Report : Skyrocketing Profits for Big Insurance Companies

Posted on February 12, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

Photo by Tanya J. Harding from stock.xchng.

Report: Big insurance companies out of control

The top five insurers made $12 billion in profits last year, while dropping coverage for 2.7 million people.

By Chris Frates / February 12, 2010

With health reform floundering, Democrats have renewed their attacks on the insurance industry and they hope that a new report out yesterday will bolster their case that insurance company practices need to be reigned in. The report finds that the top five largest for-profit insurance companies increased their profits by $12.2 billion last year while dropping coverage for 2.7 million Americans.

As a group, WellPoint, Aetna, UnitedHealth Group, Humana, and Cigna saw their profits jump 56 percent in 2009, up $4.4 billion over the previous year, according to the report. Four out of five companies saw profits increase while insuring fewer people. Cigna increased earnings by 346 percent while UnitedHealth shed 1.7 million beneficiaries. Aetna, which increased its membership and percentage of premiums spent on medical care, was the only company to see less income in 2009 than 2008.

“Increasing your profits, dropping people is a specific corporate strategy,” said Richard Kirsch of Health Care for America Now, the progressive coalition that prepared the report. “What the big health insurance companies do to please Wall Street denies affordable health insurance to millions of Americans, millions more Americans every year.”

The report comes as the Obama administration and House Democratic leadership have seized on Anthem Blue Cross’ decision to raise rates by up to 39 percent in California. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius wrote a letter to Anthem this week asking them to justify their rate hike and House Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry Waxman announced that his committee will hold a hearing on increases this month.

Robert Zirkelbach, a spokesman for the industry trade group, America’s Health Insurance Plans, said that for every dollar spent on health care, less than a penny goes to health insurers’ profits, which are below other health care industries.

“According to new government data, in 2009 the portion of premiums that went towards administrative costs declined for the second year in a row, while spending on hospitals, physicians, and prescription drugs continued to soar. The real focus needs to be on the increase in the underlying cost of medical care, which is putting health care coverage out of reach for many families and small businesses,” he said.

But Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) isn’t buying that explanation.

“They’re going to try to hide behind the actuaries to tell us the increases are justified, but you have to remember these are the same insurers that for months have been manufacturing reports claiming that health insurance reform will cause them to raise premiums,” she said. “The fact is they can’t have it both ways.”

Source / Politico

Thanks to S.M. Wilhelm / The Rag Blog

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BOOKS / ‘The New Class Society : Goodbye American Dream?’

Posted on February 12, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer


New Class Society:
Making class analysis relevant

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / February 12, 2010

I am using a text by Robert Perrucci and Earl Wysong called New Class Society: Goodbye American Dream? (Rowman and Littlefield, 2008) in a course called “The Politics of Capital and Labor.” The authors review and synthesize a variety of definitions of class from political theory and sociology.

Their answer to the question of what is class draws upon Marxian notions of relations of production, Max Weber’s ideas about persons in various organizational positions, and the more conventional view of class as relating to the distribution of income, wealth, and power.

Using data reflecting their synthetic definition of class, the authors conclude that the portrait of a U.S. class system consisting of a small ruling class, a large “middle class,” and a small percentage of economically and politically marginalized people is no longer an accurate way to describe society. The class system of the days of relative prosperity from the 1940s until the late 1960s, which looked like a diamond with a broad middle, has become like a class system looking like a “double diamond.”

In this new class society, the first diamond, the top one, consists of the “privileged class” composed of a “super-class,” “credentialed class managers,” and “professionals.” All together these representatives of privilege constitute about 20 percent of the population. All the others constitute a “new working class,” some living in relative comfort but most engaged in wage labor, modest self-employment, or part-time work. This is the second diamond representing 80 percent of the population.

Students in my course have been debating some of the formulations but certain elements of the text have been uniformly accepted by them. First, everyone seems to accept the double-diamond metaphor as a way of conceptualizing the distribution of wealth, income, and power.

Those in the top diamond representing privilege are relatively assured that their sources of income and wealth are permanent. Their sustenance and family stability are assured while the other 80 percent, the model suggests, live economically marginal existences and in conditions of precariousness.

My students raise no objections about what Perrucci and Wysong regard as broadly accepted features of this new class system.

First, since the 1970s, there has been increasing class polarization. Gaps in distributions of wealth and income have grown. Real wages of workers have stagnated since the 1970s. In addition, workplace benefits have declined, including pensions. Permanent jobs have been replaced by contingent labor. The percentage of unionization of the work force has declined by two-thirds.

The authors cite a recent study that estimates that only one-fourth of jobs today are “good jobs,” paying at least $16 an hour. And, on the other hand, the share of income and wealth accumulated by the top one percent or 10 percent or 20 percent, the entire privileged class, has risen. The rich have gotten richer while the poor poorer.

Second, since the 1980s, workers and their families have experienced downward mobility, that is their social and economic position has declined. This has occurred because stable, well paying jobs have disappeared due to outsourcing, capital flight, and deindustrialization. By any number of measures, the “American Dream” of helping one’s children to move up the status ladder has been reversed.

Third, the increasing accumulation of wealth and power through tax cuts, deregulation of financialization, and declining government support for public services have encouraged the privileged to embark on class secession.

Increasingly, the authors suggest, the privileged class withdraws its support for public institutions as it funds its own private schools, libraries, recreational facilities, and additional social services. The rich build gated communities, electrify their fences, hire private guards to protect themselves, and create private institutions to replace public ones.

The authors refer to Robert Reich’s “secession of the successful” which they say “combines traditional forms of physical and social separation and increasing numbers of privately provided services with the ideology of neoliberalism, an idea system of free market fundamentalism that encourages and legitimates hostility to public institutions.” They conclude that “class secession today involves both a separatist social identity and a conscious secessionistic mentality.”

The findings reported in The New Class Society about class in America are profound. Long-term trends in the United States since the 1970s have led to growing wealth and power at one pole and increasing immiseration at the other pole. The idea of a broad middle class is further away from reality than ever.

For the vast majority of Americans economic security is declining. And, most important, the privileged class, which has built its wealth and power on the growing immiseration of the new working class, is physically, financially, and ideologically seceding from the system that historically claimed to provide at least some institutional support for enrichment of the citizenry at large.

The authors also present data to show how the brutality of the new class society particularly impacts on people of color, women, immigrants, and other traditionally marginalized people.

While the task of my course is to study the underlying fundamental features of American society, particularly those bearing on political economy, the implications of this analysis for practical political work seem obvious.

First, progressives need to “make class analysis relevant to our organizing.” This includes educating ourselves and those we work with about the ways in which society is divided into classes based upon how people are related to the workplace, the status and power of workers in different organizational positions, the distribution of wealth and income in society and the history of class in America.

Our educational work must show how class relates to race, gender and the environment. In the end we must construct a compelling vision for the abolition of our class divided society.

Second, progressives must articulate in every political setting those experiences of class that vast majorities of the people share.

Years ago Harry Braverman, in Labor and Monopoly Capital demonstrated that work was being transformed by the capitalist system; that patterns of control of the minds and actions of workers were being increasingly controlled by a deepening division of labor, and that the work process, whether white collar or blue collar, service or manufacturing, was being homogenized. He and others called this process of work transformation, “proletarianization.”

This historic development argues for a political strategy that prioritizes education about the growing commonality of work experience of those in the bottom 80 percent of the work force.

Third, progressives must articulate programs of education and action that seek to deepen understanding of barriers to solidarity resulting from race, gender, and even political ideology. Progressives must be more mindful of the different experiences of class in America, such as the historic role of slavery and immigrant labor, super-exploitation of African Americans and women, and ethnic discrimination.

The articulation of the different experiences of class through race and gender should be used to broaden understanding of how those differences were used to increase class exploitation of all those in the majority.

Fourth, progressives should began to analyze the ways in which many of the new right wing “tea party” activists share a common experience of class. Education and advocacy must more clearly be based upon an understanding of the common interests privileged class Republicans and Democrats share and the reality of interests shared by the new working class majority.

In the end there is no substitute for building what activists used to call “class consciousness.” The realities of class exploitation, as Perrucci and Wysong suggest, seem more obvious than ever. They just need to become a central element of our political discourse.

[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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Texas State University : Escalate the Peace!

Posted on February 12, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

Bobby Whittenberg, Iraq Vet, at Escalate the Peace! rally, Texas State University in San Marcos, Wednesday, February 10. Photo by Alice Embree / The Rag Blog.

Escalate the Peace!
San Marcos demonstrators rally in the sleet

By Alice Embree / The Rag Blog / February 12, 2010

Neither sleet nor drizzle deterred a scheduled antiwar rally on the Texas State University (TSU) Campus in San Marcos on Wednesday, February 10. In the courtyard of the LBJ Amphitheatre, speakers used bullhorns to talk about Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Palestine under a banner that read, “Escalate the Peace!”

The rally was organized by two TSU student organizations, the Campus Antiwar Movement to End the Occupations (CAMEO) and the Progressive Bobcats Union (PBU).

Speakers included Rev. Jim Rigby from St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Austin and Bobby Whittenberg, an antiwar activist who was deployed to Iraq as a Marine. Courtney Glenn, one of the rally organizers, read a poem about returning soldiers. Caitlin Eaves spoke about Yemen. Liz Welch read a passage from Howard Zinn about why we should never lose hope.

I spoke about the Vietnam-era antiwar movement and about the current GI coffeehouse, Under the Hood Café, in Killeen, Texas. These lines from Courtney Glenn’s poem stayed with me:

We are the disorder
with our mislabeled freedom,
our cannon songs,
our flags of blood.

You are the fodder
for rhetoric
and I will exchange
gratitude for
apology

Today’s antiwar movement is often compared with the Vietnam era. But, the comparison usually conjures up 1968 images. On Wednesday, I watched the sleet bounce off the coat of a speaker and remembered what it felt like in 1964 to be among 20 students demanding a negotiated peace in Vietnam.

I was proud to be there with this small and dedicated group, protesting the wars that seem to morph without end, proud that women were speakers and organizers in ways that were uncommon in 1964, proud to see the familiar faces of veterans I know from the Killeen coffeehouse.

In the words of Margaret Mead, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

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Sarah Palin : Popularity Dropping Like a Rock

Posted on February 12, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer


She may still be a good story
But Palin’s poll numbers keep going south

By Ted McLaughlin / The Rag Blog / February 12, 2010

The teabaggers, Republican right-wingers, political pundits, and media talking heads seemed determined to keep Sarah Palin relevant, and an important figure on the American political scene. For the media talking heads, she is a good story since few people are noncommittal about Palin — you either like her or hate her.

Three TV networks even carried her speech to the sham teabagger convention a few days ago (although I doubt that many Americans watched). The media seems to think that Palin actually makes politics interesting, and they don’t want her to go away because then they would be reduced to covering only boring real politicians — whom the American public really won’t take much interest in for another couple of years.

The political pundits basically have the same interest as the media talking heads. They know a column about Palin will get readers — even those who hate her will read the column. Whereas, a column about Mitt Romney or some other semi-competent politician will not get nearly the readership. Therefore, they go out of their way to try and convince readers that Palin is popular and actually has a chance to be elected to something again.

As for the teabaggers and right-wing Republicans, they are just trying to remain relevant themselves. They have to appeal to the Palin-bots, because they make up a large part of the base for both groups and without them they would wither into insignificance. The teabaggers have little connection to reality, but I think most Republicans know Palin is not a real possibility as a candidate — they just can’t say that out loud without angering a large part of their base.

But regardless of how hard the teabaggers, Republicans, pundits and media personalities try to keep Palin relevant to the national political scene, the American people aren’t buying it. With each month that goes by, fewer people have a favorable opinion of Sarah Palin. As the chart above shows, Palin’s popularity is dropping like a rock(and has been dropping since September of 2008).

According to Washington Post/ABC News polls, back in September 2008 Palin had a favorability rating of nearly 60%. At that time, she was new on the national political scene and the public knew very little about her. But as the public learned more, her favorability rating has dropped in every poll taken since then.

According to the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll, taken after her nationally televised speech, her popularity is still declining. Currently, 37% of Americans view her favorably (the lowest of any poll so far) and 55% of Americans view her unfavorably (a clear majority, even considering the 3% margin of error).

But it gets even worse for Palin. That’s because about 30% of those who view her favorably don’t think she is qualified to be president. Only 26% of Americans believe she is qualified, while a full 71% say she is not qualified. These numbers are also going in the wrong direction for Palin (back in November 2009 38% said she was qualified and 60% said she wasn’t).

The powers that be may still be touting the viability of a Palin candidacy, but the American people are simply not buying it.

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

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Marc Estrin : Happy Birthday, Bertolt Brecht

Posted on February 11, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

Bertolt Brecht, 1948. Photo from Deutsches Bundesarchiv / Wikimedia Commons.

Of Poor B.B.:
Bertolt Brecht speaks from the grave

By Marc Estrin / The Rag Blog / February 11, 2010

[German playwright, poet, and theatrical director Bertolt Brecht was born on February 10, 1898, and died August 14, 1956.]

Bertolt Brecht lies in his grave. The alarm goes off and off. Time to get up again. Evil-doing comes like falling rain. Get up. We need you.

In the grey light before morning the pine trees piss
And their vermin, the birds, raise their twitter and cheep.
At that hour in the city I drain my glass, then throw
My cigar butt away and worriedly go to sleep.

No, up. Not sleep. Get up. It’s time. Fifteen days the rain is falling. The birds have stopped their cheeping. Cheep, BB, cheep at least. Twitter. Piss. Someone will hear. Someone will understand. Here’s my crust of bread. Eat, BB, eat, then speak. Get up and speak.

Like one whose blood flows from a wound and who awaits the doctor: his blood goes on flowing. So do we come forward and report that evil has been done.

Yes! Good. Come forward. Report. Report on the good times that starve the millions and poison the world.

The first time it was reported that our friends were being butchered there was a cry of horror. Then a hundred were butchered. But when a thousand were butchered and there was no end to the butchery, a blanket of silence spread. When evil-doing comes like falling rain, nobody calls out ‘stop!’

Stop! (My voice is small.) Stop!

When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible. When sufferings become unendurable the cries are no longer heard. The cries, too, fall like rain in summer.

And rain also in winter. And the tree limbs snap, and the wires break, and people huddle under what blankets they have, and the circus band blares out its tunes, and some there cackle and others smirk. I am discouraged, BB. What will become of us?

Of those cities will remain what passed through them, the wind!

And then? When it all comes crashing to the ground, what then? What shall we do?

— Remember:
Hatred, even of baseness
Contorts the features.
Anger, even against injustice
Makes the voice hoarse. Even we,
Who wanted to prepare the ground for friendliness
Could not ourselves be friendly.

Bertolt Brecht wrote poems and essays and plays. He spoke up for the poor. He said, “First, people have to be able to feed their faces — then they can think about morality.” He was number one on Hitler’s hit list. We need his voice today.

Here — from the grave — is what he says:

Nowadays, anyone who wishes to combat lies and ignorance and to write the truth must overcome at least five difficulties. He must have the COURAGE to write the truth when truth is everywhere opposed; the KEENNESS to recognize it, although it is everywhere concealed; the SKILL to manipulate it as a weapon; the JUDGMENT to select those in whose hands it will be effective; and the CUNNING to spread the truth among such persons.” – Bertolt Brecht, Five Difficulties in Writing the Truth

[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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Harvey Wasserman : Vermont’s Radioactive Nightmare

Posted on February 11, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

Image from This Week in Nuclear.

Radioactive fallout:
Vermont Yankee one of 27 U.S. reactors
Known to leak carcinogenic tritium

By Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / February 11, 2010

Like a decayed flotilla of rickety steamers, at least 27 of America’s 104 aging atomic reactors are known to be leaking radioactive tritium, which is linked to cancer if inhaled or ingested through the throat or skin.

The fallout has been fiercest at Vermont Yankee, where a flood of cover-ups has infuriated and terrified near neighbors who say the reactor was never meant to operate more than 30 years, and must now shut.

In 2007 one of Yankee’s 22 cooling towers simply collapsed due to rot.

Now the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has confirmed tritium levels in a monitoring well at Vernon to be 3.5 times the federal safety standard. The leaks apparently came from underground pipes whose very existence was recently denied by VY officials in under-oath testimony at a public hearing. Vermont’s pro-nuclear Republican Governor Jim Douglas has termed the event “a breach of trust that cannot be tolerated.”

Yankee is owned by Entergy, a Mississippi-based consortium that also owns New York’s Indian Point reactor, which suffered an internal gusher of radioactive water in May, 2009. Another leak has just been found at Oconee in South Carolina. Illinois’ Braidwood leaked so many millions of gallons of tritium-laced water that its owner, Exelon, was forced to buy a new municipal water system for a nearby town.

Entergy says none of Yankee’s tritium has been found in local drinking water or in the Connecticut River, which supplies the plant’s cooling water. Vernon sits near Vermont’s southeast border with Massachusetts, across the river from New Hampshire. “The existence of tritium in such low levels does not present a risk to public health or safety whatsoever,” says the company’s Robert Williams.

But VY is just the latest of more than two dozen U.S. nuclear plants — many built in the 1960s and ’70s — to be found with leaking tritium.

Last year at New Jersey’s Oyster Creek, tritium was reported leaking a second time shortly after Exelon got it a 20-year license extension. Entergy’s Pilgrim reactor, at Plymouth, Massachusetts, has recently leaked tritium into the ground.

The NRC’s Neil Sheehan has confirmed leaks involving 27 of 104 licensed U.S. reactors, and says that probably doesn’t account for all of them. At Yankee, Oyster Creek and elsewhere, rotting pipes are the likeliest culprit, but no one is 100% certain.

The epidemic has escalated public dismay. Vermont state Representative Tony Klein, chair of House Natural Resources and Energy Committee, says that “when you have public officials that the public depends on for their health and welfare making casual statements that a radioactive substance is not harmful to you, I think that’s ludicrous.”

For decades the Encylopedia Britannica, National Academy of Sciences and other primary scientific bodies have confirmed that no dose of radiation, no matter how small, can ever be deemed perfectly safe. “There is no threshold of exposure below which low levels of ionizing radiation can be demonstrated to be harmless or beneficial,” says Richard R. Monson, associate dean for professional education and professor of epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health.

Thus far the NRC has granted a series of license renewals to aging reactors. But by virtue of a long-standing agreement with Entergy, the Vermont Legislature can deny Yankee’s request for a 20-year extension. In the 1990s local groups like the Citizen’s Awareness Network helped force down the Yankee Rowe plant on the Deerfield River in Massachusetts, about 25 miles southwest of Vernon. The root cause was concern over embrittlement of the elderly reactor’s core, a key to the future of all other aging nukes.

In Vermont, angry debate has also arisen over Entergy’s dwindling decommissioning fund, which has been slashed by a declining stock market. Entergy has proposed spinning off plant ownership to a shell corporation whose assets may be even more dubious. But area residents also fear Entergy may be pushing Yankee operations in an attempt to find the source of its leaks.

With VY operating under duress, Katz and others report an increasing wave of concern among local citizens starting to think seriously about how they might evacuate if Entergy keeps pushing. “This plant appears to be leaking from its reactor piping, but they don’t really know where,” she says. “They don’t want to shut down because they’re afraid they’ll never get back up. Entergy is choosing to protect its bottom line rather than the health and safety of our community.”

Indeed, a desperate national industry now pushing for massive federal subsidies to build new reactors may not survive a flood of elderly clunkers being forced to close by the weight of their own contamination. “This is an industry trying to build a new fleet of Titanics while the old ones are sinking,” says Katz.

Amidst the gusher of tritium leaks, Governor Douglas wants to postpone the legislature’s vote on VY’s license extension. But his term expires in November, and all five Democratic gubernatorial candidates are pledged to a Yankee shutdown.

What happens next will be defined by fierce grassroots activism crashing into a flood of corporate money in support of a rickety old reactor being operated with increasing recklessness.

The highly hyped “reactor renaissance” — and much more — may hang in the balance. Stay tuned.

[Harvey Wasserman is Senior Advisor to Greenpeace USA and the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, and Senior Editor of www.freepress.org, where this article also appears. His Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth is at www.harveywasserman.com.]

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Sgt. Travis Bishop : Ft. Hood War Resister to Get Out Early

Posted on February 10, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer

War resister Sgt. Travis Bishop flashes peace sign to supporters as he is taken to the Bell County (Texas) Correctional Unit after being sentenced to one year in prison at court martial on August 14, 2009. Photo by Eric Thompson.

Afghanistan War refuser:
Ft. Hood’s Travis Bishop gets reduced sentence

By Alice Embree / The Rag Blog / February 10, 2010

Sgt. Travis Bishop has learned that the 12-month sentence he is serving at Fort Lewis will be reduced by three months. Sgt. Bishop was sentenced at Fort Hood near Killeen, Texas, in August 2009 for refusing orders to deploy to Afghanistan.

Sgt. Bishop, a Kentucky native and country singer, enlisted in 2004. He was deployed to Korea and then to Iraq. He had served five years of active duty when he refused orders based on religious reasons.

One of the people testifying against Bishop at his court martial was the chaplain he had hoped would listen to his concerns. Instead, Lt. Col. Ronald Leininger had reduced the amount of time scheduled for their original interview and then repeatedly took phone calls during the session. In his official statement, the chaplain said that people with Bishop’s religious heritage were “generally pro-military service with no pacifist tendencies in doctrine or practice.”

Lt. General Robert Cone, commanding general of Fort Hood approved the sentence reduction on February 4, after considering Sgt. Bishop’s clemency application. The clemency request included a legal brief alleging problems in the processing of Bishop’s conscientious objector claim, problems with the trial proceedings, and mistreatment at Fort Lewis where Sgt. Bishop has been detained.

In large part, the reduction in sentence is due to the dogged perseverance of GI rights attorney James Branum, and the public pressure that was brought to bear. Sgt. Bishop’s clemency request included 433 letters (signed by a total of 538 people from 21 different countries). Many came from pastors who disagreed with the military chaplain’s view on their churchs’ support for conscientious objection.

Through his attorney, Sgt. Bishop relayed his thanks to all his supporters. He said he had no regrets and urged others who are feeling moral conflicts with war to follow their conscience, but not to wait as long as he did to get help.

Attorney James Branum released the news of Sgt. Bishop’s early release and ackowledged many supporters, including the GI coffeehouses, Under the Hood in Killeen and Coffee Strong near Fort Lewis in Washington, Amnesty International’s London office and Courage to Resist. Sgt. Bishop’s release is expected to be no later than March 31, based on the amount of good behavior credit he has earned.

Supporters of Sgt. Bishop can find instructions on writing him at www.couragetoresist.org.

Also on The Rag Blog:

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FILM / David McReynolds : ‘Never Cry Wolf’

Posted on February 10, 2010 by Thorne Dreyer


Profoundly mystic:
Carroll Bellard’s Never Cry Wolf

By David McReynolds / The Rag Blog / February 10, 2010

We each have our own habits, and one of mine is tracking down films that had been well received in their time, but which I had missed — for which purpose Netflix is a great resource. I recently got a copy of Never Cry Wolf, made in 1983. (Somewhat ironically, since it is neither animated, nor a “family film,” it was a Walt Disney Production.)

The film is an adaptation of Farley Mowat’s autobiography. Directed by Carroll Ballard, it stars Charles Martin Smith, Brian Dennehy, and Zachary Ittimangnaq. The music, haunting enough to merit special mention, is by Mark Isham, and the cinematography is by Hiro Narita. Narita’s work is magical, his effects achieved without computers, the closeups of wolves — and their interaction with Smith — so remarkable as to be nearly incredible.

The premise of the film is that the Arctic caribou are dying off as a result of being preyed on by wolves. A young government biologist, Tyler (Charles Martin Smith), is sent to the Arctic wilderness of Northern Canada to gather proof than the savage wolves are the reason the caribou herds are dying. Tyler is flown there, to a totally isolated area, and begins his study. He is a survival expert — and indeed, he needs to be, in this situation!

What the young biologist quickly learns is that the wolves are not renegade killers, but smart, courageous, very caring of their families. In the course of the film (just short of two hours) we meet an Inuit family and realize that, like the caribou, they are at risk from contact with “civilization” (represented here by Brian Dennehy).

When the film ended I realized I was weeping. Why, I’m not sure. There was no moment of tragedy. The young biologist survives. (But it is left open as to whether he returns or remains in the wilderness.)

Smith devoted nearly three years to Never Cry Wolf and said he found the process difficult, that “during much of the two-year shooting schedule in Canada’s Yukon and in Nome, Alaska, I was the only actor present. It was the loneliest film I’ve ever worked on.”

Perhaps what affected me was the encounter with the vast, empty, yet vitally alive landscape of the Arctic.

An American composer, John Luther Adams — who had moved toward his own form of contemporary music after discovering the works of Edgar Varese, John Cage, Morton Feldman, and Harry Partch — eventually left a Southern California he found overdeveloped and moved to Alaska, which since 1978 has been his home (his work received a respectful review in the New Yorker). His music (and I’m listening to a CD of his, In the White Silence) reflects his adopted landscape.

As my email friend, Hunter Gray, will understand, better I think than most, what seems empty is full, what seems silent has a sound many have lost the ability to hear.

I found, in the 24 hours after mentioning Never Cry Wolf to a few friends, that they had seen it, and had much the same reaction I had. A strange film. Very real, and like so much that is very real, profoundly mystic.

[David McReynolds worked on the staff of the War Resisters League for 39 years, retired in 1999, and lives with two cats on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. He has been active in the socialist movement, being the Socialist Party’s candidate for President in 1980 and 2000.]

  • Rent Never Cry Wolf at Netflix.
  • Find Never Cry Wolf on DVD at Amazon.com.
  • Find Never Cry Wolf : Amazing True Story of Life Among Arctic Wolves by Farley Mowat at Amazon.com.

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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 /

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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.]

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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

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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

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