Landrieu and the Saints : A New Day for New Orleans?

Posted on February 10, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

New Orleans mayor-elect Mitch Landrieu. Photo from AP.

Who dat mayor:
A new day for New Orleans?

By Jordan Flaherty / The Rag Blog / February 9, 2010

NEW ORLEANS — In a city consumed by the Superbowl and Mardi Gras celebrations, New Orleans elected a new mayor last weekend. Mitch Landrieu, the state’s current Lieutenant Governor, won 66% of the vote — twice the total of the other 10 candidates combined. Landrieu will be the city’s first white mayor since his father held the office, from 1970-78. Troy Henry, a former Enron executive, came in second place with 14% of the vote. Fair housing lawyer and progressive activist James Perry came in fifth with 3%.

Voters also made selections in a wide range of other races including sheriff, coroner, assessor, several different judgeships, and all seven city council seats. In contests where there were three or more candidates and no one received more than 50% of the votes, there will be a runoff on March 6.

The elections marked the consolidation of a change in the city’s political power structure. For more than three decades, most elected positions in the city were in Black hands. But now, in the context of mass displacement after Katrina — as well as low voter turnout — that has changed. For the first time in more than 30 years, New Orleans will have a white mayor and a 5-2 majority-white city council.

For now, the city is united in an ecstatic euphoria over its first-ever Superbowl championship and for a beautiful moment it seems like the country’s attention and support is focused on New Orleans. It’s an open question whether the city’s new political leadership can keep this often divided city together, and direct this attention and goodwill towards a much-needed revitalization. Even within the celebration, there are worrying signs.

On Saturday, January 30, the first major parade of Mardi Gras season — called Krewe du Vieux — rolled through the Marigny and French Quarter neighborhoods. The parade is known for it’s biting and often obscene satire, with floats often featuring the city’s public officials in graphic sexual poses. This year, the majority of floats depicted Mayor Nagin. He was a pig being roasted on one float, Nero fiddling while Rome burned on another, and buried in a cemetery in another.

Ray Nagin has not been a great mayor. In fact, as the city’s first businessman mayor, he has narrowed the public sector. He has been a champion of the demolition of public housing and has done little to fight the demolition of Charity Hospital, the city’s provider of free public health care. But many of those who have demonized the mayor (recent polls gave him less than 5% approval among white residents of the city and about 20% among Black residents) are missing their mark.

The problems in New Orleans began long before Nagin was elected, and were multiplied and amplified by Hurricane Katrina. New Orleans needed tens of millions of dollars to rebuild its infrastructure even before the Hurricane. Schools were falling apart, public transportation was unreliable, and the city’s tourist-based economy offered few career opportunities.

Today, more than 60,000 residential addresses — about a third of the city’s homes — remain empty or abandoned. The city has one of the nation’s highest murder rates, a homeless population estimated at above 12,000, and a police department facing federal investigation for a wide range of crimes, including post-Katrina killings of unarmed civilians. Even if we had a great mayor, it would not be enough. The city needs federal support and visionary leadership from all branches of government. Only time will tell if those needs will be met.

[Jordan Flaherty is a journalist, an editor of Left Turn Magazine, and a staffer with the Louisiana Justice Institute. He was the first writer to bring the story of the Jena Six to a national audience. Haymarket Press will release his new book, FLOODLINES: Stories of Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six, in 2010. He can be reached at neworleans@leftturn.org.]

Source /

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Robert Jensen : Mainstream Media and the Conventional Wisdom

Posted on February 10, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

Ethan Bronner, Jerusalem bureau chief of The New York Times. His son joined the Israeli army.

NY Times and Palestine imbroglio:
No conflict of interest with conventional wisdom

by Robert Jensen / The Rag Blog / February 9, 2010

The New York Times’ public editor wrestled this week with conflict-of-interest charges sparked by the revelation that Jerusalem bureau chief Ethan Bronner’s son had joined the Israeli army.

The executive editor of the paper responded with a sensible defense of the paper’s decision to keep Bronner in that position.

Although it had the appearance of a spirited exchange, the “debate” was a tired old diversion that keeps us from facing more important questions, not just about the Israel/Palestine conflict but about U.S. journalists’ coverage of the world. As is typical in mainstream journalists’ discussions of journalistic neutrality and objectivity, the focus on an individual obscures more important questions about the institutions for which individuals work and the powerful forces that shape those institutions’ picture of the world.

The question posed by the Times officials is framed in the narrowest terms: Could Bronner maintain his neutrality and objectivity given those family circumstances, or was that indirect connection to one side of the war “still too close for comfort,” in public editor Clark Hoyt’s words.

In his Sunday column, Hoyt described Bronner as a “superb reporter” but concluded that the paper should reassign him to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest. Executive editor Bill Keller argued that such a policy would disqualify many reporters from assignments that draw on their specialized knowledge and diminish the quality of the reporting in the paper, and concluded there is no reason to reassign Bronner.

The problems with the coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict in the Times, and virtually every other corporate-commercial news outlet in the United States, are not the result of biases of specific reporters, though individual reporters may indeed have allegiances to one side of an issue.

The mainstream media have a conflict of interest at a deeper level — they are unwilling to break with the conventional wisdom about the conflict that dominates in the United States, especially among U.S. policymakers. U.S. news coverage of the conflict relentlessly presents the news within this Israeli narrative, primarily because powerful forces in this country find that narrative useful for U.S. strategic interests in the region, and U.S. journalists tend to fall in line with that view.

As one well-known mainstream reporter once grudgingly admitted to students at my university, American journalism tends to “follow the flag.” In this case the U.S. flag is planted firmly on the Israeli side of the conflict.

If that strikes you as harsh, try a thought experiment. Imagine the controversy that might arise if a Muslim-American or Arab-American correspondent married to a Palestinian had a child who joined Hamas or some other Palestinian political/military organization. Does anyone think the executive editor of the paper would defend the reporter so vigorously?

At the very least, the reporter would be expected to disavow any sympathy for Hamas and denounce the group’s use of terrorism. Even if the correspondent offered such denunciations, a reassignment would be likely.

Is Bronner being asked to make such statements? Is he being asked to denounce Israeli terrorism?

No, because the Israeli narrative — the one that U.S. policymakers endorse — does not acknowledge that systematic violence against Palestinian civilians to advance Israeli political goals is, in fact, terrorism.

Independent reports, of which the U.N.’s “Goldstone Report” is simply the latest, make it clear that such violence is a consistent feature of Israeli policy, but in this Israeli/U.S. narrative, such violence is presented as self-defense. So, Bronner can’t be asked to denounce a reality that the narrative does not recognize.

This is what is called neutrality and objectivity in mainstream journalism. Power establishes the framework, and reporting goes on within that framework. Some journalists find inventive ways to find the fissures in the system, allowing some coverage that offers an alternative view, but the pattern of coverage remains constrained by the dictates of the powerful.

So, in the Israel/Palestine conflict, U.S. reporters accept the dominant narrative of the legitimacy of Israeli violence to maintain control over the land and resources that Israel wants to retain. Palestinians argue that Israel is a colonial settler state that uses the predictably violent tactics of such states, ignoring international law and moral principles in large part because U.S. diplomatic, economic, and military support provides cover.

Most of the world supports Palestinian resistance, while in the United States the public is mostly unaware of the basic facts of the conflict. (For an excellent analysis, see the film Peace, Propaganda and the Promised Land: Media and the Israel-Palestine Conflict.)

When supporters of Palestinian rights in the United States complain about the incomplete or distorted nature of U.S. coverage, they usually are swept up in a he-said/she-said battle with the more reactionary faction of Israeli supporters. Mainstream journalists typically see themselves as embattled truth-tellers, fending off ideologues and absorbing invective from each side.

So, Keller lauds Bronner for reporting “scrupulously and insightfully on Israelis and Palestinians for many years,” which is an accurate assessment of Bronner’s work if one accepts the Israeli/U.S. narrative of self-defense as authoritative. Within that narrative, reporters such as Bronner can raise questions about the most troubling examples of Israeli violence, so long as the basic framework is accepted. This allows Keller to stand tall, declaring that “pandering to zealots means cheating readers who genuinely seek to be informed.”

Are there zealots on both sides, ideologues who don’t care about facts and want the news to reflect their vision of the world? Of course — the world is full of such people on many issues. But that says nothing about whether the Times’ de facto adoption of the Israeli/U.S. narrative in its reporting is defensible.

If U.S. journalists reduced their reliance on official sources and considered challenges to the way U.S. policymakers define the conflicts of the world, they might be able to resist the tendency to follow the flag. (The phrase, by the way, was used by former CBS News anchor Dan Rather during a speech in which he acknowledged that U.S. reporting, including his own, about the 1991 Gulf War often was flawed.)

If U.S. journalists could break out of the frameworks of the powerful, they would have to take up the more difficult work of coming to a truly independent assessment of such conflicts. That kind of journalism is crucial not only to hopes for real justice and peace in the Middle East, but also to the hopes for deeper democracy in the United States.

[Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center. His latest book is All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice (Soft Skull Press, 2009). Jensen can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu and his articles can also be found here.]

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Fearful Symmetry : A Tale of Two Presidents

Posted on February 10, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

Job losses under two presidents — December, 2007-January, 2010. Chart from Bureau of Labor Statistics / Speaker’s Office / TPM Documents.

The red increase in job loss is the climax of Republican White House control. The blue decrease in job loss is Obama and the Democrats. Sort of like when Superman flies around the world counter-clockwise to undo Lex Luthor’s fiendish destruction.

— Juan Cole / Informed Comment

Thanks to Richard Jehn / The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Primal Scream : White Racism and the Tea Party Movement

Posted on February 10, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

Sign at Tea Party in Madison, WI, April 14, 2009. Photo by cometstarmoon / Wikimedia Commons.

Bubbling under the surface:
Racial resentment in the Tea Party movement

By Rich Benjamin / February 9, 2010

[Rich Benjamin’s commentary on the underlying “white grievance” currents in the Tea Party movement were buttressed Thursday, February 4, by the statements of Republican Tom Tancredo, the opening speaker at the Tea Party convention. (See Rachel Maddow video below.) Tancredo told attendees that President Barack Obama was elected because “we do not have a civics, literacy test before people can vote in this country,” an allusion to how Southern states used literacy tests as part of an effort to deny suffrage to African American voters before the civil rights era.]

The Tea Party movement is angling to be the most revolutionary force in American politics in name and in deed, since at least the 1960s counterculture. Only this time, the political insurgents command a party of Flour Power, not flower power.

The simmering movement is the whitest phenomenon on the national scene, evident not just in the millions of Caucasians committed to its cause, but in the bedrock beliefs stirring its anti-government contempt.

How fitting, therefore, that Sarah Palin keynote the movement’s first organized confab. Neglected in all the fevered conversation around the movement’s meteoric rise, and Palin’s selection, is any useful reflection on what the cause and this figurehead stand for: white racial resentment. Packed beneath her beehive is a spitfire brew of optimistic, yet aggrieved, whiteness. Palin embodies a bizarre, sometimes alluring, combination of triumph and complaint that many Caucasian Tea Partiers identify with through and through.

Deciphering the racial codes on the movement’s ubiquitous placards does not require a doctorate in semiotics. One popular sign shows the president’s face and a caption: “Undocumented worker.” Another combines Obama’s image with this caption: “The Zoo Has an African Lion and the White House Has a Lyin’ African!”

Aside from the festive, ad hominem attacks against President Obama, the Tea Party’s leaders and its rank-and-file rarely mention race in debate, instead tucking it just under the surface of “nonracial” issues like health care reform, public spending, immigration, and pointedly, taxes.

Palin voices the right-wing drumbeat warning Americans that “government is on your back” and “you should keep your own money.” Alongside other avid Tea Party supporters like Tom Tancredo and Glenn Beck, Palin gins-up conservative whites’ existing resentment over race, carping over the “high taxes” for public services assumed to be wasted on “illegals” and minorities.

Denouncing government assistance and free school lunches at a town hall meeting in late January, South Carolina Lieutenant Governor Andre Bauer, a Tea Party supporter, said: “My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed. You’re facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don’t think too much further than that.”

At a Tea Party rally in Boone County, Kentucky (roughly 92 percent non-Hispanic white), Congressman Geoff Davis called cap-and-trade legislation “economic colonization of the hardworking states that produce the energy, the food, and the manufactured goods of the heartland, to take that and pay for social programs in the large coastal states.” In Tea Party-speak, “heartland” often means “white” — what Palin calls “the real America” — while “coastal state” means the urbanized communities that teem with racial minorities, doubling as “gateway states” for Latino immigrants.

“Immigrants are 21 percent of the uninsured, but only 7 percent of the population. This means white folks on Medicare or headed there will see benefits curtailed, while new arrivals from the Third World, whence almost all immigrants come, get taxpayer-subsidized health insurance,” gripes Patrick Buchanan on his blog. “Any wonder why all those Tea Party and town-hall protests seem to be made up of angry white folks?”

The Tea Party movement ventures a nasty turn from classic economic liberalism to white-hot anger.

The bar-stool version of the Tea Party canard goes like this: Why should we, self-sufficient small-town whites, pay taxes to support all those welfare queens, food stamp cheats and Medicaid layabouts in the big cities and coastal states? The media’s version, parroted by Palin and other Fox talking heads, commiserates with Americans in the heartland, christened “the average taxpayer,” for unjustly having to subsidize ethnic enclaves that mooch off the national treasury.

Well, not so fast. A disproportionately high share of our federal government’s tax income comes from racially diverse, immigrant-rich, urbanized states, including California, Illinois, New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts; not from extremely homogeneous, conservative, anti-tax strongholds like Idaho, Montana, Utah, the Dakotas and Wyoming.

All of this is not to say that any given rank-and-file member of the movement personally despises racial minorities. Rather, the Tea Party ethos is a direct descendant of the anti-tax segregationist politics that swept the South in the 1950s and ’60s.

Before the Tea Party’s debut, a whole generation of powerful southern Republicans propelled their careers through a conservative tax-cutting, privatizing, “free-enterprise” politics that remains wildly popular in America’s white outer suburbs and exurbs: Lee Atwater (GA), Newt Gingrich (GA), Dick Armey (GA), Tom DeLay (TX), Karl Rove (AL, TX), and George W. Bush.

These suburban and exurban Republicans intimately understood their constituents’ disdain for court-ordered desegregation. They fueled the rising mania for “individual freedom,” “privatization,” “states’ rights” and social homogeneity that once defined their Southern home turf and now defines the Tea Party.

To pernicious effect, white Tea Partiers cloak themselves in the anachronistic rights-based outlook fine-tuned by ’60s-era women and minorities. What’s the difference between Sarah Palin and Al Sharpton? Lipstick. Pay closer attention: Palin is quite like the Baptist preacher from Harlem, only paler. Sharpton’s exurb-lovin’, carpoolin’, straight-talkin’ doppleganger has her hands tied fightin’ for an aggrieved “silent majority” — or is it a vocal soon-to-be racial minority? By 2050, non-Hispanic whites will be less than half the population.

“Tea Party Nation is a user-driven group of like-minded people who desire our God given Individual Freedoms which were written out by the Founding Fathers,” according to the convention’s Web site. Tea Partiers will bend your ear about “freedom from government” or their “Hunters’ and Fishers’ Bill of Rights.”

This white-inflected rights-based outlook champions individual and neighborhood “freedoms,” withdrawn from the common nation, preoccupied by private interest, poised to behave according to private caprice. Tea Partiers contrive the right to live, make money, own property, zone neighborhoods, or protest taxes at will, without regard to the common good, a troublesome offshoot of rights-based agitprop.

Race is the subtext of now-potent populist appeals to whites, who feel battered from a tsunami of economic and cultural change. The Tea Party counterculture is waging a proxy war over race during America’s rapidly shifting economy and demographic makeup.

The Tea Party is sounding a siren call of aspiration and a primal scream of resentment — a whoop to Flour Power.

[Rich Benjamin is the author of Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America. He is senior fellow at the nonpartisan think tank Demos and sits on the board of the Roosevelt Institution. His commentary is featured on NPR and Fox Radio, and in newspapers nationwide. This article first appeared on AlterNet.]

© 2010 Independent Media Institute

Rachel Maddow blasts Tom Tancredo
Who calls for a ‘literacy test’ for voters

Source / AlterNet / truthout

The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , , , , , , | 5 Comments

Sez It All : Homescholers [Sic] for Perry [Sicker]

Posted on February 9, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

Photo by Bryan Fotographer / Houston Press. See slideshow here.

Rick Perry and Sarah Palin rally their troops

HOUSTON — The much awaited Perry-Palin rally (with extra special guest Ted Nugent) visited the Rick Berry Center in Cypress on Sunday afternoon, February 7, but made sure to wrap things up before the Big Game. Football trumps politics in Texas, of course, even if Sarah Palin comes to town. — Houston Press

Thanks to Kenneth Huey / The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

Obama’s Change and the Bush Mess : Have We Forgotten to Remember?

Posted on February 9, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

Photo montage by Larry Ray / The Rag Blog.

Remembering why we voted for change:
The Bush mess and the blame game

Eight years of Bush, Cheney, and the cynical political puppetry of Karl Rove, succeeded in driving a deep polarizing wedge into the heart of this country.

By Larry Ray / The Rag Blog / February 8, 2010

The montage of photos above is not a cheap humorous poke at George W. Bush. It is, instead, a montage of reminders of who ran this country into the ground for eight years as our president leaving a Gordian mess for someone else to deal with.

How could we so quickly forget those almost daily blunders, gaffes, petulance, and national disgraces we endured? George W. Bush has all but disappeared inside his tony gated community in Dallas. The mess he is responsible for has not disappeared and blame for it should not be craftily assigned to the new occupant of the White House.

It seems to be human nature for us to want to forget times that were embarrassing, damaging, and disappointing. And after the Bush legacy turned out to be a jaundiced irresponsible house of cards, it seems easier for many to develop near hysterical rage at the mess itself rather than at those responsible for it.

Bush’s historic damage could be a national rallying point, like the ruins of the twin towers, pulling us together to work for national change with patience, sacrifice, and understanding. Instead the damage itself has turned into a cheap political blame game. A kick-me sign for the angry and deluded.

Eight years of Bush, Cheney, and the cynical political puppetry of Karl Rove, succeeded in driving a deep polarizing wedge into the heart of this country. Bush projected to the entire world an “our way or the highway” tough guy attitude. Great sound bites, but his “way” made a mockery of truth, reason, and the law.

Sadly, that “join the posse and let’s go shoot up the bad guys” invitation was simple and appealing to lots of Americans. And it still is to a certain group. Suddenly it seemed, we were off to round up and hang Saddam Hussein before you could say “there ain’t no weapons of mass destruction.”

Unfortunately, the Bush folks with their “shock and awe” invasion had not gotten around to figuring out how to pay for that war. They later decided the U.S. would use its big credit card, expecting the Chinese and other foreign buyers to buy our debt to pay for it. Mission accomplished… again.

At the end of the eight year commute from Crawford, Texas, to Washington D.C., huge piles of lifeless post-Bush toxic fat cat Wall Street gambling debt began to smell and grow. Leaders of the party that happily allowed it to happen began to deny they caused the problem — that somehow it was all the new administration’s fault for recklessly spending so much money and trying to “do too much.”

The funereal visage of Republican minority leader, Senator Mitch McConnell, sternly casting the blame on the new president is pure Republican looking glass politics. Obama and and his political HAZMAT team hit the ground his first day in office trying to deal with a sea of red ink and the fiscal flotsam swirling around in it. A grave potential for another great depression loomed. Welcome to the Oval Office.

But those who sanctioned their party’s role in letting Wall Street bring our nation to the brink of a major depression immediately began loudly blaming the new leadership for all the problems. That kind of old, cheap political role-reversal tactic should make concerned Americans very angry. But chaos, loss of income, and an almost adolescent expectation of some sort of instant fix makes many reassign blame somewhere, anywhere.

A large majority was eager to welcome the new “Change We Can Believe In.” But before the outgoing tenants could leave town, eight years of hidden party trash and dirty Wall Street linen that had been stuffed out of sight burst the seams of the White House for all to see. It was important to the outgoing leadership that the new tenant somehow be blamed for the irresponsible, out of control problems.

Kentucky Senator McConnell and the unified “No” vote chorus he conducts began immediately to try to fix the new horse race. Using latent and not so latent racism present in so many of their party, as well as so-called independents, they began a steady attack on the messenger, Barack Obama. Easier to blame the black president whom so many already refuse to accept as “their president” for not having cleaned up everything his first year in office than to pitch in and help with the clean-up. Just say no.

Americans who had been unconcerned about buying things with money they did not have, and who gleefully bought expensive houses for nothing down like there was no tomorrow, were now suddenly losing homes, jobs, savings. Suddenly they are all upset and concerned about the economy and want someone to blame. Memories of eight years of suffering Bush and Cheney abuses have drifted to the edges of today’s short memory span, it seems.

The new guy and all his highly intelligent advisers are telling Americans how tough things are with no sugar coating. Obama explains, in detail, the depth of the problems and calls for tough change. Instead of using vapid four word sound bites that sound so good, Obama tackled the unexpected problems he inherited head on, while also repairing America’s tattered international image. The harsh reality of it all seems to many to be “change they don’t want to believe in.” Everything is now grim and uncertain.

Those in a blind state of denial include many of Obama’s own majority party Democrats who, much like Senator McConnell, want to ignore reality so they can fight for their narrow political interests just like the elephant was not in the room.

Playing a blame game will not haul us out of the huge mess we are in. Taking a minute to reflect on the montage of photos above might, however, help us remember where a majority of this mess came from and why a majority voted for change.

But change rather than sound bites requires a lot more of Americans. Health care for all Americans has been shoved aside for more than 70 years because it requires dedicated support and buy-in. Genuine Republican support in drafting a National Heath Insurance plan could have made that a reality. But it was easier to vote no and play like we are on an all expense paid weekend in Oz. But the curtain has been pulled back.

President Obama clearly believes that a positive American spirit will ultimately prevail. A majority of Americans clearly still want the change they voted for and should not let a small but loud populist uproar from pontificating short-sighted dour losers drown out reason and resolve.

The natural instinct has always been for progressive and truly involved Americans to pitch in and be part of a solution to tough problems. Throwing blind tantrums and brewing up more anger at feel good tea-parties is good only to fill the endless dead space of side-show cable TV.

[Retired journalist Larry Ray is a Texas native and former Austin television news anchor. He also posts at The iHandbill.]

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged , , , , , | 4 Comments

Mexico City Legalizes Gay Nuptials : Catholic Clergy Aghast

Posted on February 8, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

Gay rights activist cheer after a session at the city’s assembly in Mexico City last December. Photo by Daniel Aguilar / Reuters.

Mexico City sanctions gay marriage:
Catholic Church warns of Sodom and Gomorrah

In Morelia, Michoacan, Bishop Alfredo India added to the homophobic frenzy by avowing that even dogs did not engage in same sex fornication.

By John Ross / The Rag Blog / February 8, 2010

MEXICO CITY — As Valentine’s Day approaches, stationary stores in the old quarter of this megalopolis are awash with Cupids and hearts and the effusive iconography of romance. Ten-tiered wedding cakes spire to the chandeliers in the windows of the Ideal, the palace of such confectionary extravaganzas.

Down the block, beribboned classic cars are lined up outside La Profesa, a colonial church much favored for high society weddings. Marriage is merchandise for the Roman Catholic Church — priests charge sumptuous (30,000 pesos) fees for tying the knots.

Meanwhile, Church and State, ancient rivals for the affections of the Mexican people, are nose-to-nose over who exactly can marry whom.

The Princes of the Catholic Church are aghast at the recent vote of the Mexico City Legislative Assembly to legalize same sex marriage that in their jaundiced vista has transformed this megalopolis into one monstrous Sodom and Gomorrah. This past December 21, local legislators, led by the left-center Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) which holds a lopsided majority in the Assembly voted 39 to 20 to amend the city’s civil code by modifying the definition of marriage, striking down language that restricted such coupling to a man and a woman, and upgrading civil unions (“societies of conviviality”) between lovers of the same sex to matrimony.

The new law also specifically stipulates that same sex couples can adopt children, a right they previously enjoyed — any Mexican can adopt a child so long as they are 17 years older than the adoptee — but which has the Church’s testicles in a major uproar.

In the aftermath of passage, the scene in the old, ornate chambers of the Legislative Assembly was one of widespread jubilation — with pockets of bitter recrimination. Up in the balconies, gays and lesbians smooched and waved enormous rainbow flags. Down on the Assembly floor, the right-wing PAN party delegation led by Mariana Gomez, cousin of first lady Margarita Zavala, stomped out, threatening to take the notorious changes in the civil code straight to the Supreme Court.

Like with passage of such liberalizing social measures as free abortion on demand, a right to die act that promotes euthanasia, and the aforementioned civil unions, both the PAN and its perpetual allies in the Catholic hierarchy have gone ballistic at the prospect of homosexual nuptials.

Under the vaulting arches of the ancient Metropolitan Cathedral, Cardinal Norberto Rivera, the shepherd of the most populous archdioceses in Christendom, condemned same sex marriage as an “aberration” that “will invariably lead to the ruin of society” and called upon Mexico’s Catholics to disobey the new law, an edict that spurred threats by “Jacobins” as secularists are quaintly maligned by Holy Mother Church, to take the Cardinal to court on charges of “treason.” Grievously offended, Rivera protested that leftists are “trying to prohibit us from speaking in the name of Jesus Christ.”

Such Church-State conflicts have stippled the history of this neighbor republic since it declared its independence from the Spanish Crown 200 years ago this year, a bicentennial that is being celebrated with much hoopla here and which the Church demands a piece of despite separation from the Mexican State that has been defined as a secular institution by three of its Constitutions.

Writing in the Archdioceses’ weekly From the Faith, Cardinal Rivera’s mouthpiece, Father Hugo Valdemar, advocated for excommunication of all legislators who had voted up same sex marriage and suggested that couples who adopted children would do so to abuse the youngsters or exploit them for kiddie porn.

If a child has two fathers which one would be his role model, inquisitioned Father Valdemar? Would he emulate his parents by wearing make-up and mini-skirts? In Morelia, Michoacan, Bishop Alfredo India added to the homophobic frenzy by avowing that even dogs did not engage in same sex fornication.

The Catholic Church was hardly alone in its vivid vindictiveness. Both Antonio Chaudruhi, Patriarch of the Orthodox Church, and Arturo Favela, president of the Confraternity of Christian Churches, joined in denouncing such “sinfulness.”

The Mexico City Archdioceses’ hypothesis that same sex couples are child molesters is a textbook exhibition of the Church’s malignant hypocrisy. Recent scandals involving pederast priests have stained the hierarchy’s reputation and depleted its coffers. The Legionnaires of Christ have paid out millions USD to compensate victims of the order’s founder and serial sodomist Macial Marcial. (The omnisexual priest also fathered children with three different women.)

Cardinal Norberto himself has been implicated in multiple imbroglios — as Bishop of Tehuacan Puebla and Mexico City, Rivera personally shielded Father Nicolas Aguilar, accused of as many as 600 incidents of pedophilia by moving him from parish to parish, ultimately shipping him off to Los Angeles where Cardinal Roger Mahoney continued the subterfuge. Mahoney and Rivera have been called to account for their cover-up by authorities in both countries.

Separation of Church and State as mandated by the Mexican Constitution has narrowed dramatically in the 10 years that the PAN has held the presidency. Vicente Fox, the first opposition party candidate to take power, campaigned literally wrapped in the banner of the Virgin of Guadalupe and stunned so-called Jacobins by kneeling to kiss Pope John Paul II’s ring during the late pope’s last visit to Mexico. His successor, Felipe Calderon, whose Catholic zealot father was a hero of the “Cristero War” against the federal government that took 30,000 lives between 1925 and 1929, shares the podium with high Church officials at Vatican-sponsored venues such as the 2008 Catholic Families Congress in Mexico City.

The PANista governor of Jalisco lavishes state funds to refurbish churches that served as sanctuaries for the “Cristeros” and the governor of Mexico state Enrique Pena Nieto, the frontrunner for the once and future ruling PRI party’s nomination in 2012 presidential elections, just returned from a pilgrimage to Rome to obtain Pope Benedict’s blessing for his impending marriage to soap opera mega-star Angelica Rivera (no relation) AKA “La Gaviota” (“the Seagull”).

Pope Benedict used the occasion to rail against same sex marriage in Mexico as “a crime against creation that will destroy the differences between sexes…”

When Mexico City legalized abortion in the first 12 weeks of gestation, Cardinal Rivera ordered the capital’s churches to ring their bells in mourning. Collaboration between the PAN and the PRI has resulted in the criminalization of abortion in 18 states and the two parties are expected to soon announce the introduction of a constitutional amendment to outlaw the procedure everywhere in Mexico, including the capital.

Despite raging homophobia in the provinces, Mexico City remains an oasis of sexual liberation. Men holding hands and women soul kissing women in public no longer invoke horrified stares in this cosmopolitan capital where every June since the Stonewall riots convoked the movement for gay, lesbian, and transgender rights, tens of thousands march and party to celebrate their sexual orientation.

Despite the PAN’s and Cardinal Norberto’s obstreperous recriminations, in a recent survey of the right-wing party’s own base in preparation for an upcoming lawsuit to nullify same sex marriage when it kicks in March 4, half of those polled supported the new law — although 70% vehemently opposed adoption.

As the tide shifts north of the border where six U.S. states, the nation’s capital, and one Canadian province now provide legal cover for same sex marriages and unions, in Latin America, a bastion of virulent Machismo, the times too are a-changing. Uruguay and Colombia have put a legal stamp on such arrangements, as have three provinces of Buenos Aires and a Brazilian state. Cuba, led by President Raul Castro’s daughter Mariela, is moving in the same direction. Mexico City was not even Mexico’s first jurisdiction to approve such legislation — Coahuila in the north held its first same sex wedding three years ago.

This Valentine’s Day all over the Latin continent, gays and lesbians will be exchanging hearts and flowers and vows of undying love as they hand out slices of wedding cake to celebrate unholy matrimony.

[John Ross is touring Obamalandia from sea to stinking sea with his latest cult classic El Monstruo: Dread and Redemption in Mexico City (“a gritty, pulsating read” — NY Post). This week he will be in Los Angeles at Cal State L.A. (Feb 9, 4:20 p.m., Student Union), Eso Won Books (Feb 10, 7 p.m.), Pomona College in Claremont (Feb. 11 — noon lecture, Oldenborg Center), and the Urban Survival art space (Feb 13, Boyle Heights 4-7 p.m.)

Here are John’s upcoming Texas visits: Austin: Feb. 15, 7 p.m., Resistencia Bookstore; Feb. 16, 2 p.m., UT Journalism School (Talk: “Five decades of Journalism in Latin America”); Feb. 16, 7 p.m., MonkeyWrench Books; Houston: Feb. 17, 7 p.m., Sedition Books; Feb. 18, 11:30 a.m., University of Houston, with John Mason Hart; Edinburgh: Feb. 19, 7 p.m., Pan American University (Talk: “1810-1910-2010: Cycles of Mexican Revolution”); San Benito: Feb. 20, 7 p.m., Narciso Martinez Cultural Center.]

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Congress : Health Care on Life Support

Posted on February 8, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

Cartoon by Matson / St. Louis Post-Dispatch / The Moderate Voice.

Good riddance to Senate bill;
Some encouraging words from the President

By Dr. Stephen R. Keister / The Rag Blog / February 8, 2010

The word emanating from Washington regarding health care has become a mere trickle since the President’s State of The Union address. It would appear that Mr. Obama is making an effort to reestablish some of his rapport with his progressive base in an effort to offset much of the Democrat Party’s lethargy and Rahm Emanuel’s attack on the progressives in which he called them “F—ing retarded.” (Perhaps Rahm had best be set adrift and allowed to take his proper place as an adviser to the Likud Party.)

Mr. Obama has said some encouraging words regarding health care at several of his town hall meetings, although his comments have lacked specifics. He has been stressing the unemployment situation as he should in view of the widespread public anger throughout the nation and the seeming repudiation of the Democratic Party in Massachusetts.

His emphasizing regulation of the banking industry and taxing the excessive salaries and bonuses should play well with our disenchanted citizenry. He has faced up to the corporate control of Congress, but again has avoided specifics such as the fact that the American Health Insurance Plans and PhARMA have spent $10 to $20 million funneled through the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to fight health care legislation.

In my opinion, as I have noted in prior Rag Blog articles, it is no doubt a good thing that the Senate health care plan appears to be fading into oblivion. Encouraging is the fact that Speaker Pelosi has scheduled a vote on revoking the health care industry’s half-century-old exemption from antitrust laws. The vote, according to Politico, is part of a new two-track strategy to tackle things that will not be included in a more sweeping bill — if Congress ever passes one — while giving her members something popular to vote on. The move also puts pressure on Republicans, the industry, and wavering Democrats, who wish their leaders would abandon the push altogether.

Physicians For A National Health Plan have seemingly regained the initiative and are pushing HR 676, or Medicare for All (see Bill Moyers’ interview with Dr. Margaret Flowers) and other proposals that can be reviewed in detail on the PNHP website, including Dr. Quentin Young’s letter to The New York Times and Dr.Flower’s letter to the President.

These initiatives indicate that HR 676, which is merely 30 pages in length (the Senate bill exceeds 1,000 pages) will save the nation 30-40% in health care costs and provide nearly immediate coverage, unlike the Senate bill that defers coverage for 3-4 years and forces individuals by fiat to buy private health insurance, while making no effort to control costs of private insurance.

The administration and the Senate have essentially ignored the wishes of those who provide health care — the doctors and the nurses — and have ceded their allegiance to the insurance and pharmaceutical industries. However, there is encouragement out of the House of Representatives. See “The Public Option May Live Again” at the Daily Kos.

Representatives Jared Polis and Chellie Pingree have sent a letter to Harry Reid calling for the Senate to pass a public option through reconciliation. At the time of this article there were 31 other Democrats who had signed the letter. [Subsequent reports indicate that the number of co-signers has grown considerably, especially among those freshmen who seek reelection this coming autumn.] Polls of 10 front-line freshmen’s districts show that 68% of voters want a public insurance option and that by 5 to 1 voters would prefer for their representatives to fight to add the public option instead of simply passing the Senate bill.

Other problems relative to health care are on the horizon and involve those of us on Medicare. The Los Angeles Times reports that spending on health care was 17.3% of the economy last year. The share paid by the U.S. will soon exceed 50%, a study says. In considering legislation regarding health care we must take heed of what lies ahead. This underlines the urgent need for Congress to work to do away with Medicare Advantage Plans and Medicare Part D’s outlandish largesse to the insurance and pharmaceutical industries — and to tighten up on Medicare fraud and abuse.

These programs are rapidly draining the Medicare Trust Fund. It is, however, critical that we increase fees to primary care physicians as has been repeatedly called for by the American College of Physicians. We cannot leave our elderly citizens without doctors while the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries flourish.

Medicare recipients should be aware of two new websites at the Medicare Rights Center, a national nonprofit consumer service organization that works to ensure access to affordable health care for older adults and people with disabilities through counseling and advocacy, educational programs, and public policy initiatives. Go to Medicare Interactive, and for more detailed information go to Asclepois. There are changes in the Medicare programs about which many of us are totally unaware, such as pending caps on physical therapy and occupational therapy.

I have previously discussed the excessive intensive care for the dying that increases costs of Medicare to an unsustainable level for those of us who would prefer to die peacefully in our own beds, surrounded by our loved ones, with our pain and discomfort relieved by compassionate hospice care. It is barbaric that we subject those for whom the handwriting is already on the wall to the tortures of multiple intubation, multiple intravenous lines, and isolation an ICU, rather than allowing them to die in peace and dignity with family and loved ones.

The United States is a unique culture which cannot accept or face death. James F. Drane, the retired Russel B. Roth professor of bioethics at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania, discusses this phonemenon in a recent op-ed in The Erie Times News. It would behoove the Obama Administration to include Dr. Drane in any pending panel instituted to review Medicare and its future.

I fear for our country’s future, especially when I read the recent poll of Republican thinking published by Daily Kos. If indeed the Democrats fail to reach the general public with messages based on truth and fulfilled by action, we are going to be faced with some very alarming situations in the not so distant future.

Whatever we do, we must act swiftly and without equivocation, because I fear that the effect of the Supreme Court’s decision on corporate contributions will become overwhelmingly evident come the fall elections of 2010.

[Dr. Stephen R. Keister, a regular contributor to The Rag Blog, lives in Erie, PA. He is a retired physician who is active in health care reform. His previous articles on The Rag Blog can be found here.]

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

Austin and Texas : Economic Slump Finally Hitting Home

Posted on February 7, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer


Texas unemployment up;
Austin’s tech economy fading

Since Texas has borrowed all it can, and since a state can’t print money like the federal government, the feds are now under enormous political pressure to function as the job creators of last resort.

By Roger Baker / The Rag Blog / February 7, 2010

The Texas Employment Commission, which closely monitors such things, recently announced an increase in Texas’ unemployment from 8% to 8.3%. This jobless increase says that Texas, a traditionally poor state, is now strongly feeling the effects of the national economic slump.

Note that the Texas unemployment rate is mostly rising due to private jobs continuing to disappear. The numbers for the various Texas jobs sectors seem to indicate that average folks are trying to restructure their spending by cutting back as much as they can on discretionary spending; things like travel and utility costs.

Despite the gain of 50,000 jobs in the past three months to the Texas economy, unemployment levels are still on the rise.

The unemployment rate in Texas has risen from 8 percent to 8.3 percent between the November to December, even with employment gains. This is greatly due to the reduction of 23,900 jobs from various Texas employers.

“Texas continues to feel the effects of this serious national recession with unemployment in our state now at 8.3 percent,” said Texas Workforce Commission chairman Tom Pauken. “Nonetheless, unemployment in Texas remains well below the national level of 10 percent.”

Education and health services in the past 12 months have received around 60,400 jobs, specifically 4,800 just in December. Logging and mining even showed signs of growth with an addition of 300 jobs.

“December job losses offset some of the gains from the last couple of months,” said TWC Commissioner Representing Labor Ronny Congleton.

Job markets hit with the the most losses include: Trade, transportation and utilities – accounting for a total loss of 7,400 jobs just in December. Other notable job losses for December include: Leisure/hospitality with 6,500 and professional/business services with 5,300.

Down at the micro-economic level, in Texas as elsewhere, the consumer economy seems to be restructuring in a sensible way, given the hard times. We don’t really need as many malls and salesman as last year, now that more folks shop over the Internet for things they really need. Families, perhaps jobless and struggling to live on food stamps, cast what is arguably the most meaningful vote they still have, when they decide whether or not to buy some seductive item they see advertised on TV.

Clean energy and the Austin economy

How does this outside situation affect the Austin area economy? As economic background, Austin lost about 2600 jobs in 2009. Austin unemployment rate rose from about 5.2% to 6.9%. Austin-Round Rock’s registered jobless worker numbers rose from 43,000 to 63,000.

There is always reason to be skeptical of perennial optimism. Take those who point to the Austin area as one of the nation’s strongest metropolitan economies.

Nowadays, we see that computers, high tech, semiconductors, and construction have all mostly faded as lucrative sources of profitable investment for the Austin economy. It is now frequently less expensive to develop software abroad, except for fine tuning local user needs and service requirements. With energy prices less a concern than in 2008, the investment impetus for clean energy has considerably faded.

What is Austin’s next big thing? In the past few years, the Austin business community, Sen. Kirk Watson, and a constellation of influential movers and shakers have been energetically promoting Austin as a clean energy research hub. The “Pecan Street Project” is being promoted by Austin ex-city council member, Brewster McCracken, with the goal of making the Austin area into “America’s clean energy laboratory.”

Just in the last month, we have had access to another opinion that is widely accepted by the local business community. A local economic forecasting group, AngelouEconomics Inc., led by long time Austin economist Angelos Angelou, has just issued its Austin area 2010-2011 Economic forecast; a sort of a report card on Austin’s economic future, concluding as follows:

For Austin to maintain its competitiveness, it must continually build upon these great assets. In today’s struggling financial environment, this translates into increased local government support. Effective economic development policy must be bolstered by strategic incentives and inducements that are competitive with other cities’ attraction packages.

In addition to government support that attracts companies and people, Austin’s success will also be determined by its capacity to grow jobs from within. To do so, the Austin area must cultivate entrepreneurism and attract additional early-stage capital. If people migrating to the region cannot find work, they must find the tools in place to create their own. Austin area residents are very entrepreneurial, and the region needs to continually assess and improve its infrastructure to keep entrepreneurism flourishing.

AngelouEconomics expects the current economic conditions to extend through the second quarter of this year, as the embattled technology sector and real estate markets struggle to rediscover their footing. In the meantime, Austin’s traditional economic base, the public sector, will continue to provide stability. While this
“recession-proof” sector is incapable of supplying the region with an abundance of new jobs, gradual employment gains will persist through the end of the year.

The region’s economy will continue its path of improvement with the addition of 9,200 jobs in 2010 and another 17,100 jobs in 2011.

As a rule, it is probably a fact that presidential advisors, fortune tellers, and economists do not thrive on delivering bad news. This new report is not cheery, but it does deliver a whiff of guarded optimism by predicting a modest resumption of job growth for the Austin area. But this is not through the creation of many of the kinds of jobs envisioned by Austin’s clean energy development promoters.

China is now aggressively using its mountain of accumulated U.S. treasury debt to acquire the means to surge ahead on green energy manufacturing, from electric cars, to PV, to wind turbines. Contrast this with the slow progress at Austin-subsidized PV startup Heliovolt. Venture capital, which has been the lifeblood of advanced technology development efforts, is down since even last year, both locally and nationally. The Angelou report regards Austin’s clean energy research efforts as lagging in the face of international competition.

The new thinking is that the health, education, and government sectors will likely be the big job gainers in the Austin economy, to somewhat match the steady decline in Austin area manufacturing over the last decade. It is no coincidence that these are the same economic sectors that thrive on public spending by federal and state governments. For lack of an alternative, the solid job creation burden will increasingly fall on state and or federal government.

Statewide, as we can see from the Texas Workforce report, it is primarily government-subsidized jobs sectors like health and education and government that are increasing. Presumably, Austin should be able to fit into this kind of picture. But now we see spending cutbacks and hiring freezes at the Texas state level, and also at the University of Texas, requiring shutting down the iconic Cactus Cafe, and more.

The state of Texas is broke, at least in the sense that it has slashed state expenses about as far as it can. Since Texas has borrowed all it can, and since a state can’t print money like the federal government, the feds are now under enormous political pressure to function as the job creators of last resort.

The mortgage and credit-card-debt burdened U.S. consumers spend about 70% of all the money spent in the U.S. Such debt-ridden consumers are not currently regarded as a good source of profit; the consumer sector seems to be in a deflationary spiral of uncertain duration. Yet it is only the expectation of profit that can encourage banks to lend money, leading to the creation of jobs which depend on these same consumers as customers.

The big picture

With the decline of Austin’s past economic drivers, Austin’s future is now more closely linked to conditions in both the Texas and national economies. Looking at the big picture as it affects most states, they have to depend on the feds.

Meanwhile, federal deficits are now pretty much out of control, meaning that the dollar is almost certainly going to have to be devalued in terms of its buying power. Either devalued through a messy collapse or more gradually, which is much preferable.

This means we are likely to see the U.S. consumer’s spending ability continue to deteriorate over the next few years. Here is quite a good quantitative analysis explaining the background to this uncomfortable conclusion.

Wrapping up, what does this all imply for the regional Austin economy? In general, the feds appear to be attaching more strings, in ways that often seem to be sensibly restrained compared to the past, assuming they are still spending. They are tightening up on the ozone limits affecting transportation planning, tightening up federal loan requirements, targeting energy conservation, etc.

As a trend, it looks like the feds will increasingly have to be the source of public funds needed to relieve Austin’s growing unemployment problem. The Austin area will continue to rely on state government and higher education for its traditional and reliable economic base of support, but if so, it will have to be through increasing federal participation.

Accordingly, Austin should figure out how best to play ball with the federal administrators who will be funding Austin’s future jobs programs. Let us hope that this message reaches the Texas Legislature — the fact that we are probably entering a new leaner and more practical and populist era, a time when the luxurious inefficiency of the traditional Texas good-old-boy politics probably isn’t going to work. Need proof? Just ask Gov. Rick Perry whatever happened to his Trans-Texas Corridor plan.

Conclusion: For lack of a better alternative, it probably makes good sense to let the feds guide the way toward Austin’s new industrial future. This necessarily implies political competition with the other needy areas of the USA, already impatiently waiting in line for federal help.

[Roger Baker is a long time transportation-oriented environmental activist, an amateur energy-oriented economist, an amateur scientist and science writer, and a founding member of and an advisor to the Association for the Study of Peak Oil-USA. He is active in the Green Party and the ACLU, and is a director of the Save Our Springs Association and the Save Barton Creek Association. Mostly he enjoys being an irreverent policy wonk and writing irreverent wonkish articles for The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged , , , , , , | 9 Comments

Redefining History : Howard Zinn Challenged the Paradigm

Posted on February 7, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

The “Domino Theory” was a prevailing historical paradigm at the time of the Vietnam War. Image from A People’s History of American Empire, by Howard Zinn, Paul Buhle and Mike Konopacki.

CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE

Rejecting the dominant paradigm:
How Howard Zinn helped us redefine history

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / February 6, 2010

In 1962 Thomas Kuhn published a book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, suggesting that the development of scientific research was grounded in social structures. A set of scientific ideas, what he called a “paradigm,” become established in disciplines — chemistry, physics, biology — and this set of ideas, if they explain significant features of the field, become dominant. Most chemists, physicists, or biologists do scientific research from the standpoint of the fundamental ideas of the paradigm.

Kuhn said that newer generations of researchers and educators then work from within the paradigm. They do what he labeled “normal science.” Their publications, their theories, maintenance of their jobs, depend on them doing science from within the framework of the paradigm.

Kuhn then suggested that occasionally the dominant paradigm raises so many questions that it gets challenged. There is a “revolution” in the science and a new paradigm begins to dominate the discipline.

To me this view of science was fascinating. Studying any discipline, Kuhn seemed to be saying, involved the institutionalization of a way of thinking about a subject, making sure that way of thinking becomes part of the “power structure” of the discipline and only gets changed by “revolutions” in the field. The development of ideas, he implied, parallels domination and subordination in societies and stability challenged by radical change.

Some scholar/activists in the 1960s and beyond began to look at other fields, such as the social sciences and humanities, through the lens of Kuhn, whether or not it was his intention. These scholar/activists began to see that in virtually every field of study dominant paradigms were created that enshrined certain ideas including economics, history, politics, and culture.

For the most part, these paradigms celebrated capitalism, the United States in the world, American democratic institutions, and artistic works that ignored social problems and concentrated on the personal. However, increasing numbers of a new generation began to argue that key ideas were left out of these paradigms. Prominent among these suggestions was that understanding the United States and the world required considering the roles of class, race, and gender.

As a result of the turmoil on and off campuses in the 1960s, these scholar/activists were emboldened to critically revisit the dominant paradigms in their fields. They began to do research that looked at the underside of capitalism; the U.S. role in the world from an anti-imperialist lens; the connection between class, race, and U.S. political institutions; and the one-sidedness of excluding certain writers and artists for their political subjects from the study of literature and the visual arts.

Perhaps no paradigm was more enduring and institutionally self-serving than the consensus view of United States history. Students from K-12, college, and graduate school were educated to believe that American history was driven by the quest for assimilation, democratization, economic growth, and global leadership. That historic evolution was shaped by wise elites who were white, male, and wealthy; educated at the finest institutions of higher learning; and inspired by various humane religious faiths. It was a history of the rise to the top of expertise, compassion, wisdom, and the perfectibility of a people.

In Kuhn’s terms, young scholar/activists began to reflect more on the “anomalies” in the paradigm. Millions of indigenous people who had established vibrant and stable societies were massacred as Europeans and their descendants moved across the North American continent. The development of modern capitalism was based on hundreds of years of the accumulation of wealth produced by peoples kidnapped from Africa.

After slavery, racism continued to influence political and economic life throughout the United States. And, despite traditional claims, reforms in the work process, guarantees of health and welfare, and political rights resulted not from the benevolence of elites but through class struggle.

As anomalies in all the social sciences and humanities were uncovered, activists, students, young scholars, and even some older scholars realized that all knowledge reflects economic and political interests. There is no such thing as “academic objectivity.”

They discovered that the dominant ideas that were disseminated in elementary and high schools, college, graduate programs, and media punditry, reflected the paradigms that served the interests of the United States, particularly in the context of a struggle against ideas, movements, and nations that represented different paradigms and interests.

Those coming to newer perspectives also realized that the development of knowledge required not a distancing of the “scholar” from the people but the embedding of the research in political activity. Many realized that “theory and practice” were intimately connected.

Why all this discussion? Well Howard Zinn, a creator and product of the intellectual turmoil of the 60s presented us with a new paradigm for examining U.S. history, indeed all history. His classic text, A People’s History of the United States, which has been read by millions, compellingly presented a view of history that highlighted the roles of indigenous people, workers, women, people of color, people of various ethnicities, and all others who were not situated at the apex of economic, political, or educational institutions.

He taught us that we needed to be engaged in the struggles that shaped people’s lives to learn what needs to be changed, how their conditions got to be what they were, and how scholar/activists might help to change the world.

Perhaps most important, Zinn demonstrated that participants in people’s struggles were part of a “people’s chain,” that is the long history of movements and campaigns throughout history that have sought to bring about change. As he wrote in his autobiography, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times:

What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places — and there are so many — where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.

And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.

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

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Marc Estrin : On Mozart and Auschwitz

Posted on February 5, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer


THE WHITE DOT IN THE MIDDLE OF

By Marc Estrin / The Rag Blog / February 5, 2010

The calendar offers up some provocative coincidences — provocative and tartly instructive. January 27th, for instance, has given us both Mozart’s birthday, and the liberation of Auschwitz.

Mozart and Auschwitz. Could there be two poles further apart? Two poles at the blazing core of German-speaking culture, that playing field for the possibilities of the human.


Those familiar with Mozart know that his writing is not all sweetness and light. The late works, especially, peer unflinchingly into that wildness and pain that was his life, that led him, at 35, to a pauper’s grave, whereabouts unknown. So to find the dark moments in Mozart is not hard.

One of the characters in my recent novel, The Good Doctor Guillotin, Tobias Schmidt, the German piano-maker who wound up building the first guillotines during the French Revolution, describes a concert in Paris by the 22-year old Austrian visitor in which he played a set of his variations on the bawdy folk tune “Ah je vous dirai, Maman.” (We know the melody as that of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”) He talks about how

“in the middle of the unending C major of this trivial folk tune, Mozart had thrown himself and his listeners into a precipitous C minor variation which ripped open the pleasant, clever world, and exposed the darkest forces lurking in the background.”

Yes. Fairly standard, even in Haydn, and more to come in Beethoven. Yin and yang: the black dot in the middle of the white. High German culture — and then Auschwitz.

But then, there is the other dot — the white one in the middle of the black. The paradox is that this one can prove even more painful.

In another scene in the novel, Schmidt is accompanying Dr. Guillotin’s violin in a room in the captured king’s prison palace:

“Why are you crying?” Schmidt asked.
Guillotin had put down his violin.
“Why are you crying?” he asked his pianist.
“I’m not crying. That’s sweat,” Schmidt said, wiping away a tear.

I’ll tell you why they were crying. They were crying because in the E minor violin sonata there is a moment too beautiful to play — the trio in E major, haunting, unbearably poignant and lovely.

Guillotin had gulped at the key change, started to tear up at the first rising sixth of the theme, and by the repeat of the first phrase had to lower his instrument.

Schmidt was crying because — like the C minor moment in the Ah, vous dirais-je variations he had heard Mozart play — this moment, too, seemed to open a trapdoor revealing all those lurking dark forces, then shut it quickly again — but in reverse and inside out. Here it was a trapdoor not into darkness but into a universe of light, of the possible, of all that could be but isn’t.

They were crying because they understood this: That such a world is hidden from us, unattainable, glimpsed only in Mozart’s cruel caress. A dark E minor minuet: the dance par excellence of the aristocracy. Grace, beauty, decorum. Delicate but controlled and controlling. And then the intolerable knife thrust of the exquisite trio — revealing the old order for all its implications, its unsuspected possibilities of disaster.

Is that what we’re crying about?” Guillotin demanded. “An exposé of the old order? I thought we knew that. I thought we were trying a new order.”

“That’s what I, at least, am crying about,” the piano-maker said. “It’s not the ghastly court and the canting nobility I’m mourning, it’s the stability and structure, the placidity and contentment, the state of grace they would pretend. I’m crying because I understand the loss. I fear it; I fear such transience, fear mortality—in this context of most beauty. I’m crying because we will now have to face the great trembling — at hand — and inescapable.”

Guillotin dried his eyes, wiped the rosin off his strings, and, taking this cue, Schmidt closed the piano, an instrument he had built for the music room of the Tuileries palace.

The awfulness of beauty. The unbearable face of unattained, unattainable possibility. The white dot in the middle.

I wonder if those who are having so much difficulty giving up their dreams of the Obama-they-would-have are paralyzed by the same awful contrast between the dot and its matrix.

cover of the book The Good Doctor Guillotin by Marc Estrin
[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.]

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

COMIC / Tom Keough : Baseball’s Handout to Haiti

Posted on February 5, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE

Political cartoon by Tom Keough / The Rag Blog / February 5, 2010

The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment