics in the name of God.

The Tea Party is not just after Democrats; it has started a campaign against the liberal Methodist Church. It is not internally democratic either with no elected officers or set of by-laws. It seems to be managed and manipulated by shadowy political operatives and PR firms, financed by a few billionaires who support populism to defang it.

Already militias are forming because of fears of immigration, and there is also concern that if unemployment remains high there is likely to be more violence with police forces understaffed because of government cutbacks. Gun sales went up after the recent violent incidents in Arizona.

The erosion of economic stability with the rise of foreclosures and the shredding of social services is already turning a financial crisis into a social one.

We already have a sharp partisan divide and inflation of hateful rhetoric with vicious put-downs of the President and condemnations by members of Congress calling him corrupt, even a traitor.

According to a set of the characteristics of fascist nations, there is “a disdain for the recognition of human rights.” Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of “need.” The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc.

“In place of human rights enemies are turned into scapegoats as a Unifying Cause — The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists.”

This process is already far along in the USA.

Among the classical characteristics of fascism is a shutting down of debate and a focus on the state — which in our country is controlled by lobbyists and private interests. Wall Street and the military-industrial complex have far more clout than elected officials.

In the past, during the depression, there was a plot to overthrow Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It was exposed and neutered. Could something like that happen again?

Maybe it doesn’t have to, what with hawks already in control of Congress, major media outlets, the military, and poised to slash the power of unions and curb progressive social programs including public education.

Several writers believe that if and when fascism comes to America it will be packaged in a friendly form tied to benevolent advertising slogans and public interest messaging. It will be sold, 1984-style, as being unavoidable, even cool, and in our best interest.

Louisiana Senator Huey Long, a mesmerizing agitator, once said, “Fascism will come to America in the name of anti-fascism.”

[“News Dissector” Danny Schechter is a journalist, author, Emmy award winning television producer, and independent filmmaker. Schechter directed Plunder: The Crime of Our Time, and a companion book, The Crime of Our Time: Why Wall Street Is Not Too Big to Jail. Contact him at dissector@mediachannel.org.]

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Posted on January 17, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

Bruce Melton, who writes regularly for The Rag Blog on issues of climate change, explains why recent occurrences of especially cold winter weather in no way contradict scientific theories about global warming. “On a warmer planet,” he tells us, “winter weather becomes more volatile. The extremes get more extreme.” In fact, some scientists now say that the chance of having extreme winter weather has increased by a factor of three, due to “feedbacks” from Arctic warming and icemelt.

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Marc Estrin : The Ethics of Infiltration

Posted on January 17, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

Cartoon from Brainstuck.com.

THE ETHICS OF INFILTRATION

By Marc Estrin / The Rag Blog / January 17, 2011

We began two weeks ago with Hallelujah in the mall, and last week contrasted that with theatrical infiltrations less in service to consumer capitalism.

When I began publishing these in various theater journals, I was met with a storm of protesting letters concerning my unethical “manipulation” of the poor bystanders. I wrote a piece in response describing what I thought to be a continuum of manipulations, from those which decreased understanding and degrees of freedom to those which increased them.

It might be good to look at such a continuum in the light of what is going on today. Let’s start with the bad news:

A recent article by George Monbiot reports a training session organized by the right wing libertarian group, American Majority on “How to Manipulate the Medium”:

Here’s what I do. I get on Amazon; I type in “Liberal Books.” I go through and I say “one star, one star, one star.” The flipside is you go to a conservative/libertarian whatever, go to their products and give them five stars… This is where your kids get information: Rotten Tomatoes, Flixster. These are places where you can rate movies. So when you type in “Movies on Healthcare,” I don’t want Michael Moore’s to come up, so I always give it bad ratings. I spend about 30 minutes a day, just click, click, click, click… If there’s a place to comment, a place to rate, a place to share information, you have to do it. That’s how you control the online dialogue and give our ideas a fighting chance.

On a wider scale, we have the current Israeli government support for a special undercover team of workers paid to surf the internet and spread positive news about Israel. The deputy director of the Foreign Ministry’s hasbara (“public diplomacy,” aka propaganda) department has admitted the team will be working undercover:

Our people will not say: “Hello, I am from the hasbara department of the Israeli Foreign Ministry and I want to tell you the following.” Nor will they necessarily identify themselves as Israelis, he said. They will speak as net-surfers and as citizens, and will write responses that will look personal but will be based on a prepared list of messages that the foreign ministry developed.

The new team is expected to increase the ministry’s close coordination with a private advocacy group, giyus.org (Give Israel Your United Support). About 50,000 activists are reported to have downloaded a program called Megaphone that sends an alert to their computers when an article critical of Israel is published. They are then supposed to bombard the site with comments supporting Israel.

A justification for much of this — a story we broke on The Rag Blog — was shamefully enunciated by our own government’s Cass Sunstein — Obama’s Harvard Law School bud, and recently appointed Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.

Writing in a scholarly journal, (J. Political Philosophy, 7 (2009), 202-227), Sunstein proposes the following:

[W]e suggest a distinctive tactic for breaking up the hard core of extremists who supply conspiracy theories: cognitive infiltration of extremist groups, whereby government agents or their allies (acting either virtually or in real space, and either openly or anonymously) will undermine the crippled epistemology of believers by planting doubts about the theories and stylized facts that circulate within such groups, thereby introducing beneficial cognitive diversity.

From cognitive infiltration of websites, groups and meetings, it is a short enough step to the entrapments by agents provocateur we read about so commonly today. The missteps of suckered individuals have enormous life consequences — for them, and for all of us — in the age of Patriot Act paranoia and power.

If these kind of infiltrations populate one end of the continuum, what is the other end – the “good” end?

The most obvious current example lies in the operation of Wikileaks and the brave individuals that feed it sequestered material. A person working in a dishonest, destructive organization has every right to transform him or herself into an infiltrator, making available to Wikileaks or other publicity groups secret material the organization would otherwise have hidden.

As Julian Assange wrote on the Wikileaks homepage, “The goal is justice; the method is transparency.” It is paradoxical that it takes invisible infiltration to create public transparency, but there it is, and the effectiveness of this tactic can no longer be in question. Nor can the public good resulting.

While the theatrical infiltrations I described last week may be trivial compared to these larger examples, both good and bad, they do raise the question of whether all arts — Art itself — does not function as an infiltration.

One innocently goes to a bookstore to buy a book. But the contents of that book, if it be a good one, will infiltrate and infect one’s heartmind. The infiltrating virus will lie within, creating biopsychical response, spiritual molecules unlabeled, unacknowledged, perhaps unknown, but potentially agents provocateur for new thinking and action.

It is with this infiltrating image in mind that my wife, Donna, and I have recently begun a new publication project called Fomite. A fomite is a medium capable of transmitting infectious organisms from one individual to another.

“The activity of art is based on the capacity of people to be infected by the feelings of others.” — Tolstoy, What is Art?

Art, writing, music are the kinds of infiltrations which — if ethically and mindfully done — have the capacity to increase, not decrease, degrees of freedom.

[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.]

Also see:

And see:

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Posted on January 16, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

The Rag Blog and Rag Radio present acclaimed Latina rocker Patricia Vonne and folk-rock singer-songwriter Gina Chavez at Jovita’s, 1617 South First Street, Austin, Texas, on Sunday, Jan. 23, from 6:30-10 p.m. It’s a benefit for the New Journalism Project, inc., publisher of The Rag Blog, the Austin-based progressive newsmagazine Suggested donation is $10.

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Jordan Flaherty : Corporate Profiteering One Year After Haiti Earthquake

Posted on January 16, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

The Haitian national flag stands at half mast at the National Palace during the one-year anniversary of the 2010 quake in downtown Port-au-Prince, January 12, 2011. Photo by Allison Shelley / Reuters.

One year after Haiti earthquake:
Corporations profit while people suffer

By Jordan Flaherty / The Rag Blog / January 16, 2011

One year after an earthquake devastated Haiti, much of the promised relief and reconstruction aid has not reached those most in need. In fact, the tragedy has served as an opportunity to further enrich corporate interests.

The details of a recent lawsuit, as reported by Business Week, highlights the ways in which contractors — including some of the same players who profited from Hurricane Katrina-related reconstruction — have continued to use their political connections to gain profits from others’ suffering, receiving contracts worth tens of millions of dollars while the Haitian people receive pennies at best. It also demonstrates how charity and development efforts have mirrored and contributed to corporate abuses.

Lewis Lucke, a 27-year veteran of the U.S. Agency for International Development (US AID) was named U.S. special coordinator for relief and reconstruction after the earthquake. He worked this job for a few months, then immediately moved to the private sector, where he could sell his contacts and connections to the highest bidder. He quickly got a $30,000-a-month (plus bonuses) contract with the Haiti Recovery Group (HRG).

HRG had been founded by Ashbritt, Inc., a Florida-based contractor who had received acres of bad press for their post-Katrina contracting. Ashbritt’s partner in HRG is Gilbert Bigio, a wealthy Haitian businessman with close ties to the Israeli military. Bigio made a fortune during the corrupt Duvalier regime, and was a supporter of the right wing coup against Haitian president Aristide.

Although Lucke received $60,000 for two months work, he is suing because he says he is owed an additional $500,000 for the more than 20-million dollars in contracts he helped HRG obtain during that time.

A symbol of political corruption

As Corpwatch has reported, AshBritt “has enjoyed meteoric growth since it won its first big debris removal subcontract from none other than Halliburton, to help clean up after Hurricane Andrew in 1992.” In 1999, the company also faced allegations of double billing for $765,000 from the Broward County, Florida school board for clean-up done in the aftermath of Hurricane Wilma.

Ashbritt CEO Randal Perkins is a major donor to Republican causes, and hired Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour’s firm, as well as former U.S. Army Corp Of Engineers official Mike Parker, as lobbyists. As a reward for his political connections, Ashbritt won 900 million dollars in Post-Katrina contracts, helping them to become a symbol of political corruption in the world of disaster profiteering, even triggering a congressional investigation focusing on their buying of influence. MSNBC reported in early 2006 that criticism of Ashbritt “can be heard in virtually every coastal community between Alabama and Texas.”

The contracts given to Bush cronies like Ashbritt resulted in local and minority-owned companies losing out on reconstruction work. As Multinational Monitor noted shortly after Katrina,

…by turning the contracting process over to prime contractors like Ashbritt, the Corps and FEMA have effectively privatized the enforcement of Federal Acquisition Regulations and disaster relief laws such as the Stafford Act, which require contracting officials to prioritize local businesses and give 5 percent of contracts to minority-owned businesses. As a result… early reports suggest that over 90 percent of the $2 billion in initial contracts was awarded to companies based outside of the three primary affected states, and that minority businesses received just 1.5 percent of the first $1.6 billion.

Alex Dupuy, writing in The Washington Post, reported a similar pattern in Haiti, noting that

of the more than 1,500 U.S. contracts doled out worth $267 million, only 20, worth $4.3 million, have gone to Haitian firms. The rest have gone to US firms, which almost exclusively use U.S. suppliers. Although these foreign contractors employ Haitians, mostly on a cash-for-work basis, the bulk of the money and profits are reinvested in the United States.

The same article notes that

less than 10 percent of the $9 billion pledged by foreign donors has been delivered, and not all of that money has been spent. Other than rebuilding the international airport and clearing the principal urban arteries of rubble, no major infrastructure rebuilding — roads, ports, housing, communications — has begun.

The disaster profiteering exemplified by Ashbritt is not just the result of quick decision-making in the midst of a crisis. These contracts are awarded as part of a corporate agenda that sees disaster as an opportunity, and as a tool for furthering policies that would not be possible in other times. Naomi Klein exposed evidence that within 24 hours of the earthquake, the influential right-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation was already laying plans to use the disaster as an attempt at further privatization of the country’s economy.

Relief and recovery efforts, led by the U.S. military, have also brought a further militarization of relief and criminalization of survivors. Haiti and Katrina also served as staging grounds for increased involvement of mercenaries in reconstruction efforts. As one Blackwater mercenary told Jeremy Scahill when he visited New Orleans in the days after Katrina, “This is a trend. You’re going to see a lot more guys like us in these situations.”

And it’s not just corporations who have been guilty of profiting from Haitian suffering. A recent report from the Disaster Accountability Project (DAP) describes a “significant lack of transparency in the disaster-relief/aid community,” and finds that many relief organizations have left donations for Haiti in their bank accounts, earning interest rather than helping the people of Haiti.

DAP director Ben Smilowitz notes that “the fact that nearly half of the donated dollars still sit in the bank accounts of relief and aid groups does not match the urgency of their own fundraising and marketing efforts and donors’ intentions, nor does it covey the urgency of the situation on the ground.”

Haitian poet and human rights lawyer Ezili Dantò has written,

Haiti’s poverty began with a U.S./Euro trade embargo after its independence, continued with the Independence Debt to France and ecclesiastical and financial colonialism. Moreover, in more recent times, the uses of U.S. foreign aid, as administered through USAID in Haiti, basically serves to fuel conflicts and covertly promote U.S. corporate interests to the detriment of democracy and Haitian health, liberty, sovereignty, social justice and political freedoms. USAID projects have been at the frontlines of orchestrating undemocratic behavior, bringing underdevelopment, coup d’etat, impunity of the Haitian Oligarchy, indefinite incarceration of dissenters, and destroying Haiti’s food sovereignty, essentially promoting famine.

Throughout its history, Haiti has been a victim of many of those who have claimed they are there to help. Until we address this fundamental issue of corporate profiteering masquerading as aid and development, the nation will remain mired in poverty. And future disasters, wherever they occur, will lead to similar injustices.

[Jordan Flaherty is a journalist, an editor of Left Turn Magazine, and a staffer with the Louisiana Justice Institute. He was the first writer to bring the story of the Jena Six to a national audience, and his award-winning reporting from the Gulf Coast has been featured in a range of outlets including The New York Times, Mother Jones, and Argentina’s Clarin newspaper. 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 his work can be found at floodlines.org. This article was also published at the Monthly Review.]

  • NEW ORLEANS RESIDENTS: See Jordan Flaherty and Asia Rainey at Maple Street Book Shop on Wednesday, January 19 at 6:00pm. For more info, go to theFacebook event page.

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The Rag Blog

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Posted on January 16, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

Austin native Marilyn Buck — activist, poet, and long-time political prisoner — was released from prison last December after serving 25 years for crimes related to her actions in support of the black liberation movement in the late ’70s and early ’80s. Twenty days later she died of cancer. Felix Shafer, a long-time friend and artistic collaborator, has written a poetic tribute to Marilyn that puts her life and legacy into the context of her times, and that shows why she gained a very special place in the hearts of her many friends and supporters.

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