Co-Housing: Another Way Toward Sustainability

Posted on June 11, 2009 by RagBlog

Children playing in a communal yard at Doyle Street in Emeryville. Photo: Drew Kelly/New York Times.

To Your Left, a Better Way of Life?
By Chris Colin / June 10, 2009

VICKI SETZER and her cats inhabit a small ranch home on a quiet cul-de-sac in Visalia, Calif. Connie Baechler leases a split-level house in Smyrna, Ga., with her fiancé. Perfectly typical nesting arrangements, and yet something profound seemed to be missing.

So on a Saturday morning in the East Bay area of California, they and about 17 others boarded a rumbling white tour bus to try to find a mode of living better suited to the times.

The tour was one of several this season in different parts of the country designed to give participants an up-close look at various co-housing communities, and to address an increasingly common feeling that one pays too much for one’s home, sees friends too little there and generally lives a more isolated life than is desirable. These are not new complaints, but the recession has sharpened them, as it has thrown all large expenditures under deeper scrutiny.

Remedial questions are permitted on these tours, like, “What is co-housing?”

The Cohousing Association of the United States has been answering that question quite frequently as more people sign up for its tours: The communities consist of individual houses whose residents share some common space, a few communal dinners a week and a commitment to green living.

The movement has been gaining momentum here since it first arrived from Denmark two decades ago. But passengers on the bus tours describe the general climate of uncertainty as setting off more urgent waves of reappraisal: Is this how I want to raise my family? Spend my remaining years? Is there a better option — a more stable community?

Judy Pope, a consultant in Oakland, Calif., who joined the East Bay tour, described a practical interest in co-housing.

“I had a pretty robust portfolio of investments that I was going to retire on,” Ms. Pope said. “Now I’m feeling the financial pressure to live with people. I can’t continue to live in my big old house.”

In some cases, the closeness of these communities offers bulwarks against a lousy economy. Residents speak of lending money to one another when necessary or, say, pitching in to build a wheelchair ramp when insurance might not cover it. Then there is the savings associated with a more efficiently designed home, and shared upkeep costs. But strictly speaking, a home in a co-housing community doesn’t necessarily cost less than a traditional home. As advocates describe it, the benefits are of the added-value variety.

“You just get more bang for your buck,” said Laura Fitch, a 15-year co-houser who led a recent tour in Massachusetts. “You can have entertainment next door rather than going to the movies, and if you’re a parent, you don’t have to drive to all those play dates, or even buy as many toys because your kids are more entertained.”

She added that the price of co-housing often included a common house with guest rooms, a party space, a children’s play area and the security of people watching out for one another.

Jason Reichert, who works at a shipyard in Maine and joined a New England tour, said he liked the idea of weathering the country’s economic and environmental crises with a group.

“My grandparents’ community got through the Depression by being very close-knit,” Mr. Reichert said, “with one family knowing how to farm, for example, and another knowing how to raise poultry. We’ve lost that. But co-housing is accomplishing something similar.”

Craig Ragland, the executive director of the Cohousing Association, said: “Some people are looking at these communities as a lifeboat. The thinking is, if I’m surrounded by people who care about me, I’m less likely to crash and burn.”

More than 115 rural, urban and suburban co-housing communities exist across the country, consisting of 2,675 units, according to the association. There are 3 to 67 homes in each, on tiny city lots and 550-acre parcels. Some are “retrofit” communities, in which existing side-by-side homes are purchased and then converted. Others start with a piece of land and build units from scratch. In both, residents own their homes outright, but agree to participate in the communal arrangement.

The Cohousing Association has sponsored these tours for about a decade. For $105, participants get a box lunch, an enthusiastic guide or two and an eight-hour tour of various communities.

The recent East Bay trip was led by Jennifer West and Neil Planchon, both residents of local co-housing communities. The people who convened that Saturday lived alone or with families, ranged from 30-something to 60-something and came from Colorado and Vancouver, Georgia and California.

Julia Negele gardened at Jamaica Plain in Boston. Photo: Rick Friedman/New York Times.

As rolling adventures go, the trip had the esprit de corps of Ken Kesey’s psychedelic bus and the hands-in-laps manners of a sightseeing tour. Between stops, passengers talked about how they ended up on this atypical excursion.

Ms. Baechler from Georgia presented a familiar gripe. “I like my neighbors back home, but we don’t really have a community that gets together and talks,” she said. “So I end up driving 20 miles to have dinner with a friend after work.”

She added: “I guess there’s always Facebook, but I want to be sitting next to a three-dimensional person. With co-housing, we’d be able to converge just yards from where we live.”

Paul Hadley, 35, is a freelance French-horn player and stay-at-home dad in Santa Rosa, Calif. He and his wife, Judy, a chemical engineer, live with their 2-year-old in a three-bedroom house on a country road that has become a busy thoroughfare. Co-housing, Mr. Hadley said, seemed to offer a return to village life, without all the cars. He and his wife were seeking “a richer life of relationships, not stuff,” he said.

The bus steamed along, periodically disgorging passengers to stumble through people’s happy homes. Parents on the tour watched as children ran from unit to unit, no supervision required. Devotees of sustainability listened to tales of shared resources and reduced footprints. Those keen on intergenerational living saw residents of all ages mingling casually. For the design conscious, there was an intelligent flow that encouraged serendipitous meetings while still preserving privacy.

“For a long time we’d always be referred to as ‘communes for the ’90s’ or ‘the new commune,’ ” said Mr. Ragland of the Cohousing Association. “But increasingly people are seeing that it’s really just a new type of neighborhood.”

Karen Hester, who lives in the Temescal Creek community, the fifth stop of the day, answered questions about daily life in co-housing. “It’s not about utopia,” she said. “It’s fundamentally a pragmatic thing. When my computer crashes, my neighbor is over in five minutes to fix it. In turn, maybe his kids come home from school sick and I’m there to take care of them.”

The tour put the group in a kind of envy daze. At Temescal Commons, originally formed by members of a nearby Methodist church, photovoltaic roof panels let the residents sell power back to the utility company. At Pleasant Hill, children sold lemonade in a bright patch of shared grass.

But Ms. West and Mr. Planchon were clear that co-housing presented challenges, too. Ms. West recounted a heated episode at her community where someone didn’t receive a party invitation. They also spoke of meeting fatigue, a byproduct of reaching decisions via consensus model, and the surprisingly volatile matter of pets.

Do the tours win people over? Some, like Ms. Baechler, came away with reservations — she thought she might hold out for a community focused on the arts. But mostly the groups leave ecstatic, fingers nearly on checkbooks.

Delina Malo-Juvera, 36, lives in a 19th-century farmhouse in rural Maine. After the Massachusetts tour, she said she hoped to one day start a co-housing group of her own. “The economy and the state of the world — you don’t know what’s going to happen, so it’d be great to have that secure, self-sustaining community,” she said. “I loved it.”

For her part, Ms. Setzer, the cul-de-sac dweller from Visalia, said that the idea of joining a multigenerational community might be the most appealing aspect — and that she didn’t mind how few people were aware of the existence of this vaguely Norman Rockwellian lifestyle.

“I told my son about co-housing, and he thought I was a Martian,” Ms. Setzer said. “Then again, he often thinks that.”

Source / New York Times

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US Economy: Think It’s Getting Better? Think Again

Posted on June 11, 2009 by RagBlog


America’s Sea of Red Ink Was Years in the Making
By David Leonhardt / June 9, 2009

There are two basic truths about the enormous deficits that the federal government will run in the coming years.

The first is that President Obama’s agenda, ambitious as it may be, is responsible for only a sliver of the deficits, despite what many of his Republican critics are saying. The second is that Mr. Obama does not have a realistic plan for eliminating the deficit, despite what his advisers have suggested.

The New York Times analyzed Congressional Budget Office reports going back almost a decade, with the aim of understanding how the federal government came to be far deeper in debt than it has been since the years just after World War II. This debt will constrain the country’s choices for years and could end up doing serious economic damage if foreign lenders become unwilling to finance it.

Mr. Obama — responding to recent signs of skittishness among those lenders — met with 40 members of Congress at the White House on Tuesday and called for the re-enactment of pay-as-you-go rules, requiring Congress to pay for any new programs it passes.

The story of today’s deficits starts in January 2001, as President Bill Clinton was leaving office. The Congressional Budget Office estimated then that the government would run an average annual surplus of more than $800 billion a year from 2009 to 2012. Today, the government is expected to run a $1.2 trillion annual deficit in those years.

You can think of that roughly $2 trillion swing as coming from four broad categories: the business cycle, President George W. Bush’s policies, policies from the Bush years that are scheduled to expire but that Mr. Obama has chosen to extend, and new policies proposed by Mr. Obama.

The first category — the business cycle — accounts for 37 percent of the $2 trillion swing. It’s a reflection of the fact that both the 2001 recession and the current one reduced tax revenue, required more spending on safety-net programs and changed economists’ assumptions about how much in taxes the government would collect in future years.

About 33 percent of the swing stems from new legislation signed by Mr. Bush. That legislation, like his tax cuts and the Medicare prescription drug benefit, not only continue to cost the government but have also increased interest payments on the national debt.

Mr. Obama’s main contribution to the deficit is his extension of several Bush policies, like the Iraq war and tax cuts for households making less than $250,000. Such policies — together with the Wall Street bailout, which was signed by Mr. Bush and supported by Mr. Obama — account for 20 percent of the swing.

About 7 percent comes from the stimulus bill that Mr. Obama signed in February. And only 3 percent comes from Mr. Obama’s agenda on health care, education, energy and other areas.

If the analysis is extended further into the future, well beyond 2012, the Obama agenda accounts for only a slightly higher share of the projected deficits.

How can that be? Some of his proposals, like a plan to put a price on carbon emissions, don’t cost the government any money. Others would be partly offset by proposed tax increases on the affluent and spending cuts. Congressional and White House aides agree that no large new programs, like an expansion of health insurance, are likely to pass unless they are paid for.

Alan Auerbach, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, and an author of a widely cited study on the dangers of the current deficits, describes the situation like so: “Bush behaved incredibly irresponsibly for eight years. On the one hand, it might seem unfair for people to blame Obama for not fixing it. On the other hand, he’s not fixing it.”

“And,” he added, “not fixing it is, in a sense, making it worse.”

When challenged about the deficit, Mr. Obama and his advisers generally start talking about health care. “There is no way you can put the nation on a sound fiscal course without wringing inefficiencies out of health care,” Peter Orszag, the White House budget director, told me.

Outside economists agree. The Medicare budget really is the linchpin of deficit reduction. But there are two problems with leaving the discussion there.

First, even if a health overhaul does pass, it may not include the tough measures needed to bring down spending. Ultimately, the only way to do so is to take money from doctors, drug makers and insurers, and it isn’t clear whether Mr. Obama and Congress have the stomach for that fight. So far, they have focused on ideas like preventive care that would do little to cut costs.

Second, even serious health care reform won’t be enough. Obama advisers acknowledge as much. They say that changes to the system would probably have a big effect on health spending starting in five or 10 years. The national debt, however, will grow dangerously large much sooner.

Mr. Orszag says the president is committed to a deficit equal to no more than 3 percent of gross domestic product within five to 10 years. The Congressional Budget Office projects a deficit of at least 4 percent for most of the next decade. Even that may turn out to be optimistic, since the government usually ends up spending more than it says it will. So Mr. Obama isn’t on course to meet his target.

But Congressional Republicans aren’t, either. Judd Gregg recently held up a chart on the Senate floor showing that Mr. Obama would increase the deficit — but failed to mention that much of the increase stemmed from extending Bush policies. In fact, unlike Mr. Obama, Republicans favor extending all the Bush tax cuts, which will send the deficit higher.

Republican leaders in the House, meanwhile, announced a plan last week to cut spending by $75 billion a year. But they made specific suggestions adding up to meager $5 billion. The remaining $70 billion was left vague. “The G.O.P. is not serious about cutting down spending,” the conservative Cato Institute concluded.

What, then, will happen?

“Things will get worse gradually,” Mr. Auerbach predicts, “unless they get worse quickly.” Either a solution will be put off, or foreign lenders, spooked by the rising debt, will send interest rates higher and create a crisis.

The solution, though, is no mystery. It will involve some combination of tax increases and spending cuts. And it won’t be limited to pay-as-you-go rules, tax increases on somebody else, or a crackdown on waste, fraud and abuse. Your taxes will probably go up, and some government programs you favor will become less generous.

That is the legacy of our trillion-dollar deficits. Erasing them will be one of the great political issues of the coming decade.

[E-mail: Leonhardt@nytimes.com]

Source / New York Times

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Austin Lounge Lizards : Too Big to Fail

Posted on June 10, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

The Austin Lounge Lizards perform their delightful satirical ode to bank bail-outs: Too Big to Fail. Written by Lindsey Eck.

Thanks to Mariann Wizard and telebob / The Rag Blog

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Sara Robinson to Progressives: Looking Good!

Posted on June 10, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

The Millennial Generation: the future face of progressivism?

Progressives have a chance to dominate American politics for the next 40 years

The tides of history and demographics, and the way the world works are on our side.

By Sara Robinson / June 10, 2009.

[The following is a transcript of Campaign for America’s future fellow Sara Robinson’s speech to the, America’s Future Now! conference panel“Kick Them When They Are Down? How the Right Plans to Come Back and What Can Be Done About It.” It has been edited for clarity.]

I’m going to offer a couple of reasons why the long-term prospects for the progressive movement are actually pretty good. I think in the long term, the spirit of the country is with us, and there’s a couple of reasons for that. Then I want to get into three core strategies that I think we need to focus on to make the most of the opportunity.

So, I want to say flat out that I think that the progressive movement has real potential to be a lot longer and a lot stronger than most people think. And I’ll flat out say — if we play our cards right, we progressives have the potential to dominate American politics for the next 40 years. We have a huge opening here.

There are a couple of reasons for this. The first one is the millennial generation, the kids born between 1980 and 2000. They are anywhere between 10 and their mid-20s right now, and they put in their first historic appearance in the 2008 election. They were the ones who really got Obama fever and put him over the top. They are far and away the most multiracial generation in American history — about a third of them identify as mixed race.

Unlike their elders, they were raised from babyhood into consummate team players and self-organizers. They believe in the power of the collective. It’s in their bones. They understand the power of collective action. They organize into teams. They have raised the use of technology in self-organization to a generational art form. They believe in community. They are progressive, in their bones, to their core. Kudos to their boomer and Gen Xer parents who raised them that way.

They’re also natural born systems thinkers. They know that the problems that we’re facing aren’t isolated pieces and parts that can be solved by this committee and that agency. They understand that its all one thing and that if you’re going to solve it all, you’ve got to tackle it all. And there are strategies that they use to do that, and they’ve been taught these strategies by their entertainment and their families from babyhood.

This unique generation caught Obama fever at the critical age, when people’s lifetime political attitudes are shaped. They are progressives now, and if we don’t let them down, most of them will be for life. And both their sheer numbers and their solid organizing skills make them a very solid bedrock on which we can easily build a progressive structure that could stand until 2050.

Along these same lines, let’s not discount the power of collective memory. In the post-war era, conservatism had a hard time making a comeback as long as most of the country’s voter base had its memories of 1929 and World War II. Religious and free-market fundamentalism had a hard time getting any traction in the post-war decades because our grandparents knew first hand where that road led, and they weren’t having any of it.

It was only in the 1970s when those old survivors were finally outnumbered by younger voters that anyone could take their ideas seriously again. Likewise, today’s conservatives are going to have a really hard time of it as long as there’s anybody around who remembers the crash of 2008, and that’s going to be a good long while.

The other reason the coming years belong to progressives is that there are deep structural shifts afoot that no conservative media dissembling, no amount of bank bailout money and no amount of willful denial can continue to paper over.

The corporatist order has failed us utterly and completely. Most of us here know this — we’ve done the math. We know that an economy built on dwindling oil supplies, vast global inequities, and exploiting the resources of a finite earth is simply not sustainable. The current is recession is happening in no small part because we are finally bumping up against these facts. K Street and Wall Street both think they can rearrange the deck chairs and get things back to normal — defined as five years ago. But here on the progressive side of Main Street, we know that normal as we’ve known it in the post-war era is over. And rearranging deck chairs isn’t going to help when the whole boat is sinking.

The country has faced crisis points like this one before. And when it does, it always turns to its progressive side. Conservatives are just constitutionally incapable of providing the answers, vision or the incentive to lead America to a new kind of future. And the sooner and more decisively we progressives step forward and show America where we want to take it, the more confidence they’ll have in our ability to lead them there.

This is the best moment we’ve had in 80 years. The country is hungry for big changes. It’s time for us to step forward boldly, give them a new vision to grab onto, and show them just how much better things can be.

But we also need to make sure that the cons stay bottled up. The first part of that is to write a full and accurate history of the Bush years — the kind of history that makes inquiries, takes account, names names and kicks butts.

The first step in any change process is understanding that you have a problem. I think most of us get that by now. The next step is understanding exactly what the problem is. It’s only after that that you can start looking at solutions and next steps. It’s understandable that the new president doesn’t want to waste his precious time and political capital. But on this he’s putting his needs ahead of the needs of the entire progressive movement and our future.

These stories need to be told now, while they’re fresh. Former Vice President Dick Cheney is already out there trying to rewrite history. The conservatives are unbelievably good at this, and they’ll succeed if we don’t get out there and stop them. We need to claim the next narrative for our own about what happened.

The second objective is restoring America’s trust in the basic competence of its government. FDR faced this same problem, and he solved it by instituting Social Security, which saved an earlier generation, whose retirement had also been wiped out in a Wall Street feeding frenzy. I can understand that particular gift a whole lot better now.

But Social Security did more than that. It also shut up the economic royalists, and it reintroduced Americans to the value of social contracts and the belief in the common good. And it worked.

America had accepted these ideas so completely that liberals were able to seize control of the entire political discourse, and they dominated it for the next few decades. On most issues, the conservatives were there, but they had no choice but to accommodate themselves to what the progressives wanted.

In our generation, this teachable moment will be passing universal health care with a public option. The right wing is absolutely terrified about this because it knows that once Americans realize how much government can deliver, their whole political narrative will be exposed as a colossal lie.

Fifteen years ago, in the heat of the 1993 Hillary-Care debate, conservative political analyst and commentator Bill Kristol wrote a famous strategy memo in which he argued that “the passage of the Clinton health care plan in any form would be disastrous. It’s success would signal the rebirth of centralized welfare state policy at the very moment such policy is being perceived as a failure in other areas.”

Conservatives are acutely aware that if we get health care that works, they’re going to be shut out of power and out of the conversation for decades to come.

They’ve worked very hard to break the trust between Americans and the government. Once people realize that government can solve this problem, that trust is going to return. And Americans will start to think about what else we might be able to accomplish if we pull together. From that point on, the dominant narrative will be ours.

The third objective won’t be news to most of you — like I said, it’s all one thing. The problem at the root of every other problem we face is campaign-finance reform. There are piles of studies now proving that upwards of 70 percent of Americans generally support progressive values. But no matter what your issue or concern is — education, the environment, social justice, economic reform, anything — the fact is that as long as money does the talking, those voices aren’t going to be heard.

As progressives, we tend to think about this issue as an afterthought just because it’s so big and exhausting — something that might be nice if we can get to it one day. But it’s not. It’s the very first thing — the one cause that makes every other effect possible.

The Democrats don’t want to put this on the national agenda. But for us as progressives, public financing options are a non-negotiable prerequisite. If we don’t do this, we’re not going to be able to govern the way we want to, and we’re probably going to run out of power a lot sooner than we should.

There is, of course, a lot more to be said about these ideas. … But I encourage you, in closing, to take heart. The tides of history, demographics, and just the way the world works are on our side. So is the national mood.

If we can write an accurate history of the Bush years, restore the trust between Americans and their government, and get back to a place where votes speak louder than money, there’s no reason we can’t keep the conservatives in limbo until we’ve all exited stage left, and it will be our grandkids’ turn to deal with them.

Sara Robinson is a fellow at the Campaign for America’s Future, and a consulting partner with the Cognitive Policy Works in Seattle. One of the few trained social futurists in North America, she has blogged on authoritarian and extremist movements at Orcinus since 2006, and is a founding member of Group News Blog.

Source / AlterNet

Thanks to Harry Targ / The Rag Blog

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Holocaust Museum : Never Again?

Posted on June 10, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

Political cartoon by Ralph Solonitz / The Rag Blog / June 10, 2009.
[Ralph Solonitz’ cartoons also appear at MadasHellClub.net.]

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Bishop Takes Pawn : The Real Meaning of ‘Pro-Life’

Posted on June 10, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

U.S. Catholic bishops listening to Pope Benedict XVI. Photo by Alex Wong / Getty Images.

The present effort to politicize the church and marginalize pro-choice will drive away more of the flock and quickly shed the intellectual credibility it so laboriously earned.

By Sherman DeBrosse / The Rag Blog / June 10, 2009

My friend Lee recently entered an art competition and won first prize with a moving painting on the folly of war. His other entry was entitled “Right to Life.” In the upper left-hand corner was a mitered bishop proclaiming that life begins at conception and that all life is sacred.

In the lower right, the same bishop is busy denying medical assistance to the poor, childcare, and other forms of help to those who need it.

Of course, the bishops do not actively speak against helping the poor, but their political activism seems to have had the same effect because the large minority of political bishops who back the Republicans, are in effect, joining the GOP’s crusade against the poor and marginalized. They have also rounded up the votes that enabled George W. Bush to continue the war in Iraq and to torture prisoners.

Many Americans see only that a substantial minority of Catholic bishops appear to have become Republican operatives and are busy turning local churches into Republican political club houses. Lee and many others do not read the documents churned out by the U.S. bishops. He and others only see only see the political bishops refusing to allow pro-choice Catholic politicians to receive communion. They hear harsh, uncharitable, condemnations and altogether too few words trying to explain their positions to people not subject to their religious authority. In the recent debate over Notre Dame’s granting President Barack Obama an honorary degree, we saw 70 political bishops denouncing some of their co-religionists.

We would hope that the bishops would not resort to medieval threats and uncharitable language. These are bright, highly–educated men who should be able to make their case in terms that people who rely upon science and reason could respect. When the bishops copy the language and tactics of their right-wing Protestant political allies, observers simply conclude that these Catholic bishops are similarly thoughtless and uncivil.

In their defense, it should be noted that the U.S. bishops conference is on record as supporting the entire Roman Catholic peace and social justice agenda. The trouble is that the American bishops did not exert themselves in supporting the Vatican’s opposition to the Iraq war or its call for an even-handed position in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. Too often their positions on social justice issues appeared to be muted or even lip service. Critics cannot be blamed for concluding that the bishops care a lot more about their teachings on abortion and stem cell research than about these other questions. Has any Congressman been denied communion because he supported the death penalty and opposed extending unemployment benefits or including assistance for the destitute in the stimulus package?

The late Joseph Cardinal Bernardin tried to explain the great bulk of Roman Catholic teachings in terms of the fundamental belief in the dignity of every human being. It would be helpful if the bishops tied their views on abortion and stem cell research to the Catholic positions on peace, the death penalty, and a host of issues addressed in the social encyclicals. Of course, they would need to be willing to exert as much energy in opposing an unjust war and defending the poor as they expend now in defense of abortion policies that are very unlikely to become public policy in the near future. Roe v. Wade is probably settled law, and there are many political reasons to explain why both parties are not likely to change the status quo.

Above all they need to abandon the harsh language and medieval threats. Such behavior leads many to forget that these men are highly educated and to group them with the right-wing Protestant allies who often seem to lack civility and an ability for nuanced judgment. Some of us wonder if all the harsh language might inspire unhinged individuals to seek to kill abortionists.

The nub of the abortion problem is that many intelligent people think the embryo is part of our human species but they do not think it is yet a person. That is a defensible position, and the church, while disagreeing, should recognize this. The union of the sperm in the egg is part of a process and can no longer be ascribed to a precise moment. Why not admit that? On the other hand, none of this damages the Catholic position, in the words of John Paul II, that “the mere probability that a human person is involved would suffice to justify an absolutely clear prohibition or any intervention aimed at killing a human embryo.”

This is not much different from the position of Immanuel Kant, the great defender of human dignity. It is a reasonable position. It would be more persuasive if the church coupled it with its other concerns for human dignity in a wide variety of areas from labor law to health care for poor children.

By giving the appearance that the Catholic Church in the United States is becoming an arm of the Republican Party, the bishops have re-ignited a latent anti-Catholicism. Their nearly criminal handling of the sex abuse scandal has alienated the larger part of a whole generation. It is no wonder that so many women see the church as anti-woman. It offers a lame explanation for not ordaining women — women do not come with the same physical equipment as men. If the church were to adopt Cardinal Bernadine’s “seamless garment” argument and give as much attention to children’s health matters as to abortion, more women might accept the sincerity of its arguments and perhaps write off the refusal to ordain women as simply an inability to shed some very undesirable cultural baggage.

The present course of the American bishops seems to be part of the ancient “faithful remnant” outlook. In the time of Christ, his righteous opponents, intent upon absolutely strict observance of the law as they saw it, sought to separate out a holy remnant, but it is very doubtful that he was interested in doing the same thing. Maybe the bishops should see pro-choice advocates as Christ saw the tax collectors as neighbors and try to win them over.

The present effort to politicize the church and marginalize pro-choice will drive away more of the flock and quickly shed the intellectual credibility it so laboriously earned. Catholics will be viewed more and more as something akin to the evangelicals and fundamentalists — politically oriented and opposed to full dialogue and engagement. However, the bishops will enjoy the support of wealthy right-wing Catholics and they will have high visibility and some influence when Republicans are in power. Their rewards will be lip service on abortion and photographs of churchmen with important people. If they are not serious about the rest of the Catholic agenda, this might be their best course.

[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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Bush Lawyer: Prolonged Indefinite Detention Already Widespread

Posted on June 10, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

A flag waves behind the barbed and razor-wire at the Guantanamo Bay detention center. Photo by AP.

Richard Klingler:

‘the wartime framework underlying [these tactics] have settled well within the mainstream of the American tradition,’ setting the stage for ‘a broader recognition of the established legal basis for indefinite detention.’

By Daphne Eviatar / June 9, 2009

At the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing this morning titled “The Legal, Moral, and National Security Consequences of ‘Prolonged Detention,’” it was actually Richard Klingler, a former lawyer in the Office of White House Counsel under President George W. Bush and former general counsel on the National Security Council staff, who presented the dilemma most starkly in his testimony. From his prepared remarks:

The debate over indefinite detention often wrongly focuses on Guantanamo Bay. The current practice is considerably more widespread, and any limitations on indefinite detention would have correspondingly wide implications. The U.S. military indefinitely detains enemy combatants, including members and supporters of al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations, on a wide scale in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as at Guantanamo, and press reports indicate that U.S. officials work closely with our allies to detain al Qaeda members in other countries.

“Prolonged” detention is thus not something proposed for the future, for just a small subset of Guantanamo detainees. It is, instead, a practice that this Administration is already conducting on a widespread scale, will continue to pursue, and has already defended repeatedly in federal court. No matter how Guantanamo detainees are handled, this Administration will continue, directly or indirectly, to detain hundreds if not thousands of enemy combatants indefinitely in many places for many years to come.

And he added:

“The extent of the current Administration’s continued use of war powers against terrorist organizations is hard to overstate. The Obama Administration has pursued nearly every aspect the prior Administration’s conduct of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan and against terrorist networks globally. As a formal matter, this Administration has embraced nearly all the components of wartime and related Executive powers asserted by its predecessor and then subject to controversy. In addition to continuing indefinite detention in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo, and committing to do so for a subset of Guantanamo detainees even once transferred elsewhere, the Administration has, for example:

  • continued, according to the Attorney General, a valuable foreign intelligence surveillance program, unsupported by warrants, that critics had characterized as “warrantless wiretapping”;
  • continued to use provisions of the previously controversial PATRIOT ACT, including the most contested provisions, which the current FBI Director has defended and sought to have reauthorized;
  • asserted through a Presidential Signing Statement that the Executive Branch would treat certain statutory provisions infringing on the President’s constitutional powers, as determined by the President, as “precatory” or “advisory”;
  • denied habeas corpus rights to detainees held by the military at Bagram, Afghanistan and elsewhere beyond Guantanamo, avoiding judicial review of detention decisions previously criticized as creating a “legal black hole”;
  • continued the robust use of the “state secrets doctrine” to prevent disclosure in litigation of national security information;
  • fought against disclosure of documents, under the Freedom of Information Act, where the military finds that release would harm the national security;
  • declined to extend the protections of the Geneva Conventions for prisoners of war to members of al Qaeda;
  • continued to act against designated financiers of terrorism, and against would-be travelers placed on “terror watch lists,” without affording the affected individuals the due process protections demanded by critics; and
  • committed to continue use of military commissions, virtually unmodified beyond formal recognition of requirements previously imposed by military judges. [All emphasis added.]

The upshot of all this, said Klinger, is that “the wartime framework underlying [these tactics] have settled well within the mainstream of the American tradition,” setting the stage for ” a broader recognition of the established legal basis for indefinite detention.”

That was clearly not what Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) hoped to establish by holding today’s hearing, which also included testimony from a range of established international law and human rights experts about the dangers such tactics have created. But Klinger’s testimony, although perhaps framed to legitimize the Bush administration’s actions now under assault, did make clear the importance of Congress taking a hard look at what the current administration is doing under its watch.

Source / The Washington Independent

Also see Statement of U.S. Senator Russ Feingold on ‘Prolonged Detention’ / CommonDreams / June 9, 2009

And go to Incoming: More Torture Documents By Dan Froomkin / Washington Post / June 10, 2009

Thanks to S.M. Wilhelm / The Rag Blog

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When Running to Stand Still Isn’t Where Your Joy Lies

Posted on June 10, 2009 by RagBlog

In the corporate world, I always knew there was some higher position I could attain, which meant that, like Zeno’s arrow, I was guaranteed never to arrive and always to remain dissatisfied.

The Joy of Less
By Pico Iyer / June 9, 2009

“The beat of my heart has grown deeper, more active, and yet more peaceful, and it is as if I were all the time storing up inner riches … My [life] is one long sequence of inner miracles.” The young Dutchwoman Etty Hillesum wrote that in a Nazi transit camp in 1943, on her way to her death at Auschwitz two months later. Towards the end of his life, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “All I have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all I have not seen,” though by then he had already lost his father when he was 7, his first wife when she was 20 and his first son, aged 5. In Japan, the late 18th-century poet Issa is celebrated for his delighted, almost child-like celebrations of the natural world. Issa saw four children die in infancy, his wife die in childbirth, and his own body partially paralyzed.

I’m not sure I knew the details of all these lives when I was 29, but I did begin to guess that happiness lies less in our circumstances than in what we make of them, in every sense. “There is nothing either good or bad,” I had heard in high school, from Hamlet, “but thinking makes it so.” I had been lucky enough at that point to stumble into the life I might have dreamed of as a boy: a great job writing on world affairs for Time magazine, an apartment (officially at least) on Park Avenue, enough time and money to take vacations in Burma, Morocco, El Salvador. But every time I went to one of those places, I noticed that the people I met there, mired in difficulty and often warfare, seemed to have more energy and even optimism than the friends I’d grown up with in privileged, peaceful Santa Barbara, Calif., many of whom were on their fourth marriages and seeing a therapist every day. Though I knew that poverty certainly didn’t buy happiness, I wasn’t convinced that money did either.

So — as post-1960s cliché decreed — I left my comfortable job and life to live for a year in a temple on the backstreets of Kyoto. My high-minded year lasted all of a week, by which time I’d noticed that the depthless contemplation of the moon and composition of haiku I’d imagined from afar was really more a matter of cleaning, sweeping and then cleaning some more. But today, more than 21 years later, I still live in the vicinity of Kyoto, in a two-room apartment that makes my old monastic cell look almost luxurious by comparison. I have no bicycle, no car, no television I can understand, no media — and the days seem to stretch into eternities, and I can’t think of a single thing I lack.


I’m no Buddhist monk, and I can’t say I’m in love with renunciation in itself, or traveling an hour or more to print out an article I’ve written, or missing out on the N.B.A. Finals. But at some point, I decided that, for me at least, happiness arose out of all I didn’t want or need, not all I did. And it seemed quite useful to take a clear, hard look at what really led to peace of mind or absorption (the closest I’ve come to understanding happiness). Not having a car gives me volumes not to think or worry about, and makes walks around the neighborhood a daily adventure. Lacking a cell phone and high-speed Internet, I have time to play ping-pong every evening, to write long letters to old friends and to go shopping for my sweetheart (or to track down old baubles for two kids who are now out in the world).

When the phone does ring — once a week — I’m thrilled, as I never was when the phone rang in my overcrowded office in Rockefeller Center. And when I return to the United States every three months or so and pick up a newspaper, I find I haven’t missed much at all. While I’ve been rereading P.G. Wodehouse, or “Walden,” the crazily accelerating roller-coaster of the 24/7 news cycle has propelled people up and down and down and up and then left them pretty much where they started. “I call that man rich,” Henry James’s Ralph Touchett observes in “Portrait of a Lady,” “who can satisfy the requirements of his imagination.” Living in the future tense never did that for me.

Perhaps happiness, like peace or passion, comes most when it isn’t pursued.

I certainly wouldn’t recommend my life to most people — and my heart goes out to those who have recently been condemned to a simplicity they never needed or wanted. But I’m not sure how much outward details or accomplishments ever really make us happy deep down. The millionaires I know seem desperate to become multimillionaires, and spend more time with their lawyers and their bankers than with their friends (whose motivations they are no longer sure of). And I remember how, in the corporate world, I always knew there was some higher position I could attain, which meant that, like Zeno’s arrow, I was guaranteed never to arrive and always to remain dissatisfied.

Being self-employed will always make for a precarious life; these days, it is more uncertain than ever, especially since my tools of choice, written words, are coming to seem like accessories to images. Like almost everyone I know, I’ve lost much of my savings in the past few months. I even went through a dress-rehearsal for our enforced austerity when my family home in Santa Barbara burned to the ground some years ago, leaving me with nothing but the toothbrush I bought from an all-night supermarket that night. And yet my two-room apartment in nowhere Japan seems more abundant than the big house that burned down. I have time to read the new John le Carre, while nibbling at sweet tangerines in the sun. When a Sigur Ros album comes out, it fills my days and nights, resplendent. And then it seems that happiness, like peace or passion, comes most freely when it isn’t pursued.

If you’re the kind of person who prefers freedom to security, who feels more comfortable in a small room than a large one and who finds that happiness comes from matching your wants to your needs, then running to stand still isn’t where your joy lies. In New York, a part of me was always somewhere else, thinking of what a simple life in Japan might be like. Now I’m there, I find that I almost never think of Rockefeller Center or Park Avenue at all.

[Pico Iyer’s most recent book, “The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama,” is just out in paperback.]

Source / The New York Times

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Crackdown in Peruvian Jungle; Indigenous Leader Seeks Asylum

Posted on June 9, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

Alberto Pizango, leader of Peruvian indigenous communities, speaks during a news conference in Lima. Photo from Reuters / Guardian, U.K.

UPDATE: See ‘Peru: 60 dead as Garcia Regime sends police to attack indigenous road blockade,’ at Axis of Logic, with photos like the ones below.

Peruvian indigenous leader seeks asylum in Nicaragua’s embassy

Alberto Pizango was charged with sedition following protests in the Amazon rainforest which turned violent.

By Rory Carroll / June 9, 2009

See Video report from Amy Goodman / Democracy Now!, Below.

A Peruvian indigenous leader has sought asylum in Nicaragua’s embassy to escape sedition charges over anti-government protests in the Amazon which turned bloody last weekend.

Alberto Pizango, a leader in a campaign against oil and mining projects in the rainforest, slipped into the Nicaraguan embassy in Peru’s capital, Lima, after an arrest warrant was issued on Saturday.

Meanwhile in the jungle hundreds and possibly thousands of Awajun and Wambis Indians hid from security forces who were retaking control after two days of mayhem which left dozens dead, including 23 police. Dodging a military curfew and round-ups, many protestors trekked back to remote villages.

Indigenous leaders said at least 40 protesters were killed, including several children, and alleged that security forces dumped other victims in mass graves and rivers to conceal the extent of the crackdown.

“The government appears to be destroying the bodies of slain protesters and giving very low estimates of the casualties,” said Gregor MacLennan, of the advocacy group Amazon Watch, from the flashpoint town of Bagua.

Indigenous leaders said violence flared when police, including some in helicopters, opened fire last Friday on thousands of protesters who were peacefully blocking a road in Bagua, 870 miles north of Lima.

Authorities confirmed only nine indigenous protesters dead and rejected claims of cover-up. There are graphic images of dead and wounded protesters but so far no strong corroboration of accounts of mass graves or corpses being burnt and dumped. A government TV campaign portrayed protesters as barbarians who slaughtered “humble” police with spears and bullets.

The Andean country’s worst violence in a decade has left a question mark over the fate of billion-dollar deals with foreign multinationals, including the Anglo-French oil company Perenco, to extract oil, gas and minerals from the rainforest.

Indigenous leaders said they would continue a six-week-old campaign to block roads, waterways and pipelines to protect ancestral land.

President Alan Garcia, who has pushed for free trade deals with the United States and European Union, said the Amazon’s wealth belonged to all 28 million Peruvians, not just a few hundred thousand Indians. He hinted, without furnishing evidence, that the leftist governments of Bolivia and Venezuela had fomented the trouble.

The Catholic church urged the government to suspend the controversial decrees which opened the Amazon to multinationals.

“This was a disaster waiting to happen,” said Archbishop Miguel Cabrejos. “The indigenous peoples have been forgotten. We must listen to them.”

Source / Guardian, U.K.

Amy Goodman: Democracy Now! Report on Alleged Police Massacre of Indigenous People

Thanks to Jeffrey Segal and S.M. Wilhelm / The Rag Blog

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Stephanie Chernikowski : ‘Looking at Music: Side 2’ at the MOMA

Posted on June 9, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

Sonic Youth. 1983. Black-and-white photograph, 11 x 17″ (27.9 x 43.2 cm). Photo by Stephanie Chernikowski / Looking at Music: Side 2 / Museum of Modern Art, New York.

That is a very early shot of Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth playing at CBGB. They are both multi-talented, as are many of the artists in the show. Looking at Music: Side 2 examines a movement of downtown artists, musicians, photographers, and film makers who enjoyed breaking rules and usually did their art on the cheap. New York was broke and so were we. It sounds like a brilliant show and includes artists I really like — Patti Smith, Richard Hell, Jean-Michel Basquiat. I look forward to seeing it.
sc nyc 6.2009

Stephanie Chernikowski / The Rag Blog / June 9, 2009

Stephanie Chernikowski, a former denizen of the Sixties Austin artistic and literary bohemia who now resides in New York City, is featured in an exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MOMA).

The show, titled Looking at Music: Side 2, opens June 10, and runs through Nov. 30.

Stephanie Chernikowski moved to New York City from her native Texas on Columbus Day of 1975. She began working as a photojournalist shortly before her move and has continued to view life through a lens. Her concentration has been on 35mm black & white portraiture and documentation of the downtown music and arts scene, with occasional digressions.

Looking at Music: Side 2
June 10, 2009–November 30, 2009
The Yoshiko and Akio Morita Media Gallery, second floor

The Museum of Modern Art presents Looking at Music: Side 2, a survey of over 120 photographs, music videos, drawings, audio recordings, publications, Super 8 films, and ephemera that look at New York City from the early 1970s to the early 1980s when the city became a haven for young renegade artists who often doubled as musicians and poets. Art and music cross-fertilized with a vengeance following a stripped-down, hard-edged, anti-establishment ethos, with some artists plastering city walls with self-designed posters or spray painted monikers, while others commandeered abandoned buildings, turning vacant garages into makeshift theaters for Super 8 film screenings and raucous performances.

Many artists found the experimental music scene more vital and conducive to their contrarian ideas than the handful of contemporary art galleries in the city. Artists in turn formed bands, performed in clubs and non-profit art galleries, and self-published their own records and zines while using public access cable channels as a venue for media experiments and cultural debates.

See the online interactive presentation of the works included in Looking at Music: Side 2, with a slideshow of selected highlights, interpretive texts, and original acoustiguide conversations recorded for the exhibition. The site will launch by June 17, 2009.

Go to MOMA’s public flickr page for Looking at Music: Side 2.

Visit Stephanie Chernikowski’s website.

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Stopping Israeli Settlements : Can Obama Deliver?

Posted on June 9, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

Can Barack Obama succeed in pressuring Israeli’s Netanyahu to stop the expansion of Israeli settlements on Palestinian land?

Can Obama Stop Israeli Settlements?

As Obama and his advisors see the issue, American interests in reigning in nuclear proliferation, reducing terrorism, and protecting sources of oil and natural gas in Muslim countries require ending the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, or at least being seen trying our best to do so.

By Steve Weissman / June 8, 2009

Now comes the heavy lifting. Barack Obama has spoken in Cairo, calling for a new beginning between the U.S. and the world’s one billion Muslims. All the major players have offered their initial reactions, and everyone from Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu to the incredibly shrinking Osama bin Laden is asking the same question: Can Obama deliver?

The first and most obvious test will be Israeli settlements on the occupied West Bank. In his speech, Obama drew a rather modest line in the sand. “The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements,” he said. “This construction violates previous agreements and undermines efforts to achieve peace. It is time for these settlements to stop.”

Obama did not call for a withdrawal of existing settlements, the tearing down of the separation wall, or the opening of the Israeli-only highways that carve up the Palestinian land and make a viable state impossible. He left these and other life-and-death issues to future negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians.

Even so, Netanyahu and his Likkud-led government said no. “Israel will not heed President Barack Obama’s powerful appeal to halt all settlement activity on lands the Palestinians claim for a future state, officials said Friday, a position that looks sure to cause a policy clash with its most powerful ally,” the Associated Press reported.

“The government plans to allow construction inside existing West Bank settlements to accommodate for growing families, said the officials.”

Columnist Charles Krauthammer and America’s whatever-Israel-wants crowd dutifully repeated the “natural growth” argument, finding a humanitarian necessity in helping Israeli families grow and prosper on Palestinian land.

In their eagerness to avoid any suggestion of “moral equivalence” in the suffering of Palestinians and Jews, the American Likkudniks urged Obama to hold off on the settlements until he stopped the Iranian nuclear program, the build-up of Hamas missiles in Gaza, and the threat posed by a newly-strengthened Hezbollah in Lebanon.

And, no surprise, the same voices somehow managed to overlook the Fourth Geneva Convention, which makes it a crime in international law for any country to colonize land it has conquered in war.

One could be forgiven for beginning to see a pattern here.

Obama, in the meantime, soared above the fray. Having brilliantly used his speech to redefine the game, he deftly passed the ball to Bibi, suggesting that the Israeli leader might well become the Nixon of the Middle East.

“There’s the famous example of Richard Nixon going to China,” Obama told a small group of reporters, according to ABC News. “A Democrat couldn’t have gone to China. A liberal couldn’t have gone to China. But a big anti-communist like Richard Nixon could open that door. Now, it’s conceivable that Prime Minister Netanyahu can play that same role.”

Obama then flew off to the Nazi concentration camp at Buchenwald, where he repeated his condemnation of Iranian President Ahmadinejad and others who deny the reality of the Holocaust. Neither Netanyahu nor his American allies will get away with smearing this president as an enemy of either the Jewish people or the State of Israel.

All the while, the White House and State Department played solid defense, insisting that Obama was simply continuing the long-standing American opposition to Israeli settlements. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton even rejected the claims made by former Israeli officials that the administration of George W. Bush had secretly agreed to expanding Jewish settlements on the West Bank within their existing boundaries.

“There is no memorialization of any informal and oral agreements,” she told a news conference, as reported by the Israeli daily Haaretz. “If they did occur, which of course people say they did, they did not become part of the official position of the United States government.”

Will Obama make his opposition to the settlements stick where earlier administrations failed? He will definitely try, and the reason has nothing to do with whatever compassion he might feel for the Palestinians.

As Obama and his advisors see the issue, American interests in reigning in nuclear proliferation, reducing terrorism, and protecting sources of oil and natural gas in Muslim countries require ending the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, or at least being seen trying our best to do so. This is where the “foreign policy realism” of the first George Bush meets “Change We Can Believe In,” and Obama’s speech in Cairo and meetings with Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and Saudi King Abdullah set in motion a process that will push Washington in that direction.

Newsweek’s current interview with Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal makes the point. His message: The US should cut off aid if Israel does not end the occupation.

“The United States has the means to persuade the Israelis to work for a peaceful settlement,” said the Saudi prince. “It needs to tell them that if it is going to continue to help them, they must be reasonable and make reasonable concessions.”

The White House and Congress remain a long way from cutting off aid to Israel. But Obama has opened the door to increasing pressure on himself, and that will translate into increasing pressure on the Israelis.

[A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France. He is also a regular contributor to The Rag Blog.]

Source / truthout

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Far Right Makes Big Gains in European Elections

Posted on June 9, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

Nick Griffin, leader of the BNP in Great Britain, celebrates as results are announced at Manchester Town Hall. Griffin has a criminal conviction for incitement likely to cause racial hatred. Photo by Dave Thompson / PA.

Hard right on the move in 10 member states of European Union

The Netherlands leads the way with four seats for the anti-immigrant and anti-Islam Freedom Party of the platinum blond Geert Wilders, the producer of the notorious Muslim-baiting film short Fitna.

By Leigh Phillips / June 8, 2009

Also see ‘Free-web Pirate Party captures seat’ by Victoria Ek, Below.

BRUSSELS — Across Europe, the far right is on the march, claiming increased numbers of seats in ten different member states. However, in Belgium, France and Poland, the far right saw some significant losses as well.

In total, the far right is up eight seats on the 2004 European elections.

In Austria, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Romania and the UK, the far right made moderate to significant advances.

However, the extreme right saw sharp declines in Belgium, and France, and were completely wiped out in Poland.

“The far right growth is a really bad sign, and this is clearly linked to the economic crash,” Gerry Gable, the editor of Searchlight, a long-standing anti-fascist monthly magazine out of the UK, where the British National Party elected its first-ever MEP, told EUobserver.

“This is the entirely predictable result of the social fall-out of the financial crisis,” he added. “It’s a particularly worrying trend, especially in Austria and the Netherlands.”

The Netherlands leads the way with four seats for the anti-immigrant and anti-Islam Freedom Party of the platinum blond Geert Wilders, the producer of the notorious Muslim-baiting film short Fitna.

Austria as well delivered two seats to the identically named Freedom Party, up one seat from 2004 and winning 13.4 percent of the vote.

The BVO of the late Joerg Haider, a breakaway from the FPO, however was denied any representation in the European Parliament, although it did manage to win the support of 4.6 percent of voters.

Together, Austria’s far right won a clean 18 percent.

Hungary too returned three MEPs from the Movement for the Better Hungary, or Jobbik, on some 15 percent of the vote. The group is the founder of the Hungarian Guard, a paramilitary outfit whose uniforms recall the Nazi youth organisations from Europe’s darkest days.

In Denmark, the anti-immigrant Danish People’s Party, which nevertheless rejects the far-right label, gained an extra seat, up from one.

Finland also delivered up its first hard-right deputy, from the Perussuomalaiset, or True Finns, a nationalist and staunchly anti-EU grouping. The group’s win at the EU level follows on from its successes in domestic elections. In the 2003 parliamentary elections, the party won three seats and in 2007, it won five.

The Greater Romania Party won two seats, up from nil in 2007. Prior to the country’s entry into the European Union, the party did however have representation in the form of five ‘observer’ MEPs. In 2007 however, they lost all MEPs.

Greece’s Popular Orthodox Rally, or LAOS grouping, led by right-wing journalist Georgios Karatzaferis, doubled its representation from one to two MEPs, with around seven percent of the vote.

Italy’s anti-immigrant Northern League also doubled its representation, but from four to eight MEPs. However, the fate of the far right in Italy is difficult to measure, as the two other hard-right parties, the self-styled ‘post-fascist’ National Alliance of Gianfanco Fini, and the neo-fascist Social Alternative of Alessandra Mussolini, merged with Forza Italia in Silvio Berlusconi’s the People of Freedom party earlier this year.

France’s National Front however, lost four seats, down from seven, while the hard-right sovereignist Movement for France of Philippe de Villiers, now branded Libertas under the umbrella of Irish centrist eurosceptic Declan Ganley, also dropped two seats down to one.

“The Front National in France has taken a beating, largely as a result of the governing party taking on some of their rhetoric and Le Pen himself has just gone on too long and accumulated too many convictions,” said Mr Gable. “But the key is the party pulling itself apart in different directions.”

“It’s a similar story in Belgium, where the Vlaams Belang is losing backing to the Lijst Dedecker, but when they begin to pull apart, that’s when they start to suffer.”

The Flemish separatist Vlaams Belang lost one seat and now has only two in the house, while the right-wing populist Lijst Dedecker gained one. Together however, their combined roughly 15 percent of the vote does not match the Vlaams Belangs’ 23 percent of 2004.

Poland saw the biggest drop in the far-right vote, however, which returned 16 right-of-the-right MEPs last time around. This year, not a single one has been elected from either the League of Polish Families or the Self-Defence party.

Mr Gable attributed this to the hard conservatism of the mainstream parties.

“The collapse of the far right is just a sign of how right wing the governing parties have been.”

Bulgaria’s extremist anti-minority National Union Attack, or Ataka party, also dropped down one seat to two, and Latvia’s For Fatherland and Freedom (LNNK) lost three.

Finally, while results from the UK have been late to arrive, early projections suggest the British National Party will have at least one seat, from the Yorkshire and Humber region.

The candidate, Andrew Brons, “is a really nasty character and a long-time Nazi activist that has a conviction for an assault on a Black policeman,” said the Searchlight editor.

“He really is the true face of the BNP.”

“It’s very disappointing that they’ve taken any seats in the UK, and there’s still the Northwest and Midlands constituencies to come in and it could be very close there as well.”

[The above is based on preliminary results. Particularly in the case of fringe parties, results are very likely to change in the coming days.]

Source / eurobserver.com

A supporter of file-sharing hub The Pirate Bay, waves a Jolly Roger flag during a demonstration in Stockholm April 18 2009, as Sweden’s Pirate Party chairman and founder Rickard Falkvinge talks to the crowd in the background. Photo by Fredrik Persson / Scanpix / Reuters.

Free-web Pirate Party captures seat

By Veronica Ek / June 8, 2009

STOCKHOLM -– Sweden’s Pirate Party, striking a chord with voters who want more free content on the Internet, won a seat in the European Parliament, early results showed Sunday.

The Pirate Party captured 7.1 percent of votes in Sweden in the Europe-wide ballot, enough to give it a single seat. The party wants to deregulate copyright, abolish the patent system and reduce surveillance on the Internet.

“This is fantastic!” Christian Engstrom, the party’s top candidate, told Reuters. “This shows that there are a lot of people who think that personal integrity is important and that it matters that we deal with the Internet and the new information society in the right way.”

Previously an obscure group of single-issue activists, the party enjoyed a jump in popularity after the conviction in April of four men behind The Pirate Bay, one of the world’s biggest free file-sharing website.

The case cast a spotlight on the issue of internet file-sharing, a technique used to download movies, music and other content. The defendants have called for a retrial.

Despite the similar names, the party and the website are not linked. The party was founded in 2006 and contested a Swedish general election that year, but received less than one percent of the vote.

Engstrom credited the party’s appeal to young voters for its success. “We are very strong among those under 30. They are the ones who understand the new world the best. And they have now signaled they don’t like how the big parties deal with these issues.”

The Pirate Party will take up one of Sweden’s 18 seats in the 785-seat parliament. “We will use all of our strength to defend personal integrity and our civil rights,” Engstrom said.

[Reporting by Veronica Ek, writing by Adam Cox.]

Source / Reuters / Yahoo News

Thanks to Jeffrey Segal and S.M. Wilhelm / The Rag Blog

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