Ed Felien : Words Have Consequences

Words have consequences:
Political rhetoric and the attempted
assassination of Gabrielle Giffords

By Ed Felien / The Rag Blog / January 17, 2011

Gabrielle Giffords had just won her reelection in a race so tight it took three days to count the votes. Her opponent, Jesse Kelly, a Republican candidate with Tea Party backing, assailed her on health care and immigration. He attacked her for supporting the stimulus package.

Jim Nintzel in the Tucson Weekly quoted him on Feb 18:

“It must stop now," says Kelly, who promises to not seek any federal earmarks if he defeats Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in November. "This is bribery with taxpayer money, and it's a disgrace."

Kelly dismisses any notion that federal spending helps the economy.

“Government is not a job-creator," Kelly said last week at a debate with his fellow Republican candidates, including state Sen. Jonathan Paton and political newcomers Brian Miller and Andy Goss. "It is a job-crusher."

But for Don Kelly Construction, the firm where Kelly manages pipeline projects, government funding would appear to create quite a few jobs.

Kelly himself estimates that close to 90 percent of the firm's work comes from government contracts worth tens of millions of dollars. And around the country, the firm -- which is owned by Kelly's father, Don Kelly -- frequently bids on public-works projects funded by both stimulus dollars and federal earmarks.

Kelly was supported in his campaign by ALIPAC (Americans for Legal Immigration PAC). John McCain spokesman Brian Rogers said of the group, "It is backed by white supremacists, neo-Nazis and anti-Semites."

He was also supported by Sarah Palin. She appeared with him on Fox News and said, “I don’t feel worthy to lace his combat boots.” Giffords’ Congressional District was one of 20 Democratic districts that McCain carried in 2008 where the incumbent voted for health care reform.

On her website Palin said, "We'll aim for these races and many others. This is just the first salvo in a fight to elect people across the nation who will bring common sense to Washington." Their districts were on a U. S. map located by crosshairs. After the shooting Palin’s campaign denied the crosshairs were meant to appear as targets, even though she had also said on March 23, “Don’t Retreat, Instead, RELOAD!”

The imagery and the rhetoric is clear, and it’s consistent with Republican rhetoric throughout the 2010 campaign:

Robert Lowry, Republican candidate in Florida, fired at a target with his opponent’s initials written on it.

Representative Allen West’s first choice for chief of staff, Joyce Kaufman, said, “If ballots don’t work, bullets will.”

Sharron Angle talked about 2nd Amendment remedies in her race against Harry Reid in Nevada. Michele Bachman said she wanted her supporters “armed and dangerous.”

John Boehner and Eric Cantor referred to health care reform as “Job Killing Obamacare.”

And Jesse Kelly held a fundraiser in June where he advertised: “Get on Target for Victory in November. Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office. Shoot a fully automatic M16 with Jesse Kelly.” Minimum donation: $50.

Just last April, former President Bill Clinton recommended that both the media and politicians be responsible with their rhetoric since it falls on the “serious and the delirious alike.”

Henry David Thoreau said, “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.” The appeal of war is the promise of glory and meaning in men’s eyes: one desperate act and the world crowns you a hero. How tempting then to run to the head of the mob and storm the barricades. All revolutionary camps are a haven for malcontents.

And the Tea Party pretends it is a revolution with earnest patriots dressed in 18th Century tri-cornered hats, manipulated so cleverly by the Koch brothers, the Bush family, and Dick Armey for the benefit of the rich and powerful. It is a fraud perpetrated on the poor.

And Jesse Kelly is a party to the fraud. He campaigns mightily against the Stimulus and the Government, and his family collects millions in federal contracts. He pretends he is a revolutionary at the barricades. According to the Jan. 11 New York Times: “These people who think they are better than us, they look down on us every single day and tell us what kind of health care to buy,” he said at a rally in October. “And if you dare to stand up to the government they call us a mob. We’re about to show them what a mob looks like.”

Jared Loughner was not a mob. He was one pathetic deranged individual, but, because of the heated rhetoric of Jesse Kelly, Sarah Palin, John Boehner, Eric Cantor, Michele Bachman, and others in the Republican Party, he could delude himself into thinking he was (for one shining moment) the leader of a revolution. There probably is a revolution going on out there, but it seems we’re all on the wrong side.

The grand nineteenth century capitalist, Jay Gould, once said, "I can hire one-half the working class to kill the other half."

How did they succeed in getting us to take up arms against each other and not against them?

[Ed Felien is publisher and editor of Southside Pride, a South Minneapolis monthly.]

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Roger Baker : American Political Denial and the 'Downsizing of Civilization'

Image from Gas 2.0.

“My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel. I drive a Mercedes. My son drives a Mercedes. His son will ride a camel.” -- Saudi warning

Our only hope may lie in crisis:
American politics and global discontent

By Roger Baker / The Rag Blog / November 24, 2010

See "The peak oil crisis: Did we vote ourselves to extinction?" by Tom Whipple, Below.

All the political polls show that the American public is deeply unhappy. This was reflected in the broadly anti-government sentiment that threw out many moderate incumbents during the recent mid-term elections. The onset of hard times commonly favors new and stronger political medicine in search of restoring the previous prosperity, whether this be right, left, or radical center.

Such popular discontent is now global, but is rather more concentrated in the mature and established capitalist economies accustomed to high living standards. The USA sees increasing political dissatisfaction with growing support for the Tea Party Movement and almost half thinking that America's best days are past. However we also see growing economic unrest in France, Britain, and Ireland, and echoed in much of the rest of the world.

The root cause of this dissatisfaction is a globally overextended, indebted market economy, unable to grow enough to pay back its debts without cheap energy. The end of cheap oil, with its current plateau and peaking in global production, means that the global economy will never recover its previous scale of material production and level of material profitability.

The global lack of market demand needed to generate the previous profit is being fitfully met by increases of sovereign debt, via the issuing of fiat currency by the world's major central banks. This is reflected in a retreat to investment in gold to preserve wealth.

Like a pack of hungry dogs fighting over scraps of meat, we now see the G20 nations trying to gain trade advantage for their national business interests and banking groups. This is threatening a global trade war leading to a contraction of total trade, probably leading to the creation of new regional trading blocks and alliances. Yesterday Greece, today Ireland -- tomorrow Spain?

In the USA, as grassroots political and economic anxiety increases, the corporate media is actively promoting right wing political gurus like Glen Beck and Sarah Palin. They campaign against Washington, deny global warming, offer easy solutions mostly in line with corporate profitability, and blame liberal establishment scapegoats like Obama for a steadily increasing level of economic pain, joblessness, and political gridlock. Even with effective Republican control of Congress, there are deep internal divisions in the making.

One way to grasp the core political problem is to understand that the public is economically stressed, and unwilling to tolerate much economic sacrifice. In some ways this makes sense, given that an obviously dysfunctional and unstable political coalition is in charge of managing the U.S. economy, even while the independent Federal Reserve is struggling to be seen as nonpolitical.

Facing severe problems, any government needs to convince its public to tolerate temporary economic pain for long term benefit. It is as if we badly need an operation to restore our national health, but we cannot tolerate the pain of surgery, so we listen to the medical quacks as our health deteriorates. The problem now is that U.S. voters no longer trust the government to operate fairly. This is especially so after the bank bailouts that were accompanied by little banking reform.

The reality of course, is that to actually solve our problems, we first need to somehow break through our denial of the true nature of our problem. Then we need to rekindle a national spirit of political and economic cooperation such as the U.S. public willingly offered during WWII, and more recently the level of national unity seen under President G.W. Bush just after the 9/11 attacks.

Our immediate prospects seem gloomy. Because of a combination of economic decline and political paralysis, we seem to be headed for a political and economic crisis of some sort, perhaps our greatest depression, with peak oil as the icing on that cake.

Yet there is hope. Sometimes a crisis is the only way to disrupt business as usual enough to make the system receptive to fundamental change, even if wiser policies are only adopted as a last resort after the other possibilities have been exhausted.

There are still voices of reason to be found, in fact all over the Internet. One policy analyst I follow and recommend is Tom Whipple, an expert on energy economics and a fellow of the Post Carbon Institute. (The Post Carbon Institute is essentially a progressive environmental think tank, a coalition of about 30 leading environmental policy experts in different areas with a good grip on the big picture and reasonable and appropriate policy options.)

In the brief essay below, Whipple does a remarkable job of tying everything together; explaining how the end of cheap energy, the depressed U.S. economy, and the current political gridlock in Washington are tied together in terms of cause and effect. One can scarcely overemphasize the need to accurately understand what is really going on, as we collectively engage in the "downsizing of civilization."

[Roger Baker is a long time transportation-oriented environmental activist, an amateur energy-oriented economist, an amateur scientist and science writer, and a founding member of and an advisor to the Association for the Study of Peak Oil-USA. He is active in the Green Party and the ACLU, and is a director of the Save Our Springs Association and the Save Barton Creek Association. Mostly he enjoys being an irreverent policy wonk and writing irreverent wonkish articles for The Rag Blog.]


American body politic? Image from MediaFuturist.

The peak oil crisis:
Did we vote ourselves to extinction?

By Tom Whipple / November 17, 2010

The disconnect between the American body politic and reality grows larger every day.

In reviewing hundreds of pages of commentary on the election, one searches in vain for analysis that even comes close to describing what is happening to the nation -- i.e. we are in the midst of a massive deflating credit bubble and running short of affordable liquid fuels at the same time.

There seems to be general agreement that the new balance of power in Washington means two years of gridlock. Despite an occasional bow in the direction of bi-partisanship, the new majority in the house is saying quite openly that it will work to lower taxes, cut spending, will stop any efforts to deal with climate change, and will spend the next two years investigating everything it can about the Obama administration in hopes it will be so discredited in two years that the President can't possibly win another term.

Whether this agenda is what the voters thought they would get on November 2 when they voted yet again for change is another question.

Upon assuming office, the Obama administration faced the biggest choice of any American President since Lincoln -- either face up to the fact that the industrial age, with its mantra of endless economic growth, was over and start making preparations for a new era, or try to revive the economy.

Apparently the new President, unwilling to grapple with the downsizing of civilization, chose to prolong the deteriorating industrial economy for a few more years by increasing deficit spending, attempting to reform health care, and resorting to various monetary tactics that may or may not keep the financial system from ultimately collapsing.

The basis of the problem is that without steadily increasing amounts of cheap energy, reviving economic growth as we know it is simply not sustainable for long. Borrowing and printing trillions of dollars may briefly slow the decline, but little more.

The trillions spent on bailouts and stimulation kept the illusion of recovery going for some months, but did little to increase employment or reverse the disintegration of the inflated housing market. Some polls show nearly half of U.S. households have been seriously affected in some manner by the adverse economic conditions, yet the administration continued to express optimism rather than realism.

In November of 2009 and 2010, the people spoke and the Congress and many statehouses were populated with many new faces. In most cases these newly elected officials had even less idea how the situation could be fixed, but they were new and that gave the voters a ray of hope.

The one policy area where the Obama administration tried to make major changes was in dealing with global warming by controlling carbon emissions. It is interesting that an issue on which there should be universal agreement -- saving life on the planet -- managed to degenerate into an imbroglio which approaches religious fanaticism. The reason of course is that controlling emissions is now thought by many as synonymous with further job losses.

Although a stream of studies conclude that global temperatures are rising, ice is melting everywhere, and people who study such things say increasing amounts of carbon in the atmosphere is to blame, over half of America believes man-made global warming is a giant hoax.

A recent Pew poll says that only 37 percent of Americans and 41 percent of the Chinese believe global warming is a serious problem. Only in Pakistan, which ironically is on the cusp of being done in by global warming, and Poland of all places, are people said to be less worried than here in the U.S.

So where is all this leading? The new House majority can't cut the interest on the national debt, will be viscerally reluctant to make serious cuts in defense spending, and is unlikely to have the stomach to make serious cuts in entitlements. Therefore, it will likely content itself with chopping a few marquis spending programs such as earmarks, declare victory, and go back to preparing for the 2012 elections.

There is even a good chance that they will still be preparing when the next oil price spike occurs. If the spike is high enough and lasts long enough it could enter into the political debates in the 2012 election. But it really doesn't matter; very high oil prices are going to do serious harm to the economy one of these days, and when they come, the realistic discussions can begin as to what we can do.

Unfortunately the most serious of all issues facing us in the long run could turn out to be the failure of the United States to exercise any sort of leadership on emissions controls. As matters stand right now the new majority in the House of Representatives seems dead set against any kind of controls and says it will do its utmost to prevent the administration from controlling emissions administratively.

Now a few years or even a few decades of unchecked carbon emissions may not be of consequence. The problem, however, is: what if, as many believe, we are nearing a carbon tipping point. Some climate scientists say that an average global increase of 6o C will leave the earth uninhabitable.

Long before we get there, rising sea levels, droughts, floods, storms, and what have you will make life very unpleasant for those of us still around or our descendants. Someday, those who are left will wonder just what we were thinking about when we let all this happen.

[Tom Whipple is a retired government analyst who has been following the peak oil issue for several years. This article first appeared in the Falls Church News-Press and was also published in the Energy Bulletin.]

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David P. Hamilton : Parsing the Midterms: A Progressive Exodus

Political cartoon by Mike Keefe / inToon.com.
2010 Elections:
Where the votes came from
and how the Dems lost big

My hypothesis is that most of the excess decline in support for Democratic Party congressional candidates in 2010 was from political progressives of all ages, ethnicities, genders, and sexual orientations.

By David P. Hamilton / The Rag Blog / November 23, 2010

Was the performance of the Democratic Party congressional candidates uniquely bad in the 2010 midterm election? If so, why was that the case?

Composite of U.S. House of Representatives elections, 1990-2010
Year / Democratic...Republican...Independent...Libertarian...Green...Total...%
1992 / 48,550,096...43,498,015...1,255,726...848,614...134,072...97,198,316...50.8
1994 / 31,542,823...36,325,809...497,403...415,944...40,177...70,493,648...36.6
1996 / 43,393,580...43,120,872...572,746...651,448...113,773...90,233,467...45.8
1998 / 31,391,834...31,983,612...372,072...880,024...70,932...66,604,802...32.9
2000 / 46,411,559...46,750,175...683,098...1,610,292...279,158...98,799,963...46.3
2002 / 33,642,142...37,091,270...403,670...1,030,171...286,962...74,706,555...34.3
2004 / 52,745,121...55,713,412...674,202...1,040,465...331,298...113,192,286...51.4
2006 / 42,082,311...35,674,808...417,895...657,435...234,939...80,975,537...35.7
2008 / 64,888,090...51,952,981...729,798...1,083,096...570,780...122,586,293...52.3*
2010 / 35,377,756...41,128,504...79,500,000*...33.7*

% refers to the percentage of eligible voters who voted.
* estimates based on unofficial figures.


Observations based on the above

1. The percentage participation in U.S. House midterm elections has not changed significantly over the past 20 years, ranging from a low of 33.1 in 1990 to a high of 36.6 in 1994. 2010 was toward the lower end of this narrow spectrum at 33.7%.

2. The percentage drop off in total voter turnout from a presidential year to the following midterm: 1992/94 - 14.2%, 1996/98 – 12.9%, 2000/02 – 12.0%, 2004/06 – 15.7%, 2008/10 – 18.6% *(est). The average drop off in the four election cycles preceding 2008/2010 was 13.7%. Hence, the 2008/10 drop off exceeded the recent average percentage drop by 36%. On the other hand, the 2008 turnout was the highest in decades. These totals include supporters of all parties.

3. The percentage decline of total votes for Democratic congressional candidates from presidential to midterm elections in each cycle: 1992/94 – 35%, 1996/98 – 28%, 2000/02 – 27.5%, 2004/06 – 20%, 2008/10 – 45.5%. The drop off in support for Democratic Party congressional candidates in the 2010 midterm election was historically very high, reversing a trend toward less of a drop off and more than doubling the percentage drop off from the preceding cycle.

The numerical drop in votes for Democratic congressional candidates in the 2008/10 cycle was even more striking, 29.5 million votes. That compares to drops of 17 million in 1992/94, 12 million in 1996/98, 12.8 million in 2000/02, and 10.7 million in 2004/06. Considering the long term downward trend in the drop during each cycle, I estimate that 18-20 million more Democratic Party voters didn’t vote in 2010 compared to what historical trends would have predicted.


Other observations

4. According to estimates from several sources, the youth vote (under 30) dropped from 18% of voters in 2008 (.18 x 122,586,293 = 22,065,533) to 9% in 2010 (.09 x 79,500,000* = 7,115,000). That represents a decline of 68%. It is estimated that 58% of this vote went for Obama in 2008. Hence, if this percentage held constant in both 2008 and 2010, Democrats received 12.8 million youth votes in 2008 and 4.1 in the 2010 election. A more normal drop of 30% would have given the Democrats close to 9 million youth votes in 2010. Hence, Democrats lost nearly 5 million of their excess vote decline in 2010 among youth.

5. African-American vote. One estimate was that it dropped from 13% of the total vote in 2008 (15,868,500) to 10% in 2010 (7,950,000), a numerical drop of nearly 8 million and a percentage drop of roughly 50%. But 2008 represented a historic high in African American voter turnout. They represent roughly 10% of eligible voters. Hence, their turnout was more normal than in 2008. Still, if their turnout decline had been more like 30%, the Democrats would have received nearly 3 million more votes.

6. Latino vote. Commentaries so far indicate that the Latino vote was larger than expected and underestimated by pre-election polls. Democrats won this vote in congressional races by almost two to one, but Latino Republicans won governorships in Nevada, New Mexico, and Florida. Still, while it doubtless did decline numerically from 2008, it is reasonable to say that the Latino vote did not contribute to the excess Democratic decline.

7. Gay/lesbian vote. According to the Huffington Post, “Democrats' share of the gay vote rose from 75 percent in 2006 to 80 percent in 2008 and then dropped to 68 percent in 2010. Each year, approximately 3 percent of voters identified as gay, lesbian or bisexual.” Assuming that this is a very conservative estimate of the gay/lesbian vote, there were at least 2.5 million gay/lesbian voters in 2010 and 3.75 million in 2008. Hence, in 2008, the Democrats received about 3 million gay/lesbian votes and in 2010 they received just over 1.6 million, a decline of 48%. A more normal drop off of 30% would have given the Democrats more than a half million more gay/lesbian votes.

8. Women’s vote. I can’t find a source on percentages and numbers for women’s turnout in 2010. Democrats generally enjoy a “gender gap” among women voters of 7-8% on average. One commentary had independent white women voters switching markedly from Democrat to Republican in 2010. If women represented 55% of the voters and the Democrats enjoyed the normal advantage, they would have received nearly 24 million women’s votes in 2010. The actual total was more like 19 million, an excess decline of nearly 5 million.

Who were the 18-20 million who voted for Democrats in 2008 and given historical trends were expected to vote for them in 2010, but didn’t show up? We have seen that roughly 5 million of them were among youth, another 5 million were women voters, 3 million were African Americans voters, and at most a million were gay/lesbian voters. Since all those groups overlap, we have probably only accounted for 10-12 million missing voters. Where are the rest?

My hypothesis is that most of the excess decline in support for Democratic Party congressional candidates in 2010 was from political progressives of all ages, ethnicities, genders, and sexual orientations. Most of the Left came out for Obama and the related Democrats in 2008 and most stayed home in 2010.

I know at least a dozen people within a block of my house who worked hard for Obama and the Democrats in 2008 and didn’t vote in 2010, often purposefully. They stayed home as a result of dissatisfaction with Obama’s leadership, his concessions to the corporate capitalist class, and the inadequacies of Democratic Party accomplishments since 2008. I would further speculate that many also stayed home out of sheer disgust with the whole American political system.

In brief, the nexus of the excess drop in votes for Democrats was the Left. They provided legions of foot soldiers in 2008 and in 2010 they pulled out of the system altogether, often consciously. A comment on my recent Rag Blog article ["'Citizens United' and the Corruption of American Politics"] said, “Not voting is voting.” I agree. As the Tea Party is the energy driving the Republicans, it is the Left in all its permutations that propels the Democrats. This time, their message was that they wouldn’t support Democrats who too much resemble Bush-lite.

Another major factor operating in this election is the Rovian strategy, which emphasizes base mobilization and recognizes that the middle is largely a myth, especially in off-year elections. It has been validated by the overall results of the 2010 elections, despite the fact that the most inept Tea Party candidates exceeded the strategy’s potential. This is more and more the principal electoral strategy of Republicans.

Meanwhile, the Democrats are still following the old strategy of moving to the middle, based on the false assumption that the electorate is some kind of bell curve with most people grouped in the middle. In this manner, they loose touch with their own base. The only solution for the Democrats is to also adopt a more Rovian strategy, becoming actually progressive, i.e. more class conscious, to better mobilize their base.

Unfortunately, the paradox for the Democrats is that their source of funds pushes them in directions that alienate them from their base. And every indication is that Barack Obama, having spent most of his life trying not to look like an angry black man, is fundamentally unable to make such a transition.

[David P. Hamilton has been a political activist in Austin since the late 1960s when he worked with SDS and wrote for The Rag, Austin's underground newspaper.]

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Harry Targ : The 2010 Elections and the Battle of Ideas

Image from UCAN.
Assessing the 2010 elections:
Towards building a progressive majority

First, we need to communicate the basic proposition that the free marketers’ ideas do not make sense.

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / November 11, 2010

“Well, the thing is, we’re all interconnected. There are no rich. There are no middle class. There are no poor. We all are interconnected in the economy. You remember a few years ago, when they tried to tax the yachts, that didn’t work. You know who lost their jobs? The people making the boats, the guys making 50,000 and 60,000 dollars a year lost their jobs.

"We all either work for rich people or we sell stuff to rich people. So just punishing rich people is as bad for the economy as punishing anyone. Let’s not punish anyone. Let’s keep taxes low and let’s cut spending.”

-- Senator-elect Rand Paul, Kentucky, in an election night interview with Wolf Blitzer, CNN

On ideology and consciousness

In an essay, called “The German Ideology” Karl Marx argued that the ideas of the ruling class are the ruling ideas. While the relationship between ideology, dominant societal values, and ruling classes is more complicated today than Marx observed in the 1840s, the basic point is well taken.

The relative legitimacy of ideas is related to the power in society of economic and political elites. If people could hear or read different ideas they would be in a better position to choose which ones best fit their interests.

Six media complexes control more than half of the communications about the world that Americans receive via television, radio, music, movies, and the internet. Today, the “battle of ideas” is fought out between those multinational corporations that speak for the “far rightwing” in American political life (probably most supported by domestic capital, real estate, insurance and energy companies) and those that represent global finance capital.

Media corporations present news and opinions reflecting modest, not fundamental, differences about policies, programs, and institutions. Basically they all represent the interests of the largest sectors of capitalist institutions in the international political economy.

For the most part, mainstream media ignore the peace movement, trade union activism, anti-racist struggles, the environmental movement, and the global connections among all these movements. When working people appear on local television screens, they are usually presented as victims, as the powerless, not the empowered.

In this context building a progressive majority requires multi-level struggles over the communication of diverse ideas about how political and economic structures and processes work and what alternatives there are to them. As difficult as it might be, the coming period requires an escalation of the battle of ideas, a battle for the consciousness of the vast majority of the people.


Commanding Heights: The battle of ideas

A few years ago, PBS aired a six-hour series on the importance of the new age of “globalization.” They framed their portrait of late twentieth century economic and political history around the key “battle of ideas” that shaped the century. Reduced to its most vital core, the broadcast claimed that the greatest debate of the twentieth century was that between free marketer Frederick Hayek and mixed economy capitalist theorist John Maynard Keynes.

In intricate detail, the video pointed out how Keynes captured the consciousness of ruling elites and masses during the Great Depression of the 1930s and influenced the post-war global economic order framed by the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and programs such as the Marshall Plan.

In addition, British Labor Party policies after the war were highlighted as examples of the Keynesian approach (which, alas, the video suggests was proven to be erroneous by the rise to power of Margaret Thatcher in the late 1970s). It is interesting to note that revolutionary socialism from the Bolshevik Revolution, to China, to Cuba, to the rise of dependency theories about the global economy were all subsumed under the mantel of Keynesianism.

The polar opposite to the Keynesian model of society was reflected in the personage of Frederick Hayek, obscure Viennese economist who worked, almost by stealth, to build a core of supporters to retake intellectual power when the mixed economy approach of Keynes would falter. Hayek built a network of economic gurus from the University of Chicago, the world of fiction (such as Ayn Rand), and the right wing of the Tory Party in Britain and the Republican Party in the United States.

Their fundamental theoretical proposition was that markets were good for people and government was bad. The video pointed out that this ideology, known around the world as “neoliberalism,” became dominant in these two countries in the 1970s, in international financial institutions, and among marginalized elites, mostly military dictators, from the Global South. The collapse of most Socialist states in the late 1980s confirmed, the documentary claimed, what the followers of Hayek had been arguing since the 1920s.


Neoliberalism doesn’t make sense

Central to the approach of descendants of Hayek is that markets, when “free,” can provide for the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Markets stimulate productivity, growth, equality, and the maximum development of each and every individual who takes advantage of the opportunities that free enterprise offers the citizenry.

When pain and suffering prevail, the theory proposes, the heavy hand of government lurks in the background. Government for these analysts is the problem not the solution. Finally, these theorists claim, history has validated Hayek.

The problem with the free market approach is that it is dead wrong, theoretically, historically, and empirically. There is no question that sectors of the world have experienced enormous growth, technological advancements, and miraculous feats such as space travel but they have all come on the backs of millions upon millions of people who have lived lives of pain, hunger, despair, and brutal dehumanization. Tiny percentages of the world’s elites have thrived on the backs of over 90 percent of the world’s people ever since capitalism emerged from the vestiges of feudalism.

Furthermore, the economic growth and development in the era of capitalism have been intimately connected with the rise of state power, not in the service of humankind, but in the service of economic ruling classes. Navies, armies, munitions all came from state resources. The evil slave trade, the backbone of modern capitalism, could not have been created and sustained without state power. In the Western Hemisphere, it was government armies, serving the interests of emerging capitalist elites, that committed genocide against peoples from the North Pole to the South Pole.

On a more positive note, as a result of mobilizations in support of mass demands, governments have provided some health care, public education, libraries, roads, and research and development that have improved the lives of some of humankind. There never was a time since the rise of capitalism that state power was not central to whatever human development has occurred.

Finally, capitalism is a system based on the maximization of profit, more and more capital accumulation, and increasing power, spatial control, and the control of the minds and actions of all humankind. It is in the very logic of the economic system that this must occur. However, governments from time to time have mitigated the unbridled growth of power and control of capital when the traditionally disenfranchised and exploited have demanded reforms or revolution.

If we return to the “battle of ideas” as portrayed in the documentary Commanding Heights, the claim was made that in the twentieth century the followers of John Maynard Keynes successfully challenged the free marketers’ philosophy. Keynes recognized that capitalism created disruptions both in terms of growth and the well-being of workers. He argued that some governmental intervention was needed to override short-term economic crises.

This perspective gained influence when coupled with mass demands for change from workers. Governments that adopted mixed economies, such as reflected in the New Deal policies of the Roosevelt administration, were designed to mollify militants. The Keynesian “revolution” was designed to “save” the capitalist system from those who demanded a new system.


What does all this mean for building
a progressive majority in 2010 and beyond

We have to find a way to engage more effectively in “the battle of ideas.” First, we need to communicate the basic proposition that the free marketers’ ideas do not make sense. They are not logical. If these ideas were ever relevant it was in tiny villages and rural communities before the capitalist revolution.

In fact, the less the government has been involved in serving the interests of working people, the more it has been involved in promoting exploitation, war, environmental devastation, and all the problems 400 years of capitalism have left us with today.

Second, some government policies within the capitalist system can help people today. We need to allocate much more government money to create jobs -- public and private -- to build a new green economy. People employed by the state are workers just as are those who work for the private sector. Those who argue that government now has to cut back on expenditures and give more tax breaks to the rich are narrowly self-interested or ill-informed.

Third, we also need to make it clear that while governments representing the interests of working people provide the only alternative to the unbridled accumulation of power by the economic ruling classes at this time, we will have to create a new system in the long run where there are no economic ruling classes.

But for now the first educational and activist priority is convincing the people that the policies advocated by Republicans, most Democrats, and Tea Party spokespersons do not make sense. Saying “YOUR IDEAS DON’T MAKE SENSE” to the claims Rand Paul made in his interview with Wolf Blitzer is a place to start.

[Harry Targ is a professor of political science at Purdue University who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. He blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical.]

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Lamar W. Hankins : 2010 Elections Without the Tea-Colored Glasses

Shading the truth? Tea Partier at Tax Day Rally in Pleasanton, California, April 15, 2010. Photo by Justin Sullivan / Getty Images.
Looking at the election
without the Tea-colored glasses

To draw grandiose conclusions about 'demands of the American people' is unsupported by reality and is typical spin-doctoring by Tea Party Republicans and their fellow travelers.

By Lamar W. Hankins / The Rag Blog / November 7, 2010

The Republican spin-doctors, talking heads, intellectuals, and factotums want the country to believe that the Republicans got it right this election. They want us to believe that Republicans are in step with the American people; that the policies they promote represent American attitudes and values.

But if we count only those who voted on November 2, they had a 52% unfavorable view of the Republican Party and a 53% unfavorable view of the Democratic Party according to research conducted by the Pew Center for the People and the Press. Like me, a majority of the voters don’t like either major party.

But the more important figures to look at to explain the voting results last Tuesday are the electorate’s views on the general direction the country is going and its views on the national economy.

Sixty-two percent of those voting believe the country is on the wrong track; 52% see the economy as “not good” and 37% see it as poor. Only 9% saw the economy as good and 1% as excellent. That 1% must be the Wall Street bankers and hedge fund operators who voted. Nearly 90% of recent voters believe that the economy is in horrible shape. Washington needs to focus on fixing the economy before it does anything else.

While I agree with the majority view, it fails to account for some realities that were largely ignored in this election and continue to be distorted by right-wing pundits. As a recent political cartoon suggests, Bush failed us for eight years by getting us into two wars, running up huge deficits, and giving tax breaks to the wealthiest 2% of Americans, and now the Republicans are trying to blame it on the black guy. No surprise there. But this recent election was not a repudiation of Obama by an “American majority,” as George Will termed it.

A majority of the “American people” did not say “no” or “yes” to anything on November 2. Only about 41.5% of the voting-eligible population voted (as contrasted with 61.6% who voted in the 2008 general election) according to the United States Election Project. These 2010 voters may have been voting for or against various messages, but they do not represent the sentiments of a majority of Americans.

The recent voters who voted against Obama and the Democrats represent slightly more than 20% of the voting-eligible public, and far less than 20% of the total population. While the Republican Tea Partiers had an impact on who voted, it remains to be seen if they will continue as a force in American politics.

The Republican Tea Partiers were as confused at the start of their movement nearly three years ago as they were on November 2. The main theme of their effort is that they represent the patriotic rebellion that came to be known, some 50 years after the event, as the Boston Tea Party.

Today’s Republican Tea Party thinks that the Boston Tea Party was all about a rebellion against King George’s tax on tea sold in the colonies. They see that Tea Party solely as a rebellion against taxes. What it was, instead, was a rebellion against the government-granted monopoly power of the East India Company, which had been exempted from the tea tax by the Tea Act, passed by the British Parliament in 1773 -- an unholy alliance between government and corporate power. The tax exemption allowed the East India Company to undercut the small businesses that sold tea in the colonies.

The only first-person account of the Boston Tea Party is found in the memoir of George R. T. Hewes, published 50 years after the event because of an agreement among the participants that they would not write about it for 50 years. Most of the participants were dead by then, but Hewes penned the story in a book printed on ragged paper, A Retrospect of the Boston Tea-Party, with a Memoir of George R. T. Hewes, a Survivor of the Little Band of Patriots Who Drowned the Tea in Boston Harbour in 1773 (New York: S. Bliss, printer, 1834).

According to author Thom Hartmann, the value of the tea destroyed by the colonists in 1773 was about $1 million in today’s currency -- more than a little vandalism even by today’s standards.

But the views of the Republican Tea Partiers differ widely from the views of most Americans. During the last 23 years, Pew Research Center polling has revealed that 77% of Americans believe that there is “too much power in the hands of big companies.” Between 62% and 65% of Americans, over the same time span, believe that “business corporations make too much profit.”

Despite Americans’ long-term concerns about the power of the corporations, the Tea Party Republicans have promoted, almost exclusively, the notion that the only dragon that needs to be slain is the federal government.

It is an old Republican refrain that goes hand in hand with the belief that there is no role for the federal government in promoting the “public welfare,” yet Pew research over the last three decades has shown that Americans believe by a 62% majority that the “government should guarantee food and shelter,” and from 48% to 53% have agreed that “the government should help more needy people, despite debt,” and by 63% to 71% that “government should take care of people who can’t care for themselves.”

The Republicans, including the Tea Party Republicans, enjoyed success in this past election not because the values they pushed were overwhelmingly American values, but because they were able to stimulate their voters to get to the polls, helped along by Republican-dominated media and hundreds of millions of dollars in corporate contributions made by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Karl Rove political groups, and such wealthy Republicans as the oil billionaire Koch brothers, Howard Rich (a New York media mogul), John Templeton, Jr. (the now rich son of a wealthy investor), and many others.

One group that did not vote in this election was a cohort of 14 million young voters who supported Obama in 2008 but chose not to participate in this election. With the opposition to Obama and the Democratic Party serving to motivate those people who did vote, it was expected that the opposition would do very well.

This does not mean, however, that the American people are demanding change that contradicts their core values as measured over the last three decades by the Pew Research Center. It does mean that a majority of voters in 2010 do not approve of Obama’s and the Democrat’s agenda.

But to draw grandiose conclusions about “demands of the American people” is unsupported by reality and is typical spin-doctoring by Tea Party Republicans and their fellow travelers.

One problem for the Democrats in this election was that Americans do not perceive the large number of positive actions taken by Obama and the Democratic-controlled Congress that follow the values held by a majority of Americans (information compiled from various sources):

• Cut taxes -- largely for the middle class -- by $240 billion since taking office on Jan. 20, 2009 (Business Week)
• Provided the Department of Veterans Affairs with more than $1.4 billion to improve services to America's Veterans
• Signed the Children's Health Insurance Reauthorization Act, which provides health care to 11 million kids -- 4 million of whom were previously uninsured
• Signed the Christopher and Dana Reeve Paralysis Act, the first comprehensive legislation aimed at improving the lives of Americans living with paralysis
• Developed a stimulus package, which includes approximately $18 billion for non-defense scientific research and development
• Signed the Weapons Systems Acquisition Reform Act to stop fraud and wasteful spending in the defense procurement and contracting system
• Established a Credit Card Bill of Rights, preventing credit card companies from imposing arbitrary rate increases on customers
• Passed a Health Care Reform Bill, preventing insurance companies from denying insurance because of a preexisting condition, and allowing children to remain covered by their parents' insurance until the age of 26
• Provided tax cuts for up to 3.5 million small businesses to help pay for employee health care coverage
• Passed tax credits for up to 29 million individuals to help pay for health insurance
• Expanded Medicaid to all individuals under age 65 with incomes up to 133% of the federal poverty level
• Added $4.6 billion to the Veterans Administration budget to recruit and retain more mental health professionals to help veterans, especially those with PTSD
• Eliminated subsidies to private lender middlemen of student loans to reduce costs to students, and protected student borrowers from exploitation by lenders
• Expanded Pell grants, which help low-income students pay for college
• Signed a financial reform law establishing a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to look out for the interests of ordinary Americans
• Cut prescription drug costs for medicare recipients by 50%
• Passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009: a $789 billion economic stimulus plan that has helped improve the economy
• Increased funding for national parks and forests by 10%

While this list is incomplete, it serves to show that much has been done to benefit ordinary Americans during Obama’s presidency, and almost none of it was done with help from Republicans.

But these actions did not serve to motivate most voting-eligible Americans to vote. Most Americans are focused on the economic devastation they have faced for the last 2 1/2 years. The Democrats did little to respond effectively to those economic problems, primarily loss of jobs, foreclosures, and the fear caused by economic insecurity. Most Americans were not motivated to vote on November 2.

I have been a vigorous critic of Obama, and will continue to be, with regard to many issues, including the wars he has continued and expanded, his unwillingness to attempt to secure affordable health insurance for all Americans, his coddling of Wall Street and the bankers, his failure to take more direct action to head off the massive foreclosures that have devastated many segments of the country, his mistaken embrace of corporatism that has led us down the road to plutocracy, his continuation of the Bush policies that diminished our liberties (such as the Patriot Act), his frequent use of the “state secrets” doctrine to hide government misconduct, and his inability to face the reality that nearly all Republicans would rather play politics than make government serve the needs and interests of the people.

Obama’s presidency has been flawed and ugly in many ways, but it is better than most of what we have had for the last 40-plus years. The Democrats are a fickle, cowardly, sorry, and despicable political party, but for those of us who care more about the welfare of ordinary Americans than the welfare of the corporations and the wealthy, Democrats are unfortunately the better alternative among the two major choices now available.

The party will not change without unrelenting pressure by progressive populists pursuing the values held by most Americans, either from within the party or from outside.

[Lamar W. Hankins, a former San Marcos city attorney, is also a columnist for the San Marcos Mercury. This article © Freethought San Marcos, Lamar W. Hankins.]

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Jonah Raskin : Prop 19 Up in Smoke

Photo by Lucretious / stock.xchng.
Up in smoke:
Cannabis initiative post mortem

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / November 7, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO -- I spent Election Day at Prop 19 Headquarters in Oakland, California, and witnessed the final, tumultuous hours of the campaign to legalize marijuana. Not legalize it once and for all. To be precise, legalize possession of one ounce or less by a person over the age of 21, and cultivation in a 25-square-foot area.

Fifty four percent of the voters cast ballots against 19 and 46% of the voters cast ballots for it. It’s hard to argue with those percentages and, if you believe that the number of votes cast for and against is the crucial factor, than 19 lost.

That’s what big media is saying and that’s what law enforcers are also saying. The supporters of 19 have been saying that 19 won, that the 3,350,000 or so people who voted for it shows that marijuana is here to stay, and that sooner or later marijuana will be legalized.

“Demographics, economics and principle all favor the ultimate demise of marijuana prohibition,” Ethan Nadelmann, the founder and executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, said soon after the votes were counted. He added, “Marijuana isn't going to legalize itself, but momentum is building like never before among Americans across the political spectrum who think it's time to take marijuana out of the closet and out of the criminal justice system.”

Nadelmann is absolutely right when he says that marijuana won’t legalize itself. Indeed, it will take ingenuity, organization, and new strategies to persuade some of the nearly 4 million people who voted against 19 to change their minds.

In the 1960s, momentum to legalize pot built like never before, and hippies predicted that it would be legalized very soon. But that didn’t happen. The same could happen again, unless there are profound changes in strategy by the pro-legalization movement.

By and large, law enforcers want marijuana to remain illegal. By and large, commercial marijuana growers, and their friends and neighbors in California, want it to remain illegal too. The police don’t want to lose their funding and their jobs; the growers don’t want a drop in the price of pot and a dent in their pocketbooks.

Prop 19 was poorly written; even advocates for legalization pointed to its inconsistencies, legalese, and confused wording. Prop 19 left it up to individual counties in California to decided whether to implement the measure. Citizens in one county would be able to have an ounce or less if they were 21 years of age or older, while citizens in an adjacent county would not have the same legal protections. That was a recipe for disaster.

Shortly before Election Day, former Mexican President Vicente Fox commented on 19 in a radio interview. “How great it would be for California to set this example," he said. "May God let it pass. The other U.S. states will have to follow step." His sentiments were widely appreciated in the movement to end the war on marijuana.

All around the world, the citizens of the world look to California to set a positive example, and California did set the example for medical marijuana, and 13 other states followed its lead. It might not be helpful, however, to look to California to lead the way again. Other states, such as Colorado, have implemented medical marijuana in cleaner, clearer ways that California.

American Puritanism, the American work ethic, and the American suspicion of pleasure and joy also contributed to the Prohibition of marijuana. Millions of Californians don’t like the idea of their fellow citizens smoking pot at parties, driving on pot, arriving at work stoned, having sex stoned, and eating stoned. To make marijuana legal it will also mean eroding American Puritanism -- no easy feat.

What seems especially noteworthy of the Prop 19 campaign is that many in law enforcement came out in favor of legalization. They went against the tide of law enforcers who think of marijuana as the drug of choice of the hippies, and who are still fighting the battles of the 1960s.

Meanwhile, in the wake of the defeat of 19, very little seems to have changed in California in the marijuana world. Stoners, heads, and medical marijuana patients are rolling joints and smoking them. Marijuana growers are planting seeds; dispensaries are selling pot. Doctors are recommending marijuana to their patients.

Prop 19 did profoundly change attitudes, and yet now that the election is over it’s as though 19 never happened. After so much time and effort, it’s hard to believe. Prop 19 might be a foundation to build upon, and yet given the volatile political scene and political amnesi, it seems likely that the next time a pro-marijuana measure comes along, activists will have to start all over again with a clean slate.

That might not be a bad idea.

[Jonah Raskin is the author of Field Days: A Year of Farming, Eating and Drinking Wine in California and a professor at Sonoma State University.]

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FAIR : Election Coverage Misses the Mark

Image from Blogging Belmont.
Surprise!
Press urges move to the right:
Media misreading midterm elections

By Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting / November 5, 2010

With the Democrats suffering substantial losses in Tuesday's midterms, many journalists and pundits were offering a familiar diagnosis (Extra!, 7-8/06; FAIR Media Advisory, 2/3/09): The Democrats had misread their mandate and governed too far to the left. The solution, as always, is for Democrats to move to the right and reclaim "the center." But this conventional wisdom falls apart under scrutiny.

For months, the problem for Democrats was correctly identified as the "enthusiasm gap" -- the idea that the progressive base of the party was not excited about voting. The exit polls from Tuesday's vote confirm that many Democratic-tending voters failed to show up.

How, then, does one square this fact with the idea that Obama and Democrats were pushing policies that were considered too left-wing? If that were the case, then presumably more of those base voters would have voted to support that agenda. It is difficult to fathom how both things could be true.

But reporting and commentary preferred a narrative that declared that Obama's "days of muscling through an ambitious legislative agenda on [the] strength of Democratic votes [are] over" (Washington Post, 11/3/10). "The verdict delivered by voters on Tuesday effectively put an end to his transformational ambitions," announced Peter Baker of The New York Times (11/3/10).

Some thought Obama's post-election speech was still missing the point. As The Washington Post's Dan Balz put it (11/4/10), Obama was "unwilling, it seemed, to consider whether he had moved too far to the left for many voters who thought he was a centrist when he ran in 2008." On CNN (11/3/10), David Gergen said, "I don't think he made a sufficient pivot to the center today. He has to do that, I think, through policies and through personnel." Gergen went on to cite Social Security "reform" as an ideal way to demonstrate he was "taking on his base."

The Washington Post's David Broder (11/4/10) advised Obama to

return to his original design for governing, which emphasized outreach to Republicans and subordination of party-oriented strategies. The voters have in effect liberated him from his confining alliances with Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid and put him in a position where he can and must negotiate with a much wider range of legislators, including Republicans. The president's worst mistake may have been avoiding even a single one-on-one meeting with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell until he had been in office for a year and a half.

USA Today's Susan Page noted before the election (10/29/10):

During his first two years in office, Obama often acted as if he didn't need a working relationship with congressional Republicans. With big Democratic majorities in Congress... he could court a few moderate Republicans such as Maine Sen. Olympia Snowe in hopes of peeling off a GOP vote or two to block a filibuster or give legislation a bipartisan patina.

This view of Obama's politics meshes poorly with reality. Much of the Democrats' maneuvering over the healthcare bill, for example, was devoted to trying to find any Republicans who might support it, stripping out elements of the bill -- such as the public option -- that were drawing more enthusiasm from the party base. (A true single-payer plan was rejected from the beginning.)

The dramatic escalation of the Afghan War was a major disappointment to the progressive base, along with Obama's embrace of nuclear power and offshore oil drilling. And critics on the left often expressed disappointment with the White House's timid approach to Wall Street reform and economic stimulus.

Yet after the election, it was difficult to find TV pundits who would argue against the media conventional wisdom about an agenda that was too left-wing. Instead pundits were offering plenty of suggestions for Obama to move even further to the right -- Time's Joe Klein recommended building more nuclear power plants (FAIR Blog, 10/29/10) and Washington Post columnist David Broder floated a war with Iran to boost the economy and promote bipartisanship (FAIR Blog, 11/1/10).

Bill Clinton, whom media likewise counseled to move right after heavy midterm losses, was frequently held up as an exemplar: "If there is a model for the way forward in recent history, it's provided by President Bill Clinton, who established himself as more of a centrist by working with Republicans to pass welfare reform after Democrats lost their grip on Congress in 1994." (Associated Press, 11/2/10).

The advice to move to the "center" was accompanied by reporting and analysis that wondered if Obama was even capable of doing so. "Obama has not shown the same sort of centrist sensibilities that Mr. Clinton did," explained The New York Times (11/3/10).

Of course, Clinton's first two years were centrist -- and a disappointment to his base, seriously dampening Democratic turnout in the midterms (Extra!, 1-2/95; FAIR Media Advisory, 11/7/08). And the "Clinton model" failed to build broad Democratic electoral success.

Meanwhile, the pundits had right in front of them, in the sweeping Republican victory, an example of how a political party can organize a comeback -- not by moving to the center and alienating its base, but by "using guerrilla-style tactics to attack Democrats and play offense" (New York Times, 11/4/10).


The economy, stupid

Much of the election analysis sought to ignore or downplay what was inarguably an election about unemployment and the state of the economy. Reporting that sought to elevate the federal budget deficit (FAIR Action Alert,6/24/10) as a primary issue of concern served as a diversion -- and drove the election narrative into Republican territory, where rhetoric about "big government" and cutting federal spending were dominant themes.

"If there is an overarching theme of election 2010, it is the question of how big the government should be and how far it should reach into people's lives," explained the lead of an October 10 Washington Post article. There was little in that article -- or anywhere else -- to support that contention.

With the economy the overwhelming issue for the public (Washington Post, 11/3/10) the media should have led a serious discussion about what to do about it. Instead, there was a discussion that mostly adhered to a formula where the left-wing position was that nothing could be done to improve the economic situation (when the actual progressive view was that a great deal more could have been done), while the right offered an attack on federal spending but was never required to offer a coherent explanation of how such spending eliminated jobs.

As The New York Times' Baker (11/3/10) framed it: "Was this the natural and unavoidable backlash in a time of historic economic distress, or was it a repudiation of a big-spending activist government?"

There were some exceptions -- MSNBC interviews with top Republican officials on election night (11/2/10), for instance, revealed that many could not offer a coherent plan for reducing spending or the budget deficit. This should have been a larger part of the media's coverage of the election.


Who voted?
Some election reporting and commentary treated the results as if they represented a dramatic lurch to the right. As Alternet's Josh Holland noted (11/3/10), reporting like a New York Times article that talked of "critical parts" of the 2008 Obama vote "switching their allegiance to the Republicans" distracted from the main lesson -- that many Obama voters of two years ago did not participate in 2010. Republican-leaning voters, on the other hand, did.

That fact, along with the disastrous state of the economy and the normal historical trends seen in midterm elections, would seem to provide most of the answers for why the election turned out the way it did.

But much of the media commentary wanted to turn the election into a national referendum on the new healthcare law or the size of government. The exit polls provide some clues about the sentiment of voters, but the lessons don't seem to fit neatly into those dominant media narratives.

Asked who was to blame for the state of the economy, most picked Wall Street and George W. Bush (USA Today, 11/3/10). As a New York Times editorial noted (11/4/10), "While 48 percent of voters said they wanted to repeal the healthcare law, 47 percent said they wanted to keep it the way it is or expand it -- hardly a roaring consensus."

Some attention was paid to the exit poll finding that 39 percent of voters support Congress focusing on deficit reduction -- which would appear to lend some credence to the media message that voters cared deeply about deficits. But the same exit polling found 37 percent support for more government spending to create jobs.

Given that polling of the general public shows stronger concern about jobs -- The New York Times reported (9/16/10) that "The economy and jobs are increasingly and overwhelmingly cited by Americans as the most important problems facing the country, while the deficit barely registers as a topic of concern when survey respondents were asked to volunteer their worries" -- if anything, this finding serves to reinforce that citizens energized by Republican talking points were the ones who showed up to vote (FAIR Blog, 10/18/10).

In the end, the elections were covered the way elections are often covered -- poorly. As Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research put it (Politico, 11/2/10), "Until we get better media, we will not get better politics."

[Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) is a national media watch group that, in its own words, "has been offering well-documented criticism of media bias and censorship since 1986." FAIR "work[s] to invigorate the First Amendment by advocating for greater diversity in the press and by scrutinizing media practices that marginalize public interest, minority, and dissenting viewpoints."]

Source / Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) / CommonDreams

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James McEnteer : The Alamo Election

"Fall of the Alamo." Painting by Robert Onderdonk / Friends of the Governor's Mansion.

Barbarians at the gates:
The Alamo election

By James McEnteer / The Rag Blog / November 4, 2010

Our national 2010 midterm elections demonstrated that many citizens of the United States now suffer a siege mentality: against the Islamic world and other perceived barbarians at our gates; against socialists, homosexuals, minorities, and recent immigrants, documented or not. That turns out to be the majority of the Earth's humans, many of whom reside among us. We are a house divided against itself.

Whites of European ancestry professing heterosexual Christianity have run the show in the USA since before the country's independence. They are now feeling surrounded and outnumbered as the United States more accurately reflects the proportional population of the planet.

The paranoia of the powerful old guard goads them to tweak the Constitution: “Freedom of religion? Great -- except for Islam. Freedom of speech? Certainly -- as long as it doesn't affront our majoritarian values. A presumption of innocence? Everyone's entitled to that except terrorists of course, whom it's okay to torture and lock up indefinitely.”

Members of the straight, white majority feel themselves slipping into minority status in our multi-cultural society. Their nativist rage and increasingly vocal intolerance reflects their fear of losing a power based less on achievement than on skin color and inherited privilege. They have taken to hiding behind hate speech and ever-higher walls of gated communities. While such fears may be understandable, they are not acceptable.

If our society is to meet the many daunting challenges ahead of us, it's counterproductive to refight battles for racial and religious and cultural tolerance that we won more than 200 years ago. We can not afford to be squabbling over who is “more American” as the world burns. We have to move on.

Several years ago I published a book tracing the profound influence of Texas values on U.S. political policies of the past 200 years. The creation myth of Texas warrior culture is the battle of the Alamo in 1836. The Alamo myth -- still taught in Texas public schools -- conjures a small band of 180-odd freedom fighters battling for independence against a much larger Mexican force bent on suppressing their rights.

But it was a borrowed revolution. The only native Texans in the Alamo were those of Mexican descent. Whites who died there -- of Scots-Irish ancestry -- came from Tennessee, South Carolina, and elsewhere. Driven by violent race hatred, these men killed Native Americans with impunity and enslaved Blacks, before rising against the Mexican authorities largely because they despised their skin color, language, and religion.

After they died in the Alamo their martyrdom ignited racist outrage and a thirst for vengeance that remains unslaked almost 200 years later.

The astonishing rate of execution in Texas -- which accounts for more than a third of all U.S. executions -- is only one vestige of the retributive “take no prisoners” Alamo attitude. Minorities are disproportionately represented on death row in Texas, as they are in the general prison population nationwide. Texas -- like many candidates for public office in the 2010 elections -- makes a show of circling the wagons to keep “them” (outsiders) at bay.

Such primitive behavior is not logical. But logic is not the point. When right-wing extremists opine that Barack Obama holds a “Kenyan, anti-colonial world view” it sounds nonsensical. It's a code phrase meant to signify that Obama is not one of “us” (right-thinking traditional Americans, white and Christian).

The right tried to make the election about the non-Caucasian, perhaps socialistic, Islamic sympathizer, Barack Obama. He represents many nativist fears of change. His attempts to conciliate his enemies cannot succeed because their hatred of him is not logical, or based on any policies. It is visceral and beyond rational discourse.

Rush Limbaugh has said of the president, “I hope he fails.” Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said, “Our goal must be to make Obama a one-term president.” Not a single positive policy suggestion sullies the agenda of Obama's enemies. All they want, the country's welfare be damned, is to wrest control of the agenda for their corporate masters.

The very hope Obama's election offered the rest of the world, that the United States might rejoin the global community of nations for the common good, is what worries conservatives most. The problem and paradox is that the harder and dirtier Obama's political enemies fight to exclude Obama and his ilk and maintain "purity," the less of the republic there is to save.

We must not allow the American democratic experiment to end in suicidal bigoted imperial rage. Those who would recreate the Alamo will share its fate.

[James McEnteer is the author of Deep in the Heart: the Texas Tendency in American Politics (Praeger 2004) and other books. He lives in South Africa.]

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Tom Hayden : Jerry Brown's Green Vision for California

California Governor-elect Jerry Brown at Los Angeles campaign rally November 1, 2010. Photo by Justin Sullivan / Getty Images.
But it can't be just for whites...
Brown's green vision for California

Through all the political back and forth, alternative energy has been a settled idea in California, and for that we owe a large debt to Brown. He has been ahead of the curve on energy conservation and renewable resources for decades.

By Tom Hayden / November 4, 2010

LOS ANGELES -- During the campaign season, it was easy to dismiss the idea of a green energy future for California as mere campaign rhetoric. But with the second coming of Jerry Brown, the reelection of Barbara Boxer, and voter endorsement of state policies to curb global warming, California really is poised to lead the country to a greener future.

Why were California voters not carried away by the Republican wave? We have certainly had our conservative hiccups in the past. There was the 1978 election when voters passed Proposition 13, which cut property taxes but also damaged school funding and caused chronic budget crises. And in 1984, California had its Arizona moment when voters passed Proposition 187, which would have terminated many public services, including schooling, for undocumented immigrants had the courts not struck it down.

But through all the political back and forth, alternative energy has been a settled idea in California, and for that we owe a large debt to Brown. He has been ahead of the curve on energy conservation and renewable resources for decades.

During Brown's previous tenure as governor from 1975 through 1982, the nuclear industry was projecting the need for one nuclear power plant every five miles along the California coast. One of them was slated for Corral Canyon on Pacific Coast Highway near Malibu. Corporate interests also insisted on the need for a liquefied natural gas terminal at Point Conception in Santa Barbara, saying it was necessary to keep the lights from going out.

Brown turned these powerful interests down, siding instead with the no-nukes movement and the early dreamers of a solar future. Thirty years later, as a direct result of his vision, California is the most energy-efficient state in America, with an estimated 1.5 million clean-energy jobs and accumulated savings of $50 billion to $60 billion to California consumers. Two-thirds of venture-capital investments in American clean energy are in California.

American leadership on global warming has been derailed by a relentless campaign from oil companies and energy interests. "Remember Renewable Energy?" asked a New York Times editorial last week. Here in California we do remember, and the vote Tuesday reaffirmed our commitment to it.

The Obama administration still can wield regulatory power for energy conservation, and Boxer will continue to chair the Senate's environmental policy committee. But it is Brown's California that is poised to implement a vision of putting people to work at green jobs that will reduce air pollution and carbon emissions. Brown's promise is to create 500,000 new green jobs in the next eight years, and we voters should hold him to -- and help him realize -- that pledge.

Brown faces two main challenges. The first is how to pay for a cleaner energy future. He has expressed hope that setting a requirement that one-third of the state's energy needs come from renewable sources by 2020 will jump-start private investment.

Brown cites the example of the aerospace industry as a model. But he downplays the billions in federal investment that made that industry possible. He needs to recognize that some combination of rate hikes and tax revenues will be necessary to get the electricity-based transit revolution he envisions up and running.

The other challenge is to ensure that all Californians benefit from the state's green energy push. Brown has succeeded in portraying his energy vision as good for the economy, but he has not explained how it will benefit the black and brown voters at the core of his support.

Put bluntly, the green future cannot be purely white. This is a great opportunity to put people to work who are now locked out of the job market. And in the end, it makes far more sense to employ at-risk youth weatherizing homes and installing solar collectors than locking them up in the largest mass incarceration system in the world.

That incarceration system could be Brown's Achilles' heel. If his energy policies are an example of his "paddling on the left," his law-and-order legacy is an example of "paddling on the right." In 1976, when then-Gov. Brown was supporting punishment rather than rehabilitation as state policy, the state prison population was slightly above 20,000. Today, the system holds 165,000 inmates and creates a massive drain on the state budget.

With Brown's longtime support, California leads America and America leads every country in the world in incarceration rates. The state prison budget currently exceeds the combined budgets of the University of California and the California State University systems.

Brown may find that a greener future is incompatible with the state's massive spending on incarceration at the expense of education. African Americans are 3% of UC students and Latinos are 11%. At the same time, those groups are 30% and 40%, respectively, of the state's inmates.

While the state was building 33 new prisons in recent decades, its school funding has been stagnant. Prioritizing education and rehabilitation over prisons in state budgets could both save money and supply a steady and well-trained workforce for a green economy.

[Tom Hayden was chairman of Gov. Jerry Brown's SolarCal Council in 1979 and a state legislator from 1982 to 2000. A founder of SDS and a leader of the Sixties New Left, Tom's latest book is The Long Sixties.]

Source / LA Times / Progressive America Rising

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Robert Jensen : Radical Change Isn't on the Ballot

Graffiti art by Banksy.
Making real choices:
Radical change isn't on the ballot

By Robert Jensen / The Rag Blog / November 1, 2010

November 2 is going to be a big day in our political lives.

But November 3 will be far more important.

On mid-term Election Day, voters will choose between candidates with different positions on health care insurance, withdrawal from Afghanistan, and CO2 levels that drive global warming. The politicians we send to the legislatures and executive offices will make -- or avoid making -- important decisions. Our votes matter.

But Election Day is far from the most important moment in our political lives. The radical changes necessary to produce a just and sustainable society are not on the table for politicians in the Republican or Democratic parties, which means we citizens have to commit to ongoing radical political activity after the election.

I use the term “radical” -- which to some may sound extreme or even un-American -- to mark the importance of talking bluntly about the problems we face. In a political arena in which Tea Partiers claim to defend freedom and centrist Democrats are called socialists, important concepts degenerate into slogans and slurs that confuse rather than clarify. By “radical,” I mean a politics that goes to the root to critique the systems of power that create the injustice in the world and an agenda that offers policy proposals that can change those systems.

In previous essays in my campaign series on economics, empire, and energy, I argued that the conventional debates in electoral politics are diversionary because painful realties about those systems are unspeakable in the mainstream: capitalism produces obscene inequality, U.S. attempts to dominate the globe violate our deepest moral principles, and there are no safe and accessible energy sources to maintain the affluent lifestyles of the First World.

Why would politicians be unwilling to engage these ideas? Part of the answer lies in who pays the bills; campaigns and political parties are funded primarily by the wealthy, who have a stake in maintaining the system that made them wealthy. Also crucial is the ideology that pervades the dominant society; people have been subject to decades of intense propaganda that has tried to make predatory corporate capitalism and U.S. imperial domination of the world seem natural and inevitable.

As a result of these economic and political systems, 20 percent of the U.S. population controls 85 percent of the country’s wealth, and half the world’s population lives in abject poverty. None of that is natural or inevitable. This inequality is the product of human choices that benefit a relatively small elite, who buy off middle- and working-class people with a small cut of the wealth. This state of affairs is the product of policies that were chosen, and can be chosen differently.

Because these crucial questions are not on the agenda for the two dominant parties battling on November 2, we have to commit to a radical citizens’ agenda on November 3. The first step is building and fortifying -- both the local grassroots institutions that can work independently of the powerful, and the networks of empathy and caring that will be needed if we are to survive the fraying of the systems in which we live.

For that work, don’t look to the corporate bosses or the politicians they employ. Look to the person sitting next to you.

[Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center in Austin. He is the author of All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice, (Soft Skull Press, 2009); Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (South End Press, 2007); The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege(City Lights, 2005); Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (City Lights, 2004); and Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream (Peter Lang, 2002). Jensen is also co-producer of the documentary film Abe Osheroff: One Foot in the Grave, the Other Still Dancing, which chronicles the life and philosophy of the longtime radical activist. Robert Jensen can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu.]

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