Eschenbach: On Letting Go of Religion, Part I

Posted on December 5, 2008 by RagBlog


The Case for Intolerance of Religion, Part I
By Sid Eschenbach / The Rag Blog / December 4, 2008

It has been said that “God did not create man; man created God”. The case for this argument is clearer with each passing day, as today’s vast sea of rationally derived knowledge continues to erode the once solid and fertile soil where “God”, since man created him, had firmly planted his feet. It has been estimated that over 95% of all human knowledge has been generated in the last 50 years, and today new knowledge is being created daily by the tetra-byte (1012 bytes). Unfortunately, the deep roots of religious traditions have not allowed social and cultural change to occur at the same pace, and we are constantly confronted with the inherent contradictions of this reality.

The case for intolerance of religions rests upon the assertion that the original reasons for the creation and use of religions no longer exist. The case for the intolerance of religions rests upon the assertion that in the modern world the continued acceptance and practice of religions does more harm than good. It rests upon the assertion that as long as we ‘respect’ all religious dogmas and accept them as a legitimate basis for a behavioral and social ethics, we will never progress as a species and shall remain locked within the confines of anachronistic, dangerous and wholly irrelevant behavioral models. It rests on the assertion that the idea that we must venerate what he have historically revered is false and without value.
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It rests upon the rejection of the idea that ethics can only be derived from divine thought. It rests upon the fact that there now exists (in the West) nearly five centuries of rational secular thinking, a chain of thoughts, decisions and reflections which reflect an effort to define, moderate and order human activity based upon logic and reason rather than the dogma of one religion or another. This reservoir of ethics is found in common law and science, a fact which eliminates the argument for and the historical need for religion to intrude into questions of societal order. Behavioral ethics should gain their legitimacy and respect not from their relationship to divinity, but to common sense, common law, and communal consensus. Under this system, thievery is not to be tolerated not because it says somewhere “Thou shalt not steal”, but rather because it makes no sense to live in a society that would permit it. It is what we use and do daily; a complete system of stand-alone, secular ethics.

In his preface to “A Brief History of Time”, Steven Hawking relates a meeting he had with the Pope. In it, he (the Pope) recognizes the many mistakes the church has made over the centuries vis-à-vis science (Copernicus, Galileo, Darwin, etc.), but declares that there is one essential element which will always and forever be the Church’s domain…. “Creation”. Hawking’s reply, and we can only wish we’d been there, was to the effect of… “Well, your Holiness… we’re working on it!”

Unfortunately, and to the great detriment of all life here on the planet, we humans continue our love affair with ourselves. We continue to believe the age old beliefs….. that we are either gods, children of them, or can transform ourselves into them. We believe that we are divine, separate from the animals, the trees, the stars, the air and the rocks… that we are the chosen, the special. And we know all this because our Gods… the ones we made…. have told us so…. and of course they did, because our priests say they did.

In short, the two millennia old cultural inertia of the major salvation-based homocentric mega-religions (Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam) continues to be the major impediment to mankind’s development of a new ethical understanding of the universe and our place in it; a new ethical understanding to parallel our new scientific understanding of the same. Could we do this, were we to do this, we would finally be free to use all that we have so recently learned and all that we could so easily become… for the benefit of all.

Galileo Revisited

The metaphor of the splitting of the atom… a gift that man was smart enough to discover but has not yet proven wise enough to control… stands as the classic example of the type of real phenomenon our knowledge can create for us… and the insoluble ethical problems that their very creation begets. The reason knowledge creates these “ethical application” problems is because of the fundamental disconnect, growing wider each day, between knowledge and faith. While our sciences progress, our faith-based ethical systems do not, and as a result we (and they) simply do not possess the tools to deal with the new situations.

We continue to look at the world through two thousand year old glasses… and to act based upon two-thousand year old thinking. Its time we set about to break those glasses, to smash these anachronistic prisms which so distort our view of what can be called nothing other than ‘reality’. Its time to define issues of ethics in secular terms, and keep the discussion there! The time for religious tolerance has passed, and to coin a phrase, the tolerance of religious tolerance should no longer be tolerated. As an example, while we cannot simply stop the belief that one race is superior to another, we can legislate against the practice of that belief. Bigotry as a belief cannot be outlawed, but the practice of bigotry can be… and so too with ‘faith’.

It is important that there be no confusion between intolerance of religion and intolerance of beliefs. If one chooses to believe that the world was created by an angry warrior God, and this God demands that war be waged on the neighbors and that in order to satisfy his needs their heads should be cut off and posted on stakes… that, as a philosophy, is o.k. Crazy, counter-productive and even dangerous … but o.k. Its o.k., that is, until the believer leaves home with his hatchet and, together with other believers or alone… puts this belief into practice. Within himself and without the conversion of belief into action, there’s no harm done. Converted into action, he’s an Aztec warrior acting on behalf of the Aztec priest/king… or an Islamic fundamentalist, or a Zionist or an Inquisitor. “Belief” by itself, while often silly, isn’t overtly dangerous to others. Religion clearly is.

This line of thought is not simply a dry, intellectual question, for the stakes are very real and the impact upon us enormous. Religion and religiously driven ethics intrude into all of our lives in fundamental and generally detrimental ways. As Stevie Wonder sang:

“When you believe in things
that you don’t understand
then you suffer……
superstition ain’t the way!”

Aside from the all too obvious ‘war on terror’ effects, a recent cause célèbre regards the ethics of the investigative use of “stem” cells; undifferentiated cells found in all living things at certain stages of their development, is illustrative of this intrusion. Like other “ethical” issues generated by new scientific endeavor (cloning, euthanasia, reproductive rights, etc.) It also demonstrates the fact that the ignorance and desperate arrogance displayed by the church in Galileo’s time is still very much alive and well… and that we continue to suffer in huge numbers and in very real ways the impact of the decisions defined in religious terms.

In spite of its stated claims to the contrary, religion continues to work to the detriment of us all. In this particular case (and this in one of the most educationally advanced countries on the planet), religion carried the day. Nothing less than a Presidential decision means, at least until we move into the modern equivalent of post-Galilean days, that millions of people will continue to suffer diseases which science could most probably cure within a relatively short time through work based upon this research. Make no mistake… had the Church been able to halt all manner of scientific inquiry in Galileo’s time, it would have… and it would also do so today. And the question is, knowing that this is absolutely true… why should we tolerate it? Science is at war with religion, but is not fighting back.

What just this one issue (out of many) means is that we will again suffer at the hands of religion and religiously defined ethics. It means that you, your friends, your family, your nation and mine will all suffer. Cures to many of our most common diseases have been postponed unnecessarily and indefinitely. Exactly how many will continue to suffer and die because of this particular exercise of religious views that were out-dated 400 years ago is unknown, although guesses range into the tens of millions. This is a monstrous crime, but it hasn’t been described as one. And it is not reported as one because no one has to nerve to assail this, the holiest of holy grails… the concept that religious tolerance is a virtue, and the concept that ethics can ultimately only be defined in religious terms.

It’s a Crazy World

We live in a world which, as the comic George Carlin says, “If I say that I believe in extraterrestrial life… I’m crazy. But if I say I believe that 2,000 years ago a guy was born of a virgin mother and he could walk on water…. I’m sane. Well… THAT’S crazy!” It is crazy. Something is fundamentally wrong with this reality… and what is wrong is not that people continue to believe two thousand year old explanations, for there are always those in whom foolish ideas can and will exist.

What is wrong is that we collectively feel that we have an obligation to tolerate and even respect this insanity, foolishness and criminality… if it is properly dressed in religious garb. While we no longer tolerate bigots, slave owners or wife beaters, we continue to respect the faiths that produce Catholic pedophiles, Jewish and Christian extremists, and Islamic fundamentalists! While we no longer humor flat-earthers, we do tolerate creationists! In spite of the ravages caused by these deluded madmen, ecumenicalism and religious tolerance is not only currently politically correct, it is progressive political dogma of the most fundamental and compelling kind, the holiest of holy cows; doctrine stated clearly in documents no less important than the Constitution of the United States of America, and later in the U.N Charter.

And we got here because we played favorites. We got here because it was the only way out, in the mid-18th century, of centuries of religious wars… of the state backing one religion and persecuting another. Well aware of the centuries of continual religiously driven strife and turmoil on the old continent, the U.S. founding fathers found the only solution available…tolerance, freedom of religion, and the separation of church and state. The growth from intolerance to tolerance has thus been seen as a virtue, and unquestionably was at that time. Unfortunately, our social evolution has stopped there, because no better solution to the fundamental problems caused by religious behavior has been proposed since.

Ethical Evolution

How did this happen? How is it that we have allowed ourselves to become hostages to social philosophies and solutions whose day has clearly long since passed? Because we know no other social reality, we accept it. Imagine, if you can, the kind of world we’d live in if we had stopped scientific inquiry with Aristotle, geography with Vespucci, or music with Pan. It is an unimaginable world… but that is in fact the shape of the social and cultural world we live in now.

While the then revolutionary ideas of freedom of religion and religious tolerance are undoubtedly and deservedly counted among the great socio-political inventions of the 18th century… they are relics of their time. They no more represent a definitive solution to the real and overarching issues of mass population control than did Newton’s “Principia” or Darwin’s “Origin of the Species” represent the final evolution of thought for their respective fields. The “religious tolerance” way-station, a temporary solution at best, grabbed by the framers of the Constitution like a drowning man grabs a life jacket, has now been elevated to the status of “destination”, and is blindly accepted as the final solution to the problems caused by religions.

The Crisis of Ethics

More importantly, and remarkably without the risk of hyperbole, the recognition of the need to replace the religiously based codes of ethics which have served as the very foundations for the creation and control of the political states around the world for the past four thousand years must be recognized as being the most urgent problem that we face as a species. To not recognize this is to continue down this so well trodden cycle of war and peace and war and peace and war… governed by behavioral ethics derived from religious dogma.

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” states the country wisdom. Well, its broke. And it will remain broke for as long as the world’s ethics are grounded in a religious framework. The reason for that is clear, because from within these very religious codes of ethics which make possible the socio-political organizations they support are planted the seeds of conflict: the cultivation of ethnicity, nationalism, xenophobia and religio-centrisim which create the divisions that spur the friction between us.

Recent studies done by the U.S. Institute of Peace, the Institute on Religion in an age of Science, and the United Nations study on Religious Tolerance and Freedom all identify religion as being either the primary cause, or one of a few fundamental causes behind man’s identification with ethnic and national groups, they being the most common causes for conflicts between peoples. Seminal thinkers like Max Weber likewise identified religion as one of the root identifying elements of the ethnic and national identification which create the divisions which lead to conflicts.

That being the case, it is clear that any serious attempt to ameliorate the levels of global conflict must address the religious underpinning to those conflicts, be they direct or indirect. If must be recognized that separate beliefs create separate peoples…and separate peoples with separate beliefs invariably see each other as competitors…and ultimately, as enemies. The very words make it clear. Separate. Divided. Different. From totemic tribes to world cup soccer to thermo-nuclear powers, it remains the same. We become us in the moment that they become them. And the role of religion, not so much in its “spiritual” role, but rather in its socio-political power-brokering role, is one of the most fundamental of the divisions which lead us time and again down the road to hell. And not the Catholic or allegorical hell. Hell on earth. War.

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Junior’s Legacy: Hundreds of Needlessly Dead Americans

Posted on December 5, 2008 by RagBlog

Clinton Fein’s latest exhibition, Torture, which opened at Toomey Tourell Gallery in San Francisco in January 2007 is a shocking and defiant exploration of America’s approach to torture under the Bush administration. A series of staged and digitally manipulated photographic images recreate the infamous torture scenes from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, transforming the diffuse, muted and low-resolution images into large-scale, vivid, powerful and frightening reproductions. Photo: ClintonFein.com.

How Many Americans Died Because of Bush’s Torture Program?
By Scott Horton / December 2, 2008

According to a special operations intelligence officer, the answer is a number north of three thousand–not counting the tens of thousands maimed or seriously wounded, the destruction of the nation’s reputation as a moral leader, or the damage done to our Constitution. In a stunning op-ed published in Sunday’s Washington Post, a special operations intelligence officer details his direct experience with torture practices put into effect in Iraq in 2006 — long after the Pentagon had forsworn them, but while Donald Rumsfeld was still running the shop.

Amid the chaos, four other Air Force criminal investigators and I joined an elite team of interrogators attempting to locate Zarqawi. What I soon discovered about our methods astonished me. The Army was still conducting interrogations according to the Guantanamo Bay model: Interrogators were nominally using the methods outlined in the U.S. Army Field Manual, the interrogators’ bible, but they were pushing in every way possible to bend the rules — and often break them. I don’t have to belabor the point; dozens of newspaper articles and books have been written about the misconduct that resulted. These interrogations were based on fear and control; they often resulted in torture and abuse.

The Pentagon’s claims that it had returned to interrogations based on the venerable Field Manual, was, it seems, conscious disinformation. But the officer offers an assessment. The torture techniques consistently failed to produce actionable intelligence, he said. But the old techniques — which rest on confidence building — consistently worked and gave the interrogators access to information that saved lives. Moreover, the strategies employed to effect later were used as a much broader tactic, accentuating differences between native Iraqi Sunnis and foreign fighters, in what came to be known as the “Sunni Awakening.”

But then we come to the most chilling part of the op-ed, which the writer discloses the Bush Administration struggled to suppress:

I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for Al Qaeda in Iraq. The large majority of suicide bombings in Iraq are still carried out by these foreigners. They are also involved in most of the attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. It’s no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me–unless you don’t count American soldiers as Americans.

The torture techniques developed by the Bush torture team were the most effective recruitment tool we could ever have given terrorists. They cost thousands of American lives. And that’s a key element of the legacy of the forty-third president.

Source / Harper’s Magazine

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Obama : A Healthy Use of the Internet

Posted on December 4, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

The health-care mobilization taking shape before Obama even takes office will include online videos, blogs and e-mail alerts as well as traditional public forums. Already, several thousand people have posted comments on health on the Obama transition Web site.

By Ceci Connolly / December 4, 2008

Barack Obama’s incoming administration has begun to draw on the high-tech organizational tools that helped get him elected to lay the groundwork for an attempt to restructure the U.S. health-care system.

Former senator Thomas A. Daschle, Obama’s point person on health care, launched an effort to create political momentum yesterday in a conference call with 1,000 invited supporters culled from 10,000 who had expressed interest in health issues, promising it would be the first of many opportunities for Americans to weigh in.

The health-care mobilization taking shape before Obama even takes office will include online videos, blogs and e-mail alerts as well as traditional public forums. Already, several thousand people have posted comments on health on the Obama transition Web site.

“We’ll have some exciting news about town halls, we’ll have some outreach efforts in December,” Daschle said during the call. And tomorrow, when he appears at a health-care summit with Sen. Ken Salazar (D-Colo.) in Denver, Daschle said, “we’ll be making some announcements there.”

It is the first attempt by the Obama team to harness its vast and sophisticated grass-roots network to shape public policy. Although the president-elect is a long way from crafting actual legislation, he promised during the campaign to make the twin challenge of controlling health-care costs and expanding coverage a top priority in his first term.

Daschle, who is expected to become the next secretary of health and human services, is waging the outreach campaign by marrying old-fashioned Washington-style lobbying and cutting-edge social-networking technologies. Although he has yet to be formally nominated, he has already met with more than 100 insiders, ranging from union leaders and the seniors group AARP to hospital executives and representatives of corporate America.

“In the last three days I’ve exchanged three sets of e-mails with him,” said Ron Pollack, executive director and vice president of the advocacy group Families USA.

The Obama team, which recruited about 13 million online supporters during the presidential campaign and announced its vice presidential selection via text message, is now moving to apply those tools to the earliest stages of governing.

“This is the beginning of the reinvention of what the presidency in the 21st century could be,” said Simon Rosenberg, president of the center-left think tank NDN. “This will reinvent the relationship of the president to the American people in a way we probably haven’t seen since FDR’s use of radio in the 1930s.”

In seeking to translate its political skills to policymaking, the incoming administration faces potential legal and political pitfalls. It is not clear, for instance, whether Obama can legally use his list of campaign supporters in the White House; the database would probably become government property. So far, the transition team has gotten around that issue by encouraging people to register on its Web site, Change.gov. Those names and e-mail addresses go into a new database, which can be tapped to generate activities such as house parties, YouTube videos and viral discussions to rally support.

Daschle’s telephone call, which was not open to the news media, and his speech in Denver tomorrow provide hints as to how the new administration might tackle major health-care legislation.

“President-elect Obama believes that change really comes from the ground up, not from Washington,” Salazar said in an interview. “The drumbeat for change is one which goes across every single state — red, blue and purple. That kind of a drumbeat will be very effective in achieving the change needed on health care.”

The Obama team chose to begin its high-tech grass-roots experiment on the issue of health care because “every American is feeling the pressure of high health costs and lack of quality care, and we feel it’s important to engage them in the process of reform,” said spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter.

It started with a simple 63-second video posted on Change.gov, in which health advisers Dora Hughes and Lauren Aronson posed the question “What worries you most about the health-care system in our country?”

That triggered 3,700 responses, from personal tales of medical hardship to complaints about “socialized medicine.” The cyber-conversation was interactive, allowing individuals to reply to one another and rate responses with a thumbs up or down. The top-scoring comment, a pitch for a “paradigm shift” toward prevention, had 82 thumbs up.

The Obama technology gurus then built a “word cloud” showing the 100 most frequently used words in the responses. The cloud’s biggest words — indicating those used most — include “insurance,” “system,” “people” and “need.”

“The Obama administration has learned that listening may be even more important than talking, because it diffuses opposition,” said Andrew Rasiej, co-founder of Personal Democracy Forum, a nonpartisan Web site focused on the intersection of politics and technology.

Obama used the same strategy during the campaign, Rasiej said. When many of his most liberal supporters became enraged that he voted in favor of a surveillance law, Obama assigned staffers to monitor and respond to comments posted on the campaign’s Web site. After a sort of cyber-catharsis of complaints, the controversy died down, Rasiej observed.

“It will be a lot easier to get the American public to adopt any new health-care system if they were a part of the process of crafting it,” he said.

By moving early, Daschle and Obama are also applying a central lesson learned in past failed efforts to overhaul the health system, said Andrew Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union.

“This is an opportunity to deepen the education work and build the ultimate coalition for change before it’s demonized or people try to oppose it,” he said.

After the first health comments poured in to the transition Web site, Aronson made a second video, this time with Daschle, seated in shirt sleeves and a tie.

“We want to make sure you understand how important those comments and your contributions are,” Daschle says into the camera. “Already we’ve begun to follow through with some of the ideas.”

Daschle praises the suggestion of creating a “Health Corps” of volunteers, modeled after President John F. Kennedy’s Peace Corps.

Aronson, who was a congressional health aide to incoming White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, then recounts the story of a small businesswoman struggling to provide affordable health insurance to her workers.

Says Daschle: “When I was in the Senate, it was stories like that, probably more than all the factual information, that really moved you to want to act.”

Research director Lucy Shackelford contributed to this report.

Source / /Washington Post

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Cole: Rising Tuition, Prison Populations, and Pot

Posted on December 4, 2008 by RagBlog

Click on image to enlarge.

State Universities versus State Prisons;
And Marijuana Legalization as a Solution
By Juan Cole / December 4, 2008

Why is tuition so high in state universities that the NYT is wondering if families will go on being able to afford it?

As someone who has observed this rise in tuition over an academic career of 30 years, as graduate student and professor, I have some theories from an insider perspective.

State universities have had to raise tuition because state legislatures have continually cut back every year the amount of state funding for them. Already in 2005 this article in Philanthropy News Digest explained:

For example, less than 14 percent of the University of Oregon’s total revenue came from state funds in 2003-04, compared to 32 percent in 1985-86, while tuition fees accounted for more than 33 percent of the university’s budget, compared to 22 percent twenty years ago. Meanwhile, the University of Michigan has lost 12 percent of its state funding, or $43 million, over the past two years. According to UM spokeswoman Julie Peterson, state money now only accounts for 8 percent of the university’s budget. “We can’t rely on state funding alone,” said Peterson. “It simply isn’t enough.”

That statistic, whereby the University of Oregon went from having 33 percent of its total revenue from state sources in 1985 to 14 percent in 2005, was typical of what happened throughout the whole country. The typical revenue streams for state universities used to be 1) State support, 2) tuition and fees, 3) Federal grants, and 4) alumni donations and the resulting endowment. At some state universities, the state contribution may now be the fourth largest source.

Memorial Union, Oregon State University. Photo: Oregon State University.

Now, why did states cut back the universities so much? It wasn’t that the state legislators were bad people or anti-intellectuals for the most part.

The Reagan/ Grover Norquist line that government is not the solution, government is the problem, and the demand for lower taxes (especially on the wealthy) was influential in many states. So essentially the American big business class of about 3 million people was given the opportunity to quadruple its vast wealth through lower taxes (when you lower taxes on a particular segment of the public, that is wealth distribution in their favor). Meanwhile public functions of government are cut back and everybody else gets potholes, closed public libraries, underfunded state universities, etc.

I can remember when I started grad school at UCLA in 1979 I heard on the radio that because of steep cutbacks in property taxes, the state would no longer be able to afford to spray for mosquitoes. I thought to myself, lord, they’ll end up giving themselves malaria to avoid a millage!

A big drain on state budgets is the penitentiary system. In just the decade 1980 to 1990, the prison and jail population in the US doubled. Since 1980, the prison population has quadrupled. By the end of 2006, over 2 million persons were in prison and another 5 million were on probation or on parole.

I remember reading in the Ann Arbor News in 1988 about a big debate at the statehouse in Lansing over funding for prisons versus funding for universities. The prisons won.

In these same nearly four decades, there have been substantial declines in violent crimes and crimes against property in the US. The vastly increased prison population was produced by unreasonably long prison sentences for non-violent crime, by ridiculous 3-strikes-and-you-are-out life sentences and by the completely failed ‘war on drugs’ and by mandatory sentencing guidelines imposed by legislatures on judges in drug cases. Half of prisoners in state prisons did not commit a violent crime, and 20% are drug offenders.

This vast expansion in the number of imprisoned Americans required states to build prisons and to pay large amounts of money to keep people in them.

The states had to put their money into prosecuting, trying, imprisoning and then supporting to the tune of like $20,000 a year a bunch of . . . potheads.

So obviously the states had no money to spend on state universities, which were cut loose, and had to raise tuition and hit their alumni up for contributions just to try to keep their heads above water.

Of course, universities faced increased costs at the same time. European monopolies drove up the costs of medical journals in ways that the European Union should look into. Digitalization has been a huge added cost that cannot be escaped (in many cases it means paying twice for books and other materials, once in hard copy and once in digital form.) Universities with medical schools face the high costs of acquiring increasingly high tech, state of the art medical equipment. Etc.

But I think the ‘war on drugs’ and the cost of prisons has deeply harmed state economies and has hurt access to state universities for working and middle class families.

Marijuana in particular may well have important medicinal properties, and it should just be legalized.

This is a conclusion a lot of frustrated law enforcement officials have come to, and they are campaigning for an end to prohibition. Reuters has more.

It is true that some proportion of the population may face addiction problems from marijuana. But it is not as if it isn’t already a multi-billion dollar business and widely available. About 15 percent of Americans regularly use it. And about 1/5 of the population is susceptible to alcohol addiction, but that doesn’t impel us to a second Prohibition in its regard. Use some of the tax receipts on the industry to fund treatment of those who can’t handle it. A lot of the deleterious effects of being high come from people driving under the influence. But actually you could just mandate that the auto industry put in ignition switches that only a sober person has the reflexes to make work. Since we are likely to own the auto industry soon, we should be able to do what we want. And besides, green mass transit is much better than individuals driving around wreaking mayhem,and a pothead on a subway isn’t much of a threat to anyone. We should move in that direction for all sorts of reasons.

I can remember reading an op-ed in the NYT years ago arguing that there are 60 million crimes a year in the United States, but only a tiny fraction of the perpetrators is ever actually prosecuted and a smaller fraction still brought to trial. I thought to myself, and a good thing too! How would we pay for 60 million prisoners? And, if you have a country of 280 million people committing 60 million crimes a year, you clearly just have way too many laws.

The baneful impact on the United States of Puritanism, which comes in part from the Religious Right, has diverted our energies from educating ourselves, and developing our society, toward instead creating a Nanny State that employs people to make sure you only get high from alcohol, not from other substances. Bush even created an FBI porn squad. As if wealthy Republican hoteliers weren’t the primary distributors of porn (via pay per view channels) in the country.

If the Religious Right could, it would just close down all the biology classes in the country (because after all they teach that wicked Darwin) and leave the development of biotech to the South Koreans, with Americans–denied the wealth that biotechnological innovation will bring in–turned into unemployed riffraff.

It turns out that if we had more personal freedoms, we’d have more state monies and could educate ourselves to develop our potential as free human beings.

In the past 40 years, the snowball has been going in the other direction– fewer personal freedoms, a vast gulag of the incarcerated, and less and less state money for the development of the minds of the public. We’ve built ourselves a big ignorant prison, with a loud-mouthed fundamentalist preacher for a warden, and called it America.

We should legalize pot, and tax the resulting industry. We should repeal mandatory sentencing guidelines and develop rehabilitation strategies rather than putting the ill-behaved in expensive state hotels. And we should go back to having state-funded state universities.

Source / Informed Comment

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Israel Coiled for Potential Iran Strike

Posted on December 4, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer


‘While its preference is to coordinate with the US, defense officials have said Israel is preparing a wide range of options for such an operation.’
By Yaakov Katz / December 4, 2008

The IDF (Israel Defense Forces)is drawing up options for a strike on Iranian nuclear facilities that do not include coordination with the United States, The Jerusalem Post has learned.

While its preference is to coordinate with the US, defense officials have said Israel is preparing a wide range of options for such an operation

“It is always better to coordinate,” one top Defense Ministry official explained last week. “But we are also preparing options that do not include coordination.”

Israeli officials have said it would be difficult, but not impossible, to launch a strike against Iran without receiving codes from the US Air Force, which controls Iraqi airspace. Israel also asked for the codes in 1991 during the First Gulf War, but the US refused.

“There are a wide range of risks one takes when embarking on such an operation,” a top Israeli official said.

Several news reports have claimed recently that US President George W. Bush has refused to give Israel a green light for an attack on Iranian facilities. One such report, published in September in Britain’s Guardian newspaper, claimed that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert requested a green light to attack Iran in May but was refused by Bush.

In September, a Defense News article on an early warning radar system the US recently sent to Israel quoted a US government source who said the X-band deployment and other bilateral alliance-bolstering activities send parallel messages: “First, we want to put Iran on notice that we’re bolstering our capabilities throughout the region, and especially in Israel. But just as important, we’re telling the Israelis, ‘Calm down, behave. We’re doing all we can to stand by your side and strengthen defenses, because at this time, we don’t want you rushing into the military option.'”

The “US European Command (EUCOM) has deployed to Israel a high-powered X-band radar and the supporting people and equipment needed for coordinated defense against Iranian missile attack, marking the first permanent US military presence on Israeli soil,” Defense News wrote. The radar will shave several precious minutes off Israel’s reaction time to an Iranian missile launch.

In a related article at about the same time, TIME magazine raised the possibility that through the deployment of the radar, America wants to keep an eye on Israeli airspace, so that the US is not surprised if and when the IAF is sent to bomb Iran, a scenario Washington wants to avoid.

The US army sent 120 EUCOM personnel to Israel’s Nevatim Air Base southeast of Beersheba to man the new radar.

Last week, Iran’s nuclear chief Gholam Reza Aghazadeh revealed that the country was operating more than 5,000 centrifuges at its uranium enrichment plant in Natanz and would continue to install centrifuges and enrich uranium to produce nuclear fuel for the country’s future nuclear power plants.

“At this point, more than 5,000 centrifuges are operating in Natanz,” said Aghazadeh, who is also the head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran. This represents a significant increase from the 4,000 Iran had said were up and running in August at the plant.

The Islamic republic has said it plans to move toward large-scale uranium enrichment that will ultimately involve 54,000 centrifuges.

Israeli officials said last week that the drop in oil prices and the continued sanctions on Iran were having an effect, although they had yet to stop Teheran’s nuclear program. The officials said that while Iran was making technological advancements, it would not have the necessary amount of highly-enriched uranium for a nuclear bomb until late 2009.

“There is still time and there is no need to rush into an operation right now,” another Israeli official said. “The regime there is already falling apart and will likely no longer be in power 10 years from now.”

The IAF was preparing for a wide range of options, OC Air Force Maj.-Gen. Ido Nehushtan recently said, adding that all it would take to launch an operation was a decision by the political echelon.

“The air force is a very robust and flexible force,” he told Der Spiegel. “We are ready to do whatever is demanded of us.”

On Monday, Teheran dismissed the possibility of an Israeli strike, saying it didn’t take Israel seriously.

“We think that regional and international developments and the complicated situation faced by Israel itself will not allow it to launch military strikes against other countries,” Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hassan Qashqavi told reporters in Teheran, according to the Press TV Web site. “Israel makes threats to promote its psychological and media warfare,” he said.

Source / The Jerusalem Post

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Photo of the Day: Hoot for Peace

Posted on December 4, 2008 by RagBlog


What will you be doing when you’re ninety?
By Lee Jordan

This is Louis, 90 years of age !!!.. it was a freezing night in Bristol city, yet Louis was standing there, waiting for a hoot !

I have a real admiration for this young lady, such passion in her beliefs.. i’ve seen her in all conditions, waiting there with an empty road, waiting for a hoot of agreement.

During rush hour there is a hoot every ten seconds if not more, Louis will give a happy nod to each approving driver, this is why the focus isn’t so sharp on her face.

Source / Onexposure / 1x

Thanks to Betsy Gaines / The Rag Blog

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Recession: Delusional Politics meets Lewis Carroll

Posted on December 4, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer


‘”It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,” the Queen remarked.’
By Larry Ray / The Rag Blog / December 4, 2008

“The rule is jam tomorrow and jam yesterday – but never jam today!” Young Alice Bernanke stared at the ranting Queen and mumbled, “I don’t understand you. It’s dreadfully confusing!”

Monday’s top news headline could have been read through Lewis Carroll’s Looking Glass: “It’s Official: U.S. is in Recession” What a surprise. But even as the National Bureau of Economic Research read its formal pronouncement that, “A US recession began in 2007” the evil royalty and aides in Wonderland’s White house still refused to say the word “recession.”

“ `And you do Addition?’ the White Queen asked. `What’s one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one?’

`I don’t know,’ said Alice. `I lost count.'”

Instead of fessing up and accepting what has been abundantly clear to most all of us as the economic sky is falling all around, White House spokesman “Foxy Loxy,” Tony Fratto, instead, breezily remarked upon the fact that the NBER “determines the start and end dates of business cycles.”

Too late for doublespeak. Bush’s last parade had all ready been undone. Hans Christen Anderson wrote about such parades in 1837. And the ending of his tale about another deluded emperor fits the Bush political legacy perfectly:

“The Emperor is naked,” the child said.

“Fool!” his father reprimanded, running after him. “Don’t talk nonsense!” He grabbed his child and took him away. But the boy’s remark, which had been heard by the bystanders, was repeated over and over again until everyone cried:

“The boy is right! The Emperor is naked! It’s true!”

The Emperor realized that the people were right but could not admit to that. He thought it better to continue the procession under the illusion that anyone who couldn’t see his clothes was either stupid or incompetent. And he stood stiffly on his carriage, while behind him a page held his imaginary mantle.”

But hundreds of thousands of Chicken Littles were all ready out of their coop of delusion having heard Bush and company formally described by everyone as being buck naked! A flapping, frantic flock followed including Goosey Loosey, Henny Penny and a Thanksgiving survivor, Turkey Lurkey, all squawking, panic selling and sending the Dow down 680 points, almost 8%.

Lewis Carroll had yet another explanation for things, that also might fit the end of the delusional politics of the Bush era while also acknowledging that no one has a clue about what is happening economically right now:

`It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,’ the Queen remarked.

`What sort of things do you remember best?’ Alice ventured to ask.

`Oh, things that happened the week after next,’ the Queen replied in a careless tone. `For instance, now,’ she went on,`there’s the King’s Messenger. He’s in prison now, being punished: and the trial doesn’t even begin till next Wednesday: and of course the crime comes last of all.’

`Suppose he never commits the crime?’ said Alice.

`That would be all the better, wouldn’t it?’ the Queen said.

With apologies to Mssrs. Carroll and Anderson.

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

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Paul Krugman : What to Do

Posted on December 4, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer


‘Once the recovery effort is well underway, it will be time to turn to prophylactic measures: reforming the system so that the crisis doesn’t happen again.’
By Paul Krugman

The following article by educator, New York Times columnist and Nobel prize winning economist Paul Krugman appears in the Dec. 18, 2008 isssue of The New York Review of Books.

What the world needs right now is a rescue operation. The global credit system is in a state of paralysis, and a global slump is building momentum as I write this. Reform of the weaknesses that made this crisis possible is essential, but it can wait a little while. First, we need to deal with the clear and present danger. To do this, policymakers around the world need to do two things: get credit flowing again and prop up spending.

The first task is the harder of the two, but it must be done, and soon. Hardly a day goes by without news of some further disaster wreaked by the freezing up of credit. As I was writing this, for example, reports were coming in of the collapse of letters of credit, the key financing method for world trade. Suddenly, buyers of imports, especially in developing countries, can’t carry through on their deals, and ships are standing idle: the Baltic Dry Index, a widely used measure of shipping costs, has fallen 89 percent this year.

What lies behind the credit squeeze is the combination of reduced trust in and decimated capital at financial institutions. People and institutions, including the financial institutions, don’t want to deal with anyone unless they have substantial capital to back up their promises, yet the crisis has depleted capital across the board.

The obvious solution is to put in more capital. In fact, that’s a standard response in financial crises. In 1933 the Roosevelt administration used the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to recapitalize banks by buying preferred stock—stock that had priority over common stock in terms of its claims on profits. When Sweden experienced a financial crisis in the early 1990s, the government stepped in and provided the banks with additional capital equal to 4 percent of the country’s GDP—the equivalent of about $600 billion for the United States today—in return for a partial ownership. When Japan moved to rescue its banks in 1998, it purchased more than $500 billion in preferred stock, the equivalent relative to GDP of around a $2 trillion capital injection in the United States. In each case, the provision of capital helped restore the ability of banks to lend, and unfroze the credit markets.

A financial rescue along similar lines is now underway in the United States and other advanced economies, although it was late in coming, thanks in part to the ideological tilt of the Bush administration. At first, after the fall of Lehman Brothers, the Treasury Department proposed buying up $700 billion in troubled assets from banks and other financial institutions. Yet it was never clear how this was supposed to help the situation. (If the Treasury paid market value, it would do little to help the banks’ capital position, while if it paid above-market value it would stand accused of throwing taxpayers’ money away.) Never mind: after dithering for three weeks, the United States followed the lead already set, first by Britain and then by continental European countries, and turned the plan into a recapitalization scheme.

It seems doubtful, however, that this will be enough to turn things around, for at least three reasons. First, even if the full $700 billion is used for recapitalization (so far only a fraction has been committed), it will still be small, relative to GDP, compared with the Japanese bank bailout—and it’s arguable that the severity of the financial crisis in the United States and Europe now rivals that of Japan. Second, it’s still not clear how much of the bailout will reach the components of the shadow banking system—largely unregulated financial organizations including investment banks and hedge funds—that are at the core of the problem. Third, it’s not clear whether banks will be willing to lend out the funds, as opposed to sitting on them (a problem encountered by the New Deal seventy-five years ago).

My guess is that the recapitalization will eventually have to get bigger and broader, and that there will eventually have to be more assertion of government control—in effect, it will come closer to a full temporary nationalization of a significant part of the financial system. Just to be clear, this isn’t a long-term goal, a matter of seizing the economy’s commanding heights: finance should be reprivatized as soon as it’s safe to do so, just as Sweden put banking back in the private sector after its big bailout in the early Nineties. But for now the important thing is to loosen up credit by any means at hand, without getting tied up in ideological knots. Nothing could be worse than failing to do what’s necessary out of fear that acting to save the financial system is somehow “socialist.”

The same goes for another line of approach to resolving the credit crunch: getting the Federal Reserve, temporarily, into the business of lending directly to the nonfinancial sector. The Federal Reserve’s willingness to buy commercial paper is a major step in this direction, but more will probably be necessary.

All these actions should be coordinated with other advanced countries. The reason is the globalization of finance. Part of the payoff for US rescues of the financial system is that they help loosen up access to credit in Europe; part of the payoff to European rescue efforts is that they loosen up credit here. So everyone should be doing more or less the same thing; we’re all in this together.

And one more thing: the spread of the financial crisis to emerging markets makes a global rescue for developing countries part of the solution to the crisis. As with recapitalization, parts of this were already in place during the autumn: the International Monetary Fund was providing loans to countries with troubled economies like Ukraine, with less of the moralizing and demands for austerity that it engaged in during the Asian crisis of the 1990s. Meanwhile, the Fed provided swap lines to several emerging-market central banks, giving them the right to borrow dollars as needed. As with recapitalization, the efforts so far look as if they’re in the right direction but too small, so more will be needed.

Even if the rescue of the financial system starts to bring credit markets back to life, we’ll still face a global slump that’s gathering momentum. What should be done about that? The answer, almost surely, is good old Keynesian fiscal stimulus.

Now, the United States tried a fiscal stimulus in early 2008; both the Bush administration and congressional Democrats touted it as a plan to “jump-start” the economy. The actual results were, however, disappointing, for two reasons. First, the stimulus was too small, accounting for only about 1 percent of GDP. The next one should be much bigger, say, as much as 4 percent of GDP. Second, most of the money in the first package took the form of tax rebates, many of which were saved rather than spent. The next plan should focus on sustaining and expanding government spending—sustaining it by providing aid to state and local governments, expanding it with spending on roads, bridges, and other forms of infrastructure.

The usual objection to public spending as a form of economic stimulus is that it takes too long to get going—that by the time the boost to demand arrives, the slump is over. That doesn’t seem to be a major worry now, however: it’s very hard to see any quick economic recovery, unless some unexpected new bubble arises to replace the housing bubble. (A headline in the satirical newspaper The Onion captured the problem perfectly: “Recession-Plagued Nation Demands New Bubble to Invest In.”) As long as public spending is pushed along with reasonable speed, it should arrive in plenty of time to help—and it has two great advantages over tax breaks. On one side, the money would actually be spent; on the other, something of value (e.g., bridges that don’t fall down) would be created.

Some readers may object that providing a fiscal stimulus through public works spending is what Japan did in the 1990s—and it is. Even in Japan, however, public spending probably prevented a weak economy from plunging into an actual depression. There are, moreover, reasons to believe that stimulus through public spending would work better in the United States, if done promptly, than it did in Japan. For one thing, we aren’t yet stuck in the trap of deflationary expectations that Japan fell into after years of insufficiently forceful policies. And Japan waited far too long to recapitalize its banking system, a mistake we hopefully won’t repeat.

The point in all of this is to approach the current crisis in the spirit that we’ll do whatever it takes to turn things around; if what has been done so far isn’t enough, do more and do something different, until credit starts to flow and the real economy starts to recover.

And once the recovery effort is well underway, it will be time to turn to prophylactic measures: reforming the system so that the crisis doesn’t happen again.

Financial Reform

“We have magneto trouble,” said John Maynard Keynes at the start of the Great Depression: most of the economic engine was in good shape, but a crucial component, the financial system, wasn’t working. He also said this: “We have involved ourselves in a colossal muddle, having blundered in the control of a delicate machine, the working of which we do not understand.” Both statements are as true now as they were then.

How did this second great colossal muddle arise? In the aftermath of the Great Depression, we redesigned the machine so that we did understand it, well enough at any rate to avoid big disasters. Banks, the piece of the system that malfunctioned so badly in the 1930s, were placed under tight regulation and supported by a strong safety net. Meanwhile, international movements of capital, which played a disruptive role in the 1930s, were also limited. The financial system became a little boring but much safer.

Then things got interesting and dangerous again. Growing international capital flows set the stage for devastating currency crises in the 1990s and for a globalized financial crisis in 2008. The growth of the shadow banking system, without any corresponding extension of regulation, set the stage for latter-day bank runs on a massive scale. These runs involved frantic mouse clicks rather than frantic mobs outside locked bank doors, but they were no less devastating.

What we’re going to have to do, clearly, is relearn the lessons our grandfathers were taught by the Great Depression. I won’t try to lay out the details of a new regulatory regime, but the basic principle should be clear: anything that has to be rescued during a financial crisis, because it plays an essential role in the financial mechanism, should be regulated when there isn’t a crisis so that it doesn’t take excessive risks. Since the 1930s commercial banks have been required to have adequate capital, hold reserves of liquid assets that can be quickly converted into cash, and limit the types of investments they make, all in return for federal guarantees when things go wrong. Now that we’ve seen a wide range of non-bank institutions create what amounts to a banking crisis, comparable regulation has to be extended to a much larger part of the system.

We’re also going to have to think hard about how to deal with financial globalization. In the aftermath of the Asian crisis of the 1990s, there were some calls for long-term restrictions on international capital flows, not just temporary controls in times of crisis. For the most part these calls were rejected in favor of a strategy of building up large foreign exchange reserves that were supposed to stave off future crises. Now it seems that this strategy didn’t work. For countries like Brazil and Korea, it must seem like a nightmare: after all that they’ve done, they’re going through the 1990s crisis all over again. Exactly what form the next response should take isn’t clear, but financial globalization has definitely turned out to be even more dangerous than we realized.

The Power of Ideas

As readers may have gathered, I believe not only that we’re living in a new era of depression economics, but also that John Maynard Keynes—the economist who made sense of the Great Depression—is now more relevant than ever. Keynes concluded his masterwork, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, with a famous disquisition on the importance of economic ideas: “Soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.”

We can argue about whether that’s always true, but in times like these, it definitely is. The quintessential economic sentence is supposed to be “There is no free lunch”; it says that there are limited resources, that to have more of one thing you must accept less of another, that there is no gain without pain. Depression economics, however, is the study of situations where there is a free lunch, if we can only figure out how to get our hands on it, because there are unemployed resources that could be put to work. The true scarcity in Keynes’s world—and ours—was therefore not of resources, or even of virtue, but of understanding.

We will not achieve the understanding we need, however, unless we are willing to think clearly about our problems and to follow those thoughts wherever they lead. Some people say that our economic problems are structural, with no quick cure available; but I believe that the only important structural obstacles to world prosperity are the obsolete doctrines that clutter the minds of men.

November 20, 2008

Copyright © 2009, 1999 by Paul Krugman

Source / The New York Review of Books

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

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The Dog Ate It….

Posted on December 4, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Thanks to Harry Edwards / The Rag Blog

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Obama and the Left : Shout Loud and Clear

Posted on December 4, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Paraphrasing Joe Hill: ‘Don’t mourn Obama’s leanings — organize to push him the other way…’

‘I think to a large extent, we ought to stop discussing whether Obama is being “good” or “bad” and focus on the POLICIES we want his administration (and Congress) to follow.’
By Michael Meeropol / The Rag Blog / December 4, 2008

All the stories about Obama’s economic team and his economic instincts mean is that we on the left have to shout loud and clear to make the policies move in our direction.

That’s what the socialists and communists did during the Depression and though the New Deal “saved” capitalism — it also made it a lot more “worker” and “people” friendly … I think living in the America of 1945-1972 was better than living in the America of 1902-1929 … And in some ways the America of 2008 (lots of ways) is WORSE than the America of the 1970s …

It wasn’t revolution, but that didn’t stop the socialists and communists of the 1930s from fighting for the right to organize unions, for anti-lynching legislation, for the minimum wage law, etc. etc. — and it didn’t stop the Civil Rights Movements of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s from demanding the most minimal rights already guaranteed under the capitalist constitution.

I think to a large extent, we ought to stop discussing whether Obama is being “good” or “bad” and focus on the POLICIES we want his administration (and Congress) to follow.

Whether he stays in the DLC-Clintonian mode or adopts policies that significantly move away from the right-wing economic concensus depends on US and the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.

Joe Hill said, “Don’t mourn for me, organize.” We should say, “Don’t mourn Obama’s leanings — organize to push him the other way…”

And let’s not forget pressure on Congress.

(The Wagner Act came out of Congress. Roosevelt was NOT in support of it at first — and, yes, it was flawed because it excluded agricultural workers in order to get Southern racist support.]

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Hawaii : Revolutionary New Electric Car System Proposed

Posted on December 4, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

The entrepreneur Shai Agassi, right, met with Anders Eldrup, center, a Danish energy executive, in Copenhagen last March. Photo by Jonas Pryner Andersen / Polfoto / AP.

‘By using existing electric car technologies, coupled with an Internet-connected web of tens of thousands of recharging stations, Shai Agassi thinks his company will make all-electric vehicles feasible.’
By John Markoff / December 3, 2008

SAN FRANCISCO — The State of Hawaii and the Hawaiian Electric Company on Tuesday endorsed an effort to build an alternative transportation system based on electric vehicles with swappable batteries and an “intelligent” battery recharging network.

The plan, the brainchild of the former Silicon Valley software executive Shai Agassi, is an effort to overcome the major hurdles to electric cars — slow battery recharging and limited availability.

By using existing electric car technologies, coupled with an Internet-connected web of tens of thousands of recharging stations, he thinks his company, Better Place L.L.C. of Palo Alto, Calif., will make all-electric vehicles feasible.

Mr. Agassi has succeeded in assembling a growing consortium of national governments, regional planning organizations and one major car company. Tuesday’s announcement follows earlier endorsements from Israel, Denmark, Australia, Renault-Nissan and a coalition of Northern California localities supporting the idea leading to the deployment of an electric vehicle with a range of greater than 100 miles, beginning at the end of 2010 in Israel. The company plans test deployments of vehicles in 2009 and broad commercial sales in 2012.

Mr. Agassi has raised $200 million in private financing for his idea. In October, he obtained a commitment from the Macquarie Capital Group to raise an additional $1 billion for an Australian project.

On Tuesday, he said that he was optimistic about his project despite the dismal investment and credit markets because his network could provide investors with an annuity. Users of his recharging network would subscribe to the service, paying for access and for the miles they drive.

Given the downturn in the mortgage market, he said that investors are looking for new classes of assets that will provide dependable revenue streams over many years. “I believe the new asset class is batteries,” he said. “When you have a driver in a car using a battery, nobody is going to cut their subscription and stop driving.”

Mr. Agassi has argued that even if oil prices continued to decline, his electric recharging network — which ideally would use renewable energy sources like solar and wind — could provide competitively priced energy for a new class of vehicles.

He supposes that his network idea will be appropriate first for “island” economies that typically have significantly higher energy costs, and then will become more cost-competitive as it is scaled up.

“We always knew Hawaii would be the perfect model,” he said in a telephone interview. “The typical driving plan is low and leisurely, and people are smiling.”

Hawaii is a relatively small market with high energy costs. The state has about 1.2 million cars and replaces 70,000 to 120,000 vehicles annually.

Drivers on the islands also rarely make trips of more than 100 miles, meaning there will be less need for his proposed battery recharging stations. Part of Mr. Agassi’s model depends on quick-change service stations to swap batteries for drivers who need to use their cars before they have completely recharged their batteries.

Peter Rosegg, a spokesman for the Hawaiian Electric Company, said that Better Place would become a major customer for electricity and was also planning to invest in renewable energy sources that would be connected to the electric grid.

“It’s going to be a nonexclusive agreement, but so far they’re the only one that has shown up,” Mr. Rosegg said.

In late November, the mayors of San Francisco and other major Bay Area cities endorsed the Better Place network to help create an electric recharging network by 2012. The company estimates that it will cost $1 billion to build a charging network in the Bay Area that may create as many as half a million charging stations.

Despite challenges, the Better Place model is promising, said Daniel M. Kammen, a professor in the Energy and Resources Group at the University of California, Berkeley. It could appeal to owners of fleets of vehicles and to early adopter customers who are willing to work through the difficulties that will inevitably accompany a new transportation system. “It has a lot of promising features,” he said.

Source / The New York Times

Thanks to Jesse James Retherford / The Rag Blog

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Austin : The Radical Humanism of Abe Osheroff

Posted on December 3, 2008 by Thorne Dreyer

Abe Osheroff in October 1998 at the University of Washington. Photo by Larry Davis / NYT.

‘Abe Osheroff: One Foot in the Grave, the other Still Dancing.’
By Robert Jensen / The Rag Blog / December 3, 2008

In 2000 and 2001, audiences at the University of Texas heard from one of many unsung heroes of the progressive movements of the 20th century, the late Abe Osheroff. Through a new documentary that chronicles his life and philosophy, Osheroff will again come to Austin.

Most people knew Osheroff as an activist — from the frontlines of the Spanish Civil War to the picket lines of the U.S. labor movement, from the struggles for civil rights in Mississippi to the work for human rights in Nicaragua. For most of his 92 years, Osheroff threw himself into the fray with rare energy and enthusiasm. In this documentary, Osheroff reflects on the meaning of that activism and the ideas that animated his actions. A truly organic intellectual, he shares the wisdom built up over a lifetime of commitment to the “radical humanism” that defined his politics and philosophy.

Screening of the documentary film
‘Abe Osheroff: One Foot in the Grave, the other Still Dancing’

followed by a discussion with University of Texas professors
Miguel Ferguson and Robert Jensen

Monday, February 9, 2009, 7 p.m.
University of Texas at Austin
Thompson Conference Center auditorium (TCC 1.110)
Go here for a map.

Following the film, two UT professors who knew and worked with Osheroff, Miguel Ferguson (social work) and Robert Jensen (journalism) will lead a discussion about his life and work.

To learn more about Abe Osheroff: Go here for an interview and here for general information about his life.

This event, which is free and open to the public, is sponsored by the Senior Fellows honors program of the College of Communication. TCC is next to the LBJ School at Red River and Dean Keeton. There is free convenient parking for motorists in the large lots along Red River. The conference center is on Bicycle Route 42.

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