Texas Tall Tale? Turning West Texas Blue

Posted on September 8, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

Image from Jackalope Postcards.

West Texas: Can gray and brown equal blue?

At some point in the future, the Panhandle and the Lower Plains will look and vote much like El Paso and South Texas… The only question is when.

By Ted McLaughlin / The Rag Blog / September 8, 2009

There was a good article in the Amarillo Globe News Monday about the “graying” of the Panhandle and Lower Plains. The percentage of the Texas population that are 65 years-old or older is about 10%. In West Texas, it is much higher in many counties. The U.S. Census estimates there are at least 18 counties in the Panhandle and Lower Plains where the elderly make up at least 15% of the population or even more. In at least six of those counties the population is over 20% elderly.

The twelve counties with the highest percentage of elderly people are:

  1. Kent…….25.4%
  2. Motley…….24.0%
  3. Fisher…….21.9%
  4. Armstrong…….21.1%
  5. Briscoe…….21.0%
  6. Hall…….20.9%
  7. Dickens…….18.9%
  8. Wheeler…….18.9%
  9. Gray…….17.7%
  10. Lamb…….17.0%
  11. Swisher…….17.0%
  12. Floyd…….17.0%

The elderly population has been elevated nationally across the nation by the aging of us Baby Boomers, but in the Panhandle and Lower Plains, there is another phenomenon that makes the elderly percentage even worse — the flight of young people from the area. While most of the elderly are in the area to stay, many of the young are not. They are fleeing to other areas and other states for better opportunities.

So why do I say the future of the area is blue? After all, a smaller or “grayer” population is not necessarily a more Democratic one, is it? No, but there is another phenomenon happening alongside the “graying” of West Texas. That is the growing “Latinization” of this same area.

While the youth in many groups are leaving (especially whites), most of the Hispanic youth are staying put. Added to this is the fact that there is continued Hispanic immigration into the area (and while some of them are undocumented, their children and grandchildren are citizens and potential voters).

Hispanics already are the majority population in 11 West Texas counties, and next year’s census may add some new counties to that list. That’s because with each passing year, the percentage of Hispanics grows in nearly all of West Texas. This is good news for the Democratic Party.

At some point in the future, the Panhandle and the Lower Plains will look and vote much like El Paso and South Texas. That is going to happen. The only question is when. As disorganized as the Democratic Party is currently in this area, it could take 25-30 years.

But I don’t believe it has to be that long. If the racist and anti-immigration views of the Republican Party continue (and it looks like they will since the right-wing has taken over the state party), then the Democrats could hasten their coming majority with a little organization and voter registration.

Personally, I believe we could start electing some Democratic candidates in 8-10 years, and be a blue area in 15 years. But some help is needed — the sooner the better. If the state party was smart (which I question sometimes), they would send some organizers to the Panhandle and Lower Plains. These organizers would do two things — teach the local parties how to organize and run an effective Get-Out-The-Vote effort, and oversee a massive voter registration effort (especially among Hispanics).

The state party needs to make a decision. Is it going to continue to write off West Texas or start to fight for it? The decision they make will determine how long it takes to make the area blue. I hope they decide to make it blue sooner than later.

[Rag Blog contributor Ted McLaughlin also posts at jobsanger, an excellent Texas political blog.]

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Juan Cole: Labor Day in a Kleptocracy

Posted on September 8, 2009 by RagBlog


Where have All the broad Shoulders Gone? Or, Labor Day in a Kleptocracy
By Juan Cole / September 7, 2009

The unemployment rate as I write is inching toward 10 percent nationally, and that is only counting people who were still looking for a job recently. A vast bank robbery by the corrupt on Wall Street has deprived them of the credit that made the economy go. Labor Day was passed by Congress under Grover Cleveland to celebrate not only the individual American laborer but the labor movement– yes, unions, workers’ parades, hard hats and blue jeans (before the youth movement of the 1960s appropriated them, blue jeans were working class clothing, and my working class relatives upbraided me for wearing them as an undergraduate). It is to celebrate all those icons that shills for the barracuda billionaires, such as Glenn Beck, now castigate as “fascist” and “communist.” It is to celebrate what Carl Sandberg did in his poem, “Chicago:”

Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders;

And of course, the home-makers and retail workers who move the manufactured goods and the teachers are all doing the hard foundational work as well.

Who is not working are the Wall Street thieves who have largely gone unpunished or been actively rewarded for their peculation.

Now Americans have convinced themselves that we don’t have a working class. Everybody is middle class, even those who make minimum wage in the fast food industry, or those who are kept as part-timers so that the store (I’m looking at you, Walmart) doesn’t have to enroll them in a health care program. The closest we get to celebrating the workers who built this country is when we talk about “working families,” an odd locution, since aside from the idle rich who defrauded the country into bankruptcy last fall, wouldn’t that be everyone? While we have lots of workers, we no longer have an effective labor movement, because Ronald Reagan by example essentially overturned the mid-20th century traditions that had made it unseemly for employers to fire striking workers and hire scab labor. Even the anti-worker Taft Hartley law of 1947 prohibited companies from firing workers for their union activities. But the penalties for illegal union-busting are so light that companies frequently fire employees who so much as suggest organizing a union.

Damon Silvers convincingly ties our current economic woes to this union-busting. (H/t Jake McIntyre). Fewer effective unions have left American workers at the mercy of predatory company policies. Government has, since Ronald Reagan (who hated organized workers the way the devil hates holy water), also socially-engineered the tax laws so as to throw enormous further wealth at the wealthy. As a result, the average wage of the average worker in the United States has not increased since 1970 (in 2004 the bottom 60% of the population was actually making less in real terms per capita each year than in 1979). In contrast, the top 1% of the population by income now takes home nearly 20% of the country’s annual income. The top 1%, about 3 million persons, has gone from owning 25% of the privately held wealth in the 1950s under Eisenhower to owning over a third today. The top 10 percent of Americans own almost all the country’s privately-held property.

Now, the US has increased its productivity very substantially since 1970, but working Americans have captured very little of the resulting extra wealth. It has been hogged by the rich. William Domhoff notes, “Although [by 2004] overall income had grown by 27% since 1979, 33% of the gains went to the top 1%.” Silver’s graph is eloquent.

Domhoff adds, “As of 2007, income inequality in the United States was at an all-time high for recent history, with the top 0.01% — that’s one-hundredth of one percent — receiving 6% of all U.S. wages, which is double what it was for that tiny slice in 2000; the top 10% received 49.7%, the highest since 1917 (Saez, 2009).”

Reagan-Cheney between 1980 and 2008 created a new American aristocracy, a small sliver of super-rich, who buy and sell legislators, create whole “news networks” to present far rightwing fantasies as “news,” have their lackeys invade and occupy whole countries, hold themselves above the law, falsify financial statements, and suffer little or no punishment for stealing billions from the pensions of “working families” (i.e. those of us about whom P.T. Barnum remarked, “one is born every minute”.) The Republican Party has come to represent these super-rich. Since .1% of the population couldn’t actually win elections, they ally with other groups in society. About two-thirds of evangelicals have joined up with them, about a third of Latinos, significant numbers of midwestern rural families, and obviously large numbers of white southerners. In some cases these are lower middle class people on the make, who want to hitch their wagons to the brightest stars in the sky. In others, they share with the super-rich various resentments of the federal government. This alliance of odd bedfellows (think of Paris Hilton married to Joe Sixpack) is what produces the wackiness of Republican Party politics and media. They can’t come out and say that they want the country run for the benefit of 300,000 multi-millionaires and billionaires (almost all of them white), so they say they are all in favor of guns, apple pie, Jay-sus and the Confederacy. Sometimes, as with Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney, the pretense is so forced as to be implausible even to their minions. Clearly, racism and fear-mongering are also key irrational talking points for the plutocrats seeking support from the white lower middle class (though this route can backfire, as it did in 2008 when Republican fear-mongering about Latino immigration alienated most Latino voters and drove them into the arms of the Democrats.)

The unbalanced and unhealthy distribution of wealth in the United States, which Cheney’s tax cuts accelerated, explains why the Democratic Party faces such difficulties whenever it is allowed into power. It represents the poor schmucks who make up the 80 percent of the population that has been reduced to peasants by our new dukes, viscounts and princesses who have captured the lion’s share of the country’s wealth and income. Obviously, elements in the top 20% (and even moreso in the top 1%) are not happy about any outbreak of democracy. They have been given by tax breaks and union-busting the wherewithal to purchase legislators (including Democratic ones), buy crowds, and put weeping rednecks on their corporate media waxing hysterical about the prospect of a black president being allowed in their childrens’ schoolrooms. It is the unscrupulous super-rich who don’t want universal health care. They think you only get to be super-rich by refusing to pay for the government services you use (via e.g. off-shore registration) and finding ways to make the middle class pay for essential government services to the poor. And they think it helps to be heartless if you want to be super-rich, you have to say of the poor, if they get sick and can’t afford health care, they should just die. (There is nothing wrong with being rich or super-rich in and of itself; Warren Buffett is admirable; it is just that over-concentration of wealth creates temptations for persons in that class that only the principled can resist). And since the middle classes know that many among the rich will try to make them pay for any increased services for the poor, many of them oppose such progressive legislation. If we repealed the law making corporations a person and if we constrained all corporations that do the bulk of their business in the US to pay taxes here, there would be plenty of money to provide health care to everyone.

The ultra-concentration of wealth in so few hands has damaged American democracy because democracy implies equality of rights, and the super-rich have more rights than the rest of us (there are now people on the FBI’s no-fly list who are simple peaceful dissidents from the super-rich program of ‘globalization’).

Many of our corporations are essentially using us as garbage dumps for their unhealthy corporate food, creating a crisis of obesity that in turn is causing our bulging bellies to devour our brains and for men, to make it impossible for them to get it up. A government genuinely concerned with our welfare would outlaw anything but diet sodas. The unwillingness of our government to regulate this assault on our brain mass via our bellies is owed directly to the power of corporate lobbies that shape and even outright author legislation on such issues. (This paragraph is not meant to hurt the feelings of the victims of these policies; I’m saying you are victims– you have a right to expect your food to be healthy, and your government to care if it isn’t.) The super-rich are fattening us up, not for the kill, but for imbecility and impotence. At least we won’t remember to miss the fun.

Not to mention that if the government cared about the people, cigarettes would have been banned as soon as it became clear that they cause lung cancer. Cigarette manufacturers would have been forbidden to spray extra nicotine (yes) on the leaves to hook people. I think it is still the case that if any third world country, whose citizens the US is mowing down with its poisonous weed export, tried to ban the heinous stuff, the US congress would accuse it of unfair trade practices. (In contrast, the US is trying hard to stop Afghan farmers from raising opium poppies, which are also highly addictive but differ from tobacco in not being guaranteed to kill the consumers; questions of what tobacco farmers should raise instead could equally be raised in the case of the poppy farmers; but then they haven’t yet organized a powerful lobby on the Hill.)

There are other dimensions of the crisis. Since for most non-super-rich Americans, the bulk of their wealth is tied up in their homes, the mortgage crisis is the biggest imaginable blow to ordinary people in the United States. And the crisis of health care costs (which are now about 18% of national income, due to double in the next 10 years) has a direct implication for middle class well-being:

“Using a conservative definition, 62.1% of all bankruptcies in 2007 were medical; 92% of these medical debtors had medical debts over $5000, or 10% of pretax family income. The rest met criteria for medical bankruptcy because they had lost significant income due to illness or mortgaged a home to pay medical bills. Most medical debtors were well educated, owned homes, and had middle-class occupations. Three quarters had health insurance. Using identical definitions in 2001 and 2007, the share of bankruptcies attributable to medical problems rose by 49.6%. In logistic regression analysis controlling for demographic factors, the odds that a bankruptcy had a medical cause was 2.38-fold higher in 2007 than in 2001. [Himmelstein, D, E., et al, “Medical Bankruptcy in the United States, 2007: Results of a National Study, American Journal of Medicine, May 2009.]”

If this is the situation for middle class families who have health care, imagine the plight of the tens of millions who don’t.

I cannot entirely explain why the American super-rich are so much more heartless and stupid than their counterparts in Europe. In fact, they behave politically much more like Afghan and Pakistani big landlords, who pay their peasants a dollar a day and call in the army to put down any organized protests. In part, they have been offered an irresistible temptation by the destruction of organized labor; French workers wouldn’t put up with a tenth of the insults visited upon us by our overlords. But it is a dead end, even for the uber-rich. Healthy, educated workers will be key to American economic competition in the world in the coming century. Our super-rich and our politicians are hollowing the country out with their ponzi schemes and their Sparta strategy of projecting military force even as the country’s economic base in manufacturing and productivity sinks in comparison to rivals.

As we barbecue on imported grills and watch sports on our foreign-made LCD televisions and lament the bad economy, we should take a moment Monday to celebrate not just the individual worker but what is left of the American labor movement, since only if it is strengthened is our country likely to succeed in stepping back from the abyss. Aristotle warned us that each form of legitimate government is subject to decay. Aristocracies too easily become juntas. And democracies too easily become demogoguery and mob rule. The first eight years of the twenty-first century took us perilously close to both at once.

I celebrate today the organized workers, the ones who can push back against the crooks in pinstripe:

Bareheaded,
Shoveling,
Wrecking,
Planning,
Building, breaking, rebuilding,
Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with
white teeth,
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young
man laughs,
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has
never lost a battle,
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse.
and under his ribs the heart of the people,

Source / Informed Comment

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Calderon’s ‘Informe’ : Mexico as Paradise on Earth

Posted on September 7, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

El informe: Mexican President Felipe Calderon presents his third annual report to the legislature at the National Palace in Mexico City, Sept. 2, 2009. Photo by Marco Peláez / La Jornada

Calderon, ‘a small man who stands barely over five feet in his platform loafers, was flanked by two giant television screens that magnified his image to super hero size.’

The imperial president (virtual) vs. the Mexican prostate

For 90 minutes, the lame-duck Mexican president uncorked a cautiously plotted political stream of consciousness invoking a country few could recognize, and painting a portrait of Mexico as paradise on earth…

By John Ross / The Rag Blog / September 7, 2009

MEXICO CITY — “Bueno! Bueno!” my neighbor Marcia shouted into the receiver, Mexican telephonese for “Hello, what do you want?” Felipe Calderon, the president, was on the line — well, not in person, of course.

The automated message invited Marcia to watch Calderon’s upcoming State of the Union address (“El Informe“) and flogged his accomplishments during the first three years of his presidency. My neighbor, not a great fan of the right-wing Calderon, was furious at the intrusion and slammed the receiver into the cradle.

The unprecedented telemarketing campaign to boost audiences for the lame duck president’s annual Informe is thought to have originated from a call center in India.

September 1st used to be designated “The Day of The President” around here, a moment of maximum obeisance to imperial authority. Banks and schools were closed and the capital draped in patriotic bunting. One of the more objectionable features of this political worship service was the “Ley Seca” or “Dry Law.” From midnight to midnight September 1st, the exasperated citizenry could not buy a shot glass of tequila anywhere in town.

In accordance with the Constitution, the President of Mexico is obligated to deliver a report on the State of the Nation to Congress each September 1st. Although the Mexican Magna Carta only calls for a written report, seven decades of ham-fisted rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party or PRI (through 2000, all presidents were members of the PRI) imposed a magnum Presidential Address to Congress & The Nation as the centerpiece of this yearly pageant of imperial authority. The format was always the same: whatever PRIista was at the helm of state extolled his (there have been no hers) stewardship of the nation and flacked his place in history to the robotic applause of the mostly PRI lawmakers.

Back when the Institutionals ran the show, the reigning PRI “tlatoani” (Aztec for emperor) would arise early on Informe Day, slip into the red, green, and white Presidential sash, and motor in to town from Los Pinos, the Mexican White House out in Chapultepec Park. The masses would be mobilized to line the sidewalks along the route and yodel “Vivas!” Confetti was thrown from the rooftops.

At the portals of the Legislative Palace in San Lazaro, the President would be met by an honor guard of Heroic Cadets who escorted His Imperial Majesty into the vestibule where he was embraced by a delegation of senators and federal deputies who then accompanied him to the podium amidst the cheerleading of members of the mostly PRI Congress and invited dignitaries — Generals and Admirals, Princes of the Catholic Church, Captains of Commerce and billionaire oligarchs, the diplomatic corps, and an occasional foreign head of state.

The Presidente’s spoken Informe could last for hours (Luis Echeverria, 1970-76, once spoke for five.) Decorum was at a premium. Between the orchestrated bursts of applause, you could hear pins drop. There were few members of the opposition in Congress back then and none dared to speak out during the Presidential spiel which always culminated in a ten minute standing ovation and the intonation of the National Anthem.

Once the Chief of State had spoken his piece, the president of Congress, always a PRIista, would thank him ostentatiously and the party would adjourn to the National Palace ten blocks west for the obligatory “Besamanos” (“Kissing of Hands”) — notables lined up dozens deep to offer their loyalties and pump the Presidential flesh. El Presidente would then step out on the balcony to salute a carefully culled mob below on the great Zocalo plaza. If perchance an interloper was discovered in their midst, police and members of the President’s elite military guard would disappear him or her with alacrity.

When, in 1988, Carlos Salinas, who had just stolen the presidency from leftist Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, was confronted by Cardenas’s supporters, he quickly slammed shut the balcony doors. “I do not see them and I do not hear them,” Salinas imperiously declared, provoking nostalgia for Louis XIV.

1988 was a watershed in the political life of Mexico and after Cardenas was fraudulently denied high office in that year’s “Presidenciales,” “The Day of The President” took a sharp turn. That September 1st, when outgoing president Miguel De la Madrid took the podium to present his Informe to the new Congress, Porfirio Munoz Ledo, who had been elected as the first senator of an opposition party to occupy a seat (“curul“) in that not-so-august body, rose to challenge him. Striding down the aisle and mounting the carpeted stairs to the tribune, the one-time PRIista turned leftist mouthpiece, waggled a stubby finger at De la Madrid. “Shame!” he shouted in protest at the Great Fraud. An audible gasp wafted up from the stunned onlookers, 500 members of Congress, their honored guests, and members of the national and international press corps. Suddenly, a rat pack of PRI governors burst from their “curules” and cold-cocked the upstart lawmaker. The session disintegrated into chaos.

Ever since Munoz Ledo (he is a federal deputy for the Party of Labor or PT in the new Congress elected July 5th) tore off the Emperor’s “new clothes,” it has become de rigour for the opposition to act out on Informe day. Sometimes the Left stands for the whole speech with their backs to the Presidente. They bellow rude boos and caustic critiques from their curules. Hand-lettered signs are smuggled past the military guards at the doors of the chamber, accusing the President of crimes against the people. U.S. lawmakers, always shamefully cowed during their own president’s annual State of the Union address, would do well to emulate these noble acts of protest.

In 1996 leftist Marco Rascon, wearing a “Babe the Valiant Pig” masque, was jumped by outraged PRIistas.

Perhaps the high point of all this civic uproar came in 1996 when Marco Rascon, a wide-bodied deputy for the leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) donned a “Babe The Valiant Pig” masque and positioned himself beneath the podium, displaying wry banners (“Eat the Rich” was one) while President Ernesto Zedillo droned on above. Much like Munoz Ledo, Rascon was jumped and punched by outraged PRIistas (Zedillo was a PRIista of course) led by railroad union goon Victor Flores who ripped the masque from Rascon’s ears but met with the wrath of Senator Irma Serrano, a former ranchera singer known as “La Tigresa” and a one-time concubine of an infamous PRI president but now a PRDista, who retrieved the pig masque and proceeded to punch out Flores’ lights.

You had to be there to appreciate the mayhem. Indeed, few knew all about it — the cameras of Mexico’s two-headed television monopoly remained steadfastly trained on Zedillo as he fumbled his way through his Informe.

After 2000 when the rightist PAN displaced the PRI from power and became the first (and only) opposition party to ever run the country, the annual September 1st clambake continued but with diminished exuberance. The PRIistas, all of a sudden in the opposition, were too embarrassed to be disruptive and the PRD didn’t quite know how to deal with a president who wasn’t a member of the formerly ruling party.

But “Day of the President” protests escalated out of control in 2006 after yet another presidential election was stolen from the Left and PANista Felipe Calderon awarded victory over Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO), the then-wildly popular ex-mayor of Mexico City, amidst allegations of widespread fraud. On the eve of the Informe, members of AMLO’s coalition stormed the podium and refused to relinquish it despite the PAN’s steady barrage of plastic water bottles. Curul to curul fisticuffs soon engulfed the floor of the lower house. When the outgoing president Vicente Fox showed up to deliver his final Informe, he was sent home to Los Pinos unrequited. It looked like the Day of the Imperial President was finally dead and stinking.

The next year, Felipe Calderon delivered his first State of the Nation address to a half-empty Congress. When the PRD and the PRI and their allies walked out, rank and file PANistas rushed to fill the empty curules before the television cameras swept the room. Calderon’s Informe was perfunctory and even conciliatory. There were no cadets and the ballyhoo was stripped bare but the Legislative Palace was closed off to the general public by three meter-tall metal barricades and thousands of army troops to keep Lopez Obrador’s supporters at bay.

Last year, Calderon did not even put in an appearance, sending instead his protégé, Juan Camilo Mourino, a rookie Secretary of the Interior, to hand over the written “Informe” to the Mexican Congress. Two months later, Mourino was dead in a mysterious Mexico City plane crash as he returned from overseeing Calderon’s ill-advised war on the drug cartels in the north of the country.

The 2009 Informe presented formidable obstacles to Calderon’s team. The country has gone belly up and the President’s credibility is at an epic low. Although Calderon and his 350-pound Finance Secretary Augustin Carstens, assured the Mexican people that Wall Street’s catastrophic crash and the subsequent global meltdown would only give the economy “a little cough” (“catarrito“), triple pneumonia has set in. 2,000,000 jobs have gone down the drain in the past 18 months, driving up real unemployment to around 16% of the workforce.

The Gross National Product (PIB) has plummeted 10% and the future wiped out — there will be no foreseeable positive growth for years. 10,000,000 Mexicans have joined the ranks of the poor and extremely poor in the first three years of Calderon’s stewardship — according to numbers tabulated by social economist Julio Boltvitnik, 80% of Mexico’s 107 million citizens have fallen below the poverty line.

The drug war bloodbath has taken 13,000 lives since 2006 — on the day of the Informe, 18 young people were slaughtered at a Ciudad Juarez drug treatment center — and the ranks of the drug fighters have been riddled by blatant corruption. Infrastructure is falling apart and drought and famine threaten to plunge the country into a paroxysm of social unrest.

In July 5th federal mid-term elections, a referendum, on the President’s job performance, Calderon’s PAN suffered its most disastrous defeat since the party was founded in 1939. The PRI now enjoys an absolute majority in the lower house of Congress, thereby thwarting Calderon’s legislative agenda for the three years he has left in Los Pinos and converting him into a lame-duck president.

Moreover, the PRD, split and snarling, was laying in wait to ambush Calderon on Informe Day. Discretion being the better part of valor, the President who AMLO’s supporters denigrate as “Fecal,” again steered away from Congress to deliver his Informe, sending Mourino’s successor with the written version instead.

But the show must go on. If Felipe Calderon could not address the Mexican Congress without being figuratively (and perhaps literally) pelted with over-ripe tomatoes, he would speechify to a select audience of a thousand special guests — members of his cabinet and his party, administration flunkies, governors, and the fabulously wealthy business class — Carlos Slim, the third richest pasha on the planet, sat in the front row close by the masked wrestler “The Son of Blue Demon.” When PT deputy Gerardo Fernandez Norona, a flamboyant AMLO supporter, tried to crash the party he was stomped to the sidewalk outside the National Palace by Calderon’s “Estado Mayor” or elite military guard.

The National Palace was a monumental stage for Calderon’s pseudo-Informe that had once been both Aztec Emperor Moctezuma’s digs and that of the Spanish Crown’s Viceroys. 5000 troops and federal police sanitized the surrounding Zocalo. Pick-up trucks with machine guns mounted in their beds patrolled the old quarter of the capital.

Installed on a stage in the Palace’s central patio, Calderon, a small man who stands barely over five feet in his platform loafers, was flanked by two giant television screens that magnified his image to super hero size but his high-pitched voice echoed less than majestically between the stone walls of the old fortress. For 90 minutes, the lame-duck Mexican president uncorked a cautiously plotted political stream of consciousness invoking a country few could recognize, and painting a portrait of Mexico as paradise on earth despite certain imperfections that he would soon change. U.S. presidents’ State of the Union messages — save for William Jefferson Clinton’s eight endless harangues — always come in in less than an hour.

The economic collapse, the steepest plunge since 1932, had finally touched bottom, Calderon avowed, and it was all up up and away from here on out. Despite the thousands of corpses littering the landscape, Mexico was winning its drug war. Even the arrests of high-level drug warriors for being on the payroll of the cartels, was somehow a sign of impending triumph. His government’s swift action when swine flu descended over the country had been “the salvation of the human race” (sic! Actually, Calderon’s government delayed public notice of the PANdemic for six weeks.)

The President was periodically interrupted by automated applause and serenaded by a standing ovation at the conclusion of his performance piece. Everyone stood at attention as a military band struck up the National Anthem. Aside from Norona’s unfortunate appearance, no pesky leftists had disrupted his Informe. The Imperial Presidency was virtually back in place.

Calderon’s Informe was followed by a deluge of paid TV spots featuring excerpts from his self-congratulatory speech. The President himself gave ten primetime interviews to friendly radio and TV commentators the day after. And, of course, the telephone never stopped ringing.

But Felipe Calderon’s scheme to restore The Day of the President was flawed. Back in the dark ages of the PRI, all seven channels of the two-headed TV demon would have been glued to his every word and this September only two of them lavished their attentions on his Informe.

On Channel 13, svelte men and women in spandex were exercising vigorously. Channel 4 was zooming in on reruns of a space walk by Discovery astronaut Jose Hernandez, the son of migrant workers from Michoacan and the second Mexican to have ever navigated into outer space. The late Michael Jackson was doing his zombie dance on Channel 2 Entertainment News. A schlumpy-looking doctor discussed prostate health and displayed flash cards of the celebrated gland on Channel 7. Cartoon mice were mauling cartoon cats on Channel 5.

These days, it is not uncommon for Mexicans to vote with their remote.

When I went out for “comida corrida” (lunch) a few hours after Felipe Calderon had retired from the screen, I asked Eliseo the waiter what he had thought about the Informe. Eliseo shrugged sheepishly. “Actually, I was watching the program about the prostate gland.”

[John Ross’s monstrous El Monstruo — Dread & Redemption In Mexico City will be published by Nation Books in November. Thanks to all who have sent in venue suggestions for the Ross & Revolution fall-spring tour — keep ’em coming. If you have further info write johnross@igc.org.]

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BOOKS / Van Jones’ ‘Green Collar Economy’

Posted on September 6, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

Environmental activist Van Jones, author of Green Collar Economy.

A Review of ‘Green Collar Economy:
How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems’

‘The best answer to our ecological crisis also responds to our socio-economic crisis. The surest path to safe streets and peaceful communities are not more police and prisons, but ecologically sound economic development. And that same path can lead us to a new green economy’ — Van Jones

By Carl Davidson / The Rag Blog / September 6, 2009

[Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems by Van Jones, Paperback, 272 pp, HarperOne, September 29, 2009, $14.99.]

This review was first published on The Rag Blog on March 17, 2009. We are reposting it today because of the forced resignation of environmental activist Van Jones by the Obama administration. Jones was serving as an advisor to the administration on green jobs.

It’s time to link the newly insurgent U.S. Green Jobs movement with the worldwide efforts for the solidarity economy. Both are answering the call to fight the deepening global recession, and both face common adversaries in the failed “race to the bottom,” environment-be-damned policies of global neoliberalism.

That’s the imperative facing left-progressive organizers with connections to these two important grassroots movements. It’s even more important in the wake of the appointment of a key leader of one of these movements, Van Jones of “Green For All,” to a top environmental and urban policy post in the Obama administration.

Jones is a founder of an urban-based campaign focused on low-income young people, multinational and multicultural, that first developed as a progressive response to police repression, gang killings and all-round “criminalization of youth.” He saw the exclusion of this sector of the population from living-wage work and other opportunities as a key cause of the violence and destruction. Putting young people to work at low-to-medium skill levels retrofitting buildings for energy efficiency seemed like a no-brainer, so the demand for “Green Jobs, Not Jails” was raised.

The slogan found deep resonance as it spread across the country. Its all-round implications were spelled out in Jones’ widely acclaimed book, “The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems.” It spells out a string of ingenious, interconnected programs aimed at resolving the savage inequalities of structural unemployment and the global dangers of climate change rooted in carbon-based energies systems.

“Let’s be clear,” says Jones in the opening pages of his book, “The main piece of technology in the green economy is a caulk gun. Hundreds of thousands of green collar jobs will be weatherizing and energy-retrofitting every building in the United States.”

He doesn’t leave the matter there, but makes use of this picture to point out what’s “shovel ready,” to use the lingo of debate around stimulus spending. Green jobs span the entire range of occupations, with a special focus on high-tech manufacturing in emerging alternative energy industries.

“Green Collar Economy” was instantly a powerful voice in policy circles. It gained a wider and deeper significance in light of the financial crises that hit the fan soon after it reached the bookstores. Just as the voter revolt against Wall Street helped lift Obama to the Oval Office, so too was Van Jones’s urban policy monograph raised into a “What Is To Be Done” manifesto for deep structural reforms capable of busting the onset of a major depression.

“The best answer to our ecological crisis also responds to our socio-economic crisis,” Jones explains. “The surest path to safe streets and peaceful communities are not more police and prisons, but ecologically sound economic development. And that same path can lead us to a new green economy.”

How does it connect with the solidarity economy? This parallel movement with even earlier roots is widely known throughout the Global South, especially Latin America, as well as Europe and Quebec. It has been comprised of a range of projects where social capital is partnered with worker, community, consumer and peasant cooperative ownership structures. These were designed to fight back against the economic devastation wrought by neoliberal IMF-imposed “solutions” that left people without a safety net or means of survival. People turned to each other at the grassroots in common efforts, hence the term “solidarity economy.”

Both the solidarity economy and the green economy are “value centered” schools of economic thought. They are in the classical tradition of political economy, which in turn is rooted in moral philosophy. They are not simply descriptive of supposedly objective economic processes, but are prescriptive. At full throttle, they are organizing principles for shaping the future, locally and globally, via local organization and mass mobilization. For its part, the solidarity economy stresses the values of cooperation and mutual aid, especially in governance structures of productive, consumer or financial units. The green economy emphasizes ongoing sustainability and harmony between people and the eco-system of which they are a part.

The solidarity economy is about how people relate to each other, while the green economy is about how people relate to their wider environment. Naturally, there is considerable overlap between the two. Both see the current order as destructive of people and planet, and are working to turn things around.

“Equal protection of all people, equal opportunity for all people, and reverence for all creation.” These are what Jones terms the “three pillars” of the new green global economy.

Neither economic vision is monolithic. Both schools of thought span a range of views, some of which are in contention. In the Green Jobs movement for instance there are debates on nuclear power and “clean coal,” and what role, if any, these might have in a low-carbon future. In the solidarity economy movement there are discussions on the place of markets and government, and whether cooperative structures can use either or both to their advantage. There is also debate over the importance of “high road” allies within the business community, “high road” meaning traditional business structures that bring wider community and environmental responsibility into their business plans, rather than simply short-term shareholder profit.

Where Van Jones’ approach to both the green and solidarity economies most compels our attention is that he starts where the need is greatest, the millions of unemployed and underemployed inner city youth. The structural crises of neoliberal capitalism has long ravaged this sector of our society through deindustrialization, environmental racism and a wrecking ball approach to schools in favor of more prisons. To borrow from Marx, these young people are bound with radical chains, and when they break them with the tools suggested in Green Collar Economy, they free not only themselves, but the rest of us are set in a positive direction as well.

“The green economy,” Jones explains, reflecting on Hurricane Katrina, “should not be just about reclaiming thrown-away stuff. It should be about reclaiming thrown-away communities. It should not be just about recycling materials to give things a second life. We should also be gathering up people and giving them a second chance. Formerly incarcerated people deserve a second shot at life-and all obstacles to their being able to find that second chance in the green sector should be removed. Also, our urban youth deserve the opportunity to be part of something promising.”

Jones is a strategic thinker who gives definite answers to the question, “Who are our friends, who are our adversaries?” He narrows the target to speculative capital with roots in carbon-based energy industries and the militarism needed to secure their supplies. He seeks close allies in the wider working class of all nationalities, especially in the Blue-Green Alliance formed on the core partnership of the United Steelworkers with the Sierra Club. He also looks for allies among faith communities, environmentalists in the suburbs and rural populations suffering at the hands of anti-ecological agribusiness, offering a vision of wind farms and solar arrays for sustainable rural development. He sees the importance of cutting back defense spending and opposing unjust wars abroad.

Finally, he holds out a hand to green businesses in alternative energies, the current and future manufacturers of clean power:

“Our success and survival as a species are largely and directly tied to the new eco-entrepreneurs-and the success and survival of their enterprises. Since almost all of the needed eco-technologies are likely to come from the private sector, civic leaders and voters should do all that can be done to help green business leaders succeed.”

Jones is not talking just about mom and pop operations here, but an important and growing sector of productive capital. These will range from small upstarts to T. Boone Pickens-type investors wanting to create giant wind farms and large coastal arrays of wave generators, along with the manufacturing firms that build their equipment. Some on the left who want to see a clean renewable energy future will have to make adjustments in their “anti-corporate” strategies if they want to pursue this goal effectively with these high-road allies. Dan Swinney of the Chicago Manufacturing Renaissance Council explains his current project, the Chicago Green Manufacturing Network, as a case in point:

“CMRC is working with the Cleveland-based Great Lakes Wind Network/WireNET and the City of Chicago in building the capacity of local manufacturing companies to become the supply chain for the explosive wind turbine industry. Illinois and other states currently have ambitious Renewable Energy Portfolios that create a huge market for wind turbine companies and others in the renewable energy field. Currently the components for these companies are principally made by European and Asian suppliers. We will rise to the challenge of building the capacity of local companies to supply the high quality components for wind turbines and other renewable energy companies. This will be a means to diversify the markets for some of the 12,000 manufacturing companies in our region and an opportunity to create hundreds if not thousands of new permanent, full-time jobs in manufacturing.”

But Green Collar Economy’s core mass base remains a united Black and Latino community in close alliance with organized labor, the same engine of change that put Obama in the White House. And by asserting the interests and needs of that base, the green jobs and infrastructure proposals in Obama’s stimulus package serve to drive the entire recovery effort in a progressive direction.

“We want to build a green economy strong enough to lift people out of poverty,” says Jones, “We want this green wave to lift all boats… In the wake of Katrina, we reject the idea of ‘free market’ evacuation plans. Families should not be left behind to drown because they lack a functioning car or credit card…In an age of floods, we reject the ideology that says we must let our neighbors ‘sink or swim’.”

The nature of the Green New Deal’s adversaries — the carbon-based energy speculators and the military industries defending them — is the key reason Jones’ strategy requires a massive mobilized base. The structural reforms needed to dislodge and displace them are going to require a great deal of popular power from below. The petroleum-coal industrial nexus alone is subsidized to the tune of $1 trillion annually, according to Congressman Robert Kennedy Jr. in his foreword to Jones’ book. Some are outright opposed to any “New Deal,” green or otherwise, as the GOP in Congress reveal with their votes against the Recovery Act. The Green Jobs components were often cited by the right as “pork” or “the road to socialism.” Others want to destroy the Green New Deal from within, via “greenwashing.” These are politicians who take their lead from some corporations that have become skilled at changing their ads to “green” but continue producing toxics and other waste from the polluter’s agenda.

Jones singles out Newt Gingrich, the GOP’s neoliberal-in-chief, as particularly devious: “He has skillfully used rising fuel prices to stoke public support for climate-destroying measures…Their new tactic is to spread confusion about the real solutions by deliberately blurring distinctions between themselves and the champions of genuine answers.” Jones has to take the battle into the government and electoral arenas. The resources of state power are required to bring the green economy to scale, even if it requires a gut-wrenching struggle with polluters who have a good number of politicians on their payrolls and with revenue streams long fused to the public trough.

The solidarity economy faces these battles as well. For the most part, it overlaps with the green economy at the grassroots. Its mission can be summarized as generating new wealth in a green way, but with a worker-community ownership or control component built into a project’s agenda from the start. As a major finance capitalist and former oilman who wants to invest in wind farms in a major way, T Boone Pickens is clearly part of the green economy, but not part of the solidarity economy. A wind farm on an Indian reservation cooperatively owned by the tribe and employing its members and selling power both locally and regionally would be very much part of the solidarity economy.

But the picture is more complex. “Stakeholder” solutions are not quite as clear-cut. For instance, GAMESA, a Spanish high-tech firm and a leading European manufacturer of wind turbines, recently opened a plant in Bucks County, PA. To do so, it formed stakeholder partnerships with the county and state governments, getting tax allowances and land-use easements to refit and old closed steel mill. The United Steel Workers union was brought in as a partner: 1000 new union jobs were created, hiring many of the unemployed steelworkers. The “solidarity” here is between high-road capital, the USW, local government and the unemployed of the area, but it’s a stretch for some who might want to reserve ‘solidarity’ strictly to cooperative ownership structures.

The stakeholder solidarity offers practical flexibility in the wider struggle to bring both movements to scale. Cooperative structures that evolve out of deeper structural reforms have the quality of altering the relations of power in production and local governance. Even if on a small scale, they can point to a future of wider economic democracy, acting as a bridge to new socialist relations.

In any case, a powerful high-road alliance opens the door to those on its left wing who want to take it farther. Van Jones himself has no problem with either form; his book celebrates the stakeholder green jobs alliances implemented by the Green Party mayor of Richmond, CA, as well as the Green Worker Cooperatives in building salvaging businesses in the South Bronx, NY.

At one point in his book, Jones uses a metaphor of two ships to sum up the current crossroads facing the American people, the Amistad and the Titanic. The latter carried the wealthy elite indulging in idle pleasures, and a proletarian crew labored below in an unsound structure. The former had been taken over by insurgent slaves, taken to safe harbor, but still lacked wider resources for the crew’s future. The folly of reshuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic has long been a metaphor for doomed tinkering at reforms in a closed system. The Amistad, however, offers a more open future. Those familiar with the story know it involves further complex struggles, with new allies, high born and low, against a dying system. But it offers hope and change, both of which are in high regard these days.

[Carl Davidson is a member of the coordinating committee of the U.S. Solidarity Economy Network, and is webmaster for Progressives for Obama.’ He is co-author of CyberRadicalism: A New Left for a Global Age, and co-editor of Solidarity Economy: Building Alternatives for People and Planet, both available at lulu.com. This article was also posted at SolidarityEconomy.net.]

Find ‘The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems’ by Van Jones on Amazon.com.

Please see The New McCarthyism : Van Jones Fed to King CONG by Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / September 6, 2009. Post also includes ‘The right wing’s assault on Van Jones and the progressive left,’ by Carl Davidson, and the article that started it all, ‘Van Jones scandal threatens Obama presidency’ by Cliff Kincaid.

And see

The Rag Blog

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The New McCarthyism : Van Jones Fed to King CONG

Posted on September 6, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

Portrait of Van Jones by Robert Shetterly / Americans Who Tell the Truth.

Obama has fed his green Jones to King CONG

With clarity and verve [Van] Jones finally brought to the mainstream the critical message that what’s good for the environment is also good for the economy.

By Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / September 6, 2009

See ‘The right wing’s assault on Van Jones and the progressive left’ by Carl Davidson, and the article that started it all, ‘Van Jones scandal threatens Obama presidency’ by Cliff Kincaid, Below.

Van Jones has been fed to King CONG (Coal, Oil, Nukes & Gas).

Obama’s one serious green bright spot has been sacrificed at the McCarthyite altar of the corporate bloviation machine.

The brilliant, charismatic Jones was responsible for the administration’s single significant accomplishment to date. With clarity and verve Jones finally brought to the mainstream the critical message that what’s good for the environment is also good for the economy.

The convenience of this simple truth has long been known to the green power movement. Since the early 1970s we have argued that converting away from fossil and nuclear fuels — coal, oil, nukes & gas — and onto a Solartopian system based on renewables and efficiency is the only route to long-term prosperity. With community-based solar, wind, tidal, geothermal, mass transit, increased efficiency and efficiency, we can and must build a sustainable economy that will create jobs and geo-political stability.

An early articulation of this green-powered vision came at the “Toward Tomorrow” Fair at the University of Masschusetts, Amherst, in 1975. As the “No Nukes” movement was just gathering grassroots steam, we envisioned a community-based Solartopian energy system that would guarantee full employment and a survivable planet.

For the next quarter century, the No Nukes movement helped drive atomic energy into its economic and ecological black hole. As fossil fuels became ever more unsustainable, the vision took shape. Wind, solar and efficiency technologies boomed ahead.

But the multi-trillion-dollar fossil/nuke industry is nothing if not entrenched. Throughout the Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush nightmare it made common wisdom of the Big Lie that saving the environment meant economic sacrifice. In fact, except for King CONG’s short-term mega-profits, the opposite has always been true.

Van Jones finally broke through. As an informed, exciting and compelling presenter, Jones made clear that the “green collar economy” is tangible and terrific. In his writings, mass meetings, television and legislative testimony, Jones turned the corner on the message that what’s good for the environment is not only good for the economy, it’s essential. Appearing with the likes of Robert Redford on Larry King, and much more, Jones finally injected into the mainstream the message that there will be no prosperity, no full employment, and no survivable planet without the necessary and doable conversion to a green-powered Earth.

With Jones running point, Obama has in fact made millions of critical dollars available for renewable energy. The Stimulus Package does include a significant sector of cash for those wishing to bring wind, photovoltaics and other Solartopian systems into their home, office and industrial energy mix.

But we’ve seen this before. Jimmy Carter took halting steps up the Solartopian highway in the late 1970s. Tens of thousands of green jobs were created in California and elsewhere. Then Ronald Reagan ripped the solar water heater off the White House roof and Gov. George Deukmejian killed Gov. Jerry Brown’s tax credit program. The industry went into a tailspin, those thousands of jobs disappeared, and America’s dependency on foreign oil soared out of control.

With Jones gone we have to worry that Obama might now repeat history. The pretext for forcing Jones out was pathetic. Like millions of Americans he signed a petition asking for an investigation into the 9/11 felling of the World Trade Center. He used the dreaded term “asshole” to accurately describe some Republicans, and then used it to describe himself and his friends. He may have said some things that some right winger might’ve construed as racist.

Did he kill someone? Did he engage in torture? Did he steal money? Is he a lousy parent?

This is McCarthyism at its most lethal, and administrative timidity at its most dangerous. If groveling to the corporate bloviators is Obama’s strategy for making change, we are in deep deep trouble.

In fact Van Jones, as imperfect as the rest of us, was Obama’s critical firestarter in a green-powered revolution that is decades overdue. While the likes of Glenn Beck can crow over his demise, it’s the gargantuan King CONG barons of fossil/nuke who are really in the saddle. Pushing Van Jones aside is a major coup for the destroyers of the planet, and a big loss for those of us who would re-power and save it.

We will, of course, continue to fight against fossil and nuclear power and for a green-powered Earth. But as it has been for decades, the going is rough. Will this administration really be with us?

[Harvey Wasserman’s Solartopia: Our Green-Powered Earth is at www.harveywasserman.com. In 1973 he helped coin the phrase “No Nukes.”]

The right wing’s assault on Van Jones and the progressive left

By Carl Davidson / The Rag Blog / September 6, 2009

Here’s the motherlode piece fueling the rightwing blogosphere that helped bring down Van Jones. The text will show you that it won’t stop here. They will use everything they can to cripple and take down Obama from the right, and will use more and more sham “connections,” such as with me, to do it.

The right is aiming at any alliances between the liberals and the progressive left to destroy both. Their success here in this case, thanks to capitulation on this matter by the White House, shows why liberals have always been rather weak and wavering when the right bares its fangs, and why we, the progressive left, have to take up the slack, bringing others along with us. Moreover, it shows we need better and stronger organization to back up our gains.

Finally, it show the stupidity and futility of those on the left who want to aim their main fire at this time at Obama’s presidency, and end up carrying water for the right wing populists and proto-fascists. None of this means we shouldn’t criticize Obama’s wars and take to the streets against them. But it does mean you have to study how to deliver the main blow to the immediate rising danger. If you want to lend a hand, make use of the PayPal button at Progressives for Obama. Even better, join or organize a PDA and/or a CCDS chapter, or something similar that you like better. But get organized.

Van Jones scandal threatens Obama presidency

By Cliff Kincaid / September 5, 2009

Our media have been slow to grasp the significance of the Van Jones story.

Reporting from near the home turf of embattled Green Jobs Czar Van Jones, Joe Garofoli of the San Francisco Chronicle says it’s clearly a bad sign when White House flak Robert Gibbs is asked if Jones still enjoys the confidence of the President and merely replies that Jones “continues to work in this administration.”

But the White House has to know that, if Jones goes, the questions won’t end. Who appointed him? Who looked into his background? Who knew what and when?

Gibbs knows that the Jones controversy undermines confidence in the President, who bears ultimate responsibility for the appointment. Gibbs also has to know that, if Jones’ background can sink Jones, the President himself is in trouble. Obama has decades of friendly associations with communists and terrorists, ranging from Communist Party USA member Frank Marshall Davis in his youth in Hawaii to communist terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn in Chicago when he was doing community organizing and running for political office.

By comparison to Obama, when it comes to nefarious connections, Jones is a piker.

Curiously, it’s not Jones’ communist background which has proven to be the most controversial. Rather, it’s his two apologies in a week for statements calling Republicans “assholes” and having signed a 9/11 truth statement blaming the terrorist attacks on U.S. officials.

It’s the communism, stupid.

As Professor Paul Kengor points out, “We now know that even the most authoritative sources, such as the seminal Harvard University Press work, The Black Book of Communism, were conservative when estimating only 100 million deaths at the hands of communist governments. The latest research, for instance, claims that Mao Zedong alone was responsible for the deaths of at least 60-70 million in China, and Joseph Stalin alone may well have killed 60 million in the USSR-those are just two communist countries that managed to far surpass the entire combined death toll of World War I and II, the two worst wars in the history of humanity.”

Do we want adherents of this foreign ideology of mass murder holding high government positions?

Van Jones, of course, is only a symbol of the problem. And communists are not required to promote communist policies. The Obama Administration is pursuing the destruction of anti-communist Honduras, in order to please Hugo Chavez, the Marxist ruler of Venezuela currently on a friendly visit to terrorist Iran. This is a scandal that deserves at least as much attention as Van Jones’ communist connections.

Our media have been slow to grasp the significance of the Van Jones story. Some news outlets have only reluctantly covered it because of the Jones statements about Republicans and 9/11.

But Jones’ communist background has been known since April 6, when New Zealand blogger Trevor Loudon revealed it in striking detail. This was only a few weeks after the appointment was announced. Joseph Farah’s World Net Daily then picked up the story and ran several important follow-ups.

While the Jones appointment has now become both a White House and Democratic Party scandal, one prominent Republican has already gotten burned as a result of her association with the identified communist.

Meg Whitman, the former president and CEO of eBay who is running for Governor of California, has been forced by the controversy to disavow her previous comments in support of Jones. She says, “My husband and I met him and many others on a cruise sponsored by National Geographic and The Aspen Institute. He talked about supporting job growth in California, but of course I did not do a background check of his past over dinner.”

Look who else was on the “Arctic Expedition for Climate Action 2008” cruise with Jones:

  • Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright
  • Larry Brilliant, Director, Google.org
  • President Jimmy Carter & Rosalynn Carter
  • Senator Tom Daschle & Linda Daschle
  • John Fahey, President, National Geographic
  • Mike Finley, President of the Turner Foundation
  • Walter Isaacson, President, the Aspen Institute
  • Andy Stern, President, Service Employees International Union
  • R.E. “Ted” Turner, Chairman, Turner Foundation, Inc.
  • Governor Bill Ritter, Jr., Governor, Colorado>

On March 27, 2009, the Aspen Institute gave its Energy and Environment Award in the category of “Individual Thought Leadership” to Van Jones.

Although Whitman now says that she wasn’t able to do a background check on Jones over dinner, she had previously said that she “got to know him very well.”

Here’s what she said, in comments captured on You Tube: “There’s a guy over in Oakland, I think his name is Van… Jones. And he and I were on a cruise last summer in the Arctic for climate change. And I got to know him very well. And a lot of the work he’s doing to enfranchise broader communities I’m a big fan of. He’s done a marvelous job… I’m a huge fan of his. He is very bright, very articulate, very passionate. I think he is exactly right.”

For someone who “got to know him very well,” she seemed to have some trouble remembering his name. In any event, while Whitman endorsed Jones and his work, at least she didn’t hire him. The White House did.

According to the Van Jones website, “In March 2009 Van went to work as the special adviser for green jobs at the White House Council on Environmental Quality.” What does this phrase “went to work” really mean?

As we have previously reported, the Obama Transition Project developed a 7-page questionnaire of 63 questions for people seeking top administration jobs. Here are some of the questions:

  • Briefly describe the most controversial matters you have been involved with during the course of your career.
  • Please identify all speeches you have given. If available please provide the test [sic] or recordings of each such speech or identify any recordings of speeches of which you are aware.
  • If you have ever sent an electronic communication, including but not limited to an email, text message or instant message, that could suggest a conflict of interest or be a possible source of embarrassment to you, your family, or the President-Elect if it were made public, please describe.

The final question 63 was all-encompassing: “Please provide any other information, including information about other members of your family, that could suggest a conflict of interest or be a possible source of embarrassment to you, your family, or the president-elect.”

But it’s not known if Jones ever filled out the questionnaire. It seems doubtful.

The New York Times said that for those who managed to fill out the questionnaire and clear those hurdles, “the reward could be the job they wanted. But first there will be more forms, for security and ethics clearances from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Office of Government Ethics.”

So was Jones subjected to a security investigation by the FBI? No one seems to know. It seems doubtful.

I went to the website of the Office of Government Ethics, which collects and posts “Executive Branch Personnel Public Financial Disclosure Reports or Other Covered Records.” I put the name “Van Jones” into the search engine and “0 records” turned up.

It turns out that this data base only includes individuals “nominated or appointed by President Obama with the advice and consent of the Senate.” Since Jones didn’t have to go through a Senate confirmation hearing, he didn’t have to complete any of these forms.

The President, of course, didn’t have to fill out those forms, either. He didn’t have to go through an FBI background check. So the same questions being asked about Van Jones can be asked about Obama. Van Jones and his supporters know it. They probably know more about the President than we do. And that gives them political leverage and potential blackmail material.

As we argued in a previous column, it appears that a Communist Party spin-off, the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS), was instrumental in some way in getting Jones his job. A one-time secret member of this network, Rep. Barbara Lee, is a close friend of both Jones and Obama. Jones comes from Oakland, California, and Lee represents Oakland. They worked together on the “green jobs” issue before Jones “went to work” at the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Lee hailed the Jones appointment.

Another key CCDS official is Carl Davidson, a Marxist and former SDS activist described by blogger Trevor Loudon as “a big fan and promoter of Van Jones’ work.” Indeed, the latest edition of the “CCDS Mobilizer” notes that Davidson participated in New York City’s annual “Left Forum” in April of this year where he “presented Van Jones’ program for Green Jobs for inner city youth, but framing it as a larger structural reform project that could, if done right, unite a progressive majority and help get us out of the current crisis.”

In other words, the “Green Jobs” project is a disguised form of socialism.

Loudon reports that Davidson has pushed Van Jones and his agenda at every opportunity — just as he was pushing Obama as a political candidate in the 1990s. “Davidson was an ardent supporter of Obama for several years and helped organize the famous peace rally in Chicago in where Obama pinned his colors to the anti-Iraq war cause,” Loudon explains.

If you go to the CCDS website, you’ll see that one of the speakers at the recent CCDS convention was Angela Davis, former CPUSA candidate for vice president. I saw a picture of Davis on the first floor of the Ella Baker Center in Oakland when I was there in April looking into the Van Jones controversy. Jones founded the Ella Baker Center.

Rep. Lee, in her book, Renegade for Peace & Justice, talks about her work as “Comrade Barbara” in the Black Panther organization with Angela Davis, “the noted African American member of the Communist Party.” Davis was a key endorser of the July 17-19, 1992, national CCDS conference, “Perspectives for Democracy and Socialism in the ’90s.” One of the topics was, “Toward a Socialist United States?” Jones spoke to a CCDS fundraiser in 2006.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the scandal threatens not only the job of Van Jones but the Obama presidency.

The evidence suggests that a communist network has a direct pipeline into the White House. It is a network that includes the President himself.

So how can Obama fire Jones without putting his own presidency in jeopardy? This is the dilemma that grips the White House.

Cliff Kincaid is the Editor of the AIM Report.]

Source /AIM Report

Glenn Beck’s attack on Van Jones

Also see BOOKS / Van Jones’ ‘Green Collar Economy’ by Carl Davidson / The Rag Blog / September 6, 2009

The Rag Blog

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Life During Wartime : We Need More Troops!

Posted on September 6, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

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

Thanks to Dr. S.R. Keister /The Rag Blog

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Health Care Blackjack : We Need an Ace from Obama

Posted on September 5, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

The Card Player by Pablo Picasso / MoMA Collection.

The stakes are high:
The President and health care reform

I have great concern about whether the President will take a principled stand in favor of a true and unfettered public option.

By Dr. Stephen R. Keister / The Rag Blog / September 5, 2009

In my younger days, in the days of the two dollar table, I would on rare occasion enter into a game of blackjack. In some odd way, these recollections entered my consciousness when I became aware that the President is going to address a joint session of Congress on the subject of health care.

I now am transported back to the table with two cards face up, both of them fives. The croupier awaits my decision to take a hit. If I get an ace, if the President unequivocally announces that he will fight for a decent public option, i.e. Medicare For All, I win. If I am dealt a six, the game is over, the President has conceded to the insurance cartel, the pharmaceutical companies, and the for profit nursing homes and hospitals.

The second option will force those of us who have stood by the nation, the welfare of the American people, the cause of reason, to fold our cards and depart, and hope that the progressive members of the House of Representatives will vote against a bill that is a farce and a concession to the corporations that appear to control both the President and the Congress.

Better the public, which in its lethargy and lack of inquisitiveness to find the truth, continues to suffer under the current system of health care rationed by the insurance industry, under a system where the insurance industry denies the physician his sacred duty to give appropriate care to the sick and injured, where a minimum of 18,000 Americans die each year for lack of health care.

It would seem overly optimistic to expect in the near future that the United States will rise from 26th place among nations of the world, and adopt a health care system approximating that of France, Germany, the Netherlands, or the Scandinavian countries. All these provide decent health care from cradle to grave, with free choice of physician, dentist and hospital and/or nursing home. Care is not rationed as the spokesmen for the corporations would have us believe. Indeed you may well have to wait 6-8 weeks for a total knee transplant for an arthritic knee that has been a burden for many years; however, for an acute illness, or an emergency, you receive immediate care without having to waste time to give a receptionist your insurance information.

Take the oft retold story of the Canadian woman who ostensibly was informed in Canada that she would have to wait a year and a half to have surgery for a brain tumor. She ended up at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville where the surgery was done shortly after arrival. The problem is that this lady did NOT have a brain tumor. Rather than a malignancy she had a small congenital cyst in the region of the pituitary gland which over a matter of years might impinge on the optic nerve and cause visual problems. Yet the American public was totally deceived and the media, save for rare instances, did not correct the distortions. Really! One wonders who indeed paid her bill at the Mayo Clinic.

I have great concern about whether the President will take a principled stand in favor of a true and unfettered public option. Thus far he has equivocated, dealt in secret with the pharmaceutical companies, and reportedly has arrived at a ten year arrangement with them. He has had extensive meetings with the health insurance industry, the AMA, AARP, and those who oppose a public option but are in favor of the nebulous bipartisan “health care reform.” By and large physicians groups, nurses organizations, labor unions, and medical academic organizations have been shut out of the discussions, save for a rare photo-op.

Physicians for A National Health Care Program has been developing a plan for a public insurance system — not government managed, but managed by the physicians and representatives of their patients — for the past 30 years. To date this group has been largely ignored, in spite of the fact that their plan would reduce national health care costs by 30-40%, and provide each and every person health care of their choice from cradle to grave. The reason this plan has been ignored? The insurance industry would suffer, thus depriving their executives of multimillion dollar incomes and bonuses, and reducing them to the level of normal profit making businesses. Still, they have had it quite good for the past 30 years.

President Obama has been compared on occasion to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Absurd… FDR came to the presidency with a long history of public service in the family. His uncle, Teddy Roosevelt, as a Republican had been a “trust buster,” taking on the monopolistic corporations of that era. He broke with the Republican Party to stand with the people as a candidate for president from the Bull Moose Party.

FDR followed in his footsteps, serving in the Department of the Navy in World War I, being elected a state senator and later governor of New York. When he was elected president in 1932 he did not waver, he did not bow in supplication to his political opponents, he did what he felt was in the national interest. Sometimes the President won, other times he lost; however, he unequivocally did what he felt was in the interest of the citizens of the country, and did not bow to corporate power. President Obama appears to feel insecure, and panders to those who obviously dislike him intensely, accomplishing nothing, and leaving those progressive, thoughtful folks who supported him hanging out to dry.

Health care has become the ultimate test for Obama — and we can be legitimately concerned after his visit to Montana where Governor Schweitzer, in his introduction, spoke up for single payer/universal care, and obviously nettled Obama, according to a report by the state coordinator of the Progressive Democrats of America. It seems the President was unhappy with the governor’s allusion to excellent health care in neighboring Saskatchewan.

One wonders if the President is following a pattern of concession to special interests as occurred with the Wall Street bailout, the apparent lack of concern about who was behind the so called CIA torture scandal (remember the Nuremberg Trials of 1945), the concessions to the Dole and United Fruit interests in the Honduran coup, the approval of continued snooping on domestic communications, and most of all, the continued support for an increasingly unpopular war in Afghanistan which lacks a well defined rationale and/or exit strategy. Does he remember President Eisenhower’s advice regarding the industrial/military complex?

I would like to see Mr. Obama disavow the Christian extremists interjecting the end-of-times foolishness into the debate — as exemplified by “Pastor” Rick Joiner, a South Carolina evangelical who bases his spiritual authority, according to his website, on being transported to Heaven for an extended conversation with Jesus. (The Washington Spectator, September 1, 2009) “Pastor” Joiner has informed his believers, through his Liberty Council, that national health care would lead to euthanizing senior citizens as took place in Nazi Germany under Adolph Hitler.

This charlatan also has continued to inject the abortion issue into the debate. No bill in either house has mentioned abortion, which is prohibited in any event by The Hyde Amendment, passed some years ago, forbidding government funds to be used for abortions. This abortion thing is a fraudulent issue designed to mobilize the wingnuts. I am conversant with the PNHP suggestions for national health care and the issue of abortion has never been mentioned and in probability never thought of in their plans.

Obama must disavow these extremist folks, whose foolishness is subsidized by the insurance industries, and be forthright with the American people. He should know that the teabaggers, Birchers, etc., will never follow him, since their dislike has nothing to do with policy but with a deep seated hatred of an educated man of mixed race achieving the presidency. They dislike walking down the street hearing foreign languages spoken; they dislike the fact that Obama believes in sexual equality; they believe that Obama caused the financial depression, when in reality the neo-liberal economics of George Bush was responsible.

Mr. Obama must forget this foolishness regarding “bipartisanship.” The followers of Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Glen Beck will never accept him nor believe him; however, the remaining 60-70% of the American public deserve a forthright discussion. It is time to face issues head on, as did FDR. Obama must show the courage to take on the Blue Dogs who in the last election cycle received $122,370 from their corporate contributors. He must face the fact that members of the Senate Finance Committee have received millions from the health care industries.

If President Obama cannot take up the mantel of leadership one can anticipate mass defections from his progressive base, and his being defined in advance as a one term president. (I have already removed my Obama bumper-sticker.) He must voice support for the House Progressive Caucus and back them in their goal of obtaining a true, undiluted, government option, as part of health care reform, We who desire single payer realize that no mere mortal can alone defeat the corporate interest.

Once again, it’s the special interests against the people. Thornstein Veblen addressed this in his “Theory of Business Enterprise” written in 1904, when he noted: “The big businessman, uninterested in anything but the amassing of money and the accumulation of power, was actually the enemy of his enterprise. He was concerned with earnings not with values, with prices rather than goods. Profit-hungry moguls sabotaged production and held the common man down by the harsh law of diminishing returns.” Veblin as he continued, appealed for a new set of controls, for a society of engineers who recognize the social use of our machines.

Before signing off I would like to call the reader’s attention to a piece in the summer 2009 Wilson Quarterly. There is a dichotomy in the thinking of the “religious” folks who oppose health care reform that has entranced me for some time. The Wilson Quarterly notes the following, in “Porn in the USA: Who subscribes to pornographic websites?”:

“Benjamin Edelman of Harvard Business School summarizes data from a major provider of online porn in The Journal of Economic Perspectives (Winter 2009). Per capita, Utah has the most subscriptions to porn sites, and West Virginia the fewest. Some religious attitudes correlate with subscription rates. Edelman reports: In states where more people agree that ‘Even today miracles are performed by the power of God’ and ‘I never doubt the existence of God,’ there are more subscriptions. Residents of states with high rates of churchgoing prove to be about average in their appetites for porn — the only difference is that fewer of them sign up on Sundays.”

Think about it. The Religious Right rails against large government and “government interference,” yet continues to push for an anti-abortion amendment to the Constitution. These folks seem to have a continuing unnatural level of interest in human genitalia!

Our nation is indeed at a crossroads.

[Dr. Stephen R. Keister lives in Erie, Pennsylvania. He is a retired physician who is active in health care reform.]

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Firefighters: Mostly Paramedics in Some Places

Posted on September 4, 2009 by RagBlog

Firefighters from Company 10 responding to an emergency call in Washington in late August. Photo: Doug Mills/The New York Times.

Firefighters Become Medics to the Poor
By Ian Urbina / September 3, 2009

WASHINGTON — Peeling off his latex gloves after treating a 4-year-old boy having a severe asthma attack, J. R. Muyleart sighed with a touch of frustration. It was 3 a.m. and in the past 24-hour shift, Mr. Muyleart, a firefighter, had responded to at least one emergency call per hour.

But only two of those calls were for fires; most of the others involved heart attacks, diabetic sores, epileptic seizures and people complaining of shortness of breath.

“I joined the force to battle blazes, not to be an emergency room doctor,” Mr. Muyleart, 35, said as he and the rest of Engine Company 10 drove back to their firehouse, which for most of the last 15 years has been the busiest in the country, according to industry surveys.

Among the hidden costs of the health care crisis is the burden that fire departments across the country are facing as firefighters, much like emergency room doctors, are increasingly serving as primary care providers.

About 80 percent of the calls handled by Engine Company 10 are medical emergencies because the firehouse serves one of the city’s poorest areas, where few residents have health insurance, doctors’ checkups are rare, and medical problems are left to fester until someone dials 911.

In many big cities, the problem is compounded by budget shortfalls that have led to the elimination or proposed elimination of 6,000 firefighter jobs in the past year, or about 2 percent of all firefighters, according to the International Association of Fire Fighters. At the same time, emergency calls have increased by 1.2 million, or 3.5 percent, compared with the year before.

Washington’s fire department, which has not faced major layoffs, is dispatched along with Emergency Medical Services to almost all emergency calls in the belief that it can provide the quickest response. It gets more such calls per capita than just about any other fire department in the nation, and a disproportionate number come from poorer neighborhoods like Trinidad, where Engine 10 is based, in the Northeast section of the city.

In New York City, only about 45 percent of the 473,335 calls answered by firefighters last year involved medical emergencies. The city’s Emergency Medical Service handles most medical calls, responding to 1.2 million last year.

Last year, Engine Company 10 handled more than 6,500 calls, about three times the national average, according to Firehouse Magazine. The relentless pace is one reason firefighters across the country compete for a chance to work at the firehouse, which is nicknamed the House of Pain.

“We get our share of fires here,” said Leo Ruiz, 35, as he finished his breakfast after returning from a call involving a woman with abdominal pains. “But what makes this place different is that in the down time you have to be running 24 hours straight to keep up with all the other calls.”

Suddenly, another firefighter yelled “Box!” Within 10 seconds, the fire engine was rolling, four firefighters on board, heading to the day’s first “box alarm,” or building fire.

“This is what we live for,” Mr. Ruiz said as he put on his oxygen tank.

At the scene, flames spilled out of a window. In 10 minutes the blaze was under control.

Shortly after returning to the firehouse, Engine Company 10 was dispatched again. “Man down, possible seizure,” the dispatcher said, to groans from several firefighters.

In the next 24 hours, the company took three calls involving asthma attacks, five for chest pains or shortness of breath, two for assaults and six for unconscious people on the sidewalk. The only other fire was a small one in a trash hauling bin.

“Guys complain about all the medical calls, but to me it’s work,” said Lawrence Jones, 24, a firefighter who grew up in the neighborhood and has been on the force two years.

Indeed, the shift in firefighters’ duties, which has been occurring for decades, is not without its up side for fire departments.

Advances in consumer protection rules and fireproofing technology have led to a drop in the frequency of fires, so medical emergencies have helped keep firefighters employed.

Fire departments nationwide responded to almost 1.5 million fire calls in 2008, compared with 3 million in 1980, according to the National Fire Protection Association. Fire departments went on about 15.8 million medical calls in 2008, up from about 5 million in 1980, a 213 percent increase. The shift has occurred as cities realized that firefighters could respond more quickly than ambulances, and more cities trained firefighters as emergency medical technicians.

For Engine Company 10, drug addiction and violent crime are added reasons there are so many medical emergencies. Last year, the neighborhood had so many drug-related shootings that the police set up checkpoints to inspect cars that entered or left the area.

Around 3 p.m., a call took Engine 10 back to 14th and H Streets, northeast. The corner is known by the firefighters as the “vortex of sickness” because the dispatcher sends them there five or six times per shift.

“Drug overdoses, passed-out drunks, car accidents, heart attacks, seizures,” said Lt. Donald Mayhew, a fourth-generation firefighter. “It all converges right here.”

The four firefighters from the House of Pain arrived first to find a glassy-eyed man lying drunk on the sidewalk. Soon the police and an ambulance arrived, but the firefighters were already checking the man’s vital signs and trying to persuade him to stand up and move along or go to the hospital. Eventually he stood and stumbled away.

“Look around,” Mr. Muyleart said. “We have an ambulance and two cop cars here. Do we really need a fire engine and four firefighters as well?”

Some cities have questioned the cost of dispatching fire engines to medical emergencies, but most have determined that it is too risky not to always send the closest emergency personnel.

In St. Louis, Emergency Medical Services and the Fire Department merged in 1997 to save money. But the city fire chief, Dennis M. Jenkerson, still sends fire trucks on most medical calls.

“People call and say, ‘I’m having trouble breathing,’ ” Chief Jenkerson said. “Can they afford to wait five and a half, six minutes, for an ambulance? No. Seconds count with most medical emergencies.”

Most other departments also dispatch fire trucks to medical calls because firefighters are trained emergency medical technicians, cities have more fire trucks than ambulances, and fire stations are located throughout the city, said Lori Moore-Merrell of the International Association of Fire Fighters.

“If it’s a serious medical call, a fire, we sprint, regardless,” Mr. Muyleart said as he hustled to the truck after a caller reported chest pains. “It just seems like so many people use us as their primary care providers.”

[Al Baker contributed reporting from New York.]

Source / New York Times

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Alberto Gonzales, the Tragic Opera

Posted on September 4, 2009 by RagBlog

Alberto Gonzales, the Opera, Hits Stage
September 4, 2009

A graduate music student has taken the political theater of Washington, D.C., one step further this summer.

She’s turned it into opera.

Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ congressional grilling in April 2007 over fired federal prosecutors may have seemed like a dry political proceeding to most people. But where some critics heard little more than a constant chorus of “I don’t recall” — a sentence Gonzales uttered 71 times — Melissa Dunphy heard music.

Starting Friday night, Philadelphia residents can hear Gonzales’ testimony sung as the libretto of the ‘Gonzales Cantata.’ The entire hearing is re-enacted, but with the players’ genders switched. As a statement against male-dominated Washington, Dunphy has women in the men’s roles, and a man singing the part of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The production is part of Philadelphia’s Live Arts Festival & Philly Fringe, a 16-day celebration of the arts.

“This is a humanist drama, not a partisan statement,” Dunphy said in a press release. “We see Gonzales’ mistakes, but we also feel some real pathos for a man who has dug himself into a terrible hole.”

Source / America On Line

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Paul Robeson : Sixty Years After Peekskill

Posted on September 4, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

Paul Robeson. Photo from Rutgers Special Collections and University Archives.

Remembering Paul Robeson:
Sixty years after the Peekskill Riots

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / September 4, 2009

On September 4, 1949, an angry crowd surrounded the 20,000 friends of Paul Robeson who had come to hear him in an open-air concert at Peekskill, New York. After the event right-wing, anti-communist inspired mobs attacked supporters who were leaving the event. These attacks included smashing the windows of Pete Seeger’s automobile with several family members inside. Sixty years later we remember the great progressive Paul Robeson, his struggles for justice, and his refusal to bow to the politics of reaction.

The Young Robeson

One of the giants of the twentieth century, a citizen of the world, an actor/singer and activist for justice, Paul Robeson has been virtually erased from popular consciousness, a victim of the vicious anti-communist hysteria of the 1940s and 1950s.

Paul Robeson, an African-American, was born to Maria Louis Bustill and William Drew Robeson in Princeton, New Jersey in 1898, 33 years after the close of the civil war and two years after the United States Supreme Court declared in Plessy vs. Ferguson that separate institutions for Black and white people were constitutional. New Jersey, while not segregated to the extent of the deep South, was hostile to the rights of Black people.

Robeson was born into a family with a long-standing commitment to struggle for justice. His mother’s ancestors participated in the underground railroad, bringing escaped slaves from the South to the North. Her family included ministers, teachers, and artisans in the Northern free Black community. His father was a slave who escaped to the north and joined the Union army. As a minister educated at Lincoln University, Robeson’s father defended the rights of Black people in the New Jersey communities where he worked.

Many years later when he was politically active, Robeson would refer to the experiences of his people struggling against slavery and oppression to be free. He likened the struggles of his ancestors to the Black people of his day, and also to factory workers seeking labor rights, and peoples all round the world who were struggling to overthrow European colonial empires.

The young Robeson studied hard, was coached in elocution by his demanding father and performed so well in school that he was admitted to Rutgers University in 1915, only the third Black ever to enter that institution. Robeson graduated in 1919 as valedictorian, champion debater, and two-time All-American first-team football selection.

Robeson attended law school at Columbia University from 1919-1923 but decided against a law career because of the racism he faced at a preeminent New York law firm.

While he attended law school, Robeson began appearing in plays and found his way to the influential Provincetown Players of Greenwich Village. Robeson’s artistic career was successfully launched by his performances in two of Eugene O’Neill’s most important and controversial plays, “All God’s Chillun Got Wings” and “Emperor Jones.” From there his reputation and visibility spread.

By the late 1920s, he appeared in “Porgy,” “Stevedore” and “Showboat,” where he sang “Old Man River,” a song that would have deep political significance for him later on. On tour in Europe in the late 1920s and starring in a London production of “Othello,” in 1930, Robeson had become a star of worldwide proportions. During the 1930s, he would appear in eleven films, mostly British productions, further solidifying his global reputation as an actor.

As his reputation was soaring in the theatre of the 1920s, Robeson came to the realization that the rich musical heritage of his people, then called Negro Spirituals, needed to be celebrated and performed. He thus launched a singing career that would be his most enduring contribution to U.S. culture and, at the same time, would serve as a vehicle for him to participate in the struggle of Black people to achieve their freedom from racism and Jim Crow segregation. Over the next thirty years, he would learn at least a dozen languages and would celebrate the musical traditions of peoples from Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and Latin America, as well as the United States.

The Politicization of Paul Robeson

By the mid-1930s, Robeson’s outlook concerning the world around him and how the artist must relate to that world had changed significantly. Always aware of racism and segregation, Robeson began to see the oppression of his people as similar and related to the world of anti-Semitism, colonialism, worker exploitation, and attacks on the first socialist state, the Soviet Union.

Leaving a London theatre after a performance of Showboat in 1928, Robeson encountered a massive march of Welsh miners who had come all the way from Wales to demand better wages and working conditions. Robeson spoke to their group and joined their struggle. The mutual love and respect Robeson and the Welsh miners developed for each other would last for the rest of his life.

But it was the escalating Spanish Civil war, fascist armies fighting to overthrow a democratically elected government, that led Robeson to declare his commitment to political struggle on behalf of the dispossessed. In a speech given before the National Joint Committee for Spanish Relief at Royal Albert Hall on June 24, 1937 he proclaimed: “I have longed to see my talent contributing in an unmistakably clear manner to the cause of humanity. Every artist, every scientist, must decide NOW where he stands. He has no alternative.” The artist he said “must elect to fight for freedom or slavery.”

Robeson spoke out for workers, walked their picket lines, and sang to gatherings of trade unionists in auto, steel, shipping, meat packing, electrical, and mining industries who were demanding the right to form unions during the massive organizing drives of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). He sang of that great IWW labor singer/ organizer, “Joe Hill.” And he sang songs championing racial justice.

Red Scares

After World War II, Robeson met with President Truman and demanded that he take a stand against segregation and support anti-lynching legislation in the South. He already had spoken out against the exclusion of Blacks from major league baseball. Opposing the Cold War and Truman’s refusal to stand against segregation in the South, Robeson joined the campaign of third party candidate Henry Wallace, of the Progressive Party of America, who was running for president in 1948.

Robeson had often visited the Soviet Union, befriended the great Soviet film maker Eisenstein and had spoken with admiration about what appeared to be the lack of racism there. After World War II and as the Cold War was heating up, the U.S. government and right wing groups launched a campaign to stifle the voice of Paul Robeson because of his sympathies for the Soviet Union and his strong advocacy for racial justice in the United States.

He was called to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Thugs vandalized and beat attendees at the summer Robeson concert in Peekskill, New York. Government agents pressured concert impresarios to stop sponsoring Robeson concerts. And when his public access to audiences declined in the 1950s, even Black churches were pressured to cancel Robeson visits.

The centerpiece of the effort to muzzle Robeson was the decision of the State Department to revoke his passport in 1950. He was forbidden to leave the United States even though he still was a beloved worldwide figure. His passport was not reinstated until 1958 when the Supreme Court ruled that the State Department did not have the right to confiscate the passports of citizens..

Despite his not being able to travel, working people around the world continued to support Robeson. Canadian trade unionists from 1952 through 1955 organized four Robeson concerts at the border between the state of Washington and Canada. Robeson performed from the U.S. side and Canadian workers listened to his music from their side. Robeson welcomed the Canadian workers at the 1952 concert singing his signature song, “Old Man River,” from Showboat. He sang the lyrics he had revised from the original version in the 1928 musical — from stereotyping of Black people as docile to Black people as fighters for their freedom. Robeson began to insert the newer progressive lyrics in the 1930s when his own political consciousness had begun to change and for the rest of his life he saw the new lyrics as emblematic of his own political transformation.

In 1957, Welsh miners organized a chorus in a London studio and sang to Robeson listening in New York using the then new long distance telephone lines. They always remembered his support for their struggle and they wanted to demonstrate to him and the world their opposition to the efforts of the United States to stifle the voice of Paul Robeson.

After Robeson’s passport was reissued he resumed worldwide travel in the late 1950s. He fell ill in 1961, returned to the United States and for the most part retired from public life.

Robeson believed that peoples everywhere shared common musical forms and common struggles: workers, peoples of color, colonized peoples, women. He celebrated their differences but insisted on their human oneness. Perhaps we need to rediscover that vision again today. He died in 1976 but his spirited call for human solidarity is just as precious today as it was in his lifetime. And, as at Peekskill, those who support human solidarity must be prepared to “hold the line” against reaction.

‘Hold The Line’

Let me tell you the story of a line that was held,
And many brave men and women whose courage we know well,
How we held the line at Peekskill on that long September day!
We will hold the line forever till the people have their way.

Hold the line!Hold the line!
As we held the line at Peekskill
We will hold it everywhere.
Hold the line!Hold the line!
We will hold the line forever
Till there’s freedom ev’rywhere.

Words by Lee Hays; Music by Pete Seeger (1949)

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

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Net Neutrality : Next Target of Astroturf Groups?

Posted on September 3, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

“WWIII Propaganda Posters: Support Net Neutrality” by Brian Moore / Flickr.

Will ‘Astroturf’ groups block Net Neutrality reform?

It’s no secret the five biggest telecom companies want Net Neutrality to disappear. All just happen to be members of a ‘pro-consumer’ group.

By Megan Tady / September 3, 2009

Chris, McGreal, a reporter for Britain’s Guardian newspaper, took to the road last month to report on how Americans living along Route 66 — made famous in John Steinbeck’s fictional Grapes of Wrath journey — are faring during the recession.

You might think McGreal quickly encountered “real Americans” protesting President Obama’s “socialist” healthcare agenda by hurling insults at town hall meetings. Cable news channels are full of these images, which together portray the United States as a giant angry grassroots rally against reform-minded policies.

Odd, then, that McGreal reports this:

The outbursts against President Obama’s healthcare plans filling television screens, with opponents calling him a Nazi and accusing him of planning death committees to do in old people, are to a large degree manufactured by the same people who use similar tactics to oppose abortion.

McGreal has it right: There is no genuine mass uprising against healthcare reform or climate change legislation. But the industry groups and corporations who benefit from the status quo—and thus have the most at stake in these debates—want us to think otherwise. And they’ve developed a slick way of manufacturing dissent: creating fake grassroots — ”astroturf” — organizations to do their bidding in our name.

Jim Hightower describes astroturf organizations as “the corporate version of grassroots…well-orchestrated PR efforts that put real folks out front, but are instigated, organized and funded by corporate interests and right-wing front groups.”

Astroturf groups like Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks rent themselves out to combat policies that hurt major corporations, from ExxonMobile to AT&T. They were behind April’s Tea Bag rallies, which protested tax increases, and flew hot air balloons as part of a campaign to discredit climate change.

Now corporations — AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Qwest — are paying astroturf groups to derail one of the most important public policy initiatives of our time: Net Neutrality. The cable and telecom lobby is spending hundreds of millions of dollars trying to become the Web’s new gatekeepers.

What is Net Neutrality?

Astroturf groups have set their sights on blocking the passage of a valuable new bill called the Internet Freedom Preservation Act. The bill, introduced into the House in early August, would protect the Internet from telecommunications and cable companies who want to control access to online content—and thereby make more money.

The principle that protects the Internet freedom we now enjoy is Net Neutrality, which leaves us free to visit any website and create and share anything we can imagine. This “open” platform allows us to bypass the old corporate gatekeepers to create our own entertainment, and organize for social change without fearing that an Internet service provider like Comcast or AT&T will block our messages because they disagree with our politics.

Net Neutrality as a baseline rule for the Internet was stripped away by a 2005 U.S. Supreme Court ruling (PDF link) that effectively allowed phone and cable companies to discriminate against websites, applications or services that they didn’t like.

We must restore this guiding principle to protect and ensure a free-flowing Web for all. The new legislation would mandate that all ISPs adhere to Net Neutrality and refrain from controlling, blocking or slowing down online content.

Rolling out the astroturf

So who exactly is shilling for industry? Let’s connect the dots.

It’s no secret the five biggest cable and telecommunications companies want Net Neutrality to disappear. All five just happen to be members of the “pro-consumer” (read: astroturf) group NetCompetition.org, which is trying to make this nasty problem go away for them. Scott Cleland, who heads the operation, has made it his job to bash Net Neutrality, even likening it to socialism: “Just like the Soviet socialists, the net neutrality movement blatantly misrepresents the facts.”

And when FreedomWorks isn’t throwing a tea party, they’re throwing a tantrum about Net Neutrality. Take it from Dick Armey, the former House majority leader who leads the group: “The proponents of Net Neutrality have some very nice sound bites and flowery talking points that would lead you to believe that it’s about keeping the Internet free,” he writes. “I assure you nothing could be further from the truth.”

Who has paid FreedomWorks bills? AT&T.

Meanwhile, the American Consumer Institute — doesn’t that sound innocuous — is questioning the new Net Neutrality bill for consumers. Stephen Pociask, a telecom consultant and former chief economist for Bell Atlantic, is behind the site.

In 2006, when a similar Net Neutrality bill was introduced, this group actively worked to get lawmakers to vote against it.

Speak out or cede control

What’s the difference between a real grassroots organization and a fake one? Astroturf groups are paid shills who don’t openly disclose their funding sources, pretend they’re taking a stance in the public’s interest and manufacture events to make them appear to be backed by a public majority.

For too long, special interest money has polluted the waters of public discourse in America. And unfortunately, our entrenched corporate media system is all too willing to repeat astroturf messages, thereby legitimizing them and stifling genuine debate.

The open Internet lets us speak for ourselves—unlike nearly all other media platforms. If we speak out in support of the Internet Freedom Preservation Act and drown out the din of astroturf groups and industry lobbyists, it will remain that way.

[Megan Tady is a campaign coordinator and writer for Free Press, the national, nonprofit media reform organization, and a former National Political Reporter for InTheseTimes.com.]

Source / In These Times

Also see Unmasking Astroturf: Smear Campaigns Threaten Health Care and Net Neutrality by Timothy Karr / Free Press / AlterNet / August 21, 2009

And Astroturf Groups Try to Enlist Conservatives to Oppose Net Neutrality by Philip Dampier / Save the Internet / August 5, 2009

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BonTaj Roulet : Bonnie Raitt and Taj Mahal Tour for the Environment

Posted on September 3, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer


Tour taps blues to raise green:
BonTaj Roulet blazes new ground

The mix of contributions from promoters/venues and ticketing agencies with matching funds from artists and concertgoers, distributed by popular vote, is a new recipe for concert tour fundraising…

By Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / September 3, 2009

In a tough economy, with music lovers thinking twice before going to see their favorite acts, the 34-date BonTaj Roulet Tour by Bonnie Raitt and Taj Mahal is blazing new green ground in raising money for charities. So far it’s collected over $100,000 for environmental and other causes. It could add that much again before the final show on September 25 at Rancho Mirage, California.

The tour features a unique pairing that cuts across rock and blues barriers… and a whole lot more. With strong reviews and healthy ticket sales on an otherwise rough summer for the music business, the tour is also laying the groundwork for a new mix in the magic art of using commercial concerts to raise funds for green and other causes.

According to Kathy Kane, Bonnie Raitt’s manager, “the artists are giving, the concert goers are giving AND the ticketing agencies are giving, along with some key venues and promoters.” Among the collaborators are Ticketmaster, Live Nation Ticketing, and Musictoday. “Not every venue and promoter is contributing,” says Kane, “but many are trying, and every venue and promoter has worked with us to make this happen.”

A 25-cent contribution added to the price of each ticket is matched with a 25-cent contribution from the artists. The funds are distributed to causes in proportion to votes tallied through the BonTaj Roulet tour website. Visitors to the website can choose between “safe & sustainable energy,” “environmental protection,” “social justice & human rights” and “blues/music education.” “The funds will be given to nonprofit organizations across the country,” says Kane. “If safe and sustainable energy received 23% of the votes then groups working on safe and sustainable energy will receive 23% of the funds being granted.”

The mix of contributions from promoters/venues and ticketing agencies with matching funds from artists and concertgoers, distributed by popular vote, is a new recipe for concert tour fundraising, says Kane. Many of the dates also feature VIP Charity Action Fund gatherings where donors get special seats and meet with the artists after the show. “Perhaps what makes this unique is the collaborative effort coming from different entities involved in putting on a concert. This way, everyone is contributing to raise funds out of their resources, not just the artist or the fans,”says Kane.

Of the 34 dates on the tour, 31 venues participated in the fundraising effort, she adds, with two choosing to support other causes of their own.

Tour-based fundraising has been a staple of the concert business for decades. Raitt helped organize one of the biggest with Musicians United for Safe Energy (MUSE), which filled Madison Square Garden for five “No Nukes” concerts in 1979. Along with others, she has had a special seating/meet and greet component to her shows for many years. The Guacamole Fund, the facilitator of the VIP Action Fund Charity Packages, has helped stage upwards of a thousand fundraising concerts for green energy organizations over the past 35 years.

Artists such as Dave Mathews are also finding new ways to contribute green to green. As part of a “So Much to Save” Campaign, Mathews is offering a code to download his band’s music in exchange for a variety of actions designed to help save the planet. Mathews is a board member of FarmAid, which has worked for more than a decade to save family farms. His fellow board members include Willie Nelson, John Mellancamp and Neil Young.

Under a gorgeous Indianapolis sky on August 25, Taj opened with a raucous, hard-driving signature R&B set. After a short break, Bonnie delivered virtuoso versions of favorites ranging from “Love Sneakin’ Up on You” to “Angel from Montgomery,” “Thing Called Love” and “I Can’t Make You Love Me.” Taj then joined her for “Satisfied,” “Done Changed My Way of Livin'” and the bawdy “Wah she Go Do” (infamous for the line “a woman must have an outside man”). After the sun set over the city’s White River Park, the two headliners sat back and improvised, front porch style. Raitt said there were “about 40 songs” they could have done. Judging from the enthusiastic response, one got the feeling the crowd would have stayed for all of them.

The Grand Rapids Press called the show there “as close to a perfect ending for a summer concert series as it gets.” As in Indianapolis, the Cape Cod Times reported “standing ovations on nearly every song,” with “a fun mix of genres, incorporating everything from country to reggae, jazz, rock and, of course, the blues.”

The additional news is that those blues for the multitudes meant a stack of green for the greens.

[Rag Blog contributor Harvey Wasserman was a co-organizer of the MUSE Concerts, and, with Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne and Graham Nash, of the nukefree.org website. He is managing editor of The Free Press, where this article also appears.]

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