Robert Jensen on White Privilege : Teachable Moments Require Willing Learners

Posted on July 28, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

Harvard Scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. is photographed by a neighbor as he is arrested at his home in Cambridge, July 16. Photo by B. Carter / Demotix Images / AP.

Teachable moments require willing learners

A system as perverse and pervasive as white racism — in all its forms, conscious and unconscious, brutal and subtle, personal and institutional — will not end simply because we appoint black professors or elect a black president.

By Robert Jensen / The Rag Blog / July 28, 2009

Honoring President Obama’s request that the controversy involving a black Harvard University professor and a white Cambridge police officer become “a teachable moment,” here’s my contribution to an old lesson that we white people tend to be slow to learn.

In lectures about the United States’ system of white supremacy and the privileges that white people have in that system, I have sometimes told a story about being stopped by police in Austin, TX.

I was driving home in a dilapidated old Volkswagen Beetle on a busy street, late at night after a long day at work. I was dressed in shorts and a t-shirt, feeling rather cranky and looking rather raggedy. Eager to get home, I saw the yellow light and gunned it. Next I saw the flashing red lights of a police car.

I turned off onto a dark side street and dug in my wallet for my license. Just as the officer got to my car, I was opening the glove compartment to get the vehicle registration when out popped a small knife I keep for emergencies. I looked at the knife, looked at the white officer, and wondered what he would say.

“Sir, would you mind if I held that knife while we talked?” he asked politely. I handed him the knife and my documents, and he walked back to his car. When he returned he handed me those documents, along with a ticket, and my knife, without comment. “Please drive safely,” he said. And safely I drove home.

When I told that story to illustrate white privilege, I asked people of color in the room what they imagined might have happened to them in such a situation. The black and Latino men, especially, laughed. “Do you mean before or after I’m on the ground with a gun at my head?” one of them said.

My point was not that every cop is out to harass or brutalize every person of color, but that people of color could never be sure a routine traffic stop would play out routinely. I could be reasonably sure that, barring unusual circumstances, such a stop would be uneventful. Even when the knife popped out, I didn’t feel at risk.

I was feeling proud of myself for making this point to the mainly white audience, when I saw a hand go up. I called on the young black man, assuming he would endorse my analysis.

“You really don’t get it, do you?” he said. “You think your privilege started when the cop came up to the car and saw you were white. Has it ever occurred to you that when you turned onto a dark side street you were taking your privilege for granted?”

My first response was to explain: I had been on a busy street and turned to avoid blocking traffic. I was trying to be considerate of other drivers, I said.

“I know why you did it. My point is that I would never turn onto an unlit street with a cop behind me,” the young man said. “I would have pulled over and blocked traffic. I’m not going to take myself out of public view with a cop.”

My next response was to feel appropriately foolish for my unwarranted self-righteousness, and then to be grateful to the man for using that teachable moment.

He wasn’t suggesting that I be ashamed of myself, only that I recognize the burden he carries in the world that I don’t. The story was one more example of the privilege that comes with being a member of the dominant group in an unjust hierarchical system. It’s the same lesson men should learn about the sexual violence women face. Heterosexuals should learn it about the condemnation that lesbians and gays endure. The wealthy should learn it about the insecurity that poor and working people cope with. U.S. citizens should learn it about the fear of arbitrary authority that haunts immigrants no matter what their status.

I still tell that story when I lecture, now emphasizing that the man’s comments had reminded me no one with privilege ever fully “gets it.” It doesn’t mean we whites — or men, or heterosexuals, or the well off, or citizens — are consigned to perpetual stupidity, but rather that we should never think we have it all figured out.

In this allegedly “post-racial” era, these teachable moments are an important reminder that white supremacy is woven deeply into the fabric of this country. A system as perverse and pervasive as white racism — in all its forms, conscious and unconscious, brutal and subtle, personal and institutional — will not end simply because we appoint black professors or elect a black president.

In this moment, we white folks should ask ourselves, after so many teachable moments, why we still have so much to learn.

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

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The Navajo Nation and Uranium Mining: Not a Happy Combination

Posted on July 28, 2009 by RagBlog

Fred and Clara Slowman near their newly rebuilt home near Teec Nos Pos, Ariz. Many homes were contaminated with uranium. Photo: Kevin Moloney for The New York Times.

Uranium Contamination Haunts Navajo Country
By Dan Frosch / July 26, 2009

TEEC NOS POS, Ariz. — It was one year ago that the environmental scientist showed up at Fred Slowman’s door, deep in the heart of Navajo country, and warned that it was unsafe for him to stay there.

The Slowman home, the same one-level cinderblock structure his family had lived in for nearly a half-century, was contaminated with potentially dangerous levels of uranium from the days of the cold war, when hundreds of uranium mines dotted the vast tribal land known as the Navajo Nation. The scientist advised Mr. Slowman, his wife and their two sons to move out until their home could be rebuilt.

“I was angry,” Mr. Slowman said. “I guess it was here all this time, and we never knew.”

The legacy wrought from decades of uranium mining is long and painful here on the expansive reservation. Over the years, Navajo miners extracted some four million tons of uranium ore from the ground, much of it used by the United States government to make weapons.

Many miners died from radiation-related illnesses; some, unaware of harmful health effects, hauled contaminated rocks and tailings from local mines and mills to build homes for their families.

Now, those homes are being demolished and rebuilt under a new government program that seeks to identify what are very likely dozens of uranium-contaminated structures still standing on Navajo land and to temporarily relocate people living in them until the homes can be torn down and rebuilt.

Stephen B. Etsitty, executive director of the Navajo Nation Environmental Protection Agency, and other tribal officials have been grappling for years with the environmental fallout from uranium mining.

“There were a lot of things people weren’t told about the plight of Navajos and uranium mining,” Mr. Etsitty said. “These legacy issues are impacting generations. At some point people are saying, ‘It’s got to end.’ ”

After a Congressional hearing in 2007, a cross-section of federal agencies committed to addressing the environmental and health impacts of uranium mining on the reservation. As part of that commitment, the federal Environmental Protection Agency and the Navajo Nation began working together to assess uranium levels in 500 structures through a five-year plan set to end in 2012.

Using old lists of potentially contaminated structures, federal and Navajo scientists have fanned out to rural reaches of the 27,000 square mile reservation — which includes swaths of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah — to measure levels of radium, a decay product of uranium that can cause lung cancer. Of 113 structures assessed so far, 27 contained radiation levels that were above normal.

“In these situations, you have contamination in somebody’s yard or in their house,” said Harry Allen, the E.P.A.’s section chief for emergency response in San Francisco who is helping lead the government’s efforts. “To us, that is somewhat urgent.”

Many structures that showed high levels of radiation were vacant; some families had already moved out after hearing stories of contamination in their homes. But eight homes still had people living in them, and the E.P.A. and Navajo officials have worked to convince residents that it would be unsafe to stay.

“There were a lot of things people weren’t told about the plight of Navajos and uranium mining,” Stephen B. Etsitty said. Photo: Kevin Moloney for The New York Times.

“People had been told they were living in contaminated structures, but nobody ever did anything about it,” said Will Duncan, an environmental scientist who has been the E.P.A.’s main representative on the reservation. “They would tell us, ‘We don’t believe you are going to follow through.’ ”

But with a budget of nearly $8 million, the E.P.A. has demolished all 27 contaminated structures and has begun building ones to replace those that had been occupied. Typically, the agency pays a Navajo contracting company to construct a log cabin or a traditional hogan in the structure’s stead, depending on the wishes of the occupants. Mr. Allen said the cost, including temporarily relocating residents, ran approximately $260,000 per dwelling and took about eight months.

The agency also offers $50,000 to those who choose not to have an old home rebuilt.

Lillie Lane, a public information officer with the Navajo Nation E.P.A. who has acted as a liaison between the federal government and tribal members, said the program held practical and symbolic importance given the history of uranium mining here.

Ms. Lane described the difficulty of watching families, particularly elders, leaving homes they had lived in for years. She told of coming upon two old miners who died before their contaminated homes could be rebuilt. “In Navajo, a home is considered sacred,” she said. “But if the foundation or the rocks are not safe, we have to do this work.”

Some families, Ms. Lane said, complained that their children were suffering from health problems and had wondered if radiation were to blame.

The E.P.A. has started sifting through records and interviewing family members to figure out whether mining companies that once operated on the reservation are liable for any damages, Mr. Allen said.

On a recent summer day, Fred and Clara Slowman proudly surveyed their new home, a one-level log cabin that sits in the quiet shadows of Black Rock Point, miles away from the bustle of Farmington, N.M., where the family has been living in a hotel.

Mr. Slowman said he suspected that waste materials from a nearby abandoned mine seeped into his house. The family plans on having a traditional Navajo medicine man bless their dwelling before they move in.

“In our traditional way, a house is like your mom,” he said. “It’s where you eat, sleep, where you’re taken care of. And when you come back from the city, you come back to your mom. It makes you feel real good.”

Source / New York Times

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Bob Libal :
Si Kahn : 44 years of music and social justice

Posted on July 28, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

Activist, musician, and executive director of Grassroots Leadership:  four decades in the struggle.

Si Kahn

Si Kahn. Photo by Robert Corwin / Photo Arts.

By Bob Libal | The Rag Blog | July 28, 2009

I read in the paper, I watched on the show
They said that it happened a long time ago
The years had gone by, I just didn’t know
Working for freedom now
The songs that we sang still ring in my ears
The hope and the glory, the pain and the fears
I just can’t believe it’s been 45 years
Working for freedom now
— Si Kahn, “Working for Freedom Now”

Acclaimed organizer, author, musician, and the executive director of Grassroots Leadership, the Southern-based social justice organization where I work, Si Kahn will be retiring next year after 30 years at the helm of the organization and more than 44 years in the Southern freedom movement.

The following is from Si’s retirement announcement:

May 1st, 2010 marks almost 45 years to the day since I came South to join the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the visionary student wing of the Southern Civil Rights Movement. That was the first step on a road that has led me as a civil rights, labor and community organizer and musician through the coal camps, cotton mill villages and prison towns of the South and Southwest.

That road has taken me inside such powerful times as the Brookside strike in Harlan County, Kentucky; the brown lung movement and J.P. Stevens campaign in the Carolinas; and the critical work of abolishing all for-profit private prisons, jails and detention centers, and putting an end to immigrant family detention, on which Grassroots Leadership has focused for the past 10 years.

The songs I’ve written grew out of the organizing I’ve done. The people I’ve met and worked with, their words and songs, their stories and jokes, have been the stuff out of which the songs of the last 45 years have been woven.

These people, the poor and working people of the South, Appalachia and the Southwest, have been a source of continuing inspiration to me, in my music and in my organizing. Their lives and dreams have given me strength and belief.

I hope that my songs will help people find in themselves the strength they need to keep on keeping on. But I also know music is not enough to change the world. It takes organizing, people working together to reach the goals they set for themselves.

Most recently, Grassroots Leadership has taken on a national Campaign to End Immigrant Family Detention, the policy made infamous at the T. Don Hutto detention center in Taylor, Texas. Hutto is a former medium-security prison operated by private prison corporation Corrections Corporation of America. Since opening in 2006, the facility has held immigrant children and their families from more than 40 countries and drawn international condemnation.

Si’s latest song, called T. Don Hutto, can be heard at grassrootsleadership.org. It’s the latest in a long line of songs of family, community, work and freedom such as “Aragon Mill,” “Gone,” “Gonna Rise Again” and “Wild Rose of the Mountain” that have been recorded by over 100 artists. Si has released 15 albums of his original songs, plus a collection of traditional labor, civil rights and women’s songs with Pete Seeger and Jane Sapp.

Si Kahn to Perform in Austin

Si Kahn will be in Austin on Monday, August 3rd, performing an evening of music benefiting Grassroots Leadership’s Campaign to End Immigrant Family Detention at MonkeyWrench Books, 110 E. North Loop, 78751. Email blibal@grassrootsleadership.org or call (512) 971-0487 for more details. A $7-$10 suggested donation will be collected at the door, though no one will be turned away for lack of funds.

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Doctors Want Real Health Care Reform

Posted on July 28, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

Cartoon from LTSaloon.org

Doctors show support for health care reform;
Lobbyists, Blue Dogs and Republicans work to gut real change

By Dr. Stephen R. Keister / The Rag Blog / July 28, 2009

This past Wednesday I listened to President Obama’s press conference at which he discussed his ongoing efforts for reform of our health care system. I thought his presentation was uninspired although, as Dr. Paul Krugman and other economists pointed out, he did lay out the costs involved and the savings to the individual American, as well as the need for better medical care for the nation at large. I was, however, concerned that the “public option” issue did not arise until near the end of the conference, and that the President did not discuss it in any detail.

At times I felt that I was listening to Hamlet’s soliloquy, or perhaps Richard III’s, (Act V, final scene): “A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse.” In keeping with the Shakespeare analogy, we can always think of Sen. Baucus as Iago, and any of several Republicans as King Lear in Act 4, Scene 6, as he wears roses as a crown.

In any event several new issues have come to light. There are new television ads supporting universal health care sponsored by the health insurance industry but they stress their support for a BIPARTISAN health care bill. I would think it apparent to any perceptive person that there is no such thing as a “bipartisan” approach to universal health care, making this concern of the insurance industry mere fluff. Another ad in support of universal health care is sponsored by the pharmaceutical manufacturers and Families USA. I have also learned of an upcoming ad from a recently formed physicians group opposing universal health care. One can almost be assured that some well financed spin-off of the insurance or pharmaceutical industries is behind this.

A recent poll of physicians nationwide conducted by the Indiana University School of Medicine shows the following breakdown of support for national health insurance among practicing physicians in a range of fields: psychiatrists, 80%; pediatric subspecialties, 70%; emergency medicine, 68%; general pediatrics, 65%; general internal medicine, 62%; medical subspecialties, 60%; pathology, 58%; family medicine, 57%; ob-gyn, 56%; general surgery, 55%; surgical subspecialties, 45%; anesthesiology, 40%; radiology, 30%.

Obviously the great majority of physicians –- or, in the vernacular, insurance industry “providers” — ARE in favor of universal care. I am certain, as well, that none of the doctors polled received compensation for their participation. Again, be suspicious about any sponsored TV ad showing doctors in general to be against health care. The old admonition: “Follow the money.”

Returning to President Obama’s near omission of any mention of the public option in his press conference. This, I feel, is a cause for great concern, and makes one wonder just what goes on in the legislative process behind closed doors. Are we being hoodwinked? Are we being fed a political fairy tale? Kip Sullivan of Physicians for a National Health Program suggests a frightening scenario, and I would suggest that all interested in health care reform read this rather extensive article and prepare to recalibrate your thinking.

Many of us felt, from the very beginning, that universal/single payer health care was the single viable option, especially when we take into account the fact that insurance companies do not really do anything to make people healthier, but are merely efficient gatekeepers for their shareholders. Profits at ten of the country’s largest insurance companies, according to Rep. Anthony Weiner in Politico, rose 428% from 2000-2007. Yet, many of our elected representatives, the Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats, maintain their allegiance to the health insurance cartel, the pharmaceutical manufacturers, and the medical device manufacturers, rather than representing the public.

Daily I become more concerned about the apathy of the American public concerning this most important legislation, which is in their interest and in the interest of their children and grandchildren. I would guess that 5-10% of the public is actively and passionately involved in the fight for health care reform; from the rest we hear nothing but dead silence.

You can be assured that if the French populace were to be deprived of decent health care the boulevards would be filled with peaceful demonstrators; the unions, which in France work in concert with their employers, would be organizing a general strike, and the age old cry of “liberty, equality, fraternity,” would once again be heard. In the United States? Mostly dead silence!

For more than 200 years the French have been cynical of politicians and their promises. They have learned to question, not to accept everything on blind faith. They benefit from the cultural influence of Voltaire, Zola, Proust, Kafka, and Sartre whose work has served to stimulate critical thought. In France, though there have been great individual achievements, there is a sense of community and of looking out for your neighbor.

In America, many feel that to question authority is heresy. The American culture teaches subservience, uncritical belief in authority, even if morally flawed and bogus; the Horatio Alger myth and Calvinistic theology teach that God rewards the righteous by giving him/her financial rewards. Our educational system, more and more, teaches that one should not question, and as a matter of fact tends to discourage original thought and to fear the truly educated.

Rev. Howard Bess writes in Consurtium News, “One of the ironies of modern American politics is that many people who profess to follow the teachings of Jesus Christ are among the most vociferous advocates of war, the most disdainful of the poor, and the staunchest defenders of personal wealth.” This is worth reprinting and passing out to your more “devout’ acquaintances.” I was amazed some time ago to read in a poll that 60% of fundamentalist Christians had never READ the Sermon on the Mount. Also read Rabbi Michael Lerner’s observations in Tikkum Magazine where he asks, “Why Can’t Obama Convince the Dems?”.

Those opposed to health care reform continue to beat the drum of high costs. The cost is surely much less than our ongoing and highly questionable wars, of our bloated defense budget. Monica Sanchez writes in Campaign For America’s Future that the House’s health Reform Bill would produce a $6 Billion surplus. This bill, of course, includes a public option. Better still, if not too late, would be reconsideration of HR 676 which could actually reduce the costs of health care nationally by 30%.

In any event, how to raise the money? It is immoral not to undo the 2001 Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, and that could go a long way toward financing a program. And since the taxpayer, in reality, is now subsidizing employer provided health insurance — since the employee pays no tax, and it is essentially earned income — I see no objection to a reasonable federal surtax on such insurance. In the long run a true national health insurance plan would more than compensate in savings to the individual, and would provide in return peace of mind regarding health care for his or her family.

The moneyed interests in this country have denied us universal health care since it was first suggested by Theodore Roosevelt nearly a hundred years ago. Remember, as well, that French national health care began its evolution in the late 19th century under a conservative Third Republic; that German care originated at the suggestion of Otto von Bismark , a Royalist, in the late 19th century, and that it originated in the U.K. under Winston Churchill, a Conservative, after World War II.

The only truly “socialized medicine” I am familiar with is at the Veterans Administration, and in military hospitals here in the USA. The Scandinavian nations have social-democratic governments, but their health care gives absolutely free choice of physician (not “provider” as doctors are called here), hospital, specialist, and pharmacy. With certain rare exclusions the physician has free choice of treatment and the management of care. Care is not rationed on ability to pay as it is by the insurance industry in the United States.

One last thought. There’s a fraudulent television ad about a lady who came to the United States for treatment of a “brain tumor” which had not immediately been taken care of in Canada. I have learned that she did not have cancer, let alone a tumor per se. She had a fluid filled cyst near the pituitary gland and optic nerve, which in due time could cause problems with sight. It called for a procedure performed by only certain neurosurgeons, and would have required some time to schedule since it was not an emergency. It was apparently the individual’s decision to opt for immediate surgery and that was the reason for here coming to the Mayo Clinic.

It reminds me of a fine chap I played golf with some years ago who had an atrial fibrillation that could be cured by an ablation procedure done by a cardiologist per catheter. He could have had it done locally within 48 hours, but he opted for a specific cardiologist at an out of town clinic and that resulted in a two month delay. Certain decisions are those of the patient and not of the system.

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

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Feed the Blogger!

Posted on July 28, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE

Photo and design by James Retherford / The Rag Blog.

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Mexico : The Song of the Guerrilla is Heard Again

Posted on July 27, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

Rosendo Radilla Pacheco, politician, activist and folksinger, was “disappeared” by federal troops in August 1974 during Mexico’s “dirty war.” He is now the subject of a human rights investigation and a documentary film (above).

As Mexico Awaits 2010:
The song of the guerrilla is heard once again in Guerrero

Gomez Mont insisted [that] Mexico has made great advances in human rights since 1974. ‘That was another Mexico. Mexico is different now.’

Or is it?

By John Ross / The Rag Blog / July 27, 2009

MEXICO CITY – One day long ago in August 1974, the 25th to be precise, in the heat of the Mexican military’s “dirty war” to root out subversion in the Pacific coast state of Guerrero, security forces under the command of General Mario Arturo Acosta Chaparo dragged the popular musician and former mayor of Atoyac Rosendo Radilla off a bus along the Costa Grande highway just north of Acapulco.

His son, also named Rosendo and then 11, remembers that when the musician asked the “guachos” (local vernacular for federal troops) why he was being detained he was told that it was for “writing corridos (ballads) about Lucio Cabanas”, a rebel Atoyac schoolteacher whose Party of the Poor was then roaming the sierras that soar above the Costa Grande. Rosendo Radilla never saw his father again.

This past July 7th, 35 years after the elder Radilla vanished off the face of the earth, Rosendo and his sister Tita sat in a San Jose Costa Rica courtroom as the Inter-American Human Rights Court (CIDH) opened hearings into their father’s long-ago forced disappearance. The hearing was the first time an international court has agreed to put Mexico’s “dirty war” (1974-78) on trial.

To be sure, the corridista was not the only local to have been disappeared during the military’s long reign of terror. Families in Atoyac count more than 600 campesinos taken by security forces and never seen again. Acosta Chaparo was later convicted of dumping the bodies of 143 prisoners from Mexican air force Israeli Arava 201s into the Pacific Ocean near Acapulco. The names of 121 other victims were attached to the Radilla case before the CIDH.

Even Mexico’s Interior Secretary Fernando Gomez Mont, who oversees internal security, concedes that the military was probably complicit in Rosendo’s disappearance but argues that the CIDH has no jurisdiction in the case — the court did not exist in 1974 and Mexico only recognized its competence in human rights matters in 1998.

At any rate, Gomez Mont insisted before the court, Mexico has made great advances in human rights since 1974. “That was another Mexico. Mexico is different now.”

Or is it?

Not a month before the CIDH convened to review Rosendo Radilla’s shrouded fate, Mexican army troops occupied three towns in the very same sierra where Cabanas was eventually run to ground and executed in December 1974. 500 soldiers in three troop carriers, a dozen hummers, and accompanied by a brace of U.S.-manufactured helicopters invaded the high sierra municipality of Coyuca de Catalan under the aegis of President Felipe Calderon’s White House-financed War on the Drug Cartels. In one village of 50 families, the guacho threatened to burn down all the houses.

A group of advocates from the Tlachinollan Human Rights Center which reached Puerto de Las Ollas just as the troops were pulling out, recorded eyewitness accounts of torture. Among the abuses: a crippled man was pulled off his burro and when he refused to answer the guachos‘ questions, needles were inserted under his fingernails. The soldiers poured motor oil on maiz reserves the villagers had been storing to feed their families through the rainy season.

Although the incursion was reportedly ordered in pursuit of local marijuana and poppy growers, the solders repeatedly questioned villagers about the whereabouts of one “Comandante Ramiro,” leader of the Revolutionary Army of the Insurgent People (ERPI) that is said to be encamped in these mountain forests.

In a communiqué issued in early July, Comandante Ramiro took issue with the military’s cover story that the guachos were hunting dope growers. Three times between June 9th and the 11th, the ERPI had confronted the Mexican army in the Sierra of Coyuca de Catalan, killing three troops and wounding one, the guerrilla leader claimed. To counter the ERPI’s disclosure, Secretary of Defense officials displayed ten uniforms and a dozen long guns at a press conference in nearby Ciudad Altamirano, claiming that 16 members of a “gavilla” (dope gang) had been killed in the skirmishes.

If Comandante Ramiro’s story can be corroborated, the face-off in the Sierra marks the first between the rebels and the Mexican military since 11 Indian farmers attending an ERPI meeting across the state at El Charco were gunned down June 10th, 1998.

Other casualties during the six days (June 7th-13th) that the military was storming communities in the Coyuca Sierra include liberation priest Habacuc Hernandez and two young seminarians cut down on the streets of Altamirano by unknowns under the nose of the local army command.

The military offensive was conducted under a press blackout. No reporter was invited to accompany the convoy and when, on July 14th, La Jornada de Guerrero published a front-page story under the headline “The Army Lays Siege To A Sierra Town,” a thousand copies of the paper were seized by unidentified armed men on a mountain road north of Acapulco and the truck hijacked.

Photo is said to depict guerrilla leader “Comandante Ramiro.” Photo from La Verdad del Sureste.

Who is this Comandante Ramiro and what does he want? According to press reports, the rebel leader, who has become the most visible spokesperson for the guerrilla option in Mexico, is an ex-prisoner named Omar Guerrero Solis. In recent months, Ramiro has become emboldened enough to call a press conference at an undisclosed Sierra location that was attended by the national media — one photo shows a group of 15 women holding aloft their AK-47s.

The ERPI is preparing to resume its offensive against the “mal gobierno” (“bad government”) in coming months, Comandante Ramiro disclosed to reporters but conceded that his fighters were short on arms. The Comandante also told the journalists that he thought he would be killed in the coming fighting. The only way he would come down from the Sierra was “slung over the back of a mule, dead.”

The ERPI is one of several split-offs from the Popular Revolutionary Army (EPR) that rose on June 28th 1996, on the first year anniversary of the massacre of 17 farmers at a lonely river crossing Aguas Blancas closer to the coast. The EPR was itself an alliance of 14 guerilla “focos” with many cadre drawn from the descendants of those who had once fought alongside Cabanas. Throughout 1996, the EPR battled the Mexican army at many points in Guerrero and several other states before their guns fell mysteriously silent.

In Guerrero, it is often difficult to sort out who is doing the shooting. The sparsely peopled outback up in the high country of the western Sierra Madre is the traditional stomping ground of both guerrillas and gavillas, bands of pistoleros who grow “mota” (marijuana) and “amapola” (opium poppies) destined for the U.S. market. The gavillas serve as mercenaries for powerful “caciques” or rural bosses usually associated with the long-ruling PRI party who scalp the forests, sell off the timber, and grow dope and run their cattle on the cleared land.

In the mid 1990s, farmers in the sierras of Coyuca and Petatlan mobilized against the PRI caciques, some of whom had struck a deal with the U.S.-based Boise Cascade timber giant, then operating on the Costa Grande. Two leaders of the “Campesinos Ecologistas” (“Ecological Farmers”) Rodolfo Montiel and Teodoro Cabrera were run to ground by the Mexican military, tortured, and forced to sign false confessions admitting that they were dope growers. Montiel and Cabrera were imprisoned in Iguala State Penitentiary where they were designated prisoners of conscience by Amnesty International and were awarded the much-coveted Goldman Prize, an environmental Nobel, for their defense of Guerrero’s forests.

Nonetheless, despite the international renown of the Ecological Farmers, the caciques continue to call the shots up in the Sierra — the all-powerful rancher and timber poacher Rogociano de la Alba has been accused of ordering the “suicide” of the Campesinos Ecologistas‘ lawyer Digna Ochoa in 2000. Villagers rousted up in Puerto de Las Ollas in June report that the guachos repeatedly chanted “Viva Rogociano!”

The state of Guerro has been the hot pot for the war of the guerrilla (literally “little war” or sometimes “the War of the Flea”) since pre-conquest times when the undermanned Chontales bravely resisted the domination of the Aztec Empire. Jose Maria Morelos and Vicente Guerrero, the sons of Afro-Mexican muleteers, led guerrilla armies in the hot lands of Guerrero during the war of liberation from the Spanish Crown.

Some of the most illustrious battles of that incorruptible revolutionary Emiliano Zapata and his Liberating Army of the South were fought in Guerrero during the 1910-1919 Mexican revolution. Indeed, Lucio Cabanas, who, in concert with another rural maestro Genaro Vazquez, kept the guachos busy back in the 1960s and ’70s, was the grandson of one of Zapata’s generals. The EPR was larded with the grandsons and nephews of Cabanas’s fighters until it split into an alphabet soup of groups like the ERPI, the EPRI, the FARP, PROCUP, and the Comando Justiciero of the Clandestine Committee of the Poor-June 28th (CCRO-CJ28.)

The recent fireworks in the Sierra suggest that the story isn’t done yet. 2010, the 100th anniversary of the start of the Mexican revolution and the bicentennial of liberation from Spain, is seen by some as an historical platform for the resurgence of the armed option which, in light of the stolen presidential elections in 2006 and the return of the PRI to power in the recent July 5th mid-terms, seems more inviting in some quarters than the electoral one.

Until the firefight between the Mexican army and the ERPI in June, the guerrillas of Mexico had lapsed into a profound silence — often a sign that something is cooking down below. The fighters of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in the highlands and jungle of Chiapas have long since abandoned their guns as they peacefully till their cornfields in self-declared autonomous territories and the EZLN’s charismatic spokesperson Subcomandante Marcos has not been seen or heard from all year.

The EPR, which long ago moved its base of operations to Oaxaca, was jolted back to life in May 2007 when two of its historical leaders, Edmundo Reyes Amaya and Gabriel Cruz Sanchez were kidnapped by security forces from a hotel in the Oaxaca city market. To draw attention to the forced disappearances, the Popular Revolutionary Army bombed PEMEX oil pipelines in Guanajuato and adjoining Queretero state, suggesting that they have cadre in that central Mexican region. Negotiations with the Calderon government for the return of the EPR militants via a blue-ribbon commission of leftist notables headed by San Cristobal de las Casas Bishop Emeritus Don Samuel Ruiz have floundered.

Up until the June skirmishes in the Coyuca sierra, the ERPI, which was decapitated by the arrests of its maximum leaders, “Comandanta Aurora” (AKA Gloria Arenas) and Jacobo Silva, has limited itself to issuing firebrand manifestoes on the Internet.

Some years ago, Mexico’s lead intelligence agency, the CISEN, estimated that 10 to 15 armed guerrillas operated in country. Today, the agency which certainly has its ear pressed firmly to ground in light of possible insurrection in 2010, does not quantify the number of rebel groups with an armed capacity in the field.

Rooted on the remote edges of the country like the sierras of Guerrero, guerrilla bands cannot inflict much damage on the highly centralized Mexican state but coordinated, simultaneous risings in various regions of the republic would certainly be a crucible for destabilization in 2010.

Such unified initiatives have had success in the past — the Mexican revolution, in fact, was the handiwork of three separate peasant armies that sometimes moved together to unseat dictators and despots. The Zapatista uprising in January 1994 was originally conceived of as a coordinated insurrection to be carried out by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in the south and the Francisco Villa Army in Chihuahua — but the northern force was never consolidated.

On August 28th, 1996, the EPR staged coordinated attacks in Guerrero, Oaxaca, Mexico state, Guanajuato, and Chiapas targeting federal troops and police. Just this past week (July 11th-12th), in west central Michoacan state, the narco-guerrilla known as La Familia gunned down 16 federal police officers in 17 coordinated attacks. An alliance between guerilla groups and narco cartels like La Familia cannot be discounted as Mexico moves into 2010 mode.

In El Violin, a 2007 movie that recreates the dirty war in Guerrero (in its opening scene, unseen guachos brutally beat a suspected guerrillero), the late one-handed fiddle player Angel Tavira, one of an elite family of hot land Paganinis, plays an itinerant musician who spies on the soldiers and buries guns for the guerrilla until he is finked out and tortured to death (El Violin is also the name of a torture technique.) Political columnist Julio Hernandez (La Jornada) recently imagined Don Angel up in heaven wrapping his stump as he prepares to strike bow to fiddle. But the old man is confused about what to play, Hernandez wrote. He doesn’t know if what is happening in the sierras of Guerrero is the end of a long story or the beginning of a new chapter.

[John Ross is an American author, poet, journalist, and activist who lives in Mexico City. John Ross will present Iraqigirl, the diary of a teenager growing up under U.S. occupation in northern Iraq, at 7 p.m on July 30th at Modern Times Bookstore, 888 Valencia Street in San Francisco’s Mission District. Ross developed and edited the Haymarket Books volume.]

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James Retherford : Who Watches the Watchman? The Huston Plan

Posted on July 27, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer


Part IV
Who Watches the Watchman?

COINTELPRO and the Federal Government’s
Clandestine Attack on the U.S. Constitution

The plan, submitted to Nixon on June 25, 1970, called for increasing the role of the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency in domestic spying while lifting restrictions on illegal wiretaps, bugs, and break-ins…

By James Retherford / The Rag Blog / July 27, 2009

[A version of this series was originally researched and written six years ago. It describes in chilling detail how the U.S. government surreptitiously conspired to maintain lockdown social control of American citizens in the period up to and including post-Watergate. Go here for the introduction to and earlier installments of “Who Watches the Watchman.”]

The Huston Plan

As a student leader of Young Americans for Freedom at Indiana University during the mid- to late-Sixties, Tom Charles Huston was a walking provocation, intent on smoking out Communists from every dark corner. He once filibustered a campus SDS meeting; this “totalitarian Communist-front” group (according to Huston) was, in fact, so ultra-democratic that its members would not/could not muster enough political will to order him off the stage, though every word from his mouth created rancor and threatened to incite riots.

In fact, it took a spontaneous “direct action” by my friend and frequent co-conspirator Allen Gurevitz and myself to wrap Huston in an American flag and drag him off the stage. Tom Huston has been wrapping himself in American flags ever since.

Therefore it was only a mild surprise when I learned a few years later that Tom Charles Huston, as a new recruit serving on Richard Nixon’s White House staff, authored a clandestine plan to centralize the government’s political police agencies under the direct control, albeit secret, of the president. The plan, submitted to Nixon on June 25, 1970, called for increasing the role of the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency in domestic spying while lifting restrictions on illegal wiretaps, bugs, and break-ins.


The impetus for this initiative, according to Huston’s later testimony to the Church Commission, was Nixon’s growing impatience with perceived bureau ineptitude coupled with rumors that the aging Hoover had become “mentally incompetent,” at least in the view of FBI third-in-command William C. Sullivan. Without his boss’ knowledge, Sullivan had collaborated with Huston on a plan that would, in fact, greatly diminish Hoover’s decades-long iron control over domestic covert intelligence operations and would simultaneously elevate Sullivan’s own role.

Nixon aide H.R. Haldeman informed Huston on July 14, 1970, that the president had approved the plan, and Huston gave the various intelligence agencies the go-ahead on July 23. The U.S. had a new and highly illegal security program, one which called for a stronger attack on militants, authorizing illegal break-ins, mail checks, bugs, wiretaps, monitoring of international communications, and “coverage” of American students (and others) traveling and living abroad.

The plan also created a permanent Interagency Group on Domestic Intelligence and Internal Security, composed of the chiefs of the FBI, CIA, DIA, NSA, and military intelligence agencies. The group was to “oversee all domestic intelligence, prepare intelligence estimates and evaluations, and ‘perform such other duties as the president shall, from time to time, assign.’” It was to work in secret, its existence and purpose known only to those with a “need to know.” The goal: better coordination and greater responsiveness to the White House.

There was one stumbling block, however. Though his conspiratorial nose had obviously weakened with age, Hoover was still alert enough to smell a rat, especially one in his own office, i.e., Sullivan. The old man, as Huston later told Haldeman, “refused to go along with a single conclusion drawn or support a single recommendation made” and furthermore had “entered his objections as footnotes to the report.” Hoover took his complaints to Attorney General John Mitchell, who backed Hoover’s contention that the plan be reconsidered. On July 28, the White House was forced to telephone the various agencies and ask them to return the memoranda giving the president’s approval. Sullivan was quietly demoted and quickly lost his position of influence in the domestic intelligence field.

While the Huston Plan was dead, however, the various clandestine operations that it had intended to coordinate and focus continued in the form of the Justice Department’s Internal Security Division, under whose auspices 13,000 May Day 1971 peace demonstrators were arrested (illegally, so the courts would declare) by riot-gear-clad Washington police and packed into overflowing jails and outdoor stadiums as well as the special grand juries/inquisitions which I will describe in the next installment.

[James Retherford knows firsthand what it was like to be targeted by COINTELPRO. A founder and editor of The Spectator in Bloomington, Indiana, in 1966, Retherford is a director of the New Journalism Project, the nonprofit organization that publishes The Rag Blog.]

Please see

Also see James Retherford : Brandon Darby, The Texas 2, and the FBI’s Runaway Informants by James Retherford / The Rag Blog / May 26, 2009

And for more background on the history of informants in Texas, read The Spies of Texas by Thorne Dreyer / The Texas Observer / Nov. 17, 2006.

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Dick Cheney : Assassination Nation

Posted on July 27, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer


Dick Cheney: More tales from the dark side

Peter Berger, a security analyst at the American Enterprise Institute thinks that, judging from Congressional reaction, the program must have involved much more than killing some Al Qaeda people.

By Sherman DeBrosse / The Rag Blog / July 27, 2009

We have learned that Vice President Dick Cheney, in 2002, recommended sending troops into the Buffalo area to apprehend the “Lackawanna Six.” These people were accused of involvement in terrorism, which Cheney thought was enough of an excuse to bypass legal barriers to the use of soldiers to seize property or carry out police functions.

One wonders if he was interested in creating a precedent for the use of troops in American cities on a more regular basis. We know that he and his friend Donald Rumsfeld have been involved in continuation of government planning since the Reagan presidency and we suspect that all these contingency plans involved a greatly expanded role for the military.

We also know that under the Bush-Cheney administration, a Northern Command was established and that special units from it are now functioning in the U.S. to protect military property and that of defense contractors.

Rather than obsessing over why Dr. Louis Henry Gates dissed a Cambridge policeman, the mainstream media and we citizens should be showing more interest in health care reform, and far more important, the actions taken by Dick Cheney and George Bush that endanger the very health of this democratic republic.

So far, the Obama administration has not taken these matters very seriously. When Barack Obama took power, he refused to support calls for a truth commission to look into violations of the law connected with detention, torture, and domestic surveillance. He promised to close the Guantanamo detention center but retained others and continued rendition. His Justice Department defended the Bush Administration’s use of the state secret privilege and it did nothing to protect whistle blowers, firing one employee who outed Bush Administration abuses. Now Obama is threatening to veto any legislation that would curb the state secret privilege.

In Congress, Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the CIA had repeatedly lied to Congress, but some evidence developed showing she knew something about torture before she claimed she had. She said little about it then because she had concluded only a change of administration would resolve the matter. It was also clear that the agency was not telling the Congressional leaders everything.

Leon Panetta, the new Director of the CIA, defended his agency against her charges. Then, in July, he told Congressional intelligence committees that after 9/11, the Bush administration opened a new covert operation that Congress had not been told about. Democrats expressed shock, but Republicans said it was an on and off operation of little consequence. However, Peter Berger, a security analyst at the American Enterprise Institute thinks that, judging from Congressional reaction, the program must have involved much more than killing some Al Qaeda people.

Panetta terminated the program and told the Congressmen that the agency had been misled about what was going on in the program. Apparently, the CIA was more interested in training people in Afghanistan to carry out these tasks. CIA people are telling the press that few were involved in the executive assassinations operation with the possible exceptions of general counsel John Rizzo and deputy director Stephen Kappes. The only part of the CIA involved in the military-directed assassinations program was the Special Activities Unit, which had a number of former Delta Force people.

Some CIA people are delighted to see Cheney in hot water and hope he pays a heavy price for his death squads. They see Cheney as abetting a long-term Pentagon plan to swallow up the CIA. This dispute continues in the Obama administration in disputes between Admiral Dennis C. Blair, Director of National Intelligence, and Director Panetta. Don’t expect Cheney to face too much heat. A serious investigation would be politically damaging for Obama, and Cheney has left a number of “stay-behinds” who are embedded deep in the national security and cabinet departments who can obstruct any investigation.

It was soon learned that Vice President Dick Cheney had ordered the CIA not to brief the Congress about it and that it involved finding and killing terrorists abroad. Some thought it was the same “executive assassination teams” that Seymour Hersh had uncovered in March. Some believed it also involved in domestic spying and the killing of several foreign leaders, an Iranian nuclear scientist, and a Hezbollah military leader.

After 9/11, teams sought to find and kill Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders in Afghanistan and Iraq. The precedent for this was the Phoenix Program during the Vietnam War. The assassination program was expanded into George Tenet’s Worldwide Attack Matrix . It targeted enemies in numerous countries, including, possibly, the United States.

Some have attributed the murder of Abu Seger, Saddam’s money man, to the executive assassination plan. He knew where Saddam had huge stashes of cash. He was beaten to death by interrogators, even though those who arrested him had already found $40 million in plastic bags in his bedroom. But that was chickenfeed. Some attribute a 2002 Iranian plane crash to the operation because the downed craft carried Ukranian and Russian scientists. At least five other Iranian plane crashes have been attributed to this operation.

The bungled assassination of a politician in Kenya created embarrassment and the apparent shelving of the program. One cannot help wondering if British scientist Dr. David Kelly was offed by these people. Kelly told a former British ambassador that if Iraq were invaded,” I will probably be found dead in the woods.”

Due to problems with the CIA, Cheney came to rely upon people from the Joint Special Operations Command. Most of the personnel came from Delta Force. The JSOC was created in the Reagan administration and could have been used on occasion for sabotage and assassinations. The present commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McCrystal, commanded JSOC beginning in September, 2003.

It, in turn, works with the Mossad’s “Kidon” Department, which does assassinations and kidnappings. Indeed, the Cheney program was based upon the successful Israeli program of preemptive assassinations. As the rift between the Rumsfeld Pentagon and the CIA widened, the agency began to back away from joint operations, seeing them as potential threats to its normal operations. Hersh maintains that the CIA withdrew early and all the wet work was done by the Pentagon’s people.

On the other hand, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, once a top aide to Colin Powell, told Rachel Maddow the CIA did get involved in the assassinations, though it noted that much of the work was probably done by people from Delta Force. He added that it was laughable to claim the CIA never lied to Congress.

Some knowledgeable Pakistanis believe that the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto on December 27, 2007, was carried out by elements within Al Qaeda and the Taliban that were indirectly controlled, probably through the Pakistan ISI, by Cheney’s assassination apparatus. She was shot in the neck and chest before the bomb went off. Perhaps the assassination was an effort to keep General Perez Musharraf in power, suggesting a professional hit.

Investigations of Bush era crimes will damage Democratic political prospects because the MSM lacks the integrity to separate these investigations from mere political witch hunts. In previous eras, there would have been some Republicans in national life who would have been very concerned about assassinations, the state secret privilege abuses, domestic spying, and more. Alas, that is not the case today. Almost all will simply parrot the McConnell-Boehner line that probing the Cheney-Bush abuses is nothing but politics. These matters go to the very fabric of our republic, and steps must be taken make certain these actions are not precedents for future abuses.

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

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Colombian Independence Day : Uribe and the Latin American Left

Posted on July 27, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

Colombian President Álvaro Uribe.

Colombia opens bases to U.S. military

Presidents Chavez and Evo Morales of Bolivia have been especially outspoken in their criticism of President Uribe’s decision to allow U.S. bases in Colombia, and at least once he’s been called a ‘traitor to Latin America.’

By Val Liveoak / The Rag Blog / July 27, 2009

BOGOTA — Last Monday was Colombian Independence Day and there were parades and other celebrations throughout the country. President Álvaro Uribe read a long speech in a monotone on TV in the middle of the afternoon. (Doesn’t he have access to, at least, a teleprompter? You could see the papers in his hand and he very seldom even looked up, much less changed the tone of his voice.)

One of the main topics was defending the government’s decision to open three Colombian military bases to US military presence, which he insists is only intended to provide more assistance with the war on drugs. But since two of the bases, (one an air base and one a naval base, I think) are very near the Venezuelan border, President Hugo Chavez is complaining of feeling menaced, and threatening to cut off trade with Colombia. The third base is near the Ecuadoran border, not too far from the U.S. base at Palmerola being closed by Ecuadoran President Correa.

Both countries are part of the Latin American leftist/anti U.S. bloc that includes Bolivia and Cuba, and depending on the issue, Brazil, Chile, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and now El Salvador among others. One of the accusations lodged against President Zelaya of Honduras, deposed last month in a military coup that still has not been resolved, is that he was bringing Honduras into this bloc, too.

Presidents Chavez and Evo Morales of Bolivia have been especially outspoken in their criticism of President Uribe’s decision to allow U.S. bases in Colombia, and at least once he’s been called a “traitor to Latin America.” While some others have not gone so far, it is a problematic policy that he has undertaken.

Within Colombia, several legislators are questioning whether this will impinge on Colombia’s sovereignty, and are criticizing other aspects of the agreement, although there’s little concern expressed about how the U.S. presence is likely to increase aspects of the civil war which damaged civilians, such as attacks by both guerrilla and paramilitary groups, violations of human rights, and the general decay of communities near military bases.

Other news while I have been here has included a video purporting to be a guerrilla comandante bragging about the FARC’s financial support of the electoral campaign of President Correas, and the ties they have with his government. The timing of the release of this news is suspect — it is claimed to have been found on the computer discovered at a guerrilla site just over the border in Ecuador, that was captured last year, after a battle in which several high level commanders were killed.

For months, information from the computer dominated the news, accusing Venezuela and Cuba of material support of the FARC and other governments, including Costa Rica and Nicaragua, were charged with other ties. It does seem curious that only now, many months later, and at the same time as the deal with the US military was announced, the film and accusations have been released. Some of my friends are frankly incredulous; others, noting the timing, are not very concerned about the alleged connections of the Ecuadoran government with the guerrillas.

It seems to me, that in the large cities, at least, the FARC has lost the propaganda war. There’s always a lot of news about kidnapped people being held by the guerrillas. Last week a mother staged a walkathon across a Colombian state to plead for the liberation of her son, a police or army officer, who was captured years ago. There are still sporadic marches with thousands of citizens protesting the continued captivity of hundreds of people held by various units of the FARC.

A congresswoman’s frequent efforts at negotiating the release of captives is covered in great detail, despite the fact that because of her negotiations, she’s portrayed as a guerrilla sympathizer. The occasional attacks on military, police or civilians that can be blamed on the FARC or the other guerrilla group, the ERN, receive days of coverage, including the funerals of victims.

How doe this affect our work? In Monteria, one of the sites where we have an active group of AVP facilitators, corpses appear daily with sign of torture and messages warning of the fate that waits people who try to leave the paramilitary and drug gangs. My colleagues told me that while there were people in a small community that had suffered severe and brutal violence, and that it would be good to visit and offer AVP workshops, but the victims themselves did not think that outsiders, not to mention foreigners, would be safe there. They would risk kidnapping by a gang which would sell the captives to a guerrilla group.

So, although the community is hungry for AVP and especially the trauma healing workshop, they will have to figure out a way to come to a safer site in a larger city.

Since the media is more or less controlled by the government or by the groups that support right wing paramilitaries, few stories emerge that reveal the violence on the other side, although more has come out about the crimes of paramilitary groups in the last few years — a few leaders have even been prosecuted. The polarization is such that almost anyone who criticizes the government, the war, human rights violations and so forth, is likely to be called a “terrorist” whether or not the person involved promotes or uses violent tactics. But many groups rely on nonviolence and launch protests, sit-ins, marches, and so forth in the capital and in other towns.

I especially admire the young conscientious objectors groups, which, in at least 12 cities around the country, promote (and defend) not only conscientious objection to obligatory military service, but also a nonviolent commitment that will keep young people out of gangs, paramilitary groups, and criminal/narcotrafficking groups. Their analysis of the roots of violence in their country go beyond the actions of these groups, and include defending the environment, opposing the programs of “development” fomented by the government and multinational companies, and defending and educating young people about human and civil rights.

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

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Investments : Recovery Through Pinpoint Socialism

Posted on July 27, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer


Pinpoint Socialism:
Recovery through Equities, Tools, and Land

By Greg Moses / The Rag Blog / July 27, 2009

In a Friday morning appearance on Squawk Box at the Capitalism Knows Best Channel (CNBC) Warren Buffett promoted two things: a new cartoon where he plays himself as investor super hero — and equities.

“I would much rather own equities at 9000 on the DOW than have a long investment in govt bonds or a continuously rolling investment in short term money. Now, again I don’t know where it’s going to go next week or next month,” said Buffett in a quote archived at Huffington Post.

“But you still think equities is the place to be?” asked Becky Quick.

“I own them myself,” chuckled Buffett, putting mouth where money is at.

For my part — ignoring for the moment how “media savvy” the Oracle from Omaha can be — I have been paying attention to Buffett because I think what he says can be helpful in trying to understand a way upward in the direction of job growth. Also, with my brief experience in market trading, I think he does have the more sustainable long-term view of market investment. If the market crashes next week, he will still have plenty to work with.

Although I have NO IDEA what people should do with their savings this month, I do think that whenever more people decide to truly invest in equities there will be a greater chance of a recovery based on jobs. The term “jobless recovery” to me has all the charm of fingernails scraping a blackboard. Anyone who speaks seriously about a jobless recovery is only declaring that he belongs to the class which has no Real Jobs to lose.

For the rest of us, the combination of depression and joblessness cannot suggest images of anything resembling recovery. Already the image of Skip Gates in handcuffs warns us how suddenly ugly things can get.

So I am looking for a way to think about the requirements of a recovery “with jobs” and I am following the guidance of San Francisco economist Henry George who argues that workers will create value on the spot so long as they are provided proper tools. From this cue I go looking through Google News for signs of capital expenditures and investments. What’s up with tool development these days?

Notice that I did not begin my search for recovery with “consumer spending,” because I think that the mainstream chatter about this is another way of capitulating to depression. In other words, please tell me why consumers are going to increase spending while they are losing jobs? A labor-centered discussion of recovery would change the language of “jobless recovery” into “capital stagnation” so that we may more forthrightly name the thing that needs to be directly confronted.

The run-up in technology-sector equities these past few months gives us something to work with. This is a prime tooling sector for advancing development along broad dimensions of opportunity. Jim Cramer makes a compelling case that the tech sector is also more free to refresh itself compared to other sectors plundered by pirates of finance. Yet the tech sector is beginning to quiver and quake upon rocking foundations.

The first item I find when looking for “capital investment” is a press release from the National Venture Capital Association announcing that the Biotech sector has attracted a 67 percent increase “in Seed and Early Stage fundings” during Q2. Clean Technology is the next fastest growing venture sector, followed by Software and Medical Devices. Although the raw numbers look hopeful because of very recent increases, the historical levels of capital at play take us back more than a decade, “close to what we saw in 1997 before the Internet bubble.”

Next item on the Capital expenditure front is a pep talk by Andy Rowsell-Jones at Gartner, Inc., who is telling IT directors not to capitulate to cuts in IT budgets.

“While IT expenditure may be a small proportion — ranging from 1.7 percent in the construction and engineering industry to 12.6 percent in the banking and finance sector — budgets have been cut in light of the economic situation. Rowsell-Jones said IT spending has risen every year from 2003, but is being cut for this year, according to a recent Gartner survey.” The banking sector is not even upgrading its own computers? Hold your expletives, and pass the subpoenas…

The third item is from Stockholm, reviewing the quarterly report from Ericsson Telephone: “Several telecom operators have announced plans to reduce investments in order to maintain cash-flow in the economic downturn, a trend that can hurt companies like Ericsson that supply network equipment.”

From this short sample of findings we may draw a preliminary hypothesis that capitalism is in no great position to deliver the tools that will be needed for a speedier economic recovery. And this is why so long as Capitalism Knows Best we are staring at a chasm that is called the jobless recovery.

What is called for is something we might call pinpoint socialism where public resources are put to use injecting support for tool-making in precise contexts. In the case of IT upgrades and telecom network equipment, the needs are “shovel ready.” They have been planned and budgeted. Suppliers are at hand. Only a vicious cycle of “free market cash implosion” has trickled down. If active and sensible agents of public trust were to get busy in these areas, putting our debt bubble to productive use — instead of taking August recesses — jobs could still be “saved or created” in the near term.

As a preliminary parameter for public injections of funds to make new tools, there could be a simple baseline requirement that qualifying companies must state the need in their SEC filings. If the companies are caught lying about their capital investment needs, theoretically there is an agency that could send in the Cambridge Police.

Along a second line of analysis offered by Henry George, successful experiments are taking place in Pennsylvania and Michigan regarding a different approach to land policy. Wikipedia has a good orientation to Land Value Tax (LVT) that gives brief credit to Henry George. The basic idea is to shift the burden of taxation away from capital (capital gains) and labor (income tax) — both of which we need more of — and place the taxation onto land (which is ever in fixed supply).

According to reports archived at earthrights.net:

“Any non-Genesee County residents may acquire LBA property only with an enforceable plan to place the property into immediate productive use (meaning the property is to be occupied immediately or with the immediate commencement of some form of development project that fits our stated mission). This applies to vacant lots as well as properties with structures, residential and commercial properties.”

The LBA principle of land liberation is right out of “Progress and Poverty” by Henry George, which argues at length that labor and capital will keep each other more productive if all unused land is set free. Need we remind ourselves there will never be a cheaper time in our lives to liberate the land monopolists?

Finally, while we’re at it, may I venture to suggest, that wherever today you find people complaining about “Mexican illegals” — tomorrow — with fresh tools and liberated land — everybody will marvel at the rise of cities of gold.

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

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Homeless Vets and Hungry Kids? Empathy Meets Realpolitik

Posted on July 27, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

Graphic by Larry Ray / The Rag Blog.

Empathy Meets Realpolitik

How many of our nation’s leaders have ever gone to bed hungry? U.S. Department of Agriculture statistics show that, ‘12.4 million children in the U.S. are “food insecure” — defined as not being able to get enough food to maintain a healthy, active life.’

By Larry Ray / The Rag Blog / July 26, 2009

Summertime and the living is easy… for our elected politicians in Washington D.C.

In just a few days they will suspend their hearings and deadline-driven decision making and return to the voters back home who keep them in office.

Homeless veterans across America, American children who do not have enough to eat, families facing foreclosure and unemployment all will still all be there when this great leadership body returns in a month or so, their campaign cash needs having been firmed up after non stop meetings with their voter base.

Meanwhile, last weekend almost one thousand homeless American military veterans in the San Diego, California, area sought help at a three-day tent city program called “Stand Down.” This volunteer effort has been operating for more than 20 years. It is a three-day chance for homeless veterans, many from the Vietnam era, but with increasing numbers from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to get free housing and social services. Hot food, a haircut, dental work, legal aid and a clean place to sleep in a familiar military camp setting is there to help these souls living on the very edge.

That in the USA we have a thousand former military veterans, down and out in the shadows of one large city should evoke both sadness, and no small amount of outrage and frustration. However, it is not just San Diego. The Department of Veterans affairs estimates that one out of three homeless people across America is a veteran.

How do all the car magnets and lawn signs urging that we “Support Our Troops” somehow exclude those troops who become disabled and fall through the cracks once they get back home? Do we just say tough luck to those who turn to drugs and alcohol, the ones who desperately need extra help? Where is our empathy?

Empathy? Conservative politicians have loudly used that word as a pejorative just recently. The word was invoked by President Obama as a desirable quality in a federal judge. More specifically his nominee to the Supreme Court, Judge Sonia Sotomayor.

Empathy? An effete, bleeding heart label? Hardly. Empathy is simply the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. But in that very definition we see among our elected leaders many who neither understand, nor share the feelings of others than themselves and their starchy conservative cohorts.

Empathy? How many of our nation’s leaders have ever gone to bed hungry? U.S. Department of Agriculture statistics show that, “12.4 million children in the U.S. are ‘food insecure’ — defined as not being able to get enough food to maintain a healthy, active life.”

Food insecure? Kids are hungry, not getting enough to eat. American kids. Using some bureaucratic euphemism does not fill empty tummies. Euphemisms make the reports coming out of Washington agencies look a little less shocking. “Food insecure” doesn’t jump off the page like “starving” or “undernourished,” and helps keep this disgrace beneath the political radar.

Homeless American veterans and American children who never get enough to eat are merely two examples of ongoing problems that many of our politicians somehow must not hear about when they go back home. Our bloated and ineffective health care system is on this long list of old and worsening problems. But as a majority of our politicians work diligently to finally bring forth a new overhauled and affordable universal health plan for all Americans, again conservatives throw up roadblocks.

Conservative protests about leaving huge indebtedness to our grandchildren actually mask a selfish fear of losing votes back home if they support a new, and initially expensive national health care plan. Empathy is absent from this narrow reasoning. Personal political career interests hold hostage the entire inertia and completion of work, particularly in the House of Representatives.

The very politicians now expressing such deep concern for our national debt were deafeningly silent as President Bush raised the national debt each of his eight years in office to a breathtaking record $11.3 trillion.

Properly done, universal health care would eventually greatly reduce soaring insurance and overall medical costs. But initially, funding for such a massive landmark change in the way we take care of America’s health will be expensive and will require political backbone to make it a reality. More backbone will be needed to address the needs of homeless Veterans and our undernourished children.

Approval of long overdue universal health care will require the very two things sorely lacking in current political opponents — statesmanship and empathy. For those lacking these qualities, it is essential that we point them out, on both sides of the aisle, and inundate their offices with email, letters and phone calls demanding that they use their stated concerns for program cost as positive negotiable input to the committees working to craft the final health plan and not as a singular duplicitous barrier to progress.

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

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Texas ‘Experts’ : Axe Cesar Chavez and Thurgood Marshall from Textbooks

Posted on July 25, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer


‘Experts’ hired by Texas State Board of Education:
Chavez and Marshall don’t belong in school books

Evangelical minister Peter Marshall said, ‘To have Cesar Chavez listed next to Ben Franklin is ludicrous.’ [Chavez] is not a role model who ‘ought to be held up to our children as someone worthy of emulation.’

July 25, 2009

The Texas State Board of Education is currently preparing to adopt new social studies curriculum standards. These standards have major national implications as Texas is such a major purchaser of textbooks and their state’s required curriculum drives the content of textbooks produced nationwide.

The Board of Education has hired six “experts” to determine what will be in the books our schools use. Some of these “experts” are arguing that the state’s social studies and history textbooks are giving “too much attention” to some of the most prominent civil rights leaders in US History, namely Cesar Chavez and Thurgood Marshall.

David Barton, one of these “experts,” claimed Cesar Chavez “lacks the stature, impact and overall contributions of so many others.” Another of these “experts” evangelical minister Peter Marshall said, “To have Cesar Chavez listed next to Ben Franklin” — as in the current standards — “is ludicrous.” He went on to say Chávez is not a role model who “ought to be held up to our children as someone worthy of emulation.”

The same “expert” wants to eliminate Thurgood Marshall, a prominent Civil Rights leader who argued the landmark case that resulted in school desegregation and was the first African-American U.S. Supreme Court justice. He wrote that the late justice is “not a strong enough example” of an important historical figure to be presented to Texas students.


Board members and their appointees have complained about an “over representation of minorities” in the current social studies standards. This is ironic in light of the changing demographics of our country [and especially of the state of Texas]. Sadly, Latino and African-American children have the highest dropout rates in the country. It’s essential to ensure schools are providing students with role models and historical figures whose experiences reflect their own.

We must be concerned when the contributions of Cesar Chávez, Thurgood Marshall and other individuals who have contributed so much to the landscape of American democracy are cast aside and ridiculed. We should welcome the inclusion of all Americans who have helped to make this nation great.

It is horrific to discover that the Texas State Board of Education has allowed these panelists to use our children’s social studies curriculum as a platform for their political agendas. Please take action today to stop this travesty from going forward.

To send this message to the Chair of the Texas Board of Education, Gail Lowe (R), and to pass it along to others, go here.

Source / United Farm Workers

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