The Rag Blog

Health Care Hypocrisy : The GOP’s Nutty Screaming

Posted on November 22, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

“Wait Times!” Cartoon by Matt Bors.
The GOP’s health care nuttiness
And the insurance industry backstory

The problem the right has with health care reform is not that it represents intrusive government (it doesn’t). It’s that it doesn’t represent the kind of intrusive, authoritarian government they like.

By Glenn W. Smith / The Rag Blog / November 22, 2009

The sheer volume of the nutty screaming from the Right can obscure the rank hypocrisy of the GOP’s attacks on health care reform. So let’s clear up a few things.

Health care reform is about getting our neighbors better health care, reducing unnecessary suffering and early death. “Socialism!” cry the Republicans. “Tyranny!” But how are the reforms being discussed any different in kind from existing public health services, like ambulances?

Here’s a picture. A Republican gets a broken collar bone in a car wreck. The EMS folk show up. “Get away,” shouts the Republican. “You’re a communist!” Right.

Just as baffling: the same right wing people who support government domestic spying, an imperial presidency, an end to habeas corpus, government controls on our private lives, public school teaching of unique religious doctrine, etc. oppose a government role in making us healthier. Spy on us, send our kids to war, imprison us without cause, tell us who we can love, control women’s bodies — it’s okay for government to do those things. But improve our health? That’s dangerous.

The problem the right has with health care reform is not that it represents intrusive government (it doesn’t). It’s that it doesn’t represent the kind of intrusive, authoritarian government they like.

Or how about this. An obscure panel that develops medical guidelines questions whether regular mammograms should be delayed until age 50. They are suggestions, not regulations. All hell breaks loose. “See,” cry the Republicans. “Government rationing of health care!” Lost in the shouting is the undeniable fact that private health insurance companies are already rationing health care. But here’s the key point: All the shouting– from justifiably concerned and confused women to right wing partisan exploiters — gets the agency to back off. See, government can be made accountable in ways private insurance companies never have been and never will be.

The health care debate has made one fact obvious: there are no credible, principled arguments against using our democratically elected government to help improve our health. Many of those screaming “socialism” today are already accepting the benefits of Medicare of Social Security. Right wingers, paid by insurance companies to do it, attacked those programs too, warning that they would destroy America.

For those of you who are on your way to Thanksgiving dinners next week with family members who, let’s say, do not always see eye to eye with you politically, here is a little of the private insurance back story. It might be helpful.

The insurance industry did not really want to get into the health business, and didn’t until the 1930s and 1940s. Why? Because they couldn’t figure out how to make money. Life insurance made money, because the investment of premium dollars earned them much more than benefits paid. Property insurance was profitable because premiums are paid by millions of people whose houses never burn down. But everyone needs a doctor. What to do?

Insurance big wigs figured it out. Deny coverage to those at risk of poor health. Deny reimbursement or benefits to policy holders. In other words, all of the health insurance industry profits come from the denial of care. It’s an ugly fact, but true nonetheless.

And this turned the American health care system into a brutal, nationwide version of Sophie’s Choice. Collectively, the health of one depends upon the sacrifice of another. Is that really how we want to treat one another?

The New York Time’s Nicholas D. Kristof made an excellent point in his column this week. I’ll close with his thought:

These days, the critics of Medicare have come around because it manifestly works. Life expectancy for people who have reached the age of 65 has risen significantly. America is no longer shamed by elderly Americans suffering for lack of medical care.

Yet although America’s elderly are now cared for, our children are not. A Johns Hopkins study found that hospitalized children who are uninsured are 60 percent more likely to die than those with insurance, presumably because they are less likely to get preventive care and to be taken to the doctor when sick. The study suggested that every year some 1,000 children may die as a consequence of lacking health insurance.

Why is it broadly accepted that the elderly should have universal health care, while it’s immensely controversial to seek universal coverage for children? What’s the difference — except that health care for children is far cheaper?

[Austin’s Glenn W. Smith, according to Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas, is a “legendary political consultant and all-around good guy.” His excellent blog on politics and culture is DogCanyon, where this article also appears.]

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Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged Health Care Reform, Health Insurance, Republican Party, Socialism | 3 Comments

Agriculture : The Uses of Biotechnology

Posted on November 22, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

Genetic science in agriculture:
The uses of biotechnology

By Roger Baker / The Rag Blog / November 22, 2009

I recently wrote about GMO’s on The Rag Blog (“The Future of Agriculture: Genetics and the Limits of Oil“) and I want to expand a little on the thoughts I presented in that article.

Biotechnology is a powerful new tool that we are just learning to use, but it can give certain targeted benefits to agriculture. Maybe you could engineer a strain of cotton with some poison alkaloid genes expressed in the cotton bolls to defeat boll weevils for years or a decade, assuming boll weevils were your main problem.

We would all likely agree that we don’t want to see Monsanto in charge of this work, but what if some U.S. government lab offered the results of the weevil resistant gene spliced cotton seeds to all southern U.S. farmers, both big and small at low government subsidized cost? A sort of shallow band aid approach reflecting our simple current understanding of gene splicing that might be of obvious benefit for a time, but that ought not to be privatized.

But what if global warming is your main problem, as is typically likely with many food crops? Here gene spicing will do little good. Why?

Because in the case of global warming, you really need to find strains of existing plants where nature and natural selection have already solved the problems of climate acclimation involving many genes in ways we do not understand and won’t for many years. This assumes that our government would put a reasonable amount of effort into the basic research, now that we have the lab tools to greatly advance our deep understanding of how biology works.

Global warming (intensifies droughts in the Southwest, and floods in many cases) plus peak oil will hit U.S. and world agriculture quite hard and the forced response will require improved tolerant strains and varieties of crops from our genetic resource banks (now largely privatized?) to be developed and planted.

If I were advising some scholarly young person which branch of science to go into to make a good living for decades to come, I think I would now advise them to go into public sector agricultural science, and perhaps plant breeding in particular. Agriculture will have to become a lot more localized and I believe that crop experts good at passing on practical advice way down to the backyard garden level will be in big demand.

There is another side to the current revolution in genetic science, and that is personal medicine. The use of genome analysis and genetic engineering to solve medical problems on an individual level is likely to become a very profitable and effective branch of medicine since it can provide individualized advice on preventive medicine.

But biotechnology is rapidly moving to China. They have cheap, dependable, and skilled lab workers there and the highly targeted pharmaceuticals and methods like antibodies and genome analysis are labor-intensive.

This all cries out for socialized medicine or strong regulation of the biotechnology industry. Since I assume the Chinese have socialized medicine for their own domestic care, the emphasis maybe should be to ensure that the American companies don’t charge a hundred times the real cost/Chinese price for delivering the same medical benefits in the U.S. — now that we have largely failed to reform the high cost drivers in our medical health delivery system.

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Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged Agriculture, Biotechnology, Genetic Engineering, Global Warming, Medicine, Science | 3 Comments

Val Liveoak : Remembering the ‘Tope’ in El Salvador

Posted on November 21, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

Mural at the University of Central America in San Salvador depicts martyred Jesuit priests and suggests complicity of the nation’s business and political leadership.

Slain Jesuit priests honored in El Salvador

In El Salvador, six Jesuit priests are being honored twenty years after their murders by the U.S.-backed Salvadoran military. On Monday [November 16, 2009], the priests were bestowed the nation’s highest civilian award, marking the first time the Salvadoran government has honored the priests since their deaths. In a ceremony attended by the priests’ families, Salvadorian President Mauricio Funes said his country is “pulling] back a heavy veil of darkness and lies to let in the light of justice and truth.” — Democracy Now (see story below)

Twenty years later:
Remembering the ‘Tope’
A time of fear in El Salvador

By Val Liveoak / The Rag Blog / November 21, 2009

I lived in El Salvador from August 1986 to September 1990. I worked on a Catholic parish team in a small town in the eastern part of the country, training village health promoters.

Our town in northern Usulatán was very isolated, literally the end of the road, with nothing beyond it but mountains and the unpatrolled border with Honduras. But in November 1989 we joined the whole country in the time of fear and danger called the “Tope” — the “final offensive” of the FMLN, the rebel guerrillas.

Most of the fighting was in the larger cities, with street fighting especially in San Salvador’s poor neighborhoods. The guerrillas expected that the population would rise up in support of their offensive, and that they would thus win the long civil war against the government. As it turned out, that didn’t happen in numbers sufficient to turn the tide, and the war continued for another two years.

We had little news, and being far from most of the action, were spared the worst of the struggle. We’d get some radio news, from the FMLN’s clandestine station, and occasionally from Voice of America or BBC. We knew about the simultaneous U.S. attack on Panama City as the army went in to arrest the then president, Manuel Noriega. But all the highways were shut down by a paro, a traffic blockade enforced by the guerrillas on a national level. And phone and electric lines were cut, too. There was no way to know what was happening to our friends in other places, nor to let them know how we were doing.

The offensive went on for many days. We could hear sporadic artillery in the next town over, but our town remained quiet, although government soldiers from a large garrison in town were out patrolling. We probably continued our visits to outlying villages 2-3 times a week since we went on foot anyway. But mainly we hunkered down and waited it out.

On the morning of Nov. 16, the news came that the six Jesuit priests and their housekeeper and her daughter had been found shot execution style at their house at University of Central America, the UCA. We struggled with fear since we also lived in a parish house, beside the church. Would more priests, nuns and lay workers be targeted? Would there be men who would come in the night for us?

During that time we had a young Salvadoran man from the capital working with us. He had been an active member of popular organizations in his poor neighborhood. He became filled with fear for his safety when the radio announced the death of a near relative in the fighting. He quickly decided to flee the country, and began the perilous trip by land to exile in the U.S. The last we heard, he was living as an undocumented worker in Los Angeles.

After over two weeks of fighting, things finally calmed down and the guerrillas went back to the hills. After the traffic blockade was lifted, we went into the capital to see how others in our program were doing, to call home and let people know we were ok.

Our friends had had to flee the house where our volunteers stayed since it was in the crossfire when people in the house next door began firing at soldiers in the streets. To find safety, they went to the Hilton where the international press stayed, and we shared the room there with four or five other volunteers for a few days. (The Hilton may not have been all that safe—one journalist found rifle shells pressed under his door, a not so subtle threat.)

On the TV there we watched CNN tell the story of our colleague who had been arrested by the Salvadoran police and charged with having weapons buried in her yard, which she denied. Senator Christopher Dodd and other from the U.S. intervened, and after more than a week, she was released from jail and deported. But as an aside to that story, then Undersecretary of State Elliot Abrams said, “Well, we know that some of the U.S. citizens who claim to be missionaries support the guerrillas.” I’ll never forget my outrage — I shouted at the TV, ”Why not just paint targets on our backs!”

After the fighting, the destruction and the killing, things settled back into an uneasy calm in the city. Soldiers and police patrolled the streets, arms at the ready. Cleanup began, and the last of the burials took place. Death threats and oppression of the opposition continued. There were sporadic battles in the rural area. In our town, the soldiers patrolled and noisily trained in the early mornings right outside the church. Everyone kept their heads down a little lower. The memorial chapel for the Jesuits was built and regular services were held there. Life, such as it is during a war, went on.

[Texan Val Liveoak is a nonviolent activist, currently living in El Salvador and San Antonio. She coordinates Peacebuilding en las Americas, the Latin American Initiative of Friends Peace Teams that also has programs in the African Great Lakes region and in Indonesia.]

Demonstrators in San Salvador in 2008 hold banners depicting six Jesuit priests massacred in 1989 in El Salvador. Photo by Edgar Romero / AP.

In Landmark Ceremony,
El Salvador Honors Slain Jesuit Priests

November 18, 2009

In El Salvador, six Jesuit priests are being honored twenty years after their murders by the US-backed Salvadoran military. On Monday, the priests were bestowed the nation’s highest civilian award, marking the first time the Salvadoran government has honored the priests since their deaths. In a ceremony attended by the priests’ families, Salvadorian President Mauricio Funes said his country is “pulling] back a heavy veil of darkness and lies to let in the light of justice and truth.” El Salvador’s defense minister also announced the military is ready to ask for forgiveness and open its archives to a long-sought investigation. The Jesuits had been outspoken advocates for the poor and critics of human rights abuses committed by the ARENA government. They were killed on November 16, 1989, when a military unit entered the Central American University campus and shot them to death. The priests’ housekeeper and her daughter were also killed in the attack. The current head of the university, Priest Jose Maria Tojeira, welcomed the posthumous recognition.

Priest Jose Maria Tojeira:

Many people from all parties—of course, ARENA, as well—said the priests were great men who helped to end war before, because their martyrdom pushed to accelerate peace talks. But never in twenty years has there been an official word of recognition for these people’s dignity. This is the first time, and I think it’s a very important symbol that should be opened to all victims from El Salvador.

The order to kill the priests is widely believed to have come from senior ARENA party and military leaders, but no high-ranking official has ever been charged

Source / Democracy Now

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Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged Central America, El Salvador, History, Latin America, Revolutionary Movements | 1 Comment

Bart Stupak and the Family : The Power of C Street

Posted on November 21, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

Above, the Fellowship’s house on C Street in Washington, D.C. Photo by Olivier Douliery / Abaca Press / MCT. Below, U.S. Rep. Bart Stupak. Photo by Susan Walsh / AP.
The Fellowship on C Street:
Bart Stupak and the impact of the Family

Expect it to grow in power if economic conditions do not improve dramatically

By Sherman DeBrosse / The Rag Blog / November 21, 2009

See ‘C Street House no longer tax exempt,’ by Zachary Roth, Below.

Congressman Bart Stupak of Michigan led about 40 other Democrats and the Republicans in amending the House Health Care Plan with a proviso that made it impossible to use federal credits in the proposed insurance exchanges to purchase insurance that covered abortion. Stupak says that women could use their own funds to buy abortion riders through the exchanges.

In 17 states, women have the right to buy such riders to accompany their coverage under Medicaid, but few have done so. There is no language in the amendment that prohibits purchasing riders, but the wording is complex and can be read many ways. The Library of Congress says that the riders cannot be purchased.

The houses on C Street

Representative Stupak is a member of the Family or the Fellowship and resides at its house on C Street in Arlington. The Family has another complex in Arlington at “The Cedars,” a former CIA safe house they purchased in 1976. The townhouse at 133 C Street, S.E. is a former convent registered under the ownership of Youth With A Mission to Washington D.C. Five or six other Representatives and Senators live there and pay about $600 a month rent.

Until recently, the building was classified as a church, and was not on the tax rolls. Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC), perhaps the most conservative man in Washington, is a resident, as are Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS) and Representatives Zach Wamp (R-TN), Bart Stupak (D-MI) and Mike Doyle (D-PA). There are many powerful Washington politicians who are members of the Family and/or come there for religious studies. Among they are Pete Domenici (formerly R-NM), Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), Lindsay Graham (R-SC)) , Mike Enzi (R-WY), John Thune (R-SD), Mark Pryor (D-AK) and James Inhofe.

They all champion what they call “family values.” Washington, D.C. authorities recently removed the house’s tax exemption. Zach and other C Streeters have been busy building megachapels on military bases. Most of these “Christian” politicians are Republicans, but some members are conservative Democrats. Prominent people from outside politics are sometimes found there, and it is said that Michael Jackson once spent the night there.

What sexual scandals reveal

Senator John Ensign resided in the C Street house until he found it necessary recently to move because of spotlight his sex scandal brought to the secretive cult. Ensign had been involved with a former member of his staff, and her husband had also worked for the Nevada Senator. The senator’s parents gave her family $96,000, but the husband of his mistress said that Ensign and his C Street friends had discussed far larger payments. Senator Tom Coburn, another member of the cult, said he would not discuss in court any advice he gave because it was a confidential communication. The Oklahoman claimed this privilege because he is a practicing OB-GYN and also an ordained deacon.

Former Rep. Charles “Chuck” Pickering of Mississippi is a former resident of the C Street house, and his former wife claimed that the Congressman carried on there with another female. He is a former Baptist missionary. South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford , now famous for his affair with a beautiful Argentine newscaster, is an alumnus of C Street from his Washington days, but he did not live there. He returned to C Street to seek advice about dealing with his love problems.

No one seems to know if Senator David Vitter, now well known for his interest in prostitutes, had any ties to the Family. He has had a great deal to say about Christian family values. Tennessee Republican state Sen. Paul Stanley also had a lot to say about morality and family values. He was caught in an affair with a 22 year old intern. His first wife claimed physical abuse and got a restraining order against him. His second wife was a former intern. When in Washington, he stays at the C Street upscale dorm for right-wing Christian politicians.

Ordinarily the sexual transgressions of politicians are best not discussed, but there is a different situation when politicians who advertize themselves as “Christian” and proponents of “family values” are involved. At the least monumental moral hypocrisy is involved. Former Family leader Doug Coe once said, ”when you’re chosen, the normal rules don’t apply.” He was not referring to sexual conduct, but people who think they are chosen by God to do something important often have a hard time where the rules might apply to them. Some of them have said that morality and ethics are secular concepts.

Sen. John Ensign moved out of C Street after his sex scandal became public.
Harold Bloom, a great scholar at Yale, wrote that the American religion is antinomianism. Two of its elements are claims to special mission and exemption from some norms. Some of the people who came here in the Seventeenth Century thought God expected them to build “A City on a Hill.” But they stressed its nonmaterial dimensions. American exceptionalism reinforced the idea of mission as did Manifest Destiny and its various extensions.

The Family has a strong admixture of antinomianism, but it is clear that it is the American religion. We might recall that some of the antinomians in early Massachusetts Bay claimed to be specially chosen by God and exempted some societal rules, and they were accused of sexual sinfulness.

The Family is about power

As noted in my previous article on this subject, the Family has a record of catering to unsavory dictators abroad who inflicted great harm and burdens upon their peoples. There were also signs of a softness towards fascism in its history. Many of these people chose not to work through churches because they are too democratic and because women have considerable influence in some churches.

With the exception of Senator Pyor, they oppose organized labor, and have a long record of backing big business, Big Pharma, the health insurance companies, and military contractors. They are all hawkish and bent on extending the American empire. They think unfettered capitalism is God’s will.

It is a peculiar form of Christianity they advance. Christ comes across not so much as the friend of the poor and outcasts, but instead seems to be a hard charging executive type and role model for dictators, captains of industry, and people with Type A and authoritarian personalities. The Family’s Christ is no longer the “Prince of Peace.” Rather they repeatedly say he came to bring the sword and division. Somehow, it is hard to imagine their Christ espousing the principles of the Sermon of the Mount or calling other people “brother” unless those people were initiates in a secret cultish organization.

When one first learns what the Family is all about, one is tempted to wonder how such a group became so powerful. While the Fellowship has more power today than before, we should remember that, in the Vietnam era, Family members ran World Vision and the Family was a front for some business and intelligence activities in Southeast Asia.

The Family has long been active in organizing military officers and can take some of the credit for creating right-wing Christian dominance in the military, as observed at the Air Force Academy and in the Marine Corps. It also has some influence in Campus Crusade for Christ. It is impossible to measure the extent of its power, but what we see is indeed impressive.

C Street resident Jim DeMint may be the most conservative man in Washingon.
Dominionism

The Family’s members are clearly dominionists, people who believe that there should be no separation of church and state, and that God’s saints should rule. There are different varieties of dominionism, and it is unclear how the Fellowship is tied to other strands. Dominionism in the United States is growing more rapidly than almost any other movement. The press missed the fact that three of the churches Sarah Palin attended are part of a dominionist movement called the New Apostolic Reformation.

One of our two or three best religious reporters was taken in by Sarah’s talk about ‘a post-denominational Christianity.” He thought she was for broad tolerance and respect. The term refers to a time when the apostles leading the NAR have forced the competition out of business. As a rule, dominionists have ties to white power groups, survivalists, militias, and even secessionist groups like the Alaska Independence Party. These are the sorts of folks who turn up at Tea Bagger rallies. These elements are growing and are ripe to be manipulated by the Family’s politicians.

Good scholars speculate that as the dominionists gain power, they will be less concerned about the second coming of Christ. If they have a shot at gaining power, they will talk less about rapture and end times and more about why they need to rule a good long time to prepare for the Lord’s coming, sometime in the distant future.

Is the Family a cult?

Some might object to calling the family a “cult.” The fact is that it is secretive and relies upon charismatic leadership. In the past, some cults had different levels of membership, and this seems true of the Family. Some cults in history, such as the Manicheans and Albigensians, claimed to have special knowledge. In the case of the Family, they just insist on a unique interpretation of Christianity. Unlike those two cults, the Family seems very materialistic in its concerns — the focus on cultivating powerful people and gaining power, serving big economic interests, fostering globalism and American imperialism.

The Family is as American as spoiled apple pie

Since the 1970s, the nation has embraced the corpus of economic doctrines associated with what is called market fundamentalism. Even the Social Darwinism of the late 19th Century — root, hog or die and leave the poor to their fate — has had an astonishing rebirth. As the middle class has become more anxious about its future and threatened standard of living, people have been more inclined to turn their backs on forms of religion that embrace peace and social justice.

The Social Gospel among protestant denominations seems in headlong retreat, and among Roman Catholics there is a growing core of bishops obsessed with abortion but unwilling to give more than lip service to the church’s teachings on peace, economic justice, the death penalty, and preservation of the environment. Many of them act as though the church has become an arm of the Republican Party.

Of course, all the mainstream churches are hemorrhaging members as people move to right wing Christian denominations that blend promises of prosperity with nationalism, and cultural and economic conservatism. Many of them are openly Republican political clubhouses. These forms of Christianity illustrate how easily religion can be absorbed and transformed by the host culture. Given all of this, The Family should come as no surprise. It may not represent genuine Christianity, but it is a genuine and almost typical outgrowth of American culture, reflecting forces that have long been here.

We lack effective language to discuss the common good

Obama and the Democrats are having a devil of a time selling health care reform in part because there is no compelling way to help people think in terms of the common good.

Decades ago, Daniel Callahan of the Hastings Institute discussed health care reform with several senators, including Jacob Javits and Ted Kennedy. They told him that a major obstacle was that American culture provided no common concepts and language that enabled Americans to discuss the common good. That situation has grown worse. Now we have crowds of old people, some bearing arms, demanding that there be no effort to help the 45,000,000 without health insurance because they fear their benefits might suffer a little.

South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, whose extramarital affair with an Argentine newscaster hit the news, is a C Street alumnus. Photo by Brett Flashbnick / AP.
Our founders left us with some concepts that could have facilitated an honest discussion of the common good, but over time materialism and selfish individualism made them appear to be suspect. The nation’s founders left an ideology that combined Lockean individualism with the goals of equality and brotherhood.

A minority, inspired by radical British writers like Thomas Paine, Joseph Priestly, and Richard Price was responsible for drawing equality and brotherhood from the thought of the republican tradition. The people who introduced these elements were an important minority, and their support for these ideas was infectious, even influencing some Protestant elements that people today would mistakenly equate with today’s fundamentalists and evangelicals.

Over more than two centuries, the potency of equality and brotherhood in American thought waxed and waned. Of late, they have been in sharp decline. When these ideas were powerful, Americans had periods of reform. Often, these periods of reform came at times when progressive elements in American religion were strong. The last period of significant reform was the when the civil rights movement made headway pursing Martin Luther King’s dream of a beloved community.

The late John Patrick Diggins thought that over the course of American history the idea of individualism gained ground at the expense of equality.. This may have been because Americans were essentially a people of plenty, as David Potter said. Until 1980, real wages and the standard of living increased steadily. We were blessed with an abundance of land and resources that fuelled prosperity, but Americans were inclined to attribute success to their own virtues, most of were thought to have stemmed from rugged individualism.

Another reason why it is so hard to talk about the common good is that the subcultures of our population groups are largely rooted in what Leo Strauss called modern rather than ancient thought. The ancients valued virtue and were accustomed to thinking in terms of the community. According to Strauss, a sharp philosophical decline in virtue began with Machiavelli’s The Prince.

Eventually, man would see himself as freed from the natural order, free to define what a human being should be. Strauss, unlike many of his unwitting followers, thought the state and society better equipped to determine what was acceptable conduct, and he welcomed the decline of Christianity. The dominant cultural stream in the United States is rooted in religions that were founded after ancient community-oriented thought was in decline. We just are not accustomed to thinking in terms of community.

The sad truth might be that the ravings of a Ronald Reagan, Rush Limbaugh, or Glenn Beck resonate strongly with so many Americans because they appeal to elements that have become dominant strains in our culture. They also have the great advantage of appealing to people who want simple answers to complex questions.

At first glance one might think see the secretive and elitist Family as an odd phenomenon. But, like the movements led by Gerald L.K. Smith, Father Caughlin, and Charles Lindbergh in an earlier time, the Family is a typical American movement. Like those other movements, it will grow in strength during tough economic times. The power the Family holds is a natural outgrowth of our history. In the case of the Family or Fellowship, the marriage of religion, “market economics,” Social Darwinism, and aggressive nationalism results in a grotesque form of Christianity that is essentially a shell or Trojan horse for more dominant forces that have done little to advance the good.

C Street House no longer tax exempt

By Zachary Roth / November 17, 2009

Residents of the C Street Christian fellowship house will no longer benefit from a loophole that had allowed the house’s owners to avoid paying property taxes.

Previously, the house — despite being home to numerous lawmakers — had been tax exempt, because it was classified as a church. That arrangement had allowed the building’s owner, the secretive international Christian organization The Family, to charge significantly below market rents to its residents. In recent year, Senators John Ensign (R-NV), Tom Coburn (R-OK), Sam Brownback (R-KS) and Jim DeMint (R-SC), and Reps. Zach Wamp (R-TN), Bart Stupak (D-MI) and Mike Doyle (D-PA) have all reportedly called C Street home.

Natalie Wilson, a spokeswoman for the Office of Tax and Revenue for Washington D.C., told TPMmuckraker that her office inspected the house this summer. “It was determined that portions of it were being rented out for private residential purposes,” she said. As a result, the tax exempt status was partially revoked. Sixty-six percent of the value of the property is now subject to taxation.

According to online records, the total taxable assessment is $1,834,500. The building’s owner last month paid taxes of $1714.70 on the property.

A commenter using the name Vince Treacy, posting on a blog run by George Washington Law professor Jonathan Turley, noted in June that the property enjoyed tax exempt status. In a comment yesterday, he wrote:

Well, at least one complaint just happened to be filed a few months ago, by some anonymous citizen who will remain nameless “”wink, wink,” with the taxpayer hotline at the DC tax office.

The C Street house has lately been the subject of unwanted attention thanks to its role in three GOP sex scandals. Ensign, who reportedly recently moved out of the house, was confronted there last year by his fellow C Streeters, including Coburn, about his affair with a top aide’s wife. South Carolina governor Mark Sanford revealed this summer that he had received counseling from the house’s denizens over his own randy hijinx with his Argentinean mistress. And the wife of former GOP congressman Chip Pickering has alleged in divorce proceedings that the house was the site of “wrongful conduct” between her husband and his girlfriend.

Source / TPM

Please see:

BOOKS / The Secret Fundamentalism of ‘The Family’ by Sherman DeBrosse / The Rag Blog / Oct. 18, 2009
Exposé: The ‘Christian’ Mafia by Wayne Madsen / Insider Magazine

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged Congress, Conservatives, Dominionism, Evangelical Christians, Fundamentalism, Philosophy, Political Scandal, Washington D.C. | Leave a comment

A Modest Proposal : Eat the Rich!

Posted on November 20, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

Photo by chrisjfry / Flickr.
Serve the people!
Carve up Wall Street

By Alex Knight / The Rag Blog / November 20, 2009

See Amy Goodman’s interview with Robert Scheer on Wall Street and the economy, from Democracy Now!, Below.

Yesterday, Democracy Now! reported that two major records have been broken in 2009 — Wall St. profits ($35.7 billion in the first half of the year), and the number of Americans going hungry (50 million). These two seemingly unrelated tragedies immediately suggest a common solution — carve up the bloated hulks of Wall Street swine and serve them up to the American people!

On Tuesday, the NY Comptroller’s Office released a report showing that “broker-dealer operations of New York Stock Exchange member firms earned a record $35.7 billion in the first half of 2009.” Through September, $22.5 billion in profits were reported from the four largest firms alone — Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase. These are the same banks that got bailed out by the Federal Government last year — which means that taxpayers like you and I paid for these creeps’ bonuses.

Not coincidentally, these obscene profits were recorded at the same moment that the Department of Agriculture released a report showing that “nearly 50 million people — including almost one child in four — struggled last year to get enough to eat” (as written in the Washington Post on Monday). While the economy has been in the tank and unemployment has surpassed 10% officially, food prices have been skyrocketing, and so millions more Americans are being forced to go without needed nutrition.

Why isn’t it a coincidence? Because the crooks who sent global markets into a freefall last September, causing millions to lose their homes and jobs, have been rewarded for their bad behavior with preferential treatment from Uncle Sam. These Wall Street piggies have been gorging themselves on trillions of U.S. federally-approved dough, while regular folks struggle to pay the rent or put food on the table — without so much as a measly health care reform bill to give hope to their deteriorating condition. Now one out of every four of our kids is going hungry while the government subsidizes the very stock market slimeballs responsible for creating the trouble to begin with.

“Where’s OUR bailout?” struggling folks are wondering, as they see food prices climb and jobs shipped overseas by the day. 50 million folks are wondering where their next meal is gonna come from… and it’s time to entertain innovative, cost-effective proposals, even if they may seem exotic.

Well it turns out there’s one way to solve this problem without tapping the Treasury for so much as a penny!

It would bring down the cost of high-protein, high-quality food, providing much-needed nutrition to the hungry.

It could create high-paid and unionized manufacturing jobs, right here in the U.S. of A!

It would be environmentally friendly, dolphin-safe, and carbon-neutral (although there may be some associated methane emissions after the plan is implemented).

Best of all, this solution would remove the parasitic, bonus-hungry, pyramid-scheming, derivative-trading, regulation-gutting, President-advising, economy-wrecking, bailout mongers from the picture, allowing the American people to determine our economic future democratically!

And it’s so straightforward even Timothy Geithner could understand it:

Eat the Rich!

Below is the transcript from Democracy Now!’s interview with Robert Scheer on these two unprecedented reports and what they mean for the economy.

AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to the latest on the economy. A pair of new government reports released this week paint a startling picture of where the country is, more than a year after the economic meltdown. On Tuesday, the New York Comptroller’s Office said Wall Street profits are set to exceed the record set three years ago. The four largest firms — Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase — took in $22.5 billion in profits through September. The top six banks set aside $112 billion for salaries and bonuses over the same period. In a recent interview, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein, defended the bank’s massive profits, saying Goldman is, quote, “doing God’s work.”

Meanwhile, the Department of Agriculture has revealed that far more people are going hungry in the United States than previously thought. The Department estimates 50 million Americans, including a quarter of all children, struggled to get enough to eat last year. The number of children who live in households in which food at times was scarce last year stands at 17 million, an increase of four million children in just a year.

Our next guest has been closely following the impact and causes of the economic meltdown. Robert Scheer, editor at Truthdig.com, author of many books, including The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America. His latest column is called “Where Is the Community Organizer We Elected?” He joins me here in Burbank, California.

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Robert Scheer. OK, just talk about these figures, from hunger to Goldman Sachs.

ROBERT SCHEER: Well, first of all, I mean, the whole thing about the profit of Wall Street that makes it particularly obscene is that we gave them that money. Your previous guest talked about how China is carrying $800 billion of our debt. We’re running up a $1.4 trillion deficit.

And what happened was, we threw a lot of money at Wall Street. In particular, in relation to Goldman, we had this buyout of AIG, $180 billion. We’ve guaranteed the toxic assets of these enterprises. And that money, in a really truly shameful way, was passed on directly to the very companies that you mentioned that are giving themselves profits. So there’s something—yes, I’ll use the word “obscene.”

It’s also interesting that he should say he’s “doing God’s work,” Blankfein, the head of Goldman Sachs. And my goodness, if Scripture is clear on anything, it’s condemnation of those who take advantage of the poor. You know, after all, Jesus threw the money changers out of the temple. Scripture is devastating in its condemnation of usury, the immorality of usury. And yet, in your promo, you mentioned Chris Dodd is trying to get a bill passed that would cap interest rates.

You know, where is the Christian right? Where are the Christians? Where are the Jews, for that matter? Or the Muslims? At least the Muslims, in their religious practice, don’t believe in interest as a principle, but the idea that we’re jacking up credit cards to 30, 35 — this is loan sharking. And we can’t even get a bill passed through Congress that would cap interest payments.

The other thing is, their rationalization is they’re somehow saving the economy. It’s the old blackmail thing. They ruined the economy; they got the legislation, the radical deregulation they wanted, that permitted them to become too big to fail — Citigroup and these companies; and then they turn around and say, “If you don’t throw all this money at us, the economy is going to go into the Great Depression.”

But they haven’t solved the main problems. Mortgage foreclosures this month are higher than they’ve been in ten months. We have the commercial housing market exploding, you know, apartment building rentals exploding, going into mortgages. And so, you know, they are not dealing with the fundamentals. What has happened is an incredibly expensive bandaid was put on this. And these people don’t even have — they’re not even embarrassed.

And the reason I wrote that column is they’ve also captured the President. And, you know, I voted for this president. I even contributed money that I didn’t have to his campaign. You know, I still feel great that he’s the President. You know, I’m biased. I like the guy, you know. I like everything about him.

AMY GOODMAN: Yet you ask, where’s the community-organizer-in-chief?

ROBERT SCHEER: I am appalled. This is not a minor criticism. I think the guy is betraying — betraying — his own presidency, the promise of his presidency, because he has taken these thieves — and I use the word advisedly. You know, I think people like Lawrence Summers, who pay themselves — you know, maybe he’s not legally a thief, but, you know, a guy who pays himself, or gets paid from hedge funds and other people, $15 million in ’08, while he’s advising Obama about the economy.

And he’s the guy who, more than anyone else, when he was Secretary of the Treasury in the Clinton administration, pushed through the radical deregulation that allowed these businesses to get in all this trouble and refused to regulate derivatives and all that sort of thing. And then these guys are made the head of the — what? They’re going to save us now?

And so, you have the one I attack, particularly, Neal Wolin, who was the general counsel of Hartford, but before that he’d been the general counsel to the Treasury Department, he’s now Deputy Secretary of the Treasury, and he’s the guy that pushed through the reversal of Glass-Steagall. He wrote the actual words in, you know, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. And now he’s our deputy. And he condemns — the point of the column was that there’s actually a chance to do something now. Chris Dodd has finally seen the light. He is the most important…

AMY GOODMAN: While he is running for reelection.

ROBERT SCHEER: Yeah, running for election.

AMY GOODMAN: Ralph Nader could run against him possibly.

ROBERT SCHEER: Right, and he’s also under pressure, because he did get insurance money and all that sort of thing. But the fact is, he’s got a bill that makes sense, which is, you know, the Fed has been at the center of the problem. Ron Paul is right. The Libertarians are right. You know, the Fed is out of control. It has a higher degree of secrecy than the CIA. We don’t know what they’re doing with our money. There is no accountability there.

Basically it’s run by the banks themselves on the regional level. They’re the ones that are listened to. And what’s happened is that Chris Dodd said, no, you’ve got to take power away from the Fed, and you have to put a new agency that will control these “too big to fail” agencies. And the administration is opposed to it. I can’t—I mean, I know why they’re opposed to it.

AMY GOODMAN: The administration is opposed to it, and the Republican senators are opposed to it.

ROBERT SCHEER: Yeah, exactly.

AMY GOODMAN: Why are they opposed to it?

ROBERT SCHEER: Because they think — they like business as usual. I mean, they are for Wall Street going its own way. They haven’t learned the lesson that capitalism uncontrolled is capitalism destroyed.

You know, I really found your previous interview on the China thing fascinating. And why is China doing well? You know, this is a startling lesson here, because we were always told unbridled capitalism is the best capitalism. Well, the Chinese have a marriage, like western Europe, but even more so, of government and the free market. It’s not unbridled capitalism. And they’ve been able to come out of this recession that we created. It’s an incredible object lesson here. These commies over there were able to take the capitalist energy and free market model and control it to a considerable degree, and they have an eight, ten percent growth rate now at a time when we’re floundering.

AMY GOODMAN: OK, so you have Lloyd Blankfein, head of Goldman Sachs, saying they’re “doing God’s work.”

ROBERT SCHEER: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: And then a week later, they issue this apology, apologizing for past mistakes that led to the financial crisis and announcing a plan to work with Warren Buffett to help 10,000 small businesses recover from this recession and spend $100 million a year for five years. Now, the Financial Times did point out the $100 million annual cost is the equivalent of one good trading day, but explain what’s going on here.

ROBERT SCHEER: Well, first of all, Buffett is the biggest holder in Goldman Sachs, and Buffett is a man of social conscience. I think he’s a very decent, enlightened capitalist of the kind you would hope exists, a long-term view, doesn’t want to destroy the system. And Buffett has said a number of sensible things over the years. And I think he put pressure on them.

He said, “Look, you guys are out to lunch here. You don’t understand how much the people hate you at this point.” You know, and Buffett is out there in real America, you know, and he called them on it. But it’s chump change, what they’re talking about. It’s a program to help small businesses.

I just want to say something emotionally, since you brought up the poverty. I happened to be in Riverside, California last week, and this is a place where the American Dream died at this point. These are people who work hard. You know, they clean our buildings. They work in factories. They got conned into buying homes they couldn’t afford by people who were then going to package them and sell them somewhere.

And you go out there now — I talked to a young man, he bought a house for $350,000, scraped up everything. He works like a dog. His parents have been cleaning buildings for forty years. That house is now worth $120,000. He lost not only — he lost everything his family had ever saved. OK? So we’re talking about human tragedy.

These people—he went to college, he went to Riverside, UC Riverside, did everything he was supposed to do, works, you know, twelve-hour days. As I say, his family has always worked hard, paid their taxes, scraped up this money. They buy this house and to have the American Dream. And every fourth house — they’re making their payments, but, you know, house next door, house over there goes back.

Why didn’t we have a freeze on foreclosures? The smartest thing to do. Jon Stewart recommended it on The Daily Show. He’s the only person. I mean, where are these pundits, you know? And they would laugh. His guests on The Daily Show would laugh at him when he brought it up. But, you know, a freeze on foreclosures, we still need it. A moratorium on foreclosures for two years. They’re not doing it. What they’re doing is throwing more and more money at Wall Street.

And I go back to Obama and the point of my column: he has betrayed his own — what is it? It wasn’t a revolution, but his own promise. You know, he gave a speech at Cooper Union in ‘08, in March at Cooper Union. This was two months after Robert Rubin, the mentor of all of these people, said there’s no problem, we don’t have any flap in the economy, it’s just a little mild blip.

And Obama gave a speech that was right on. You could give that speech now, and it would be on target. He blamed Wall Street. He blamed radical deregulation. And then, inexplicably, when he got the nomination, he turned to these very same people that had created the problem and said, “OK, now you get us out of it.”

And they’re not doing it. You know, maybe if they’d gotten religion, maybe if they’d learned their lessons, you know, maybe if they were a different breed — but they’re not. You know, and this Neal Wolin, he attacked Chris Dodd. You know, and they say, “Oh, you’re going to create nervousness for Wall Street.” That was the word they used: you’re going to make Wall Street nervous. I want to make Wall Street nervous. You know, the next time these guys figure out another way to fleece us, they should worry they’re going to get caught. Maybe they won’t do it.

AMY GOODMAN: What about this new government report that’s found Goldman Sachs could have suffered dramatic losses if the federal government hadn’t intervened to bail out AIG, American International Group, the report by the special inspector general for the government bailout program raising doubts about Goldman’s previous claims that it was hedged against potential AIG losses?

ROBERT SCHEER: Yes, well, first of all, this has been…

AMY GOODMAN: What does all that mean?

ROBERT SCHEER: This is the big lie from Goldman, is that, you know, we didn’t — look, look what happened. Lehman was Goldman’s competitor, was allowed to go belly up, OK? The Secretary of the Treasury was a former head of Goldman Sachs. I don’t want to get into conspiracy theories here, but Robert Rubin was a head of Goldman Sachs, OK? And Paulson was a head of Goldman Sachs. They decide not to—you know, and Rubin was involved in these discussions, Lawrence Summers, Paulson and so forth. Timothy Geithner, who is our Secretary of Treasury, was head of the New York Fed for five years while all this was going on.

So they say, “Let Lehman go, you know, down the tubes,” which is great for Goldman Sachs, because now you have basically two investment houses that are getting all the business. “But on the other hand, we’ll put all this money into AIG,” which was backing these junkie derivatives, these mysterious packages, “and it will be a pass through. People won’t notice, because we’re giving it to AIG.”

$180 billion of our taxpayer money, we taxpayers get nothing in return, AIG is still in the toilet, but Goldman got its money. You know, it got upwards of $20 billion, that they don’t have to pay back. They make a big thing about “We’re going to pay back some of the TARP funds” and everything. And by the way, they were allowed to become a bank. No hearings, no judicial proceedings and so forth. You know, the very thing Lehman was asking for — “Let us become a bank so we can get some of this TARP funds and everything” — that was granted to Goldman Sachs.

You know, Ron Paul, by the way, who has been trying to go after the Fed, and he has an accountability piece of legislation that the Democrats have gutted, and said, “Let’s have an audit of the Fed. Let’s find out what does the Federal Reserve do. What are the deals they made? Where did the money go?” We don’t have that.

And the inspector general of the Treasury Department, the inspector general, you know, Elizabeth Warren, all of these people have pointed — from the Congressional Oversight Panel — all of these people point out, “We don’t have the facts. We don’t know where the trillions are going.” We know trillions have been committed. We know all of these huge pools — Bank of America’s $300 billion of toxic assets have been backed up. But there’s no accountability.

I have covered the CIA, I’ve covered national security, and I’ve covered banking. I did it for the LA Times in one way or another for thirty years, OK? It is more difficult to cover Wall Street, in terms of secrecy and classification and their protection, than it is to cover the CIA and the Pentagon. That much I’ll tell you.

You know, you get greater claim on the truth covering the Pentagon, as I did in my last book, than I’m having in my current book called The Great American Stick-Up that Nation Books is publishing. And, you know, these people go, “No, it’s proprietary. It’s our business. It has nothing to do with you.” And that goes for the Fed, which is supposed to be a government agency.

And so, for Chris Dodd to say, “No, we have to take power away from the Fed. We have to create a new independent agency to supervise these too big to fail institutions to make sure that they don’t go belly up and we taxpayers pay for them again,” he’s absolutely right. And people watching this, if there’s one thing they should demand from the Obama administration, is get behind the Dodd bill on taking power from the Fed and creating a new publicly accountable agency. That’s absolutely critical. Without that, we’re not going to get out of this mess, and we’re not going to prevent a future one.

AMY GOODMAN: Very quickly, you profile — you profile Brooksley Born in an article, “They Shot the Messenger.”

ROBERT SCHEER: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: What was his message?

ROBERT SCHEER: That was in Ms. Magazine, that my wife wrote, Narda Zacchino, and I worked with her. Brooksley Born is the great hero of the whole drama. Brooksley Born was the head of the Commodity Futures Board. And Brooksley Born, seventeen times, testified before Congress that this was a disaster in the making.

And the old boys’ club that is now in power — Lawrence Summers, Timothy Geithner, and it was Robert Rubin and Neal Wolin, who condemned Dodd the other day — they smashed Brooksley Born. They took away her power. They pushed through the Commodity Futures Modernization Act that said there can be no regulation of these over-the-counter derivatives. That’s why we’re in this big mess today.

So Brooksley Born should have statues to her, you know? She is on the committee — Nancy Pelosi appointed her to the committee that’s supposed to be, you know, overseeing the rewrite of legislation. I’m hoping, you know, that she’ll be listened to. But basically it’s the old boy club that got us into this mess that is scamming us once again.

AMY GOODMAN: Robert Scheer, I want to thank you for being with us, of Truthdig.com, author of many books, including, appropriately, The Pornography of Power.

[Alex Knight maintains the website endofcapitalism.com where this article also appears, and is writing a book called The End of Capitalism. He can be reached at activistalex@gmail.com.]

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged Banking, Broadcast Media, Capitalism, Democracy Now, Economy, Obama Administration, Poverty, Wall Street | 5 Comments

Robert Jensen : How I Stopped Hating Thanksgiving

Posted on November 20, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

“The First Thanksgiving,” painting by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris (1863–1930) / Wikimedia Commons.
How I stopped hating Thanksgiving
And learned to be afraid

This is a society in which even progressive people routinely allow national and family traditions to trump fundamental human decency.

By Robert Jensen / The Rag Blog / November 20, 2009

I have stopped hating Thanksgiving and learned to be afraid of the holiday.

Over the past few years a growing number of white people have joined the longstanding indigenous people’s critique of the holocaust denial that is at the heart of the Thanksgiving holiday. In two past essays (here and here) I examined the disturbing nature of a holiday rooted in a celebration of the European conquest of the Americas, which means the celebration of the Europeans’ genocidal campaign against indigenous people that is central to the creation of the United States.

Many similar pieces have been published in predominantly white left/progressive media, while indigenous people continue to mark the holiday as a “National Day of Mourning.”

In recent years I have refused to participate in Thanksgiving Day meals, even with friends and family who share this critical analysis and reject the national mythology around manifest destiny. In bowing out of those gatherings, I would often tell folks that I hated Thanksgiving. I realize now that “hate” is the wrong word to describe my emotional reaction to the holiday. I am afraid of Thanksgiving. More accurately, I am afraid of what Thanksgiving tells us about both the dominant culture and much of the alleged counterculture.

Here’s what I think it tells us: As a society, the United States is intellectually dishonest, politically irresponsible, and morally bankrupt. This is a society in which even progressive people routinely allow national and family traditions to trump fundamental human decency. It’s a society in which, in the privileged sectors, getting along and not causing trouble are often valued above honesty and accountability.

Though it’s painful to consider, it’s possible that such a society is beyond redemption. Such a consideration becomes frightening when we recognize that all this goes on in the most affluent and militarily powerful country in the history of the world, but a country that is falling apart — an empire in decline.

Thanksgiving should teach us all to be afraid.

Although it’s well known to anyone who wants to know, let me summarize the argument against Thanksgiving: European invaders exterminated nearly the entire indigenous population to create the United States. Without that holocaust, the United States as we know it would not exist. The United States celebrates a Thanksgiving Day holiday dominated not by atonement for that horrendous crime against humanity but by a falsified account of the “encounter” between Europeans and American Indians. When confronted with this, most people in the United States (outside of indigenous communities) ignore the history or attack those who make the argument. This is intellectually dishonest, politically irresponsible, and morally bankrupt.

In left/radical circles, even though that basic critique is widely accepted, a relatively small number of people argue that we should renounce the holiday and refuse to celebrate it in any fashion. Most leftists who celebrate Thanksgiving claim that they can individually redefine the holiday in a politically progressive fashion in private, which is an illusory dodge: We don’t define holidays individually or privately — the idea of a holiday is rooted in its collective, shared meaning. When the dominant culture defines a holiday in a certain fashion, one can’t pretend to redefine it in private. To pretend we can do that also is intellectually dishonest, politically irresponsible, and morally bankrupt.

I press these points with no sense of moral superiority. For many years I didn’t give these questions a thought, and for some years after that I sat sullenly at Thanksgiving dinners, unwilling to raise my voice. For the past few years I’ve spent the day alone, which was less stressful for me personally (and, probably, less stressful for people around me) but had no political effect. This year I’ve avoided the issue by accepting a speaking invitation in Canada, taking myself out of the country on that day. But that feels like a cheap resolution, again with no political effect in the United States.

The next step for me is to seek creative ways to use the tension around this holiday for political purposes, to highlight the white-supremacist and predatory nature of the dominant culture, then and now. Is it possible to find a way to bring people together in public to contest the values of the dominant culture? How can those of us who want to reject that dominant culture meet our intellectual, political, and moral obligations? How can we act righteously without slipping into self-righteousness? What strategies create the most expansive space possible for honest engagement with others?

Along with allies in Austin, I’ve struggled with the question of how to create an alternative public event that could contribute to a more honest accounting of the American holocausts in the past (not only the indigenous genocide, but African slavery) and present (the murderous U.S. assault on the developing world, especially in the past six decades, in places such as Vietnam and Iraq).

Some have suggested an educational event, bringing in speakers to talk about those holocausts. Others have suggested a gathering focused on atonement. Should the event be more political or more spiritual? Perhaps some combination of methods and goals is possible.

However we decide to proceed, we can’t ignore the ugly ideological realities of the holiday. My fear of those realities is appropriate but facing reality need not leave us paralyzed by fear; instead it can help us understand the contours of the multiple crises — economic and ecological, political and cultural — that we face. The challenge is to channel our fear into action. I hope that next year I will find a way to take another step toward a more meaningful honoring of our intellectual, political, and moral obligations.

As we approach Thanksgiving Day, I’m eager to hear about the successful strategies of others. For such advice, I would be thankful.

[Robert Jensen is a professor in the School of Journalism of the University of Texas at Austin and a 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. His articles on The Rag Blog are here and his writing can also be found here.]

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged American History, American Indians, Genocide, Indigenous People, Ritual, Robert Jensen, Thanksgiving | 18 Comments

Lily Keber : Putting Families in Jail in America

Posted on November 20, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

Putting children in jail:
T. Don Hutto and family detention in America

As hope for change in Obama immigration policy dwindles, activists speculate on the fate of family detention.

By Lily Keber / The Rag Blog / November 20, 2009

See ‘Hutto: America’s Family Prison,’ A film by Lily Keber and Matt Gossage, Below.

When she first arrived in the U.S. with her two small children, Denia didn’t realize she was pregnant. Fleeing an abusive relationship in Honduras, she had traveled north to the U.S. to reunite with her mother, a naturalized citizen living in Houston. But instead of reuniting with their grandmother, Denia and her daughters found themselves in a medium-security prison, dressed in prison garb and forced to line up to be counted several times daily.

Though pregnant, she was losing weight from lack of food. Guards shouted at her children and threatened to take them away if they misbehaved. Security lights were left on all night, and alarms went off if a child wandered from its cell during the night.

Denia remembers:

“I was really scared. I would say: ‘Dear God — what am I going to do with a newborn here? He’ll die in this freezing cold’ It was so cold, and the worst thing was that they wouldn’t give us enough blankets… And how could I get enough rest if resting is prohibited here? I wouldn’t be able to take care of myself properly the way one should after giving birth. I was really worried.”

The rise of family detention

Unfortunately, Denia’s experiences are not unique. The U.S. has been detaining families since March 2001. In an effort to end what was labeled the “catch-and-release” policy — wherein migrants with immigration violations were given a mandate to appear in court and then released back into the community — the Department of Homeland Security under Michael Chertoff began detaining all immigrants without documents — even those with small children.

The first facility for families was an 84-bed converted nursing home in Berks County, PA. At Berks, families were separated by age and gender and slept in dorm-style rooms, 2–8 per room. (Children under five slept with their parent.) But even with Berks open, there was not enough room for all the families ICE was detaining. Some were still being released. Others were separated — adults sent to adult facilities while children as young as six months old were sent to children’s facilities or foster care. After 9/11, DHS announced it needed more room to expand, and turned to long-time partner Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) for solutions.

The largest for-profit corrections company in the country, CCA is best known for its infamous failed bid to take over the corrections operations of the entire state of Tennessee. However, by 2000 CCA had hit hard times and its stocks were at an all-time low. In July 2005, it had been forced to shutter the T. Don Hutto Detention Facility — a medium-security prison in Texas — due to lack of demand. CCA jumped at the government’s offer to pay $2.8 million a month to house immigrant families. In May 2006, it reopened the prison as the T. Don Hutto Residential Facility. Little had changed except the name and the population. Razor wire still laced the fencing, though now with wooden playgrounds in the yard and painted murals in the halls.

Familes in the hall of the T. Don Hutto Residential Center in Taylor, Texas. Photo by Charles Reed / Dept. of Homeland Security / via AP.
“I was shocked. It was like nothing I had ever seen,” said Barbara Hines, director of the University of Texas Immigration Clinic and one of the first to visit Hutto. Frances Valdez, a former UT Immigration Clinic student, adds:

“It was surreal. It was everything I had already experienced in other jails, but here was this baby. I would go out [to Hutto] asking [the inmates] about their immigration issues and… they started telling me about the conditions… They were like, ‘Hey, I can’t be here, get me out of here. My kids are getting sick, and they can’t eat the food and I can’t eat the food, and they separate us at night and they yell at us and they only give us 15 minutes to eat and my children are really scared and crying and it’s horrible.’”

Other reports from initial visits describe children in prison garb, poor sanitation, limited education for the children, only one hour of access to fresh air and recreation, and armed guards threatening the families.

Denia’s 5-year-old daughter remembers:

“For me it was terrible because I would always dream at night that they were yelling at my mother and they were going take her to another jail. And they had told us that mothers who misbehave and take extra cookies in their pockets [for their kids to eat] would be sent somewhere else and…that they would take the children away from their mothers.”

Word spread about the facility and outrage grew. An early report of the rape of an inmate by a guard mobilized neighbors. Local activists from Williamson County and nearby Austin began staging candlelight vigils and protests. Representatives from the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children testified to Congress about its findings at Hutto, recommending the facility be closed immediately.

Jorge Bustamante, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants, attempted an investigation on conditions in Hutto and was denied access. Two documentaries were made, and screenings staged across the country. Articles appeared in the New York Times, New Yorker, The Economist, salon.com, and local papers.

Barbara Hines, clinical law professor at the University of Texas, Austin, with ACLU lawyers Vanita Gupta and Lisa Graybill at T. Don Hutto in 2007. Photo from statesman.com.
In March 2007, the ACLU and UT Law Clinic waged a lawsuit against ICE maintaining that children were being held in inhumane conditions. Several months later, ICE settled and pledged improvements to the facility. Education and recreation times increased, pregnant women were allowed more food, and families permitted to close the door to their rooms as they slept. CCA officials maintain that reforms at Hutto had been underway already and were not due to the lawsuit.

Immigrant detention continued to expand throughout the Bush years. Plans were announced for three similar facilities to be built in other parts of the country, and rumors spread of families held in other unauthorized facilities.

With Obama’s election, hopes soared that the new administration would usher in comprehensive change in immigration policy. In August of this year, ICE Secretary John Morton announced a reworking of the nation’s immigration jail network into a “truly civil detention center.” In August 2009, ICE announced Hutto was to stop taking families, and that plans for three additional family detention facilities were to be scrapped. Obama’s call for progressive reform was, it seemed, coming to fruition. By September 17th, all families had left the facility.

Demonstrators at T. Don Hutto. Photo from Of América.

Family detention under Obama

Today, Hutto looks pretty much the same as it always has: a drab building tucked just out of town, sandwiched between a train car storage yard and fields of Texas beef cattle. The razor wire is gone, and freshly painted murals inside the facility depict smiling cartoon animals, a reminder to visitors of its former occupants. Hutto is back at maximum occupancy, though this time with women. Even before the last of the families were out, CCA had worked a new contract with ICE to house women from its other immigrant detention facilities at Hutto.

“By more fully utilizing the facility’s capacity and consolidating the female populations from multiple facilities, this change will yield substantial savings each month, “ICE spokeswoman Nina Pruneda said. And indeed, current reforms seem driven as much by the bottom line as by humanitarian concerns. By ending family detention at Hutto, ICE will save nearly $900,000 per month in contract costs.

The question remains, though: Where are arrested families going today? According to ICE, detained families will now be housed at Berks Family Residential Center in PA. Yet not a single family from Hutto made it to Berks; all were either deported or released. And at an 84-bed capacity, it is hardly sufficient for current needs, let alone for future expansion. Compounding this is an August announcement in the Reading Eagle that Berks County commissioners “are considering getting out of the alien-housing business.” New federal regulations prohibit governmental agencies from turning a profit on these types of services, and the county is just breaking even.

According to ICE spokesperson Carl Rusnok, today “each family is evaluated on a case-by-case basis. The Berks Residential Family Facility is the only facility ICE now uses to house families. Families that are encountered may be placed at Berks, placed on an ‘alternative to detention’ or issued a notice to appear before a federal immigration judge and released on their own recognizance.”

But Bob Libal of Grassroots Leadership worries:

“I think it is still unclear what is happening to people apprehended at the border. ICE says it is sending people to Berks, but I think there is some concern ICE may facilitate a new family detention center. I think it is important to look critically at Berks… and see if conditions are adequate or if people are being held for long periods of time. Is Berks another 84 beds that ICE doesn’t have to use?”

Libal adds: “The advocacy community is ready to fight for increased use of alternatives rather than increased family detention.”

Others worry that ICE has no intentions of limiting detention, only of avoiding the flashpoints that caused public outcry in the past. This spring, it released a request for comments on standards for a family residential facility, leading some to suggest that it will be building its own facilities. “ICE says they are in the process of developing a new assessment tool that will help them determine whether a family can be released, or placed into an alternatives program pending resolution of their status instead of being detained,” says Michelle Brane of the Women’s Refuge Commission. [The Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children has since changed its name to Women’s Refugee Commission.] “They have told us in the meantime that they are releasing families and using alternatives to detention.”

Alternatives to detention — such as supervised release and ankle-bracelet monitoring — allow a family to remain in the community while greatly improving the chances they’ll make their court hearing. It also saves the government a substantial sum of money: the most expensive alternatives to detention cost $14 per day, compared with detention rates that can exceed $100 per day.

“In general, ICE seems to be moving away from subcontracting its detention needs out to private companies and local jails,” said Lauren Martin, doctoral student at the University of Kentucky. This continued reliance on detention “indicates a lot of continuity between Bush and Obama. They’re going to build facilities for low-risk populations like asylum seekers, families, etc, and actually expand capacity.”

A cell with a baby bed and children’s toys at the T. Don Hutto Residential Center in Taylor, Texas. Photo by L.M. Otero / Pool via AP.
Though all sides agree that Hutto is better than it was when it initially opened, it’s hard to find such enthusiasm about the broader picture. “Even though Hutto no longer holds families, there’s still 512 women being held there. That’s not something that anyone would have advocated for. Beyond that, here they haven’t made any moves to shut down or improve the most egregious conditions in Texas detention centers… There’s a lot of skepticism,” contended Martin.

A recent report by Dr. Dora Schriro, former director of the ICE Office of Detention Policy, focuses federal priorities on detainee care and uniformity at detention centers. The report recommends that ICE establish standards and assessment tools for its detention facilities, improve medical care, and provide federal oversight of its detention operations- all goals lawyers and activists have been calling for.

But with nearly 380,000 immigrants detained in ICE custody a year — 30,000 on any given day in 300 facilities nationwide — it is clear that Obama has not brought a shift away from detention, only a repeal of some of the worse malpractices of the Bush administration.

Where family detention will go from here, no one knows for sure. “ICE has made clear that they plan to issue [a Request for Proposals] and open a new facility, one that they say will be better suited to families with young children. It is still unclear what that means,” says Michelle Brane. “For the present, we are all still waiting for answers from ICE.”

[Lily Keber is a documentary filmmaker and teacher living in New Orleans. Her film Hutto: America’s Family Prison brought family detention to national attention and continues to be used as an activism tool throughout the country. She currently is a media trainer for New Orleans Video Voices, a media collective devoted to fostering critical, independent thinking through the direct and meaningful use of new media.]

Hutto: America’s Family Prison:
A film by Lily Keber and Matt Gossage

Hutto: America’s Family Prison from Lily Keber on Vimeo.

For previous Rag Blog articles on T. Don Hutto and immigrant family detention, go here.

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged ACLU, Criminal Justice Reform, Documentary, Family Detention, Filmmakers, Hutto Prison, Immigrant Detention, Immigration, Private Prisons, Texas, UT-Austin, Video | 4 Comments

Rogues and Centrists : How Media Frame the World

Posted on November 20, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

The symbolic uses of politics:
The Gipper and the Rogue

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / November 20, 2009

Moderate Republicans — yes, they are not extinct, though most are in hiding — scoff at Sarah Palin and wish she would go away.

…Reagan piously gave lip service to the right-wing social agenda while doing nothing to further it by legislation.

…The ‘Gipper’ talked tough about the Russians — while doing more that any other president to foster détente.

…But it’s no coincidence the Eisenhower ‘50s and Reagan ‘80s were periods of unusual peace and prosperity.

Evan Thomas, ‘Gone Rogue,’ Newsweek, November 23, 2009.

Hitherto men have constantly made up for themselves false conceptions about themselves, about what they are and what they ought to be. They have arranged their relationships according to their ideas of God, of normal man, etc.

Karl Marx, ‘Preface,’ The German Ideology

Insights from social science

A long time ago the eminent political scientist Murray Edelman wrote a book entitled The Symbolic Uses of Politics. In it he postulated that most people experience the political world not through concrete reality but through emotional symbols. For example, the classic way in which people relate to their political institutions is through the flag of their nation.

Americans viewing the flag see images of men in combat fighting for freedom or men and women standing in line waiting to vote for their preferred political candidates. A colorful cloth with stars and stripes gets transformed in our consciousness into a rich, glamorized history even when the emotive images are in direct contradiction with people’s lives.

In addition, Edelman suggests the ways in which the emotional symbols get embedded and reinforced in the consciousness of peoples by borrowing from anthropological writings on myth and ritual. Myths are networks of emotional symbols that collectively tell a story that explains “reality.” Rituals reinforce in behavior the mythology of public life. We need only reflect on the pledge to the flag that opens elementary and secondary school class sessions in rich and poor communities alike or regular meetings of AFL-CIO labor councils.

Edelman pointed out that emotional symbols (he called them “condensational”) provide the primary way people connect with the world beyond immediate experience. The extraordinary complexity of the modern world is reduced to a series of powerful symbols such as the threats of “international communism” or “terrorism.”

Media analyst Todd Gitlin, wrote about “media frames;” that is the ways in which media construct the symbols and myths that shape information about the world. Print media shapes what we read, who are regarded as authoritative spokespersons, and what visual images shape our thinking about countries, issues such as war and peace, trade, investment, and the global climate. Television emphasizes visual images rather than words. Whatever the media form, points of view are embedded in the words and images communicated.

Writers such as Noam Chomsky, Michael Parenti, and Robert McChesney accept implicitly Edelman’s counsel that people experience the world indirectly and usually in emotional form. They also assume, as does Gitlin, that what we read, see, and hear about the world is framed for us. They go further to suggest that what Marx called the “false conceptions about ourselves” in symbols, myths, rituals, and frames are usually the product of ruling class interests.

Enter Rogues and Centrists

The Newsweek article cited above was selected not because it was unique but rather because it was representative of ongoing and dominant media discourse. Sarah Palin, while popular with an undetermined but substantial segment of the U.S. population, is presented as an extremist. The article hastens to add that a similar collection of “Democrats can be just as rigidly partisan on the left.” The article suggests that these extremes represent big problems for the political parties in which they operate and most importantly this “polarization” is a threat to the well being of the United States itself.

The article then refers to the “two greatest postwar presidents,” Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan. They were great in part because they presided over two periods, the ’50s and the ’80s, “of unusual peace and prosperity.” Reagan was the president who did the most to stimulate détente with the former Soviet Union.

In addition to this curious revisionism about “peace and prosperity,” the author claimed that while these two presidents were products of conservatism in their respective Republican parties, they ruled from the center.

To generalize from this extraordinary historical rendition, therefore, contemporary politicians must learn that “populism” from the left or right must be avoided if American society is to survive and thrive.

Further, the article says that the Eisenhower and Reagan years symbolize peace. The collapse of the former Soviet Union occurred because of the policies of the latter. And, despite an enormous array of data and human experiences to the contrary, the 50s and 80s were years of prosperity as well as peace. One can conclude from the description that history is myth, symbol, and ritual, and it is packaged and provided to us in media form as frames.

Perhaps the most potent assumption embedded in this mystification is the proposition that only centrist politics can work.

What role for the Rogues?

It is clear that the centrist agenda could not be defended on its own terms. It is an agenda that supports militarism, financial speculation, deindustrialization, and globalization. The byproducts of these processes are experienced directly by working people throughout the country as joblessness, declining real wages, inadequate access to health care, education, and transportation, and forms of pollution that can be seen from many people’s bedroom windows.

But if Americans can see “extremism” from the “left and right,” often shown on the screen as screaming protesters, then the centrist logic becomes more compelling even though people know that centrism means a weak public option in health care and Wall Streeters regulating themselves.

And which political extremist today can better promote the symbols, myths and centrist media frame than Sarah Palin. So while journalists and their bosses have nothing but scorn for her, she is trumpeted on every news and talk show on television.

The analysis above is not too surprising but what remains more difficult is figuring out a progressive agenda for recapturing the production of symbols and myths and establishing a space to provide more effectively alternative media frames. While alternative media and advocacy groups exist, the need to develop a national and global progressive media agenda still is required.

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

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged Alternative Media, Media, Political Opinion, Populism, Ronald Reagan, Sarah Palin, Sociology | 1 Comment

R.I.P. Bill Narum : Legendary Artist of the Texas Counterculture

Posted on November 19, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

Below, cover of Space City!, June 1, 1971. Illustration and design by Bill Narum.

Bill Narum was a dear friend of The Rag Blog and my personal friend and colleague for more than four decades. He was art director at Space City!, the pioneering underground paper we published in Houston in the late Sixties and early Seventies. He was a major force in the Houston underground radio scene — at KLOL and KPFT — and became one of the most important graphic designers and poster artists in the Texas counterculture. And he was still going strong.

He was also an activist, deeply committed to social justice, to basic political and cultural change, but — as with most things in his life — he did it without bombast or bluster.

Bill Narum was an exceptional talent; he was also a calm and gentle human being. His death leaves a void that cannot ever be filled.

Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog / November 19, 2009

R.I.P. Bill Narum:
Legendary Texas counterculture artist,
underground radio pioneer

By Chris Gray / November 19, 2009

See gallery of Bill Narum art, Below.

Bill Narum, a key figure in Houston’s counterculture in the late 1960s and early ’70s, passed away Wednesday night, November 18, 2009, at his home in Austin. The cause of death was an “apparent heart attack or something that took him quickly while sitting in his studio at the art table in his chair,” said Narum’s close friend Margaret Moser, who profiled him for the Austin Chronicle in 2005.

Austin native Narum, who was in his early 60s, grew up in Houston and discovered his talent for graphic design early on. “In the fifth grade, I’d been drawing girlie cartoons from Playboy in a notebook, and I left it in my desk after class,” he told the Chronicle. “The next day I was reprimanded for disrupting class because they were passing around my notebook.”

In the late ’60s, Narum co-founded Houston free-form FM rock station KLOL and worked as an illustrator for underground newspaper Space City News. He struck up a long-lasting friendship with a band then just starting out, which had recently rechristened itself ZZ Top. Narum would go on to become ZZ’s house graphic artist, moving from posters and album covers such as 1976’s Tejas to epic murals for the band’s fleet of semis and the famous cactus-and-cattle-skull stage design for the trio’s legendary 1975-76 “Worldwide Texas” tour.

Bill Narum, from left, with Houston underground radio pioneers Dan Earhart and Larry Yurdin. Photo by Gloria Hill, Austin, 2008.
After moving back to his hometown in the ’70s, Narum continued designing posters for venues such as Antone’s and Armadillo World Headquarters, and explored a budding interest in both video and computer-game design. In 2005, he was elected president of the board of directors of Austin folk-art storehouse the South Austin Museum of Popular Culture around the same time his 40-year retrospective, “You Call That Art,” opened at the museum.

Speaking of Narum’s many achievements, SAMOPC director Leea Mechling told the Austin Chronicle: “He’s a major contributor to the cultural dynamics of not only Austin, but Texas, the United States, and the world.”

Source / Houston Press

Senator John (Corn Dog) Cornyn, R-Texas, aka Lapdog to President Bush. Graphic by Bill Narum / The Rag Blog / May 23, 2008.

Also see:

Bill Narum: We Call That Art by Margaret Moser / Austin Chronicle / Nov. 20, 2009
R.I.P. Bill Narum / by Bill Hood / This Week I Learned / Nov. 19, 2009

The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged Art, Artists, Austin, Counterculture, Deaths, Graphic Design, Houston, People, Psychedelic Rock, Sixties, Space City, Texas, Underground Culture, Underground Press, Underground Radio | 8 Comments

The Future of Agriculture : Genetics and the Limits of Oil

Posted on November 18, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

Agriculture, genetics and a sustainable future…

…the oil requirement for U.S. food production and transportation will no doubt loom as a much bigger factor, forcing a restructuring of the food industry.

By Roger Baker / The Rag Blog / November 18, 2009

An old friend, Val Liveoak, posting on a Rag-junkie list, drew my attention to this interesting article on genetic engineering and its problems.

This got me thinking along the following lines. There are certain problems that, by its nature, genetic engineering can solve in a seemingly miraculous fashion. In the case they mention, the plants seem to have been made successfully insect resistant which takes less insecticide (until the insects evolve a resistance to the plant gene). On the other hand the other gene change making a crop plant herbicide resistant, while requiring use of Roundup herbicide, was encouraging fast natural selection of weeds resistant to that herbicide.

In other words genetic engineering can sometimes give you a narrow targeted benefit for a time as an alternative to selective breeding. But the latter often offers deeper more realistic solutions. Good stable solutions to environmental problems take a long time to evolve, and take the combined orchestration of many genes, in ways we are only beginning to understand. Only recently can we read genomes and relate this information to the plants we eat and use.

For example the best attempts by even the best genetic engineers to tinker with the genes of a common potato to try to make it more resistant to a cold arid climate would no doubt be an utter and complete failure when compared to the more traditional breeding approach. We simply don’t now have much more than an initial idea of how the many genes we can now decode are somehow able to cooperate to produce a successful organism.

One had perhaps best start with an Andean Peruvian strain of potato that is well adapted to living in such harsh regions. Then a practical horticultural expert might do multiple generations of cross-breeding with other useful potato strains to come up with a good hardy suitable species, even though this may still have some troublesome quirks. In the United States a century ago, mules, while being infertile, were still widely used to solve practical agriculture power problems.

We are beginning to understand in a scientific way the details of such things as how and why plants survive harsh conditions, and the necessary trade-offs involved. It is proper to expect that the public sector should do open pro bono research, along similar lines to how the NIH was funded for decades, with wide public benefits. Intellectual “property” with wide public benefit in medicine and food production will need to be shielded from the pattern of private corporate profiteering that was somehow tolerated as normal until recently in our wildly-overextended, debt-ridden, infinitely expansionist global economy.

Here in the USA, a shortage of cheap fuel will almost certainly become apparent during the next five years. To help you understand why, here is the link to an excellent introduction to petroleum energy problems by Gail Tverberg of Energy Bulletin, together with some of her conclusions:

Oil production is reaching its limit: The basics of what this means

…There are many views of the task ahead. Some think more research is the answer, or more nuclear, or improved electric transmission plus wind turbines, or electric trains. To a significant extent, these views depend on a person’s view of the timeframe involved, their analysis of where we are now, and their view of how much or how little international trade will be affected in the years ahead.

My personal view is that the main task we should be focusing on now is how to move to a much simpler system—one that depends mostly on locally grown food and locally manufactured goods. This will likely mean a much lower standard of living. Limiting population should probably be a goal, because it will be easier to have enough for all if there are fewer mouths to feed.

I do not see climate change legislation as terribly helpful. Cap and trade will add huge overhead to the system—something we really cannot afford right now. Peak oil is likely to mean a continuing major recession, and a natural decline in fossil fuel use. To me, we would be better off spending our resources developing local agriculture and local manufacturing, and perhaps even sailing ships.

Since monoculture of crops is helping to encourage a lot of the bad habits of corporate agriculture (see Paul Roberts’ book, “The End of Food”), why not solve two problems at once? Why is our normal city school education blind to agriculture? Why not encourage residential rainwater harvesting, and building rich absorbent organic soils appropriate to localized backyard agriculture as preparation for involving a high percentage of the local population involved in food production? If we believe external circumstances will eventually prod us along in that direction, why not raise our consciousness now and get a head start?

If we are going to have a safe and sustainable future fifty years from now, we are going to have to limit population and live a harder life, involving more of our time spent on growing and obtaining food. Everyone may have the ultimate pocket gadgets to stay in touch, but I think local community organization is still going to have to come back in some sense, maybe like the old Israeli agricultural cooperatives.

I think staples, grain and legume and vegetable oil production should be socialized like the ancient Roman daily grain allotment, whereas fresh produce should be more a free enterprise small farm local economics. Trucks and highways will largely have to give way to rail, which is slow and limited in range but very energy efficient. Slow water transport is so inherently efficient it will make a comeback.

This is what I see as a relatively optimistic well managed quasi-socialist scenario for the USA. You don’t have to go far to find worse prediction, but if we are smart and remember our sense of humanity, we could muddle through the next few decades with a certain grace.

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged Agriculture, Environment, Fossil Fuels, Genetic Engineering, Peak Oil, Sustainability, Transportation | 2 Comments

Minsinformation and the Economy : The Games Republicans Play

Posted on November 18, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

The independents are jumping ship…
Republican misinformation and economic reality

By Sherman DeBrosse / The Rag Blog / November 18, 2009

By persistent obstructionism and using endless false information, the GOP pulled off some big wins in the 2009 elections. Worse still, they have been able to convince people that Obama has handled the economy badly. The YouGov poll shows that 47% disapprove of Obama’s handling of the economy, while 43% approve.

The biggest problem is that the independents who supported Obama are deserting in big numbers. One reason for this is that unemployment is getting worse, and is now at 10.2%, somewhere around 17% when we take into account all the gimmicks that are employed to keep the figure artificially low. We think that it will be 9.5% next November, around 15% in real terms. That does not bode well for the Democrats in next year’s elections.

The most recent Rasmussen poll shows 49% of respondents blaming George H. W. Bush for the bad economy; 45% blame President Obama. The tendency has been for the number blaming Bush to sharply decline, while the number of those blaming Obama are increasing. One third of likely voters thought the stimulus was doing some good.

Republican columnist Peggy Noonan tells us that voters think deeply about the issues and follow the news carefully. She says the public cannot be easily manipulated. No sane, and rational person could conclude the economy Obama inherited was not all that bad or that he could be expected to fix it in less than ten months.

Even granting the public’s impatience, it is hard not to conclude that the Democrats have not effectively communicated with the public about the economy. The Republicans have shown far better message control. The lies they have been endlessly repeating are not particularly clever. But they are effective because they play to people’s desire for simplistic answers and they fit a childlike view of economics that the Republican information machine has sold the American people for more than three decades.

Republican politicians and pundits as well as mainstream media types repeatedly say that President Barack Obama now “owns” the bad economy.

The more astute Republican spokesmen concede that the downturn began under Bush but insist that Obama should not have sought the presidency if we were unable to administer a quick fix. That they are justified in blaming Obama for lost jobs and the slow recovery. Their false assumption is that all recessions are the same and can be fixed easily.

This simple fact is that Obama inherited a financial system that had almost fallen apart and an economy on the verge of depression. Even now the financial system is so shaky that the banks are still hoarding money. As long as they continue not lending, employers will not be able to borrow money to expand production. Anyone can understand that, and the Democrats had better be making these simple points at every opportunity.

John Boehner, the typical Republican spokesman, continually asks “Where are the jobs?” though there has not been enough time for Obama’s policies to work. Then he says that all the stimulus money has been spent and has accomplished nothing. The fact is that $500 billion still has not been committed and much of the remainder is just getting into the pipeline. Republicans have vastly inflated the amount of debt incurred under Obama. The amount of the Stimulus was $787 billion, but the Republicans have been saying it was $ 1 or 2 trillion and no one corrects them. This man consistently generates so much misinformation that someone in the House leadership should be detailed to answer Boehner’s distortions and lines.

Representative Jack Kingston of Georgia boiled down the Republican argument to this simple lie: “Let’s remember the Pelosi plan for jobs: an $800 billion stimulus plan that caused unemployment to go from 8.5% to over 10%.” How anyone can believe the plan created unemployment — and in such a short time — challenges the imagination. Of course, one might suggest that such arguments were pitched to people still unhappy that a black man is in the Oval Office.

Democrats must answer Boehner and Kingston by noting that the Republicans offer no jobs plan other than tax cuts for the wealthy and blocking efforts to stimulate the economy. We Democrats have a plan, and it is beginning to work by reducing the number of lost jobs. It may not create jobs as quickly as we want because the deep economic problems are rooted in a system the GOP created and defended. It cannot be changed overnight.

Only in America

Obama’s policies helped saved us from another depression. Yet he is being blamed for not working miracles. He inherited the worst sort of recession — one with very high unemployment, which is followed by very slow recovery of jobs. The financial system he inherited is a basket case, and it will take years to fix it. Only in the United States, among advanced countries, would a president and his party be punished for heading off a depression and not producing an impossible economic miracle. That is because the level of our political discourse is so low, our voters so uninformed, and our mainstream media so unprofessional.

Now many people believe the wild claims about “socialism” and losing their liberties, and Democrats ruining the economy, because they have almost no conceptual framework with which to view the economy. For decades they have been taught that invisible economic laws operate the economy and that government must interfere with those laws. A careful study of these market forces in reference to CEO compensation might raise questions about this.

Recently CEOs were getting huge bonuses while stockholders were taking it on the chin. What happened? Did market forces find a shortage of bad CEOs and choose to heap vast rewards on the bad ones? Lack of regulation produced the financial crisis, and now the Republicans are trying to weaken the proposed new rules. They are even fighting the creation of a new agency to protect loan consumers. Is that because the banks were so fair with customers in the past?

A good economist will tell you that economic actors always try to lower their exposure to risk. That is why there are monopolies and why energy companies in some states reach informal agreements not to compete with one another. It explains why state insurance commissions end up in the hip pocket of the industry and approve great rate hikes when the portfolios of the companies go south. That is why people have always been trying to game the system.

The CEO appoints the compensation board to make sure he gets an enormous compensation package. Financiers like Bernie Madoff found other ways to make the system work for them. Former Republican Senator Phil Gramm found a way to so rig the markets in derivatives that he got richer while many of us lost a good chunk of our savings. Yes, some Democrats like Bill Clinton went along with him, and they should be doing penance. So much for the market fundamentalism that led us to near disaster!

Jacoby compares the current political atmosphere to the period when Joseph McCarthy was difficult to challenge. Now as then, there was a headlong flight from reason and a distrust of rational arguments. Reason, history, and facts have become dirty words. The level of political discourse has been so debased that we might be approaching the point when intelligent exchange of ideas is nearly impossible. Emotions and irrationalism were powerful forces. McCarthyism passed after a brief period of dominance, but now, half a century later, people in the conservative think tanks have figured out how to quickly generate such periods of hysteria and to prolong them when they think it necessary.

Susan Jacoby noted that it was not the secrecy surrounding the Clinton health care plan that accounted for its demise. Rather, the Democrats had failed to prepare and educate voters on what the Clinton plan would involve. They should have anticipated simplistic Republican complaints and lies and used facts to help voters see through Republican appeals to emotions and fear. With little good information at their disposal, many average Americans believed the Harry and Louise claims against Clinton care.

Democrats need to inject reason into this poisonous atmosphere, and they must remember that they lack a fair MSM or a vast network of well-funded think tanks to educate the public and prepare the public for progressive initiatives. They need not focus on the Republican base; those folks are not open to persuasion. There are thinking independents out there who can be reached with reason and facts.

Democrats will need to learn a few things about message control and to draw upon the expertise of people in cognitive science like George Lakoff. If Democrats cannot seize the initiative in the national discourse, we could well see a president Sarah Palin and a cabinet stuffed with tea baggers like Dick Armey in 2013.

[Sherman DeBrosse is a retired history teacher. Sherm spent seven years writing an analytical chronicle of what the Republicans have been up to since the 1970s. The New Republican Coalition : Its Rise and Impact, The Seventies to Present (Publish America) can be acquired by calling 301-695-1707. On line, go here.]

The Rag Blog

Posted in Rag Bloggers | Tagged Economic Recovery, Economic Stimulus, Economics, Republican Party | 3 Comments

Crazy for God : Frank Schaeffer on the Rachel Maddow Show

Posted on November 18, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

[There was a remarkable segment on last night’s Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC (Nov. 17, 2009). Former evangelical leader Frank Schaeffer described for Maddow and her audience some genuinely frightening activity that is occurring on the fringes of the religious right, including the use of biblical verse to make thinly-cloaked calls to violence against the President of the United States. Schaeffer asks why the moderate Christian leaders are not up front denouncing this activity. — Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog / November 18, 2009]

Frank Schaeffer on Rachel Maddow:
The religious right and the marketing of violence

This is not funny stuff any more. They cannot be dismissed as just crazies on the fringe.

November 18, 2009

See ‘I’m Now a “Liberal” Because I’m a Conservative,’ By Frank Schaefer, Below

[Rachel Maddow reports on the latest racist and disturbing attacks on President Obama, including the merchandising of Psalm 109:8 on T-shirts and teddy bears. The Biblical verses are threatening when taken out of context as they do and applied to the President.]

MADDOW: And then there’s this, a Biblical quote making the rounds in anti-Obama circles, as reported this week in The Christian Science Monitor: Pray For President Obama — Psalm 109 Verse 8. What’s Psalm 109:8? Well, it reads “Let His Days Be Few, And Let Another Take His Office.’ Let his days be few. Uh, it’s followed immediately by another verse: ‘Let His Children Be Fatherless, And His Wife A Widow.”

And don’t forget, that sentiment is now being merchandized on bumper stickers, on mouse pads, on teddy bears, on aprons, framed tiles — those are nice — keepsake boxes, T-shirts. Let his days be few, ha, ha, on a teddy bear. Is anybody else creeped out by this?

Joining us now is Frank Schaeffer, whose father Francis Schaeffer helped shape the evangelical movement in the United States. Mr. Schaeffer grew up in the religious far-right. He’s the author of Patience With God: Faith For People Who Don’t Like Religion Or Atheism. Mr. Schaeffer, thanks very much for coming back on the show.

SCHAEFFER: Thanks for having me on.

MADDOW: “Let his days be few and let another take his office. Let his children be fatherless and his wife a widow.” This is such strong language in secular terms about President Obama. Can you tell me if this means something less threatening to people hearing this in a Biblical context?

SCHAEFFER: No, actually it means something more threatening.

I think that the situation that I find genuinely frightening right now is that you have a ramping up of biblical language, language from the anti-abortion movement, for instance, death panels, and this sort of thing, and what it’s coalescing into is branding Obama as Hitler, as they have already called him, as something foreign to our shores -we’re reminded of that, he was “born in Kenya” — as Brown, as Black, above all, as not us. He is Sarah Palin’s “not a real American.”

But now, it turns out, that he joins the ranks of the unjust kings of ancient Israel, unjust rulers, to which all these Biblical allusions are directed, who should be slaughtered, if not by God, then by just men.

So there’s a direct parallel here with Timothy McVeigh’s T-shirt on the day of the Oklahoma City bombing, in which he said that the “tree of liberty had to be watered occasionally by the blood of tyrants,” and that quote we saw again at a meeting at which Obama was present being carried on a placard by someone carrying a loaded weapon.

What we’re looking at right now is two things going on. We see the evangelical groups that I talk about in my new book, Patience With God, enthralled by an apocalyptic vision that I go into in some detail in there. They represent the millions of people who have turned the Left Behind series into best-sellers. Most of them are not crazy, they’re just deluded. But there is a crazy fringe to whom all these little messages that have been pouring out of Fox News, now on a bumper sticker, talking about doing away with Obama, asking God to kill him…

Really, this is trawling for assassins. And this is serious business. It’s un-American, it’s unpatriotic, and it goes to show that the religious right, the Republican far-right, have coalesced into a group that truly wants American revolution, and if it turns out to be blood in the streets and death, so be it. This is not funny stuff any more. They cannot be dismissed as just crazies on the fringe. It only takes one.
[….]
MADDOW: And, to be clear, I mean, over-the-top political criticism is as American as apple pie, and incredibly intense criticism has been leveled at George W. Bush and against every President that’s gone before him in modern times, but you’re saying that there is essentially a religious inflection in the most extreme of the commentary against Obama that’s operating on a religious level, that’s a signal to a religiously-minded audience.

SCHAEFFER: Absolutely. Look. This is the American version of the Taliban. The Taliban quotes the Qu’ran, and al Qaeda quotes certain verses in the Qu’ran, in or out of context, calling for jihad, and bloody war, and the curse of Allah on infidels. This is the Old Testament, Biblical equivalent of calling for holy war. Now, most Americans’ll just see the bumper sticker and smile and think that it’s facetious. Unfortunately, there are 22 million Americans or so who call themselves super-conservative evangelicals. Of this, a small minority might be violent. But, the general atmosphere here is really getting heated.

And what surprises me is that responsible, if you can put it that way, Republican leadership and the editors of some of these Christian magazines, etc. etc., do not stand up in holy horror and denounce this. You know, they’re always asking “Where is the Islamic leadership denouncing terrorism? Why aren’t the moderates speaking out?” Well, I challenge the folks who I used to work with… I would just say to them: ‘Where the hell are you? This is not funny anymore. And be it on your head if something happens to our President…

Source / Democratic Underground

I’m now a ‘liberal’ because I’m a conservative

By Frank Schaeffer / November 4, 2009

People ask me why I’m a progressive these days and “changed sides” from being a conservative. I didn’t change sides.

I grew up in a fundamentalist missionary family that in the 1970s and 80s morphed into my father’s activity as one of the founders of the religious right. We would hobnob with Republican leaders from Ronald Reagan to Gerald Ford and the Bush family, Jack Kemp and many others. One day it dawned on me that the far right of the Republican Party — in other words its base — actually hates America.

The religious right reveled in rising crime statistics, “family breakdown” statistics, failing public schools and so forth. As I explain in my book Patience with God: Faith for People Who Don’t Like Religion (or Atheism), if crime started going down, or public school test results started going up — without the country “turning back to Jesus” — then that would prove that somehow “we” were wrong.

We wanted our country to fail because it had “turned away” from what we believed to be true.

Combined with the fact that we began to lose parts of the culture war, when it came to other Americans beginning to recognize gay rights, expanding women’s rights, abortion rights and such, the religious right and the Republican Party infected gun-toting America with a chip on its shoulder about a mile wide. This led to the myth that “they” (fill in the blank, gays, Jews, blacks, liberals — whatever) are “taking away our country from ‘us.'”

“Conservative” means that you believe it’s right to legalize torture, but reject health care for all.

These days to be a conservative means that you hate the United States government elected by the people; believe that if millions of citizens are out of work that it’s their own fault and that the rest of the community should not help them by spending tax dollars; think that Sarah-believes-in-casting-out-demons-before-she-ran-for-governorship-Palin speaks for you.

To be a conservative means you believe that healthcare reform will lead to “death panels”; that the president of the United States is not a “real American”; that a university education is a dangerous thing; that Americans who live in big cities are less American than those who live in small towns; that brown people, blacks, progressive whites, gays, public school teachers, Hispanics, immigrants, are somehow conspiring to subvert the “real America” with a “gay agenda” or a “Muslim agenda” or at least the browning of “our” white America.

In other words to be a conservative today is to be an anti-American, nihilistic libertarian know-nothing who believes in unregulated consumerism and the theology of dominion, and the Rapture that many conservatives also subscribe to along with such ‘facts’ as that Obama is the — literal! — Antichrist.

In other words to be a conservative today is to be an anti-American, nihilistic libertarian know-nothing who believes in unregulated consumerism and the theology of dominion, and the Rapture that many conservatives also subscribe to along with such “facts” as that Obama is the — literal! — Antichrist.

Other than trying to stop women from having abortions and fighting the whole world, our “terrorist enemies,” in other words everyone “not like us,” conservatism today is nothing more than a pent-up reaction against everything “we” don’t understand — like art, literature, government, history, geography, diversity, how people get to be gay, black or female… things like that.

Conservatism today is actually not for anything. It is just against everyone but “us” and a few like us bound together by an alternative reality, otherwise known as Fox/NRA/Beck/Palin/Jesus’s Return — “News.”

The irony is that conservatives used to wrap themselves in the American flag and belonging to a cause built on higher ideals than pure selfishness and individual choice. Patriotism was based on principle, not fear and anger. Conservatism led by people such as the late William F. Buckley, Barry Goldwater and others had its feet firmly planted in what it regarded as the reality-based community as opposed to liberal wishful thinking about progress coming from government, human nature, etc.

The problem for the conservative movement — hence the Republican Party — is that the us in “us” was never more narrowly defined.

No one said it openly, in fact it was denied, but it really amounted to we “real Americans” boiling down to mostly uneducated white people, dumb enough to believe things such as Sarah Palin’s barefaced lies about Obama consorting with terrorists, and/or, post the Obama election, conspiring to unleash “death panels” on unsuspecting elderly and/or handicapped Americans while turning us into a “Communist state” as everyone knows Hitler did to Germany, that other “communist country” famous right up there with Canada and the UK for killing its sick, tired and poor.

What is the conservative movement today, and/or the Republican Party?

It’s about as far away from conservatism as it can get. It is a party ready to trash its own country in support of nihilistic, selfish market-driven “values” — the very opposite of conservative values of family, community and stability. It is in fact what conservatives of the 60s said the hippies were: selfish brats with no sense of responsibility to anyone.

It’s also a party of armed revolution not so subtly egging on its lunatic fringe to commit violence. It applauds white rubes who show up at public meetings carrying loaded assault weapons “to make a point” and signs reminiscent of Timothy McVeigh and his famous T-shirt; “the tree of Liberty must be watered with the blood of tyrants” and the like are held up by Murdoch/Beck/Fox and company — those profiteers off the unregulated market — as paragons of good sense and free enterprise and gun rights.

To be an actual conservative today is to be a progressive Democrat.

An actual conservative believes in community and accountability to a moral tradition that puts the greater good of others ahead of oneself. Take a look at the way the very conservative communities of New England’s Puritan towns were arranged around the village green known as “the commons.”

Shared public spaces were owned by the community, for instance grazing land, and town meeting houses. People were obliged to show up and participate in the fledgling democracy and vote. Taxes were dispensed by committees for charitable purposes. A duty to government and obligations placed on citizens by other citizens — when it came to putting the life of the community ahead of the self — were the norm.

The free market and individual enterprise were strictly curtailed based on not just the needs of the community but, when it came to things like banking and lending, the Old Testament teachings that frowned on “usury” — in other words banks making more money than they should from ordinary people — were upheld.

President Obama is a conservative. He believes in the brotherhood of all people. He believes in the freedom of the individual to make moral decisions. He believes that sexuality, religion and skin color should not define us but the content of our character should define us. He believes that we are our brother’s keeper. He believes in loyalty to community and country — in other words patriotism, whether that’s the honor of serving in the military or the honor of paying taxes to support not just national defense but how we treat what the Bible calls the least amongst us.

People ask me why I’m a progressive these days and “changed sides” from being a conservative. I didn’t change sides.

What changed — ironically with my father’s and my nefarious “Help!” — was a conservative movement that became an enclave for hate-filled ignorance, anti-American sentiment and nihilistic individualism. What changed was my bare faced self deception as I profited from the God business and the far right even though I knew better. Today I am an independent voter, and an Obama supporter, and a progressive because I am a conservative.

[Frank Schaeffer is the author of Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back, and the forthcoming Patience with God: Faith for People Who Don’t Like Religion (or Atheism).

Source / The Brad Blog

The Rag Blog

Posted in RagBlog | Tagged Broadcast Media, Conservatives, Evangelical Christians, MSNBC, Political Philosophy, Rachel Maddow, Religious Right, Right Wing Extremists, Video | 4 Comments

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