Sherman DeBrosse : Rage, Racism, and the Future of the Tea Bagger Movement

Posted on April 7, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer


The Tea Baggers:
An identity temper tantrum with a violent edge

By Sherman DeBrosse / The Rag Blog / April 6, 2010

[This is the second in a two-part series on the Tea Bagger movement by Sherman DeBrosse. Go here to read part one.]

Much of Tea Bagger rhetoric reads like some sort of identity temper tantrum and is given to wild claims and exaggerations. Over and over, Tea Bag people talk about getting their country back, and they subscribe to paligenesis, the myth of a national rebirth akin to a phoenix rising from the ashes of destruction.

There is so much anger because on the flip side there is choking fear. These people are afraid that people like them will no longer be dominating this country. They rightly fear that their place in the middle class and future prosperity are threatened by forces they cannot identify. It is no surprise that they are largely whites.

Older voters vote more frequently than younger ones. The older voters were raised with what is called the “strict father morality” and they are deeply attached to the norms and mores of an older America that was less inclusive and tolerant. Though beneficiaries of the New Deal, they respond positively to appeals to Social Darwinism. Many of them were “Reagan Democrats” and were angry about “welfare queens.” The “take back our country” theme, couched in nostalgic patriotic terms, appeals to these voters. They too feel threatened and are often bewildered by contemporary norms and culture.

There is a lot of gender anxiety and white nationalism in the Tea Party movement Sometimes, it seems that many of the Tea Baggers are looking for someone to lead them from the jaws of defeat, a Daddy. Chip Berlet writes that so long as they do not find a charismatic leader, all we have to worry about is the coming of proto-fascism. There is probably too much gender insecurity among Tea Bagger men to permit Sarah Palin to emerge as a Mommy.

All this wild Tea Bagger rhetoric can inspire violence. The same theories led Timothy McVeigh to attack a federal building in Oklahoma City. Perhaps similar talk led a demented man to fly an airplane into an IRS building. Words do have consequences.

By March, 2010, the Tea Bagger rage was moving toward demanding annihilation of liberal enemies and the purgation of the nation of any traces of Democratic policies. A Rush Limbaugh stand in told a joke about what any American soldier would do when left with just two rounds in an elevator with Osama bin Laden, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi. The bottom line was he would shoot the two Democrats and then try to strangle bin Laden. Similarly, Rex Rammell, conservative candidate for governor in Idaho, has joked about hunting President Obama.

Converting people who were not already Republicans

If the Tea Bag strategy only activated the Republican base and people in the various fringe rightist movement, there would be plenty of reason to work. The problem is, as noted in a previous post, that it has attracted so many independents, who by nature look for quick and easy solutions and usually are not very well informed.

As far back as the 1970s, Donald Warren identified another group that he called “Middle American Radicals.” They felt caught between Wall Street and great concentrations of economic power on one side and organized minorities on the other. By no means were they all racists or bent on injuring immigrants. For the most part, they were disconnected from government, unions, churches, and other mediating structures.

In the eighties, more than five million whites fell into poverty, with many more to follow as manufacturing firms moved overseas. Now, there is again a great surge in the number of whites falling below the poverty line. These people think the most important question for debate is, “Who is an American and what will America look like?” The Middle American Radicals have been growing for three decades. We know too little about them, and they are another large, fertile recruiting ground for the militias and Tea Baggers.

These people know that the American system is not working for them, and they think that only the Tea Bag Movement offers an alternative to the status quo. Their situation is analogous to that of many workers in the United Kingdom during the period of economic stagnation prior to Maggie Thatcher’s ascent to power.

They did not like the existing situation and saw in Thatcherism a clear choice. Even though she heaped new tax burdens on them, many British working class folks stuck with her for some years, rewarded with jingoism and Social Darwinist sermons that made them feel good about themselves and superior to those who depended upon the dole.

Many parallels can be found in the history of Europe in the 1920s and 1930s as bewildered and ill-informed working class people sought meaning and comfort by embracing the various forms of right wing populist extremism.

Teabagger Brady LaMotte says “Our government is out of control.” Photo from Snapshots of Teabaggers / The Stranger.

Creating true believers

An economic crisis is the perfect time to recruit people for rightist movements. Political neophytes, independents, and Middle American Radicals who were drawn into the Tea Party Movement were landed by powerful tools of persuasion.

Strong convictions can be created in one’s consciousness through clever external information management. This can be done without engaging reason, and it can be easily deployed in the politics of hatred. Fear and anger are powerful motivators. These appeals to basic emotions are most persuasive at a time when there is great economic insecurity. Some Tea Baggers relate that after listening to Glenn Beck or some other shockjock, they literally had a sort of conversion experience. They were reborn. They no longer felt helpless and now channeled their energies into political militancy.

By repeating the same claims about Barack Obama being a socialist and communist, political operatives can embed that information in people’s memories as fact. It does not matter that his health care proposals were largely borrowed from Republican proposals. Likewise, repeating the claim that there will be death panels trumps the calm display of facts that this simply is not the case.

When these false claims are linked to appeals to patriotism and membership in the ranks of victimized middle Americans, convictions deepen. Victimhood has a strong claim to moral authority. At this point, people relate to a tribe of virtuous, victimized Americans who have every right to hate liberal elitists.

In Going to Extremes, Cass R. Sunstein shows how people then reinforce their convictions by association with others who share their beliefs. Research and reading are unnecessary to validate what they feel so deeply about. At this point, the beliefs promoted by clever propagandists become part of a person’s identity, which is sacred to him or her.

Minimizing the influence of the Tea Party Movement

Some liberal columnists seem to be whistling as they pass the graveyard when they emphasize that there are some libertarians among the Tea Baggers. One says not to worry; they are just a modern version of the anti-federalists of the late 1780s and 1790s. Maybe or maybe not, but those people took up muskets to make their point.

Some dismiss the Tea Baggers as harmless and compare them to the hippies of the 1960s. There are significant differences. The hippies fought against injustice, while Tea Bagger spokesmen like Glenn Beck seem to justify and explain away injustices. The hippies saw through capitalist propaganda while the Tea Baggers have soaked it up and are saturated by it.

It is true that the Tea Bag movement could eventually be a problem for Republicans because these people tend to oppose Republican efforts to reach out to Hispanics. Already, Hispanics in Idaho, Washington, and Oregon are feeling threatened and intimidated by the Tea Baggers.

We are told not to worry too much about the Tea Baggers because libertarians resent the Christian Right’s inclination to interfere in our personal lives, but we should recall that Republican libertarians have a history of bowing to what the pastors want. Bob Barr has forthrightly spoken out against the Prior Act when he told the CPAC convention that people should not be “seduced by that siren of security over freedom.”

However, the vast majority of Tea Baggers have gone along with what the Republican Party has wanted. When Dick Cheney appeared at the CPAC convention there was something like a collective orgasm, so much did the audience approve of torturing detainees and stripping them of the right to civilian trials. Extreme atavism has always been part of right-wing populism, and that fuels militarism, jingoism, a disregard for the requirements of the law when it comes to the rights of enemies.

As the Tea Baggers were ramped up, the national political atmosphere became more and more atavistic. We got a clue of how the media would approach this super-heated atmosphere when Neocon Dick Gregory, Meet the Press host, commented, “I don’t know that Obama has the same ability to reflect the emotions of the country as Bush did at certain points in his presidency.”

On the same program, Newt Gingrich engaged in pure demagoguery, saying that the Obama administration was more interested in “protecting the rights of terrorists… than protecting the lives of Americans.” The former Speaker of the House is a highly intelligent man and holds a Ph.D. in history. He certainly has a better grasp of our laws and judicial system than that.

The problem of race

Most of the Tea Baggers probably do not hate Obama just because he is black, but his race certainly does not help. Some of their anger is at the emergence of a more inclusive nation where there are greater opportunities for blacks and other marginalized people. This is happening at the same time that many in the middle class perceive that their status and economic security is threatened. Unfortunately, the blacks and other marginalized people will not return to the back of the bus, and it may be too late to reverse all the policies that endanger the middle class.

The Democrats have long had a Caucasian problem. Not since Lyndon B. Johnson have they won the white vote. White males are most likely to vote against Democrats. These “angry white men” resent the gains African-Americans, other minorities, and women have made. Rusty De Pass, a rightist in South Carolina claimed that an escaped gorilla was one of Obama’s ancestors.

It could well be that much of this racism is a problem growing out of the unconscious operations of the brain. In The Hidden Brain, Shankar Vedantam talks about unconscious biases that help us “leap to conclusions.” There are unconscious cerebral features that act like an account or reality checker. It tallies information on what are popular views and what are popular biases. It notices economic inequality and discrimination, and this hidden dimension of the human brain might reach some wrong conclusions about African-American people.

Some of the Tea Baggers’ distrust of a black president might come less from real malice than from the brain’s hidden software. Some people, through careful thought and introspection, have managed to overcome unconscious racism; other people are not much into introspection.

At the moment, many Tea Baggers are scapegoating blacks and immigrants. A recent poll showed that 25% of Americans think Jews are responsible for the near meltdown of the banking system. Many on the extreme right share these views and believe the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is legitimate. This conservative anti-Semitism is under wraps now
because the conservatives see the state of Israel as an ally. This could change.

Courting the extremists

The Tea Party movement has clearly activated people who are variously described as survivalists, patriots, militiamen, Constitutionalists, white supremacists, and Christian Identity members. The Southern Poverty Law Center reports that the armed “patriots” are on the rise again and infiltrating the Tea Bagger movement. Oath Keepers, comprised of former policemen, firemen, and servicemen, is growing rapidly. They believe they have the right to ignore laws they dislike.

There is a great danger that these people will be able to recruit and indoctrinate some of the many independents who have been drawn into Tea Baggism. The independents usually have few fixed political principles, do not follow politics carefully, and look for quick easy fixes and simple explanations.

At the moment the Republican Party is appealing to extreme states’ rights doctrines, particularly the pre-Civil War notion that through the Tenth Amendment a state can nullify a federal law. Andrew Jackson took on the nullifiers in the 1830s, and many thought the Civil War settled the legal question once and for all. Then George Wallace and others revived it as “massive interposition” in the 1950s and 1960s to fight desegregation. By reviving a legal doctrine last deployed by segregationists and racists, the GOP seems to be legitimizing the strange and archaic body of doctrines advocated by the white supremacists and many militias.

David Frum, a former George W. Bush speechwriter, has worried that the anger has gone too far and could hurt the GOP. He blames it on FOX News and the cable and radio commentators. Frum suggested that the Republican leadership thought Fox worked for them and discovered, instead, they were working for Fox. “The anger trapped the [Republican] leadership,” Frum noted , and “the leadership discovered they have no room to maneuver as a result of the anger.”

Frum is worried that some independents might be turned off by the Republicans hyperbolic rhetoric and lack of proposals. This matter was obliquely debated within the ranks of elected Republicans, but they seemed to have reached the conclusion that any concrete proposal would provide a target for Democrats. Republicans briefly claimed that Representative Paul Ryan had written a “Republican” health reform plan, but as soon as the press wrote about it, the leadership distanced themselves from it.

No doubt, the GOP think tanks employ experts in cognitive science who have guaranteed that there will be no substantial reaction against extremism so long there is not an economic miracle, with the economy cranking out vast numbers of new jobs. The fact that the think tanks are working so hard to defend the Tea Baggers suggests that eliminationist extremism is not a very short term strategy.

Tea Party indoctrination might be effective

Tea Baggism gives people a collective identity and invites them to buy into a collective memory that could make them committed Rightists for decades to come. Some may also be persuaded to become gun show/gun shop patrons and join one militia or another.

Creating a Tea Bagger collective memory is simply an extension of several decades of Republican mastery of linguistic and cognitive theory. The beauty of collective memory is that it creates memories that can have nothing to do with reality. They can be passionately believed because they become inextricable from identity.

The Tea Baggers are in the process of assuming the identity of American history’s victims — good, patriotic, productive folks who are victimized by big government that spends too much and does not respect their rights. To be sure, this collective memory will include versions of historical events and processes that are far from the truth. Yet, they will be fervently believed and will become nearly impossible for outsiders to challenge with facts, logic, and analysis. The most powerful collective identities have clear enemies. Of course, liberals are at the top of the list. Others who will have this status are black and brown people.

Collective memory works like “mythic history” — in the words of Pierre Nora, a French expert on history and memory; it replaces real history and is fervently believed. Collective memories are about our identities, so strong emotions reinforce them. That is why they are considered sacred.

The term “collective memory” is useful and evolved out of Emile Durkheim’s concept of collective consciousness. Yet, we know that there is no particular place spot or place in a collectivity where a memory is stored. It is a common memory existing in the minds of members of an identity group and also in symbols, texts, and other parts of a culture. Some members have a stronger emotional attachment to it than others. The concept is an effort to get at how people’s thinking is shaped by a culture or subculture and by membership in a group.

According to Peter Novick, “Collective memory simplifies, sees events from a single, committed perspective; is impatient with ambiguities of any kind…” It overlooks historicity, all the complexities involved with examining events in the different contexts and in another time. It provides “imaginary representations and historical realities” that are deeply rooted in cultural identity and the values of an imaginary community.

Collective memory emerges from social arrangements and the “ways minds work together in society,” and “totemic meanings” emerge that are part of a community’s super-ego. It is an imaginative form of historical consciousness based “more on myths than facts.” In brief, collective memory refers to how people recall in the context of a group. It is never objective or value-free, and it reflects simulations of the past shaped by present needs. It can be politicized memory. Its formation is, according to Nora, “largely unconscious” and it “accommodates only those facts that suit it.”

Tactics that demonstrate contempt for American democracy

Recently, Bob Schrum said the Tea Baggers moment will be brief. Three decades ago, most observers thought that right-wing populism of the Christian Right was a brief flash in the pan. The folks in the conservative think tanks found ways to keep it going and expanding for decades. Perhaps maintaining exclusionism at a high level depends on continued economic crisis, but it is possible that Republican strategists have figured out how to sustain it for a long time.

If we are to experience a period of sustained stagnation and high unemployment, it is possible that many more working people will find solace in the Tea Bag movement. The Democrats can attempt to help people who are suffering with unemployment insurance and the promise of health benefits, but man does not live by bread alone. The right-wing populism strategist have long known this and have found contemptible ways of shoring up people’s identities and giving them meaning simplistic things to believe in.

Historian Chip Berlet of Political Research Associates has written that “fascism is the most militant and violent form of right-wing populism.” This is an interesting and useful way of relating the two phenomena, and the concept of eliminationism permits us to locate the Tea Baggers as an extreme form of right-wing populism, one that could be the anteroom to some form of authoritarianism. Tea Baggism is clearly a reactionary political movement and something very different from genuine conservatism. The Tea Partiers are not about preserving what is best in America, and their rhetoric and tactics threaten to seriously disrupt the Democratic process.

Democracy depends upon an open public market place of ideas, but these people try to shut it down. It requires reason, civility, willingness to compromise, and truth-telling. The frenzied Tea Party people reject these ideals.

Perhaps they can be partly excused because, like many of us, they are suffering from serious economic dislocations. But what are we to think of the politicians who know what democracy requires and still use these people, who abuse Senate rules to produce stalemate, and now fold their arms and say they will punish their opponents by refusing to cooperate again in 2010?

They have shown utter contempt for our political system but still stand a good chance of increasing their power in November. Something is very wrong!

[Sherman DeBrosse is a regular contributor to The Rag Blog. A retired history professor, he also blogs at Sherm Says and on DailyKos.]

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Mr. Fish : A Conversation with Graham Nash

Posted on April 7, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

Above, Crosby, Stills and Nash at Atlantic City in 2009. Photo from Vicarious Music. Below, Graham Nash. Photo from last.fm.

A Conversation With Graham Nash:
Vietnam, Diane Arbus, and Green Day

By Mr. Fish / April 6, 2010

“They got guns, we got guns, all God’s chillun got guns!”

So sang the Marx Brothers during the frenzied buildup to the ridiculous war that finally erupted at the end of the 1933 anarchic comedy, “Duck Soup.” What has always struck me about that film, beyond its satirical strengths and punchy one-liners, was the fact that it was released during the worst year of the Great Depression, after the GNP had fallen a record 13.4 percent and unemployment had risen to 23.6 percent.

It was as if Hollywood were attempting to provide the public with a much needed escape from the agony of the massive financial crisis by allowing them the chance to remember, with some fondness, how preferable war, even a farcical one, was to staring the economic calamity clear in the face. If only a plunging dollar could be bayoneted and ballooning interest rates could be strafed out of existence; to have a mortal enemy to kill is always preferable to having a wound, stabbed into the back and out of reach, that bleeds the strength out of one’s optimism.

I’d gone to Atlantic City in August of 2009 to see Crosby, Stills and Nash to be reminded of the exquisite outrage that they, along with Neil Young, had so famously hurled into the hellish maelstrom that was the Vietnam War and to reapply its relevance to my own opposition to the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, desperate to forget how poor I was becoming, how many bills I’d be unable to pay at the end of the month, and how the current financial crisis, like the one almost 80 years earlier, was slowly dimming the lights on every other calamity in the world and making American self-pity the only agony worth woeing over.

Atlantic City in August, while indeed funky — and no stranger to brown acid or vast amounts of illicit sex between strangers — is no Yasgur’s Farm. Sure it is thrilling to approach by air-conditioned car, this metropolis of magnificent lights, skyscraper hotels, insomnia made jubilant by a gazillion flashing light bulbs, all of it pressed right up against the black ocean, but outside of the car it is abscessed New Jersey, the air damp and over-inhaled and brackish, smelling like a drunk octopus riding a horse through stale popcorn.

And then you enter any one of the casinos and immediately find yourself surrounded by the repulsive yin to the outside yang. Thusly, walking into the Borgata Hotel Casino for the CSN show, I found the air to be overly polite, like it had been blown through an Easter basket. And then there was the geometrically cacophonous carpeting as convincing of elegance and luxury as a 300,000-square-foot toupee; Tourette’s woven into a nauseating aesthetic.

And then there were the cheap sonsabitches walking around in loud shirts and crisp white sneakers trying to buy a million dollars with pocket change, their telepathy horse-trading so hard with Jesus Christ that their lips were moving.

With incontinent classical muzak dribbled through the PA system and making me feel more like I was waiting for a teeth cleaning than a mind blowing, I sat down in my assigned seat and, looking at the empty stage before me and the great hive of drums hanging amid a ridiculous contraption of chrome scaffolding and the fake candles wicked with four-volt bulbs placed here and there and the Flying V resting on a guitar stand, I began to worry that the men who I’d come to see might no longer exist; at best, like the candles, they might be poor parodies of themselves, having become so waterlogged by their own celebrity over time that the only thing left linking them to the glory of their past was the names on their drivers licenses.

I had to wonder if I’d made a huge mistake believing that, given the adoration of enough fans, an alligator bag might learn how to swim gracefully again; or that Muhammad Ali might be able to stop shaking just long enough to snatch a fly out of the air and be beautiful again; or that it could be 1969 again.

Then the lights went down. Then the trio of legendary sexagenarians took the stage, Stills in pleated black dress pants, Nash in bare feet and Crosby in an outfit one might throw on to clean out the garage. (Uh-oh.) Then the familiar harmonies were blended. Then, almost immediately, a mood as perfect as a pearl was fashioned right in the middle of all that superfluous and muculent funk surrounding us all.

It was breathtaking.

Five months later I found myself sitting down with Graham Nash at the Waldorf Astoria in New York to talk about both his recent induction, as a Hollie, into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the publication of his new book of photography, Taking Aim, a collection of candid photographs of musicians, past and present, some taken by Nash himself, all of them chosen by him, his commentary captioned on nearly every page.

Predictably, when you have a conversation with somebody as dynamic as Nash it’s easy to ping-pong wildly off topic, which we did. Despite being almost 70, up close his eyes appeared to be brand new and curious about everything. Typically closed when he sings, and he’s been singing for a long time, it made sense to assume that his eyes have probably seen less, though contemplated more, than the average person and, like coins with limited exposure to the outside elements, are now bright and shiny enough to practically emanate their own light.

Crosby, Stills and Nash at the Big Sur Folk Festival, September 15, 1969. Photo © Robert Altman / altmanphoto.com

Mr. Fish: Let me start things off with a quote by photographer Robert Frank: “When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of poetry twice.” I mention that quote because I think it expresses what is uniquely special about how you seem to approach both your photography and your music, which is with a great respect for the vulnerability of a particular moment.

Graham Nash: It’s all about communication. It has to communicate — that’s all I want to do. I don’t want everybody to agree with me — if they don’t agree with me, that’s fine. I’m just trying to communicate, it’s that simple. And I don’t want to waste your time, because that’s all we’ve got. When you boil it all fucking down, it’s your family and time, that’s what you have and you deal with it however you want. If I’m fine and my wife is fine and my kids are fine, the rest is a fucking joke.

And I can play this game — life — I know how to do it. I’m old. I’m 68 years old, right, and I know how to do this and I don’t want to waste your time. Same thing happens with a song — I do not want to waste your time with a song. Why waste three minutes of a person’s life that they can’t get back by singing them a song that sucks and doesn’t say anything? Why show somebody a photograph that’s a picture of nothing?

M.F.: Right, and that’s precisely what I mean about your focus and the moments you capture — you do have this reverence for time as an incremental measure of a meaningful life. Your best work, like “Our House” and “Simple Man,” “Lady of the Island” and others, reminds us how precious, how sacred, simple experiences can be when they’re unguarded and stripped of pretense.

G.N.: Yes—that is what I try to do, and I can only try.

M.F.: And your photography reflects the same reverence.

G.N.: I think a still photograph has an amazing ability to move. Of course it doesn’t physically move, but it moves you. If I put an image in front of you I want you to be thinking, I want you to be getting angry, I want you to be getting sad, I want you to fucking react — I want you to wake up!

And if I’m writing a song like “Chicago,” I want you to be angry because when you bound and chain and fucking gag a man and call it a fair trial you’re fucked! This is America, for God’s sake. We have a Constitution. We have respect for humanity. I don’t give a shit what Bobby Seale was doing in that courtroom — you cannot bound him and chain him and gag him and call it a fair trial.

And when those kids got killed at Kent State, fucking Neil was furious and the way he dealt with his anger — same as you deal with your cartoons, you fucking pour it onto the page — we pour it onto the page of tape. And, again, we don’t want to waste your time.

M.F.: Which I think is what differentiates an artist from, say, a mainstream journalist or an anchor on the 7 o’clock news [who] want to waste our time and to pacify our anger and to keep us from dissenting against power. An artist’s main responsibility is to be honest and to not bullshit, which is contrary to the job of a politician or somebody whose objective is to preserve the status quo.

G.N.: Absolutely true.

“Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park, New York City.” Photo by Diane Arbus.

M.F.: Now, just to illustrate what you said about the power of a good photograph, I read somewhere that your song, “Teach Your Children,” was inspired by your reaction to the Diane Arbus photograph, “Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park.”

G.N.: I’d actually written the song right before seeing the Diane Arbus, but when I saw that image… what had happened was I’d been collecting photography from 1969 onwards and in a particular show at the de Saisset Gallery in Santa Clara, which was the first show of images I’d collected, I put the “Hand Grenade” photograph next to a picture [by Arnold Newman] of [Arnold] Krupp, who was the German arms magnate whose company was probably responsible for millions of deaths.

It was an eerie photograph, a portrait, and the lighting is weird and his eyes are dark — a great image. And looking at them together I began to realize that what I’d just written [“Teach Your Children”] was actually true, that if we don’t start teaching our children a better way of dealing with each other we’re fucked and humanity itself is in great danger. I mean, look at what’s going on in the world today — look at the Obama administration. What a pile of shit we gave him to deal with, now he’s trying to deal with it all on many fronts and he’s getting shit for not concentrating on one thing.

M.F.: Well, frankly, I don’t think it’s the job of the president to solve many of the problems most threatening to us. I think it’s a mistake to think that the Office of the Presidency of the United States is a humanitarian position. Rather, [the presidency] is a job for somebody with a business mind — somebody who honors the traditional power structures and upholds the absolute authority of multinational corporations and who can manipulate information in such a way as to prevent regular people from noticing how little control they really have.

G.N.: And the dance between them all is insane.

M.F.: But let’s compare what’s going on in the world right now versus what was going on in the 1960s. There are some depressing similarities: We have an unjust and illegal war that we’re fighting — in fact, we have two, some would say more. All unnecessary and brutal and …

G.N.: Silly — yep.

M.F.: And, when you consider the economic crisis, you think of Dr. King and his commitment to helping the poor and lower working class.

G.N.: Sure, and the division between the rich and the poor is getting wider and wider and wider.

M.F.: And there’s the social unrest exploding all over the world in places like Greece and the Occupied Territories, Iran, and there’s the environmental movement still straining its efforts to save the species and now you have Obama talking about building new nuclear power plants, even after people like you fought so hard through the ’70s to stop construction, which was a remarkable victory.

G.N.: Right — when we did the No Nuke concerts at Madison Square Garden, there hasn’t been another nuclear power plant built in this country since.

M.F.: I know — it was such an incredible accomplishment.

G.N.: Well, when I met with Obama’s people, before I decided to support him, that was my first question: What is his stance on nuclear power? I knew about his relationship with Exelon in Chicago and I knew he got money from them, so I wanted to know what the hell his stance was. And they said, well, it’s a very interesting stance because he knows we might need it, but he knows we’ll never get it.

So he can afford to say that we need to do this, but he knows damn well that until we can figure out how to store the waste and until we figure out how to keep it out of the hands of terrorists, it’ll never get done. So I think he’s walking this brilliant line between appearing to support what is an unbelievable industry that has never made a penny and has taken billions from the American taxpayer and knowing that we’ll never get [new operational plants].

M.F.: But the message [Obama] is sending to the anti-nuclear activists, then, is that big business trumps their concerns. The pronouncement that we need to build more nuclear power plants can only be seen as the President turning his back on the left.

G.N.: I think they need to look a little deeper.

M.F.: I’m not so sure. I think the left would prefer a public victory to a private investigation into what may or may not be true about what a politician says.

G.N.: I think that’s right.

M.F.: I think that progressives would rather have an administration that honors their past victories and that doesn’t try to marginalize their deep concerns and send the message that the dominant culture is going to continue pushing liberal values aside.

Your point about Obama’s decision being a political move is not lost on me. However, I feel that I must point out my belief that perhaps the greatest contribution made by your generation was the idea that there should be no compromise on certain issues, particularly when it comes to things like war and pacifism and anything that threatens [to compromise] our humanitarianism or the public health.

In fact, I think that there is a lot of rage and disappointment coming from people who saw some of the liberal principles they believed [Obama] had but was forced to compromise to get elected as never having been part of his core belief system at all. I think that in the back of some people’s heads they thought he was going to be like Gandhi.

G.N.: Where is the disappointment coming from, though? What is he actually doing that is pissing the left off?

M.F.: Maybe it’s what he’s not doing that’s pissing them off.

G.N.: Like what?

M.F.: His amping up of the war in Afghanistan. His secret renditions program. The bank bailout. His position on gay marriage and Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. The nuclear issue we’ve been talking about. Support of Israel has been a sticking point, although some of the recent news on the illegality of the new settlements is pretty remarkable. The fact that you can all of a sudden criticize the Israeli government and not be called an anti-Semite is amazing.

G.N.: To have even put Israel in the middle of all that stuff is insane. Sometimes I wonder if we didn’t do it all deliberately.

M.F.: Right, like our supplying weapons to both Iran and Iraq during their war in the 1980s in order to help keep the region unstable and reliant upon our intervention for survival.

G.N.: Yeah, that’s right — Eisenhower was right, wasn’t he? But you have to add something else to what he said. It’s not only the military-industrial complex, but the military-industrial-commercial complex, because trying to make sure everybody is in line to buy a new pair of sneakers and a soda is insane.

M.F.: And that brings up another interesting comparison with the past. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, in order to be involved with the anti-war movement and in order to be an effective feminist and in order to fight for civil rights, you needed to do all those things in public. There was no Internet; there was no safety net that allowed you to privately involve yourself in a mass movement.

G.N.: Yeah, you had to do it publicly and there were risks.

M.F.: And that was even part of the appeal. I remember back to when I was seven years old in the early ’70s and how I wanted to grow up to be Angela Davis.

G.N.: Wow! How fantastic!

M.F.: And I really believed it was possible — I mean, why not?

G.N.: Yeah!

M.F.: And now I feel ripped off that I’m not Angela Davis.

G.N.: Well, when we had the opportunity to speak out, we did, even to the detriment to ourselves. But where is that movement now?

M.F.: I think the movement is being controlled.

G.N.: By whom?

M.F.: By the military-industrial-commercial complex. They don’t want us waking up. They just want sheep — go buy your sneakers, man!

G.N.: Exactly — and Old Navy can sell you a T-shirt with a peace sign on it and you can put it on and suddenly think you’re involved in the peace movement.

M.F.: And you don’t even have to do anything—just wear the T-shirt.

G.N.: Yeah, it’s insane. They learned with the Vietnam War, man, you know — when Walter was telling you every fucking night while you were eating your steak dinner how many fucking Americans had just been slaughtered. The public can only take that for a certain amount of time, then they start to write to their congressman, they start to get pissed and they start to rise up and then all of a sudden the Vietnam War stops. Right? Did you ever see any footage of Grenada? Did you see any footage of Panama? Did you see any footage of Iraq?

Graham Nash. Photo from last.fm.

M.F.: No.

G.N.: They learned — they learned how to control it. And the media, as you well know — you can count on one hand who owns the media that covers the entire planet. They have no interest in people standing up and saying that the president doesn’t have any fucking clothes on.

M.F.: And what do you think can be done about that? Can the movement be revitalized? Is there a different strategy that people should be using…

G.N.: Sure, and here’s a perfect example. When Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt, and I found out that Congress was trying to slip an odd sentence into an energy bill that would make the public responsible for $50 billion to restart the nuclear industry again we did a video of Stephen’s song, “For What it’s Worth,” with Ben Harper, with me and Bonnie and Jackson and we went to the Hill and met with all those people and showed them 126,000 signatures that we’d gotten in three days and we managed to get the sentence taken out.

I mean, we didn’t learn anything from Chernobyl? You know how many people are still fucked up from Three Mile Island? And you know it’s going to happen again. You can’t have 104 plants here and 72 in Japan and 15 in France and expect nothing to go wrong. In the ’50s they used to say that nuclear power would be so cheap that they wouldn’t even have to charge for it — bullshit! Do you know how much energy it takes to build a nuclear plant, to keep all that shit cool and safe so they can store it for thousands of years, the waste I mean?

We’re only 200 years old and we can’t control anything! How the fuck are we going to control this shit for thousands of years? It’s madness! It’s a industry that has no future — they’re only trying to make money on construction. They’re even trying to say it’s green!

M.F.: I guess radioactivity is green because you can’t see it — like it’s only theoretical pollution.

G.N.: Well, water is really the next big thing — there’s going to be wars over water. I knew this 33 years ago. That’s why I moved to the wettest spot on earth, I swear to God. I was in San Francisco and we were being told on billboards to shower with a friend because the drought was coming and stuff like that and I knew what we were doing to the Colorado River, how we were damning it and fucking it up, and all the San Francisco people were saying, “Why are we sending all our water down to that fucking desert?”

And I’m thinking, water, I’ve got to find a place where water will never be an issue. So 33 years ago I moved to Hawaii. Now I’m lucky enough to be able to do that, but that’s how serious I think the water problem is going to be.

M.F.: I think you’re right, and what scares me most is how we don’t currently have any kind of organized mass humanitarian movement that might help us survive such a catastrophe and prevent us from descending into real tribal savagery. I mean, one of the things that your generation had — that my generation doesn’t have — were young people who were able to articulate the politics of dissent and humanitarianism well and who were able to, for want of a better word, make progressiveness and radicalism sexy. That’s what drew people to the counter-culturalism of the time, the music, the fashions, the grooviness of it all …

G.N.: And we knew that, sure.

M.F.: You made it hip to thumb your nose at the Johnson and Nixon White House, but you also grounded [your dissent] in a certain logic — there was a great deal of sanity in wanting to stop the war and to argue against materialism and to live a more spiritual existence. It was more than just an opinion that you were pushing — it was a lifestyle.

G.N.: You’re absolutely right.

M.F.: And I just don’t see that happening nowadays. In fact, most unsettling to me about the recent death of Howard Zinn…

G.N.: What a brilliant man.

M.F.: Right, but what I found so odd about him dying was how unfair his passing seemed. I found myself wondering, “Wow, all the real radicals are disappearing.” It was like he was gunned down in his prime, but he was, what, almost 90? I suddenly realized that most of the people who make me want to be a bigmouth are all over 60, at least.

G.N.: [Progressive humanitarianism] moves forward in small increments. Did you see Pearl Jam on “Saturday Night Live” this past weekend?

M.F.: I didn’t.

G.N.: Right — Eddie Vedder, playing his guitar, and what’s written on his guitar? ZINN! And people can twist their heads up and say, “What’s that written on his guitar? Zinn? What the fuck is that?” And then they go to Google and they type in Zinn and all of a sudden they’re off!

M.F.: Right.

G.N.: I’m not saying that that’s the only way to do it — I’m just saying that that process is still going on. When you give a person too much to think about, they become inactive a lot. They get paralyzed. I mean, look at what kids are faced with today. I heard a thing on NPR the other day while driving around about how some of these medical students owe $300,000 in student loans. Think about that. How the fuck are they supposed to pay that back?

And the woman who they were interviewing said that she wanted to be a family doctor, but she couldn’t afford to be a family doctor. She has to subset and subset and subset and become the only doctor who does operations on ears and then she makes all the money, but it isn’t what she wants to do.

I want to be a pediatrician, I want to be a family doctor for people — you can’t! You can’t afford it! Lawyers are the same way. Accrue massive debt in law school and forget about going into something like civil law. You’re forced to becoming a lawyer for some corporation somewhere.

M.F.: It’s all very carefully designed. Keep the sheep occupied and we’ll rob them blind and they won’t even know. In fact, we’ll even smile at them and tell them they’re doing great — like you said, we’ll sell them a T-shirt and let them think they’re in the peace movement.

G.N.: Right.

M.F.: Keep everybody crazy.

G.N.: Another important lesson that came from the 1960s was the fact that it isn’t necessary to go to every march and to every demonstration and every sit-in and to be an expert on every bit of legislation that might be moving through Congress to be political. I think the notion that you require a vast understanding of every issue in public circulation can become a deterrent to people getting involved in dissent, like they’re not smart enough.

Again, that was the genius of [that] generation: it was enough for a person to remain committed to a lifestyle based on humanitarian ideals, to claim real ownership over his or her values and a lifetime dedicated to peace, love and understanding …

M.F.: Good ol’ Elvis!

G.N.: Right — and that was enough to be effective politically, because it was a way to exist off the grid and not rely so heavily on needing to be subservient to the dominant culture. In other words, so long as you don’t need laws to know that racism is wrong, or that sexism is wrong…

Or that homophobia is wrong …

M.F.: Or murder or stealing, yeah. As long as your ideas and beliefs are not determined by whatever rewards or punishments you feel you might receive from the state, you’re politicized and fighting power. You’re saying that your morality is self-generating and not imposed by an artificial hierarchy.

G.N.: Right, I’ll give you another example: We had my song, “Teach Your Children,” in the middle of 1970, bolting up the charts. …And then Kent State happened. We went down to Los Angeles and we recorded [Ohio], mixed it, recorded “Find the Cost of Freedom” for the B-side and we said we want it out right now. “Well, you can’t do that—you’ve got a hit moving up.”

We want it out right fucking now! We put that out in 12 days and the fucking cover for the 45 was a picture of the Constitution with four bullet holes in it. We killed our own single. You don’t do that — you’re not supposed to do that. We didn’t give a shit. We thought the slaughter of these four kids, which the government still hasn’t apologized for, was more important.

M.F.: And that’s what I’m saying, that that simple understanding doesn’t seem to be part of contemporary culture anymore, particularly when it comes to the arts community and the musicians who have historically been so effective in communicating that message.

G.N.: But they are there.

M.F.: Are they?

G.N.: What about the Beastie Boys? What about their Tibetan campaign? How about Green Day?

M.F.: Well, all right—Green Day is a good example.

G.N.: Let me tell you something—I have never met them, right? And as I was leaving the after party [for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony] at the Bull and Bear, in this hotel, I see Billy Joe [Armstrong] as I’m headed up the stairs and I don’t stop, you know, I just wave respectfully, and he parts the people around him and comes up and he hugs me for two minutes, babbling about what a great songwriter I am and how he wanted to be like me and write melodies that are in people’s hearts all the time and I said, “Wait a second—you have to understand, I am really proud of you.” Wait a minute, why’s that? “Because you’re doing what we did — you’re standing up there and fucking telling it like it is! “American Idiot” was brilliant!”

It kind of shocked him a little bit. But there is this chain of musicians who really do give a shit. They are there, maybe few and far between, but they are there. Tom Morello from Rage Against the Machine is a fucking brilliant man. And we’re trying to influence those people — me, people like James Taylor, we’re all trying to influence those musicians who are coming up and following us because we’re dropping off the other end of this diving board, we can’t help it. It’s called old age and eventually death. But we want to encourage people to stand up and to give a shit and to have courage.

[Dwayne Booth (Mr. Fish) is a renowned cartoonist and freelance writer whose work can most regularly be seen on Harpers.org and Truthdig.com. His website is Clowncrack.com. Dwayne Booth lives in Philadelphia, PA, with his wife and twin daughters.

Source / Truthdig

Thanks to Larry Piltz / The Rag Blog

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Alice Embree on Political Activism : Carry it On

Posted on April 6, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

Alice Embree, holding sign, participates in anti-war vigil at Texas State Capitol, March 19, 2008. Photo by CodePink/Austin.

On my political activism:
Carry it on

By Alice Embree / The Rag Blog / April 6, 2010

[On March 30, Long-time Austin activist David P. Hamilton wrote an article in The Rag Blog announcing his “retirement” from political activism. He discussed his disillusionment with Barack Obama, whom he worked hard to elect, and with American democracy, which he considers “irretrievably corrupted.” For David, the passage of a health care reform bill that he considered a sham was the final straw, and — at 66 — he said he’s “passing the torch.”]

I’m responding to David Hamilton’s retirement notice posted on The Rag Blog last week. Everyone should get to retire or take leave from the movement for social justice. It’s never been a paid job and the benefits certainly haven’t included major medical or dental care.

We don’t need burn-out. But we desperately need persistence. We all must find a balance between what replenishes and what depletes us. For years I have identified with Marge Piercy’s poem, “To Be Of Use.” But, her guidance in “Spring Offensive of the Snail” may be more important.

I cannot live crackling
with electric rage always.
….
This time we have to remember
to sing and make soup.

We can’t lose faith in the struggle for social justice because Obama delivered an expanded war and a Wall Street bailout and failed (never really trying) to deliver a public option for health care. If our faith was in electoral politics, it was misplaced.

My post-retirement activism has been both rewarding and difficult. Bush’s election in 2000 was discouraging, but was nothing compared to watching the hopes of a worldwide peace movement dashed in March 2003 and Bush re-elected in 2004.

I have found strength in the efforts of others — Cindy Sheehan sitting in a ditch near Crawford; CodePink with their theatrical stunts and dogged determination. I’ve found hope in an emerging GI movement that I support with work on a Killeen coffeehouse. I’ve turned out for Texas State Employee Union campaigns and felt the solidarity of a statewide union. I’ve supported the organizing efforts of immigrant workers. I’ve picketed a private prison that housed children and seen it shut down by persistent community organizing and dedicated attorneys. In El Salvador I was an election observer to an historic left victory. I’ve chronicled some of this for The Rag Blog.

At the same time, I’ve been dismayed by the escalation of war and the inept presidential leadership on health care. I’ve been saddened by the earthquake in Chile and truly disheartened by the election of a right-wing president in a country I care for. There have been plenty of setbacks.

In Austin, the beloved “progressive” city, I’ve watched East Austin get re-shaped by developers with hardly a murmur from progressives. Dismissing the term “gentrification” as too polite, union organizer and writer Bill Fletcher, says: “We need to stop the class and racial cleansing of our cities… where workers are being driven out of cities…” A piece of this might be ending — in the simple name of democracy – the costly, at-large electoral system here. Austin is the only large city in Texas with this legacy representation.

Decades ago, Mariann Wizard wrote a farewell poem to Austin entitled “Sweet Suck City.” That is what I often think of this town, so steeped in its own coolness.

On March 8th, I was impressed by the International Women’s Day event in San Antonio — it’s 20-year staying power, its link to the current struggle of hotel workers, its multiculturalism. I’m sure it’s easier to admire that coalition from afar than to invest the day-to-day effort it takes to maintain unity. But, trust me, I haven’t seen anything like that kind of coalition work in Austin, Texas.

So where does this take us? What is to be done? For starters, make some soup, tend the basil, and then read Howard Zinn’s, You Can’t Be Neutral On a Moving Train.

Walk the dog and then think about what small thing you can do. Give a donation to the Workers’ Defense Project. Host a fundraiser for Iraq Veterans Against the War. Help Killeen’s Under the Hood Café. Help subsidize community organizers who want to attend the next U.S. Social Forum in Detroit.

This struggle isn’t about Obama. I heard Bill Ayers describe Obama very well at a SXSW panel. “He’s a centrist and an ambitious politician.” Ayers recounted Obama’s answer to a campaign question about whom Martin Luther King, Jr. would support. Obama responded, “He’d be building a movement.”

Bill Fletcher, a labor union strategist, said Monday, “As a socialist, I know something about socialism. Obama is not a socialist.” But, Fletcher didn’t apologize for voting for Obama. During the election season, I registered voters, made some calls, walked some precincts and went to a county convention. Those hours spent were a drop in the bucket compared to meetings, vigils, marches, fundraisers, and other events invested in social justice causes.

I believe that electoral politics is a game stacked for capitalist centrists. We don’t have proportional voting in this country that allows smaller parties to gain some long-term representation and traction. We have a winner-take-all, electoral-college system. And now, with the Supreme Court decision, corporations will be given even more decisive electoral power.

Progressive change has always happened in this country through organizing and demanding change of politicians. What we need even more than activists at this time are organizers. We cannot concede organizing to the right wing.

A union friend of mine reminded me that the left often likes to hold up a flag and see who will come to them instead of going to people. Whether it’s through “working people’s assemblies” as Bill Fletcher suggested or through other means, this is a time not to mourn, but to organize. Fletcher reminded a roomful of union folks that F.D.R.’s New Deal didn’t happen in a vacuum. Union leaders came to him with a set of demands and he said: “Make me do it.” They organized. He responded. That’s how change happens.

But do remember to tend the basil, enjoy the grandchildren, and make the soup.

[Long-time Austin activist Alice Embree is a contributing editor to The Rag Blog and a member of the board of the New Journalism Project.]

Also see “David P. Hamilton : On My Retirement from Political Activism” by David P. Hamilton / The Rag Blog / March 30, 2010

The Rag Blog

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Posted on April 6, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

Carry It On

By Alice Embree / The Rag Blog / April 6, 2010

[On March 30, Long-time Austin activist David P. Hamilton wrote an article in The Rag Blog announcing his “retirement” from political activism. He discussed his disillusionment with Barack Obama, whom he worked hard to elect, and with American democracy, which he considers “irretrievably corrupted.” For David, the passage of a health care reform bill that he considered a sham was the final straw, and — at 66 — he said he’s “passing the torch.”]

I’m responding to David Hamilton’s retirement notice posted on The Rag Blog last week. Everyone should get to retire or take leave from the movement for social justice. It’s never been a paid job and the benefits certainly haven’t included major medical or dental care.

We don’t need burn-out. But we desperately need persistence. We all must find a balance between what replenishes and what depletes us. For years I have identified with Marge Piercy’s poem, “To Be Of Use.” But, her guidance in “Spring Offensive of the Snail” may be more important.

I cannot live crackling
with electric rage always.
….
This time we have to remember
to sing and make soup.

We can’t lose faith in the struggle for social justice because Obama delivered an expanded war and a Wall Street bailout and failed (never really trying) to deliver a public option for health care. If our faith was in electoral politics, it was misplaced.

My post-retirement activism has been both rewarding and difficult. Bush’s election in 2000 was discouraging, but was nothing compared to watching the hopes of a worldwide peace movement dashed in March 2003 and Bush re-elected in 2004.

I have found strength in the efforts of others — Cindy Sheehan sitting in a ditch near Crawford; CodePink with their theatrical stunts and dogged determination. I’ve found hope in an emerging GI movement that I support with work on a Killeen coffeehouse. I’ve turned out for Texas State Employee Union campaigns and felt the solidarity of a statewide union. I’ve supported the organizing efforts of immigrant workers. I’ve picketed a private prison that housed children and seen it shut down by persistent community organizing and dedicated attorneys. In El Salvador I was an election observer to an historic left victory. I’ve chronicled some of this for The Rag Blog.

At the same time, I’ve been dismayed by the escalation of war and the inept presidential leadership on health care. I’ve been saddened by the earthquake in Chile and truly disheartened by the election of a right-wing president in a country I care for. There have been plenty of setbacks.

In Austin, the beloved “progressive” city, I’ve watched East Austin get re-shaped by developers with hardly a murmur from progressives. Dismissing the term “gentrification” as too polite, union organizer and writer Bill Fletcher, says: “We need to stop the class and racial cleansing of our cities… where workers are being driven out of cities…” A piece of this might be ending — in the simple name of democracy – the costly, at-large electoral system here. Austin is the only large city in Texas with this legacy representation.

Decades ago, Mariann Wizard wrote a farewell poem to Austin entitled “Sweet Suck City.” That is what I often think of this town, so steeped in its own coolness.

On March 8th, I was impressed by the International Women’s Day event in San Antonio — it’s 20-year staying power, its link to the current struggle of hotel workers, its multiculturalism. I’m sure it’s easier to admire that coalition from afar than to invest the day-to-day effort it takes to maintain unity. But, trust me, I haven’t seen anything like that kind of coalition work in Austin, Texas.

So where does this take us? What is to be done? For starters, make some soup, tend the basil, and then read Howard Zinn’s, You Can’t Be Neutral On a Moving Train.

Walk the dog and then think about what small thing you can do. Give a donation to the Workers’ Defense Project. Host a fundraiser for Iraq Veterans Against the War. Help Killeen’s Under the Hood Café. Help subsidize community organizers who want to attend the next U.S. Social Forum in Detroit.

This struggle isn’t about Obama. I heard Bill Ayers describe Obama very well at a SXSW panel. “He’s a centrist and an ambitious politician.” Ayers recounted Obama’s answer to a campaign question about whom Martin Luther King, Jr. would support. Obama responded, “He’d be building a movement.”

Bill Fletcher, a labor union strategist, said Monday, “As a socialist, I know something about socialism. Obama is not a socialist.” But, Fletcher didn’t apologize for voting for Obama. During the election season, I registered voters, made some calls, walked some precincts and went to a county convention. Those hours spent were a drop in the bucket compared to meetings, vigils, marches, fundraisers, and other events invested in social justice causes.

I believe that electoral politics is a game stacked for capitalist centrists. We don’t have proportional voting in this country that allows smaller parties to gain some long-term representation and traction. We have a winner-take-all, electoral-college system. And now, with the Supreme Court decision, corporations will be given even more decisive electoral power.

Progressive change has always happened in this country through organizing and demanding change of politicians. What we need even more than activists at this time are organizers. We cannot concede organizing to the right wing.

A union friend of mine reminded me that the left often likes to hold up a flag and see who will come to them instead of going to people. Whether it’s through “working people’s assemblies” as Bill Fletcher suggested or through other means, this is a time not to mourn, but to organize. Fletcher reminded a roomful of union folks that F.D.R.’s New Deal didn’t happen in a vacuum. Union leaders came to him with a set of demands and he said: “Make me do it.” They organized. He responded. That’s how change happens.

But do remember to tend the basil, enjoy the grandchildren and make the soup.

[Long-time Austin activist Alice Embree is a contributing editor to The Rag Blog and a member of the board of the New Journalism Project.]

The Rag Blog

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Employment Crisis : Inequality and the Global South

Posted on April 6, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer


How it impacts workers:
Transformation in the Global South

The end product… has been increasing global inequality in wealth and income and the continuation of massive poverty, powerlessness, and precariousness.

By Harry Targ (with David Cormier) / The Rag Blog / April 4, 2010

Neo-liberalism challenges the non-aligned movement

Since the 1970s, poor countries have been increasingly forced to embrace neo-liberal economic policies at home — cutting government programs, privatizing the economy, opening up the economy to foreign penetration, and shifting to an export-orientation — contrary to the agenda of the Non-Aligned Movement. For many countries, neo-liberal policies constituted a radical break from state policies in which government collaboration with or oversight of the economy were common (so-called heterodox policies).

The Non-Aligned Movement of newly independent countries began to meet in the 1950s. Their concern was the polarization of the international system around debates about “communism” and the “free world” or USSR/U.S. conflicts. For them the central issue was economic development. NAM countries became attracted to variants of Socialist or heterodox policies that called for strong state involvement in economic growth.

Because of United States/Soviet competition during the Cold War for the support of NAM, it gained voice in the United Nations system. Leaders of NAM countries began to demand a new international economic order or NIEO that would regulate international capitalism: limit the free reign of transnational corporations (TNCs), reschedule debts, liberalize patent laws, stabilize prices of agricultural commodities and raw materials, and in other ways regulate global capitalism to reduce some of its negative consequences for the Global South.

In Latin America, these policies were referred to as Import-Substitution Industrialization. The thinking behind ISI, initially developed by Economic Commission for Latin America economists and later amended by dependency theorists, was that manufacturing countries gain more from global exchange than export-oriented raw materials producing countries. Consequently Latin American countries needed to shift resources to industrialization. In the process, ISI policies required protections from unbridled foreign, i.e. United States, economic penetration.

The debt trap

The ability to further implement the NIEO and ISI was dramatically reversed by two historic world events. First, the Middle East wars led to dramatic increases in the price of oil during the 1970s. Oil poor countries that had embraced industrial development policies based on the importation of cheap oil experienced enormously increased trade deficits. Western banks choked with oil profits needed to find ways to use the glut of petro dollars. As a result, poor countries were forced to borrow huge sums of money from banks and banks encouraged the blossoming debt system.

To illustrate, indebtedness of the non-oil producing Global South increased five times between 1973 and 1982 reaching a total of $612 billion (Wayne Ellwood, The No-Nonsense Guide to Globalization, 43). By the new century, the total debt of developing countries had reached nearly $3 trillion, or $400 for each person living in the Global South (Ellwood, 48) In the 1990s, payments flowing from the South to the North in interest on loans exceeded loan funds entering the countries concerned.

In addition to the debt trap, as suggested above, the debt system came with a policy price: requirements that debtor countries reverse commitments to the NIEO vision and ISI policies. In the 1980s, the neo-liberal economic policies, central to the process of globalization, began to spread throughout the global economy. The debt system has been institutionalized ever since such that countries have become trapped in debt and requirements to carry out the policies of the banks.

The nail-in-the-coffin of Socialist or mixed-economy policies resulted from the economic and political disintegration of Socialism in the 1980s. The former Soviet Union sought to match the U.S. side of the arms race (the Reagan military build-up was the biggest in U.S. history). It found itself in expensive military quagmires in places such as Afghanistan. In addition, political legitimacy of the regime in the Soviet Union and across Eastern Europe declined with the inability of Socialist economies to match consumer growth in the West. The end result was the collapse of Socialism at the same time that the debt system was imposing neo-liberal policies everywhere.

Paradoxically, its advocates claimed, the neo-liberal policy agenda would increase the ability of poorer countries to participate in the global economy. Economic reforms at home would entice increased foreign investment. Shifting from tariffs to markets and from production for domestic consumption to production for sale on world markets would increase earnings which could be plowed into domestic economic development (as well as paying back the bankers for interest on loans).

Data on the 1990s indicated that direct foreign investment increased by about 15 times over the decade. However, 75% of the investment went to just 12 countries, the most industrialized of the countries of the Global South with the largest markets. These countries included Argentina, Brazil, China, Indonesia, Mexico, and South Korea.

Also trade data, exports and imports, indicated that the countries of the European Union, the United States, Japan, and Canada accounted for half of all world trade. Similarly a small number of countries accounted for half of the world’s imports. Despite claims by advocates, neo-liberal economic policies did not increase incorporation of most poor countries into the global economy.

The transformation of work

The transformation from Socialist or heterodox policies in the Global South to neo-liberalism, while not stimulating incorporation into the global economy and development, did facilitate changing work patterns. Neo-liberal policies, including privatization and shifting production from domestic consumption to exports, radically transformed rural work in many countries of the Global South.

Governmental pressures undermined traditional patterns of agriculture including land ownership and production processes. Land holdings were consolidated under the control of foreign or wealthy domestic investors. More productive and larger agricultural units began to produce commodities for sale in rich overseas markets.

Peasant farmers who in the past produced food stuffs for domestic consumption were replaced by agricultural workers and new technologies to produce winter vegetables and flowers for foreign customers. Countries which had produced enough food for their own people became net importers of food products. In addition, agricultural subsidies characteristic of the United States and countries of the European Union made it all but impossible for poor farmers to compete with the cheap imported food.

As a result of the new agriculture, and farmers forced off their land, migration to urban centers magnified, as more and more rural dwellers sought work. Cities in the Global South doubled or tripled in size, becoming surrounded by make-shift dwellings of people looking for work. Some rural migrants were able to find work in the new export-processing zones or sweat shop industries rising in some countries of the Global South.

The pool of cheap labor in the Global South, replenished by the transformation of agriculture, provided an attractive opportunity for textile, electronics, and other manufacturing employment, once basic to the manufacturing economies of the industrialized countries. The globalization of production occurred in tandem with the imposition of neo-liberal economic policies, and the transformation of agriculture.

These changes were reflected in changing employment/unemployment rates and the kind of work that became available in the Global South. From 1950 to 1990, there was a decline by almost 1/3 of those of working age in the world engaged in agriculture. The percentage of the world work force in agriculture in 1990 was down to 49%, from 67% in 1950 (In Latin America and the Caribbean the decline from 1950 to 1990 was from 54% to 25% in agriculture).

In addition, the growth in industrial employment between 1950 and 1990 was modest, not commensurate with the declining agricultural employment. (In Latin America, the decline in agriculture was more dramatic than the world figures while the increase in industrial employment was not greater than the world figures.) More recent International Labor Organization (ILO) data suggests that in the world at large “the share of employment in manufacturing declined between 1990 and 2001 in all economies for which data are available…” (ILO, 21 Nov. 2005).

Further, the world data (and the data for Latin America) indicate that the major sectoral growth in employment has been in the service sector. Increases in service sector employment ranged from 8% to 16% among countries in different economic strata. The largest growth in the service sector occurred in the lower-middle income countries.

The rise of the informal sector

Finally, the most significant shift in employment throughout the world, particularly in the Global South, is from the formal economy (agriculture, industry, and service) to the informal economy. Most workers in this growing sector of the work force are driven by a desperate need to provide the rudiments of life. Consequently, they are willing to do virtually anything to earn money.

This may involve lucrative small street market sales, or low wage home work (from house cleaning to garment assembly), or prostitution, or drug dealing. Work in the informal economy is not regulated. Workers enjoy no work place health and safety protections. They receive no health or retirement benefits. And, of negative consequence to the national government, they pay no taxes.

In a recent report produced by the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations, “The Inequality Predicament,” a distinction is made between “haves” and “have-nots” in terms of employment. The former are employed in the formal economy. They are more likely “…to earn decent wages, receive job-related benefits, have secure employment contracts and be covered by relevant laws and regulations” (UN, 2005, 29). The informal sector represents the polar opposite in terms of wages, benefits, and rights. The growth of the informal sector worldwide, the report says, is intimately tied to growing global inequality.

The UN report estimates that “informal employment accounts for between one half and three quarters of non-agricultural employment in the majority of developing countries.” They indicate that the percentage of those who work in the informal sector varies across the Global South: 48% in North Africa, 51% in Latin America and the Caribbean, 65 % in Asia and 78% in Sub-Saharan Africa (UN, 30).

In addition, the report refers to studies that suggest that the informal sector accounts for significant shares of the overall income and gross domestic product of individual countries. One study of 110 countries in 2000 found that the 18% of the gross national incomes of OECD countries came from the informal sector, 38% in “transition” countries (formerly Socialist), and 41% in developing countries. The informal economy accounted for 42% of the GNP in Africa, 26% in Asia, and 41% in Latin America (UN, 30-34).

The precarious classes

Data shows that unemployment around the world rose over the period from 1993 to 2002 and declined somewhat in 2003. What may be the most significant finding from this data is the fact that the seeming recovery of 2003 only imperceptibly impacted on unemployment rates. Even if sectors of the global economy experience growth, some theorists suggest, recovery given the system of global capitalism is “jobless.”

The economic transformations initiated in the Global South in the 1970s occurred in the context of the concentration and globalization of capital and the declining resistance including the collapse of Socialism. The oil crisis, the rise of a global debt system, global policy shifts from state/market economies to neo-liberalism parallel significant changes in work activity from agriculture and industry to service, to the rise of the informal sector and unemployment. The end product of these transformations has been increasing global inequality in wealth and income and the continuation of massive poverty, powerlessness, and precariousness.

While rates of poverty declined over the last 20 years of the twentieth century, still half the world’s population in 2001 lived on less than $2 a day. And the percentage declines in extreme poverty, less than $1 a day, during this period mask the fact that more people in 2001 were in extreme poverty than 20 years earlier. The numbers of people in extreme poverty increased in Latin America and the Caribbean, the Middle East and North Africa, South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and India. The numbers of those in poverty declined in East Asia and the Pacific and China.

Also, it is clear that income inequality has been increasing between richer and poorer regions of the globe. With the OECD countries representing the rich countries, on a per capita income basis, shares of income of peoples in Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean have declined between 1980 and 2001. Weller, Scott, and Hersch (2001) report that in 1980 median income in the richest countries (top 10 percent) was 77 times greater than the median income in the poorest countries (the bottom 10 percent). By 1999, the gap had expanded to 122 times.

The transformation of employment from agriculture and industry to service and the informal sector — a shift that has been characterized as one from “have” to “have-not” jobs — has been reflected in the continuation of massive poverty around the globe and substantial evidence that the distribution of wealth and income has worsened over the period of neo-liberal policy influence. “The Inequality Predicament” makes it clear as well that income inequality is reproduced in the distribution of access to health care, education, housing, access to water, and sanitation.

Data like these led Samir Amin (2003) to predict that the transformation of the global political economy was precipitating a crisis of poverty and human misery that will transcend the expectations of the most well-meaning humanists. Amin described the emergence of “precarious classes” in both rural and urban areas.

Estimating that half the world’s population (3 billion people) live in the country, he predicted that nearly 2.8 billion of them will become economically redundant. That is, given technology, 20 million people could provide the food needs for the planet. In the cities, 1.5 billion of 3 billion people are marginalized workers who experience work temporarily and/or who always live with the insecurity of job and income loss.

Over 4 billion people of the 6 billion living on the planet, Amin wrote, constitute “the precarious classes,” made redundant because of declining employment and being reduced to perpetual employment insecurity due to the exigencies of the pursuit of profit in an era of neo-liberal globalization. This situation, Amin asserted, constituted a coming global crisis not seen in human history.

[Harry Tarq is a professor in American Studies who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. He blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical.]

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Compassion Deficit : The Triumph of Materialism

Posted on April 6, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

Cartoon by Stiners / The Unheard.

Compassion deficit:
On the unpopularity of health care reform

By Sherman DeBrosse / The Rag Blog / April 6, 2010

David Broder recently wrote about interviewing people in Florida and Texas about health care reform. He learned they were strongly opposed because it involved helping other people.

He hastened to add that Americans are very generous and compassionate. It was just that in these tough times, people worried about adding to the debt.

Maybe, but I doubt it.

In the first place, those folks should know that health care reform does help them. Without it, the uninsured are still treated at our expense in hospitals. The cost of treating them is even higher because it is in the ER and occurs when something really bad happens. There is no preventive care. After the initial jump in usage of services, the plan will begin cutting costs.

The interesting thing is that so many people with benefits oppose health care even when their own children lack it. Given even the smallest amount of thought, they should know that the odds of some or even many of their grandchildren going without coverage are substantial.

That they cannot see that far is a tribute to the Cadillac of a Republican information machine and also an indication that our culture is very different from what it once was. Talk of Martin Luther King’s “beloved community” today is a cruel joke.

Broder lets Americans off the hook because they accepted Medicare Part D. In the first place, the Republicans passed it, so there weren’t wingnuts running around yelling about socialism. Moreover, most people expect to live to collect on Part D, so they are getting something. It is not just helping the other guy.

A reason why there is so much opposition to reform is that over the last three decades, we have become a very materialistic people. Years back, Christians warned about materialism.

My use of the term is more Hegelian. It refers to imperialism, Social Darwinism, militarism, materialism, globalism, and capitalist fundamentalism. I’ll get mine and let the devil take the other guy.

At the other extreme, we have compassion, social justice, respect for the rights of labor, a collaborationist foreign policy, and primacy of community.

What has been going on for a long time is that the “spiritual” forces in society have been overwhelmed, and it is hard to see how they will bounce back any time soon. The great German historian Friederick Meinecke wrote that when the material forces dominate the culture it sometimes happens that only a catastrophe can lead to restoring balance.

Materialism has completely overwhelmed our culture. No wonder the Republican information machine was so successful in generating opposition to health care reform. They are expert persuaders, but they also knew that their three decade effort to transform the culture had worked.

[Sherman DeBrosse is a regular contributor to The Rag Blog. A retired history professor, he also blogs at Sherm Says and on DailyKos.]

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Posted on April 5, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

Carry It On

By Alice Embree / The Rag Blog / April 5, 2010

I’m responding to David Hamilton’s retirement notice posted this week. Everyone should get to retire or take leave from the movement for social justice. It’s never been a paid job and the benefits certainly haven’t included major medical or dental care.

We don’t need burn-out. But we desperately need persistence. We all must find a balance between what replenishes and what depletes us. For years I have identified with Marge Piercy’s poem, “To Be Of Use.” But, her guidance in “Spring Offensive of the Snail” may be more important.

“I cannot live crackling
with electric rage always.
…
This time we have to remember
to sing and make soup.”

We can’t lose faith in the struggle for social justice because Obama delivered an expanded war and a Wall Street bailout and failed (never really trying) to deliver a public option for health care. If our faith was in electoral politics, it was misplaced.

My post-retirement activism has been both rewarding and difficult. Bush’s election in 2000 was discouraging, but was nothing compared to watching the hopes of a worldwide peace movement dashed in March 2003 and Bush re-elected in 2004.

I have found strength in the efforts of others – Cindy Sheehan sitting in a ditch near Crawford; CodePink with their theatrical stunts and dogged determination. I’ve found hope in an emerging GI movement that I support with work on a Killeen coffeehouse. I’ve turned out for Texas State Employee Union campaigns and felt the solidarity of a statewide union. I’ve supported the organizing efforts of immigrant workers. I’ve picketed a private prison that housed children and seen it shut down by persistent community organizing and dedicated attorneys. In El Salvador I was an election observer to an historic left victory. I’ve chronicled some of this for the Rag Blog.

At the same time, I’ve been dismayed by the escalation of war and the inept presidential leadership on health care. I’ve been saddened by the earthquake in Chile and truly disheartened by the election of a right-wing president in a country I care for. There have been plenty of setbacks.

In Austin, the beloved “progressive” city, I’ve watched East Austin get re-shaped by developers with hardly a murmur from progressives. Dismissing the term “gentrification” as too polite, union organizer and writer Bill Fletcher, says: “We need to stop the class and racial cleansing of our cities… where workers are being driven out of cities…” A piece of this might be ending – in the simple name of democracy – the costly, at-large electoral system. Austin is the only large city in Texas with this legacy representation.

Decades ago, Mariann Wizard wrote a farewell poem to Austin entitled “Sweet Suck City.” That is what I often think of this town, so steeped in its own coolness.

On March 8th, I was impressed by the International Women’s Day event in San Antonio – it’s 20-year staying power, its link to the current struggle of hotel workers, its multiculturalism. I’m sure it’s easier to admire that coalition from afar than to invest the day-to-day effort it takes to maintain unity. But, trust me, I haven’t seen anything like that kind of coalition work in Austin, Texas.

So where does this take us? What is to be done? For starters, make some soup, tend the basil, and then read Howard Zinn’s, “You Can’t Be Neutral On a Moving Train.”

Walk the dog and then think about what small thing you can do. Give a donation to the Workers’ Defense Project. Host a fundraiser for Iraq Veterans Against the War. Help Killeen’s Under the Hood Café. Help subsidize community organizers who want to attend the next U.S. Social Forum in Detroit.

This struggle isn’t about Obama. I heard Bill Ayers describe Obama very well at a SXSW panel. “He’s a centrist and an ambitious politician.” Ayers recounted Obama’s answer to a campaign question about whom Martin Luther King, Jr. would support. Obama responded, “He’d be building a movement.”

Bill Fletcher, a labor union strategist said Monday, “As a socialist, I know something about socialism. Obama is not a socialist.” But, Fletcher didn’t apologize for voting for Obama. During the election season, I registered voters, made some calls, walked some precincts and went to a county convention. Those hours spent were a drop in the bucket compared to meetings, vigils, marches, fundraisers and other events invested in social justice causes.

I believe that electoral politics is a game stacked for capitalist centrists. We don’t have proportional voting in this country that allows smaller parties to gain some long-term representation and traction. We have a winner-take-all, electoral-college system. And now, with the Supreme Court decision, corporations will be given event even more decisive electoral power.

Progressive change has always happened in this country through organizing and demanding change of politicians. What we need even more than activists at this time are organizers. We cannot concede organizing to the right wing.

A union friend of mine reminded me that the left often likes to hold up a flag and see who will come to them instead of going to people. Whether it’s through “working people’s assemblies” as Bill Fletcher suggested or through other means, this is a time not to mourn, but to organize. Fletcher reminded a roomful of union folks Monday night that F.D.R.’s New Deal didn’t happen in a vacuum. Union leaders came to him with a set of demands and he said: “Make me do it.” They organized. He responded. That’s how change happens.

But do remember to tend the basil, enjoy the grandchildren and make the soup.


Type rest of the post here

Source /

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Austin Heat : Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet?

Posted on April 5, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer


Report:
Extreme summer heat and
Irreversible ecosystem demise

Austin’s summers will be a third more extreme than those of the Sonoran Desert and about 10 times more extreme than the normal Texas Hill Country summers.

By Bruce Melton / April 5, 2010

[Our colleague, investigative journalist Ken Martin, has just launched an impressive new project called The Austin Bulldog (see below). The Bulldog has just posted an investigative report by Greg M. Schwartz entitled “Who Protects the Texas Environment? Hint: It Isn’t the State Agency That’s Supposed To.” It’s well worth the read.

In its initial number, The Austin Bulldog has also published this rather sobering commentary by Bruce Melton.]

The U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) coordinates federal research on environmental changes and their implications for society. The program began as a presidential initiative in 1989 during the Reagan — Bush era and called for “a comprehensive and integrated United States research program that will assist the nation and the world in the understanding, assessment, prediction and response to human-induced and natural processes of global change.”

The implications of this report are beyond extreme. Austin (Central Texas) normally has 12 days of 100-degree-plus heat per summer based on temperature records that go back to 1854. In the next 80 to 90 years, Austin is projected to average between 90 and 120 days of 100-degree plus heat every year. (See accompanying chart, Number of Days Over 1000F.) The Sonoran Desert Museum in Phoenix, Arizona, only averages 87 days over 100 degrees.

CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE

The Sonoran Desert is a traditional thorn and gravel desert with little to no water, blistering temperatures and, except for the natural inhabitants of the desert, is totally inhospitable to life. Austin’s summers will be a third more extreme than those of the Sonoran Desert and about 10 times more extreme than the normal Texas Hill Country summers.

Most life, as we know it in the Hill Country, will be dead by mid century. The transition to a thorn and gravel desert will be well underway. Today the changes have already begun.

Two things complicate the issue. There is a simple scientific concept that says scientists are conservative in their work. This is the “publish or perish” concept. Simply put, a scientist must be absolutely certain about the results of his or her discoveries or they will not be able to publish their papers in the academic journals. If a scientist is found to be wrong after their results are published, the journals will be much more cautious about publishing that scientist’s work in the future. A scientist’s work is therefore conservative to minimize the risk of being wrong.

The second complicating factor is that the rate of change has increased. Not long after the turn of the century, impacts of warming started increasing faster. A quote from the USGCRP Report states the obvious “Some of the changes have been faster than previous assessments have projected.”


The next graphic shows the atmospheric load of carbon dioxide (as carbon) in gigatons, from the USGCRP Report. The colored lines are the computer model’s projections. The black line with the circles shows actual atmospheric measurements. The purple line is the A1F1 scenario (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2007 Report), more commonly known as “the worst-case scenario.” What the actual measurements show is that carbon dioxide, right now, is greater than and increasing faster than in the worst-case scenario from the climate models.

At the end of the 21st century (2090 to 2100), my grandkids (if I ever get any) will still be alive. But the plants and animals and beautiful Hill Country creeks will have died by mid-century. Desert plants and animals will not have had much time to colonize the area. What will remain will be bleak and lifeless, an ecosystem in limbo between climate states.

Dry preservation will create a tomb-like landscape, stark, bleached and sun-scorched. This may seem far-fetched, but little more than a few degrees of change can completely alter an ecosystem. In Austin this last summer, our average temperature was 4.8 degrees above normal. This small amount of warming set an all-time record, by a large margin, for the hottest summer ever recorded. Thousands of trees died because of the drought. The USGCRP says that parts of North America could see temperature increases of up to 13 degrees.

The brutal reality is, regional ecosystem extinction will not arrive at the end of the century. It will arrive any year now. It will progress in a worsening spiral until the streams and animals are gone and the forests have been reduced to sticks in the blazing sun. Some years, at least in the next decade, may seem somewhat normal. But the death will come unless we start reducing not just our emissions, but also the invisible greenhouse gas load that has been building in our atmosphere for centuries.

It comes down to this: Worse than the worst-case scenario means that our efforts to date have had no impact. Changes will continue beyond the 2090 to 2100 time frame, and much of what has been discussed in this article will happen even if we stop emitting all greenhouse gases this instant. But we can still take CO2 out of the atmosphere and reverse the built-in changes yet to come. This accomplishment will rival the Manhattan and Apollo projects. All we have to do is start spending money on our environment like we are spending it on our institutions that are too big to fail because; the Earth is too big to fail.

[When Bruce Melton, P.E., isn’t practicing civil engineering, he’s studying climate change and writing a book about it, a book for the masses. Melton was one of eight Austinites named in the “Heroes of Climate Change” article published in The Good Life magazine in July 2007. To read more of his work on climate change, visit his website, Melton Engineering Services Austin.]

Editor Ken Martin describes his ambitious new project:

The Austin Bulldog is something new and different hereabouts. We’re mainly concerned with doing hard-hitting investigative reporting for stories that make a difference in the Austin community. We also publish informed commentary and question-and-answer interviews.

The Austin Bulldog is nonprofit, nonpartisan and non-advocacy. We will go where the facts lead us and report accordingly.

A variety of websites have sprung up in Austin over the years. Some are high-dollar subscription newsletters for insiders with a monetary need-to-know. Among the free-to-read sites, some fill a well-defined niche, such as partisan politics or criminal justice. Others provide a wide variety of information by aggregating the work of local bloggers.

None of these sites — subscription or free — are dedicated to investigative reporting by experienced professional journalists. That’s our niche.

Check it out.

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Life During Wartime : Spending on Defense

Posted on April 4, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

Political cartoon by Joshua Brown / Historians Against the War / The Rag Blog

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Leonardo Boff : Easter for the Crucified Earth

Posted on April 3, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

“The Crucified Land,” 1939, oil on canvas by Alexandre Hogue.

Our devastated common dwelling:
Easter for the crucified Earth

By Leonardo Boff / The Rag Blog / April 3, 2010

Easter is a celebration shared by Jews and Christians, and is a metaphor for the present situation of the Earth, our devastated common dwelling.

Etymologically, Easter means passage from slavery to freedom and from death to life. The Planet, as a whole, is passing though a severe Easter. We are within an accelerated process of loss: of air, of soil, of water, of forests, of ice, of oceans, of biodiversity, and of sustainability of the very Earth-system. Terrified, we witnessed the Earthquakes of Haiti and Chile, followed by tsunamis.

How does all of this relate to the Earth? When will the losses end, or where will they lead us? Dare we hope, as in Easter, that after Good Friday of the passion and death, new life and resurrection will always burst forth?

We need a retrospective look at the history of the Earth to shed some light on the present crisis. In the first place, we must recognize that earthquakes and disasters are recurrent in the geologic history of the Planet. There is a basic rate of extinction that is part of the normal process of evolution. Species exist for millions and millions of years, and, then they disappear. Like an individual who is born, lives for a certain time, and dies. Extinction is the destiny of individuals and species, including ours.

But beyond this natural process, mass extinctions exist. The Earth, according to geologists, may have experienced 15 such great extinctions. Two were particularly grave. The first, 245 million years ago, with the rupture of Pangea, that single land mass that broke apart, giving birth to the present continents.

That event was so devastating that it decimated between 75% and 95% of all the living species then in existence. Beneath the continents, the tectonic plates continue to be active, colliding with each other, overriding or drifting apart, in a movement called continental drift, which causes the earthquakes.

The second occurred 65 million years ago, caused by climatic disturbances, rising of the sea levels, and warming — events generated by a 9.6 km asteroid that fell in Central America, causing huge firestorms, tidal waves, poisonous gasses, and a long darkening of the sun. Dinosaurs that had dominated, sovereign, upon the Earth, for 133 million years, totally disappeared, and 50% of other living species as well.

The Earth needed ten million years to completely remake herself. But it allowed for a wide range of biodiversity such as never before in history. Our ancestors who used to live in the treetops, feeding on flowers, shivering with fear of the dinosaurs, could come down to the ground and make their way, culminating in what we are now.

Scientists, like Ward, Ehrlich, Lovelock, Myers, and others, believe that another great extinction is occurring, one that began some 2.5 million years ago when vast glaciers began to cover part of the Planet, altering the climates and the sea levels. That process was greatly accelerated by the appearance of a truly devastating meteor, namely, the human being, through his systematic intervention in the Earth system, particularly in recent centuries. Peter Ward (O fim da evolução, 1977, p. 268), says that this mass extinction is clearly visible in Brazil, where over the last 35 years, four species were definitively extinguished each day. And he ends by warning: “a gigantic ecologic disaster awaits us.”

It is the existence of earthquakes that destroy everything and kill thousands and thousands of people, such as in Haiti and Chile, that creates in us a crisis of meaning. Here we must humbly accept the Earth such as she is, generous mother or cruel stepmother.

She follows the blind mechanisms of her geologic forces and ignores us, which is why the tsunamis and cataclysms are so terrifying. But she passes information to us. Our mission as intelligent beings is to decode that information to avoid damage, or to use it for our own benefit. Animals capture that information, and before a tsunami hits, they fly to the highest places.

Perhaps at one time, long ago, we also knew how to capture that information, and defend ourselves. We have lost that capacity now, but to supplement our deficiency, there is science. Science can decode the information that previously the Earth passed to us, and suggest strategies of self defense and of salvation.

We are the Earth herself, with her consciousness and intelligence, but we are still in the youthful phase with very meager learning. We are entering the adult phase, learning how to better handle the energies of the Earth and of the cosmos. Then, the mechanisms of the Earth, through our knowledge, will stop being destructive. We all must grow, learn and mature.

The Earth hangs from the cross. We must take her from there and resurrect her. Then we will celebrate a true Easter, and we will be able to wish: Happy Easter!

Original in Portuguese; translated into Spanish by Servicios Koinonia; translated into English by Refugio del Rio Grande, Texas.

[A Brazilian theologian, philosopher, educator, and author of more than 60 books, Leonardo Bofff lives in Jardim Araras, an ecological wilderness area in the municipality of Petrópolis, Rio de Janeiro. Boff is Professor Emeritus of Ethics, Philosophy of Religion, and Ecology at the State University of Rio de Janeiro. A former Franciscan priest with a doctorate from the University of Munich, Boff was an early advocate of liberation theology. In 1991, after a series of clashes with the Vatican, Boff renounced his activities as a priest and “promoted himself to the state of laity.”]

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A King’s Easter : Reflecting on Jesus and Eggs

Posted on April 3, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer


A King’s Easter:
Pausing to reflect on Jesus and eggs

By Greg Moses / The Rag Blog / April 3, 2010

This year — for the second time — the sad anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. falls on Easter, a day that according to Google Trends brings annual peaks of interest in the search terms Jesus and eggs.

Easter is a perfect context for thinking about King’s death in a Kingian way because as a preacher of Easter sermons he would insist that after we pay death its due we should not neglect the fact of life which after all makes death possible in the first place.

Likewise with movement. For King life was movement. And half the hope for life was bound up in hope for the next movement which in his case would have been the Poor People’s Campaign of summer 1968. I say half the hope because as a Sunday preacher King warned against placing your whole hope in human effort.

Paradoxical as it sounds, the great maestro of social movement insisted that human effort could never completely do for itself. That would be like saying Jesus resurrected himself or the egg laid itself. There’s something besides all the things you can do — which you should do — for yourself. Something the movement needs which is not the movement itself.

David Rovics sent out an email yesterday reflecting upon the growing anticipations that people are having. Something is badly needed which is not being provided. Or as the Secretary of the Treasury says, unemployment will remain at unacceptable levels for many more years to come.

A movement of some kind is in the making. What’s not so clear is how people are preparing their half of the responsibility for it. King died while doing too much. Paradoxically the preacher of Easter sermons who said human effort was only half the ingredient of movement was exhausting himself in that half trying heroically to make up for the rest of us who exhaust ourselves doing too little.

In a book of spiritual teachings I recently ran across the term “personal work” and I think King would have liked that term. In the process of nonviolence as practiced by King, “personal work” was required. During the Easter campaign of 1963, protesters were required to meditate on the life of Jesus. They had to sign cards saying they had thought deeply about the example of Jesus. Jesus was required reading.

With our common life scooped out and replaced by mass media velocities — and considering the pattern of our recent debates about health care — there is reason to think that movements have been replaced in the internet age by virtual flame wars. And the thing about flame wars is that they lack all evidence of “personal work.”

Capitalism, once again, has imploded out from underneath millions of people whom it pretended to serve. And socialism even under these conditions finds underwhelming support. Between the cracks of two deflated ideals, a necessary movement grows roots. With so much death around us, King’s Easter reminds us that if we don’t neglect “personal work” there is always hope for birth and rebirth through righteous, organized, and disciplined social movements.

[Greg Moses is editor of the Texas Civil Rights Review and author of Revolution of Conscience: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Philosophy of Nonviolence. He can be reached at gmosesx@gmail.com.]

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Marc Estrin : George’s Messiah

Posted on April 3, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer


Happy Easter,
But crucify him first

By Marc Estrin / The Rag Blog / April 3, 2010

This morning, the cheery NPR voice announced that today was Good Friday — but not for the Catholic Church, which was reeling from you know what. Good Friday — good.

I suppose it can be seen as good if you like nailing people onto crosses and the institutional power secreted from those wounds, but for most followers of Jesus Who Is Called The Christ, it’s a pretty sad end of the week.

Here in Happy-face Land, we love Easter, pink, white, and blooming. And now even Good Friday has been gobbled by Goodness. But George Fredrick Händel was not so easily scammed.

Most American performances of Messiah offer only the Christmas portion with tacked-on Hallelujah and Amen celebrating a babe not yet messiahed. But Messiah was written as an Easter piece, full of pain, suffering and transcendence. The familiar Christmas portion was a prologue only — to contrast with the anxious and metaphysical burden of the work. But Hallmark will have its way.

I am the president and only member of the National Bring Back Messiah As An Easter Piece Society. I have little influence on American cultural practice. But I do get to write novels with their interior rants.

Tweaking When the Gods Come Home to Roost for possible publication, I came across this short chapter I thought you of classical music persuasion might enjoy:

George’s Messiah

George loved Messiah. It was nothing a Jewish boy in Levittown had been expected to love, but it happened. Until he was fifteen, he had steered clear of this goyish mania. But one day, a lovely young girl with long, dark hair handed him a leaflet for an afternoon performance a busride away in Queens. Maybe she sang in the chorus. It must be all right for a Jew to go into a church, he thought, if it’s for a concert, and not to eat the body and blood. He wouldn’t tell his parents. They’d never know.

The young man was ravished by the experience. He used the word in every possible meaning: he was seized and violently done to; he was overcome by horror, joy and delight; he was pre-sexually bewitched, for the long-haired one was in fact singing soprano in the front row, and never had such an angelic voice issued from such sensuous purity. This concert was of the Easter portion of the work, and from “Behold the Lamb of God” to the last “Amen”; he was transfixed with wonder.

From the three bar mitzvahs he’d attended he knew Jews didn’t make this kind of sound. Synagogues were filled with the discordant rumble of davvenning, each worshipper finding his individual prayer voice and rhythm, chanting, whispering, singing, crying, repeating phrases over and over, lost in the brumming of the crowd. Sometimes a cantor sang. But this — this! It is music, music that hath ravished me! He got home at an unsuspicious five o’clock, and never mentioned his encounter.

He had tried to hear Messiah every year since then, but with all the changes that had occurred along the way, he had managed to bat only about .300. So what a boon — right here, in his own community, that he could conduct an annual Messiah! The sad part was that he could never share this joy with his family, old anti-clerical mom and pop ever more rigid in their disdain for religion. The idea of their very own son promoting Christ the Jew-killer might, he thought, send them each into heart failure. So this was his one activity he never called home about.

Choosing to do the Easter portion of Messiah for Christmas was George’s little revenge on America. Though written as an Easter piece, and traditionally performed in Europe during Easter time, in coming to America Messiah had shifted seasons, and along with them, content. Though the Puritans had banned the celebration of Christmas, post-Puritan America has embraced it with a vengeance, currently exhorting all to worship at the mall of one’s choice.

Perhaps in the land of the Easter Bunny and the lethal injection, crucifixion is seen as barbaric. Christmas, not Easter, is where most American celebration is concentrated, and with it, most concertizing. Messiah has become a Christmas piece, and most American performances restrict themselves to its first section concerning Advent and the birth of Christ. The meat of the oratorio is left out, and the introductory portion is capped with the Hallelujah chorus — a masterwork written to praise Christ’s ascent to his heavenly throne, unreported in these Hallmark card performances.

“A premature ejaculation at best,” George thought when feeling generous. But if Americans were determined to hear part of Messiah at Christmas, he was going to be damn sure it was the Easter portion that attacked them.

At 6:30 on the evening of the concert, Betty cell-phoned in to say that she had had a flat on I-680, that the AAA said they’d be there within fifteen minutes, and that being the case, she’d be at the church by ten after, and could they hold the performance? As if there were a choice.

So George came out at 7:05, and announced that the concert would begin at 7:20 because, as the contemporary world amply demonstrates, the Messiah always comes late. Then he did a remarkable thing, unexpected, certainly, because of his refusal of the first part of Messiah, but unexpected, ever, in any form, under the eye of God. He sat down at the Steinway, and played the slow opening of the opening “Symphony” of the work. Twenty-four stately, double-dotted measures marked grave — this the limit of his keyboard technique.

When the moment came for the Allegro moderato to begin, George stood up, walked to the curve of the piano as if for a vocal recital, placed his right hand on the rim of the case, and performed that three-part fugue all by himself. He whistled the soprano voice out of the right side of his mouth, the alto out of the left, and vocalized the bass part with accurate, wordless humming. You don’t believe this. It is true. Upwards of a hundred people heard it with their own ears. He must have been practicing this in the shower for the last twenty years in preparation for that night.

Now Messiah is one of the grandest works of western culture. It is simply not appropriate for a serious conductor to whistle the overture in public performance. But the effect, rather than being ridiculous, was to create a churchfull of gaping at the wonder that is man. No problem was too great for one who set his mind to it, no achievement too difficult. The room was riddled with people who had dedicated themselves to Bay Area excellence: none could gainsay George Helmstetter’s accomplishment.

Betty arrived, pumped and wired. The chorus filed on to the risers. In spite of George Bernard Shaw’s opinion alleging “the impossibility of obtaining justice for that work in a Christian country,” mid-Messiah instantly summoned the audience to pain and passion including even them, the guilt-free of the world. “Behold the Lamb of God,” the sacrifice upon whom all sins would be heaped and slaughtered into renewal, the Lamb whose blood would be smeared on door jambs to frighten Death away, the Lamb that would conquer the wolves, the conquering Lamb.

What about this Lamb? Handel took great pains to describe its scorn-filled whipping. “He gave his back to the smiters, and his cheeks to them that pluckèd off the hair.” Blood and hair clotting together on the prison floor. Here is perhaps the only major artwork which celebrates saliva as such: “He hid not his face from shame and spitting,” spit in the face, a cadence, ach-ptoo!

The listeners were assured, in no uncertain terms, that the Lamb was burdened with their very own doings: Surely he hath born our griefs, and carried our sorrows. The fierce F-minor cries, the painful, discordant suspensions: He was wounded for our transgressions; he was bruised for our iniquities, a catharsis of pity and terror.

Even the Jewish mothers of many in the audience would not have been able to evoke such a sense of guilt. The thoughtful were carried emotionally along, while at the same time wondering about the phenomenon of the Messiah. Is this suffering lamb the Saviour of the world? How odd.

The Messiah’s function is to be victorious. Christians thought of Christ. Jews thought through their own lens of the “true” reference, the continued oppression and persecution of Israel throughout the Christian and pre-Christian centuries — the Nazi destruction, the pogroms of the nineteenth century which had brought their parents to the New World, the persecutions of the eighteenth century, the seventeenth, and on back to the Exile, where the image of the Lamb converges with that of scattered Israel.

“And with His stripes we are healed.” What is that about? Why should one’s agony be inversely proportional to another’s? Conservation of Wound? Conservation of Tears? Conservation of Pain? Beckett has told us: “The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh.”

Handel lingers over the word “healed” as if to lay soothing balm upon Christ’s — and our — wounds. Yet even this very moment, was beyond a definitive scan. The perverse listener — and who is not perverse? — could easily hear the melismatic syllables of “healed” as “hee-hee-hee-hee-heeled,” in effect a subtle but demonic, underlying cackling, as if to say that no matter what the unction, the wound is too great to be cured — you’ll see. Hee-hee-hee. George was haunted by this dopplegängbanging effect, but was unable to phrase his way around it. The Lamb of God, and the sheep who have gone astray.

“All they that see him, laugh him to scorn. They shoot out their lips and shake their heads, saying”: Enter the scornful, the brutal choral metamorphosis from a confessing people of God to an unruly crowd in obscene play at a public execution. So does Jekyll turn unexpectedly to Hyde.

He trusted in God that He would deliver him: let Him deliver him, if he delight in him. Such assertive contemptuousness! The trivializing, de-legitimizing of God, putting his capitalized pronoun on a syncopated weak beat, now ironically, self-flatteringly strong. What pristine nastiness, abundantly clear. Thy rebuke hath broken His heart. He is full of heaviness. He lookèd for some to have pity on him. But there was no man, neither found he any, to comfort him.

Not only was this George’s favorite moment of Messiah, with the single most touching note in music slipping into place in the piano’s middle voice, a pensive entwinement of suffering and beauty. In the pause after pity on him, a luminous E rises half step to a questioning, consoling F, as if at least one human heart might go out to Jesus from the frigid emptiness answering his gaze.

But it was also the theological key to the work: Here was the heart of it. As every culture has known and proclaimed, something is wrong with the human race. Things are not as they should be. There have been many intellectual explanations — mythological, religious, philosophical. But here is the psalmist’s prophetic assessment: the primal fault is that we disdain God. We have turnèd everyone in his own way. The biblical word for this is “sin.”

Since by man came death… The listeners had to interpolate the moment of death. But George found this not egregious. The whole textual strategy of the Messiah is one of brilliant, evocative avoidance. Charles Jennens, an otherwise unremarkable British gentleman, had provided his friend George Fredrick with a libretto of theological genius, portraying every shade of devotion from piety, resignation and repentance to hope, faith and exultation.

And all this without resorting to narrative, as in the Passions of Bach: Christ did this, and then he did that, the misery composed directly into the music. The Messiah commands attention because of what it does not show, for the most part indicating, rather than depicting events. And therefore the death of Jesus, that epoch-making moment, really could exist as a lacuna between his unrewarded search for comfort and the triumphant Lift up your heads which followed. Praise be to Handel for demonstrating this.

Lift up your heads; The Lord gave the word; Their sound is gone out. And so, for the Jews, the Ark takes its place in the Temple, for the Christians, the Son takes his place in Heaven, and the preachers tell the world — but some do not hear. Why do the nations so furiously rage together? Tim Eckleburg stepped out to sing, less than accurately but with conviction, to sing of the kings of the earth, of the rulers that counsel together against the Lord.

Again, the demonic chorus: Let us break any bonds with the Anointed, and cast away their yokes from us. And what will happen? This time Willy Higinbotham, a “real” tenor from the Cal music department, stepped forward to describe the smashing and breaking that will ensue, an image which always reminded George of the piled up debris confronting Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History.

And then, the great moment, the moment incoherently misplaced in American versions, the phenomenal Hallelujah Chorus. The piling up of debris? Hallelujah! For the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth — which at first blush is not a very encouraging vision of the future. But what if it were to become the case — that the kingdom of this world is become the kingdom of our Lord, and that over such a peaceable kingdom He shall reign forever and ever ? It did give one pause, in the midst of the war on drugs and the war on terror.

Almost three hundred years earlier, King George had stood in his excitement, dragging the court to its surprised feet around him, and now the audience at the Mt. Diablo Unitarian-Universalist Church took this traditional ninth inning stretch incapable, however, of diverting the impregnable momentum of the music.

For all the radiance of the performance, there was one moment that stood out above all others. Dr. T.J. Eckleburg, with his strong baritone, came in too soon after George’s breathtaking pause before the final cadence, shattering the loudest silence in creation. After the concert, BB commented to another alto: “I’ve sung Messiah many times in my life,” she said, “and I’ve always waited for someone to come in too soon. It was very satisfying to me.”

[Marc Estrin is a writer and activist, 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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