China. If we close our eyes, we all can envision the ancient culture, the beautiful hills, the monumental Great Wall, cordial people and their delicate features, the exotic music and the lovely tea.  Isn't it true?China has become one of the strongest financial countries in the world, and we keep pouring our money into that regime. The Chinese society differs completely from ours. The Chinese government determines what its citizens are allowed to do, how many children a couple can have,  what you are to study, what you can read, the music you are allowed to hear and even the future of a newborn child, things that are unimaginable in our culture. And their food, everyone loves their food with those wonderful noodles, delicate flavors, perfect balance of vegetables and for those that enjoy a succulent shrimp, a perfectly cooked piece of beef or pork they have wonderful dishes as well. And the fortune cookies, that all of us want regardless that they are never eaten and that all we care about is the fortune that hides inside, even when it makes no sense and we know it’s fake, they are fun and we want them. Of course, their culinary art is very different outside China; it’s altered to fit our less “refined” taste buds. For starters, it is true that rats are part of their menu, and what is even worse than rats, they eat dogs and cats. It breaks my heart to see the barbaric way in which they kill these poor animals, animals that for most of the civilized world are considered to be our companions and our best friends. Being the good businessmen they are, they save the skin of these poor creatures and sell them to clothing factories where they will use it on the collars and ...

The American Legislative Exchange Council, (ALEC) prefers to do its business in secret. And since ALEC's founding in 1973 by Paul Weyrich (who co-founded the Heritage Foundation and is widely considered to be one of the Godfathers of the New Right); former Illinois Republican Congressman Henry Hyde; and conservative activist Lou Barnett, the organization has successfully stayed out of the spotlight.Source Watch, a project of the Wisconsin-based Center for Media and Democracy, described ALEC as a "semi-secretive" organization that "has been highly influential, has operated quietly in the United States for decades, and received remarkably little scrutiny from journalists, media or members of the public during that time." A report by the American Association for Justice, titled "ALEC: Ghostwriting the Law for Corporate America" described the organization as "the ultimate smoke filled back room."As John Nichols recently pointed out in The Nation, "the shadowy Koch brothers-funded network ... brings together right-wing legislators with corporate interests and pressure groups to craft so-called ‘model legislation.'" And while ALEC is predominantly concerned with cutting tax rates for corporations and wealthy individuals, privatization, de-regulation, and weakening, if not eliminating unions, it "also dabbles in electoral and public safety issues. And ‘Stand Your Ground' proposals have for seven years been on its agenda."....Investigations surrounding the cold-blooded murder of the 17-year-old Trayvon Martin by a self-styled vigilante, could push ALEC out into the openThe Florida "stand your ground" law, which may allow the killer of Trayvon Martin to walk free, "is the template for an American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) ‘model bill' that has been pushed in other states," PR Watch's Brendan Fischer recently ...

In mid February 2012 an array of top U.S. intelligence chiefs appeared before Senate Intelligence Committee to give their annual report on "currant and future worldwide threats" to national security. Those testifying included CIA Director David Petraeus, National Intelligence Director James Clapper, Defense Intelligence Agency Director Lt. General Ronald Burgess, and FBI Director Robert Mueller. Their presentations on what is and is not a real threat to the nation, as well as the reaction of the senators holding the hearings, turned out to be an exercise in one dimensional thinking. What is real? Well, what comports with your point of view. Here are two examples from their testimony:1. The Enemy Within – Rogue individuals operating "within the ranks" of the intelligence community and armed forces" now constitute a major threat to U.S. security. According to Lt. General Burgess these people are "self-radicalized lone wolves." He then pointed to the "recent massive Wikileaks disclosures."Everyone involved in these hearings agreed with this assertion even though it is based on a dubious, yet unquestioned, assumption. The assumption is that the behavior of U.S. government forces is a model of acceptable normal military and intelligence behavior. Those who work for the government but find this behavior unacceptable, and indeed a criminal betrayal of all that is humane, and then do something about that conviction, are "self-radicalized"dangers to national security.But what if the support of oppressive and racist regimes, the invasion of other ...

(The following is a transcript of a talk I gave at San Quentin State Prison on February 2, 2012.)

This afternoon I’d like to begin our conversation with a single question: what does individual financial responsibility look like in an economic system that cannot help but to behave in financially irresponsible ways? To approximate an answer we must first challenge traditional notions of individual financial responsibility like balancing a household budget, establishing good credit, and securing employment. These components are central to the idea of financial responsibility, but they only tell one half of the tale.

For example, how many times have we blamed ourselves for what we’re been told is a personal shortcoming, deficiency, or flaw? How many times have we heard that hard work is the linchpin of financial security? And how many times have we thought that if we merely changed our “irresponsible behavior,” then we’d be on the fast track to success and stability? We should have little patience for theories of financial responsibility that divorce what are thought to be as poor individual decisions from the context in which they are made. As human beings we make our own history, though not always under conditions of our choosing. That said, this afternoon I’d to frame our discussion around such “social conditions not of our choosing.” I hope that this back and forth dialogue will help to bridge the gap between the "individual" and "institutional" forms of financial responsibility. People are never just people, but rather we’re people in places, societies, cultures, and political organizations. We're all part of larger social systems that shape our ways of being, doing, and feeling.

So what exactly is the relationship between creature and culture? Between you and me? Between you and we? And what responsibilities do we, as individuals, have to the communities in which we live? I submit to you that financial responsibility is bi-directional: we are ...

As we all know only too well, the United States and Israel would hate to see Iran possessing nuclear weapons. Being "the only nuclear power in the Middle East" is a great card for Israel to have in its hand. But — in the real, non-propaganda world — is USrael actually fearful of an attack from a nuclear-armed Iran? In case you've forgotten ...

In 2007, in a closed discussion, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said that in her opinion "Iranian nuclear weapons do not pose an existential threat to Israel." She "also criticized the exaggerated use that [Israeli] Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is making of the issue of the Iranian bomb, claiming that he is attempting to rally the public around him by playing on its most basic fears." 1

2009: "A senior Israeli official in Washington" asserted that "Iran would be unlikely to use its missiles in an attack [against Israel] because of the certainty of retaliation." 2

In 2010 the Sunday Times of London (January 10) reported that Brigadier-General Uzi Eilam, war hero, pillar of the Israeli defense establishment, and former director-general of Israel's Atomic Energy Commission, "believes it will probably take Iran seven years to make ...

Question One.  The combined pay of the 299 highest paid CEOs in the US is enough to support how many median salary jobs?

45,000?  83,000?  102,325?

Two.  The median net worth of black households in the US is $2,200.  What is the median net worth of white households in the US?

$4,400?  $44,000?  $97,000?

Three. The US Department of Housing and Urban Development issues a national survey every year listing fair market rents for every county in the US.  HUD also suggests renters should pay no more than 30 percent of their income on housing costs.   In how many of the USA’s 3068 counties can someone who works full-time and earns the federal minimum wage pay 30% of their income and find a one-bedroom apartment at the fair market rental amount?

19?  368?  1974?

Four.  How much must the typical U.S. worker earn per hour to rent a two-bedroom apartment if that worker dedicates thirty percent of his income, as HUD suggests, to rent and utilities?

$9.39? $14.63?  $18.46?

Five.  The wealthiest 1 percent of the US has a net worth which is how many times greater than the median or typical household’s net worth?

50?  150?  225?

Six.  Which of these countries puts the highest percentage of their people in jails and prisons?

China? Iran?  Iraq?  Germany?  Russia? USA?

Seven.  In 2012, the US will pay out about $620 million for old age Social Security benefits to 45 million families.  How much is budgeted for military spending by the US in 2012?

$310 billion?  $620 billion?  $836 billion?

Eight.  The US ...

If you missed the last two, fantastic episodes of the Newt Gingrich circus, check out his deluded, anything-but-concession theatricals.  Here and here.

No doubt, as electioneering grows uglier, more divisive, and far more expensive, everyone longs for a more transparent, steam-lined system.  And for this notorious, career demagogue, allegedly awash with ideas, no problem.  Now, all praise Newt for his magic thinking, as straightforward as it is self-serving.

First, declare yourself the best candidate, thus broadcasting the presumption you deserve to win.   Second, like an instant lottery winner, award yourself the GOP nod, then pre-emptively install yourself into the Oval Office.   For Newt the sociopath, the world need only create a modest new category, the President-in-Waiting, like the Prince of Wales standing by for the inevitable succession.

Despite a crushing Florida primary loss, Newt scoffed at the defeat and the “blatantly dishonest” (thus temporary) winner-frontrunner.  Then begins an epic rant, armed with a fistful of major reforms he’d enact hours after his presidential inauguration. Unrestrained, Gingrich’s denial is frankly beginning to give chutzpah, let alone grandiosity, a bad name.  Providential inevitability trumps public opinion and elections: the anointed hero must only present himself, then remove Excalibur from the rock and accept the glory.  Yessiree, lunacy reigns for this ridiculed fan of lunar colonies (yes, both from the same root).

Newt’s litany begins with pre-inauguration demands that ...

The human body is an amazing creation. It's not only the most complex system known to mankind, but it embodies within it signals that tell its owner that something has gone wrong. A similar signaling system exists in political bodies. Those tasked with reading the signals--be they individuals, physicians or politicians--can choose to consciously ignore the warning signs. The Middle East peace process between Palestinians and Israelis has been emitting SOS signals for decades, but only recently are those signals being received and analyzed for what they are transmitting--a clear and irreversible message that the entire paradigm of "two states for two peoples" has collapsed.

Like doctors who peddle medications instead of practicing medicine, many politicians are under the influence of their narrow political interests and prefer not to call situations by their name. After so many years of failure--political, legal, diplomatic and economic--those who are paid to diagnose and treat reality are being replaced with voices from all corners of the world, voices convincingly making the case that the entire premise undertaken by the Palestine Liberation Organization, starting as far back as 1974, is no longer feasible.

Some will say that the PLO was tricked by the West into a path that was never intended to succeed. Others may claim that the PLO had no option but to acquiesce to the pressures placed upon it to enter, more recently, the Oslo peace process, in hopes that the West (mainly the US) would then pull its weight in bringing Israel in line with international law and UN resolutions. Regardless of the analysis of the past, very few people on the ground who are intimately involved in the attempt to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli "conflict" would venture to spend any additional political credit on the notion that two independent states, Israel and Palestine, remain a way out of this man-made tragedy.

The measures ...

“Corporations are people, my friend.” -Mitt Romney at the Iowa State Fair

Corporations are obviously not people.  But Romney is accurate in the sense that corporations have hijacked most of the rights of people while evading the responsibilities. An important part of the social justice agenda is democratizing corporations.  This means we must radically change the laws so people can be in charge of corporations.  We must strip them of corporate personhood and cut them down to size so democracy can work.  People are taking action so democracy can regulate the size, scope and actions of corporations.

One of the most basic roles of society is to protect the people from harm.  The massive size of many international corporations makes democratic control over them nearly impossible.

Corporate crime is widespread.  The New York Times, ProPublica and others have revealed Wall Street giants like JPMorgan, Citigroup, Bank of America and Goldman Sachs have been charged with fraud many times only to get off by paying hundreds of millions.  Professors at University of Virginia have documented hundreds of corporations which have been found guilty or pled guilty in federal courts.

Corporate abuse is even more widespread.  For example, Corporate Accountability International named six to its Corporate Hall of Shame, including: Koch Industries for spending over $50 million to fund climate change denial; Monsanto for mass producing cancer causing chemicals; Chevron for dumping more than 18 billion gallons of toxic waste into the Ecuadorian Amazon; Exxon Mobil for being the worst polluter; Blackwater (now Xe) for killing unarmed Iraqi civilians and hiring paramilitaries; and Halliburton, the nation’s leading war profiteer.

Making corporations responsible to democracy of the people is challenging considering Wal-Mart, the world’s biggest corporation, does more ...

Part I - Two Fronts

In January 2011, I wrote an analysis in support of a one-state solution to the on-going Israeli-Palestinian struggle. It is the Israelis themselves who have made the one-state solution the only practicable approach, because their incessant and illegal colonization of the West Bank has simply eliminated all possibility of a viable and truly independent Palestinian state. Israeli behavior has not changed in the past year and so I still stand by the position.

That being said, it is important to point out that even a one-state solution capable of bringing justice to the Palestinians, and in doing so, saving the Jews from the folly of Zionism, will not be possible without worldwide intervention. What is necessary is a struggle on two international fronts:

A) A strong growing international boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign against Israel and

B) Growing popular pressure in the United States that forces a change in foreign policy towardIsrael.

Without achieving both of these goals the fate of both Palestinians and Jews looks very bleak indeed.

Part II - Israel Will Try To Prevent A Civil Rights Struggle

The necessity of this two-front international approach was reinforced for me upon reading a speech given by Noam Chomsky in Beirut in May of 2010. When commenting on a one-state solution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, he made the following points:

1. For the indefinite future, "Israel will continue doing exactly what [its] doing....[taking] the water resources, the valuable land...the Jordan Valley...and send[ing] corridors through the remaining regions to break them up into separated cantons..."

2. In the process the Israeli government will make sure ...

One of these is a genuine fake rogue; the other is unspeakable.     AP/photo

Calling Sister Sarah, whose travesty of "going rogue" comes down to dishing dirt.  Or Sen. McCain, ex-half-a-maverick – shuffle that walker to the side. Time for has-been, media mavericks to make way for Newt Gingrich, the gutsy, grandstanding "real rogue for real America" (trademark bidding open).  This great southern rebel, the most pompous, least likely "man of the people" since Ross Perot, assaults not only the subversive president, but all establishment elites (richer than he) who dare cross his fiery path.

Of course Newt's a real rogue in a less fake sort of way.   Didn't Gov. Chris Christie call him an "embarrassment to the party"?  Add in heaps of denigration from party attack dogs: from David Brooks and Peggy Noonan to George Will and Charles Krauthammer.  Even Glenn Beck and Ann Coulter revile Newt.  And didn't Newt himself make a theatrical bow to the "going rogue" nitwits, "Palin would have a 'major role' in his White House." Maybe running mate, in charge of energy.  Guffaw, stagger.  Really, what opera can afford two prima donnas full of themselves?

It takes quite a nervy, slick operator to dare slam Mitt as the lying "Massachusetts moderate" while forgetting your own similar takes on TARP, individual health mandates, immigration, and cap-and-trade.  Or call yourself a "Tea Party reform conservative."  ...

Dear Gov. Mitch Daniels and your Republican Brethren,

Your response to President Obama’s State of the Union last night was deceitful, historically tenuous, and politically unsophisticated. George Orwell once said that “in a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

(Follow along here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7giygZFgHY )

M.D. "The percentage of Americans with a job is at the lowest in decades.”

TRUTH: Daniels speaks truth without context. Yes, the unemployment rate is indeed the highest it has been since 1983, but it has actually fallen by 1.5% since its peak in December, 2009. http://www.miseryindex.us/urbyyear.asp
http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000

M.D. “In three short years, an unprecedented explosion of spending, with borrowed money, has added trillions to an already unaffordable national debt. And yet, the President has put us on a course to make it radically worse in the years ahead.”

TRUTH: Over the course of President Obama’s first three years he and Congress increased the national debt by 41%. And in Ronald Reagan’s first three years? You guessed it. He increased the national debt by 55%. http://www.skymachines.com/US-National-Debt-Per-Capita-Percent-of-GDP-an...

M.D. “The federal government now spends one of every four dollars in the entire economy.”

TRUTH: Yes, but since 1980 federal spending as a percentage of GDP has changed very little. Since Reagan’s first term Republicans presidents have spent on average 21.53% of GDP on federal programs, Democrats, 21.6%.
http://www.factcheck.org/2010/07/geithners-gdp-whopper/

M.D. "The President's grand experiment in trickle-down government has held back rather than sped economic recovery.”

TRUTH: Just two weeks ago President Obama detailed his plan to supplant six current federal agencies with one in order to create a “more efficient and lean” government. The move is projected to save taxpayers $3 billion over ...

Part I - Flawed Systems

Winston Churchill once said that "No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others that have been tried from time to time." He was right. Democracy in its various manifestations is a flawed system, flawed by virtue of its roots. By definition it is the system where power flows from the people (or at least a supposed majority of the people), and as there are no perfect people, then.... Well, the logic speaks for itself.

Many of democracy’s problems are common to all forms of governance. For instance, (a) the tendency of a political leader to mistake his or her own interests or that of his party, for the nation’s or community’s interests and (b) the corruptive influence of powerful subgroups or lobbies usually coming through the manipulation of money and other resources. The ubiquitous nature of these problems suggest that they are structural. That is they are built into the system no matter what form a government takes. That does not mean such flaws cannot be held in check or minimized. As James Madison, the father of the U.S. Constitution believed, they might be subject to control by a well crafted constitution. However, it is unlikely that they can be eliminated.

Part II - Today In The USA

Today, we are presented with a stark example of U.S. democracy’s systemic flaws. Again, these bring together the influence of small but powerful and wealthy subgroups with the tendency of national leaders to define interests in personal ways. The trigger for the present structural malfunction is a foreign policy issue. It is the issue of Iran (which, alas, is a reworking of the recent issue of Iraq).

As the Consortium News website

Haiti, a close neighbor of the US with over nine million people, was devastated by earthquake on January 12, 2010.  Hundreds of thousands were killed and many more wounded.

The UN estimated international donors gave Haiti over $1.6 billion in relief aid since the earthquake (about $155 per Haitian) and over $2 billion in recovery aid (about $173 per Haitian) over the last two years.

Yet Haiti looks like the earthquake happened two months ago, not two years. Over half a million people remain homeless in hundreds of informal camps, most of the tons of debris from destroyed buildings still lays where it fell, and cholera, a preventable disease, was introduced into the country and is now an epidemic killing thousands and sickening hundreds of thousands more.

It turns out that almost none of the money that the general public thought was going to Haiti actually went directly to Haiti.  The international community chose to bypass the Haitian people, Haitian non-governmental organizations and the government of Haiti.  Funds were instead diverted to other governments, international NGOs, and private companies.

Despite this near total lack of control of the money by Haitians, if history is an indication, it is quite likely that the failures will ultimately be blamed on the Haitians themselves in a “blame the victim” reaction.

Haitians ask the same question as many around the world “Where did the money go?

Here are seven places where the earthquake money did and did not go.

One.  The largest single recipient of US earthquake money was the US government.  The same holds true for donations by other countries.

Right after the earthquake, the US allocated $379 million in aid and sent in 5000 troops.  The Associated Press discovered that of the $379 million in initial US money promised for Haiti, most was not really money going directly, or in ...

Part I - New York City

The announcement came from the mayor’s office of New York City (NYC) on 19 December 2011 in the form of an eleven page declaration. It begins "Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, Cornell University President David J. Skorton, and Technion-Israel Institute of Technology President Peretz Lavie today announced an historic partnership to build a two-million-square-foot applied science and engineering campus on Roosevelt Island in New York City." This is the result of an Applied Sciences Competition that drew at least seven competitors from around the world.

Good news? Well, NYC officials certainly think so: "Thanks to this outstanding partnership...New York City’s goal of becoming a global leader in technological innovation is now within sight." And all it will cost the city is some public land on Roosevelt Island and "$100 million in city capital to assist with site infrastructure." Oh yes, and written in invisible ink, ‘the forfeiture of one municipal soul." That is the catch. What we have here is a three way pact with the Devil. There is New York City and........

Part II - Cornell University

Cornell University is an 147 year old elite institution located in Ithaca New York. According to the announcement cited above it is "a global leader in the fields of applied science, engineering technology, and research, as well as commercialization and entrepreneurship." Just what NYC was looking for. 

Cornell is led by David J. Skorton, a former professor of medicine and a proven college administrator. He has been the university’s president since 2006. Among other things, president Skorton presents himself as an ethical leader. Back ...

Part I

On 12 December 2011 hundreds of Israeli settler fanatics besieged a West Bank IDF army base. They destroyed equipment, set fires, and even stoned the base soldiers. This was the second such attack in a month. The cause? Anger over the army’s dismantlement of a small number of isolated, unauthorized settler outposts. The Chief of the Central Command of the Israel "Defense" Forces, Major General Avi Misrahi, is quoted as saying "I have not seen such hatred of Jews towards soldiers during my 30 years of service." He must not have been looking.

This was not an exceptional event. The subsequent indignation over the attack expressed by Prime Minister Netanyahu ("red lines have been crossed") was, as Alex Fishman writing in Yedioth Ahronoth put it, staged hypocrisy. The Prime Minister is certainly aware that for some time there has been on-going skirmishing between the settlers and government security forces. Right wing settlers regularly throw rocks and fire bombs at police and army vehicles and "physical altercations" between settlers and Israeli police and soldiers are "almost routine." This is so despite the fact that the government, both Prime Minister and Knesset, "either tacitly or openly" support the settlers; then why the hatred and why the attacks?

At this stage the battle is over strategy. The Israeli government wants to gobble up all of Palestine in an orderly step by step fashion. In part, this is to avoid too much international criticism at any particular stage of the process. On the other hand, the settlers don’t give a damn about ...

On Monday, November 28 a small cadre of Senate Democrats introduced legislation intended to extend and expand the payroll tax cut first introduced by the Jobs Creation Act of 2010. The Middle Class Tax Cut Act of 2011 (S.1917) – drafted chiefly by the Chair of the Joint Economic Committee , Senator Bob Casey (D-PA)— was summarily rejected by Republicans late last week. (Read the text of S.1917 here: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c112:S.1917) Two weeks earlier Republican leaders threatened to reject wholesale any bill imposing tax increases on the wealthy and with the single exception of Senator Susan Collins of Maine every Senate Republican voted against the measure. Bernie Sanders—celebrated social-democrat from Vermont—also voted against the bill.

Had S.1917 passed it would have reduced the social security payroll tax on employees and on the self-employed from 4.2% (already reduced under the Jobs Creation Act of 2010 from the regular 6.2%) to 3.1% for 2012. The bill would also have cut the social security payroll tax levied against employers on the first $5 million of taxable payroll from 6.2% to 3.1%. Senate democrats claimed that their proposal would have been fully subsidized by assessing a surtax on modified adjusted gross incomes in excess of $1 million.

And then yesterday—a mere four days after the rejection of his first proposal—Senator Casey amended his bill to meet a number of republican demands. In an effort to assuage Republican concerns that the overall package was too large, the most current iteration of S.1917 no longer provides any tax break for employers thereby cutting the size of the package by roughly one-third, from $265 billion to $185 billion. Secondly, the amended bill substantially reduces the surtax on the wealthiest Americans. The bill pares down the surtax on modified adjusted gross income in excess of $1 million from 3.25% to 1.9%. The surtax has also been made temporary, not permanent as the in the original bill, and ...

When the Vietnam War became history, and the protest signs and the bullhorns were put away, so too was the serious side of most protestors' alienation and hostility toward the government. They returned, with minimal resistance, to the restless pursuit of success, and the belief that the choice facing the world was either "capitalist democracy" or "communist dictatorship". The war had been an aberration, was the implicit verdict, a blemish on an otherwise humane American record. The fear felt by the powers-that-be that society's fabric was unraveling and that the Republic was hanging by a thread turned out to be little more than media hype; it had been great copy.

I mention this to explain why I've been reluctant to jump with both feet on the Occupy bandwagon. I first thought that if nothing else the approaching winter would do them in; if not, it would be the demands of their lives — they have to make some money at some point, attend classes somewhere, lovers and friends and family they have to cater to somewhere; lately I've been thinking it's the police that will do them in, writing finis to their marvelous movement adventure — if you hold the system up to a mirror the system can go crazy.

But now I don't know. Those young people, and the old ones as well, keep surprising me, with their dedication and energy, their camaraderie and courage, their optimism and innovation, their non-violence and their keen awareness of the danger of being co-opted their focusing on the economic institutions more than on the politicians or political parties. ...

Any epoch of capitalism allegedly premised on competition is visible only from our rearview mirror. It is a leftist truism that in the process of competition, capitalism destroys competition. Competition, therefore, is transformed into its opposite: monopoly. Capitalism no longer survives by enlarging competition, but rather by forestalling it.

The supreme outcome of the contemporary globalization of monopoly capital has been an amplification of world exploitation, poverty rates, wealth disparities, and food insecurities. Since the mid-1970s the rate of world growth has stalled by nearly 70%. (http://www.nationofchange.org/public-republican-privatization-prisons-an...) And one consequence of decelerating rates of growth has been a turn to financialization by giant firms unable to find sufficiently high return investment outlets in production. Beginning in the early 1980’s large corporations gradually began to rely on speculative investments made possible by highly leveraged assets. Overleveraged capital has resulted in a global financial crisis at a time when state systems everywhere are increasingly subject to the vagaries of the “market” and are forced to subsidize the failures of corporate capitalism through taxpayer sponsored “bailouts.” Leaders at national, regional, and municipal levels have begun to counter—so they say—the resulting fiscal crises by disinvesting in social services and by creating more regressive tax systems, thereby intensifying the effective level of exploitation. Hence, the internationalization of monopoly capital, rather than contributing to the stabilization of global systems, is aggrandizing crises in both the scarcely indistinct private and public sectors.

The repugnance of inequality has become deeper and more entrenched. Today the richest 2% of adult individuals own more than half of global wealth, with the richest 1% accounting for 40% of total global assets. Although the gap in per capita income ...

 Do moderates pray to the same deities? From sodahead.comThe key to unabashed cheerfulness, like mine, is moderating expectations.  Set low enough standards, as some ancient codger must have mused, and you'll never be disappointed.  So, wide-eyed optimists jarred from a deep sleep by a furious thunderclap will take heart – if our roof isn't leaking, the house still level, and the toilet flushes.  We positivists wake to the morning's renewed, infinite possibilities – until space, time, commuting, bosses, or family-holiday dinners intervene.In this spirit, let's tackle the wild idea that fringe extremism hijacked a less delusional, "conservative" party open to compromise.  Right, the steamroller for decades busting its gut to repeal the 20th Century by reinstating the ominous 19th.  Or for Newt (no child labor laws) Gingrich, the 18th.  Nevertheless, this season's spectacle of imploding nincompoops caused the pundit left to overshoot, stereotyping every rightwing claim as irrational and extreme.  Today, we unpack moderate chunks in the extremist gumbo by adopting this philosophic perspective: "could be worse."  Optimists are optimistic not because we think things are great but because we can imagine worse. 'This is nothing'Reality, after all, is 80% perspective, unless you're flattened by pain, in jail, drenched by pepper-spray or bloodied by a police riot.  To get a handle on what appears ...

Part I - Bad Movies

Have you seen those old time movies notable for their endings? The cowboy is seen riding into the sunset or the lovers are reunited, etc. And then comes the end - the screen dramatically fades to black. Most of these movies are pretty bad. The stories are predictable, the acting melodramatic and directing inept. Well, this genre seems to be making a comeback, but off the screen rather than on it. In this revival, the Israelis are leading the way.

Israel’s bad movie starts out as an historical drama with moral overtones. It’s the story of Israeli democracy but, unfortunately, it has an illogical and misguided script. It begins with the premise that you can have a religiously exclusive democracy amidst a multi-religious population. Under these circumstances happy endings are impossible and the drama quickly turns to tragedy.

Part II - Final Act

The final act of this tragedy appears to be playing itself out before our eyes. It opened in 2009 with the second term of Prime Minister Netanyahu Netanyahu is a hard-line "Likudnik" determined to expand Israel to the Jordan River (if not the Potomac). That makes him an ally and supporter of the settler fanatics who represent today’s version of Zionist fascists.

There is a correlation between the condition of Israeli democracy and the ambitions of Netanyahu’s allies. As the settlements expand, Israeli democracy shrinks. This in turn is tied into the fact that the prime minister is determined to keep greater Israel demographically Jewish, and this means expansion must be coupled with ethnic cleansing. One can see this clearly in present Israeli policies in East Jerusalem as well as the violent harassment of Palestinians by settler thugs throughout the West Bank. Following logically from the flawed premise in the original script, this is a perfectly predictable ending for the story of modern Israel.

The drama ...

In 1944 the great Hungarian political economist Karl Polanyi penned The Great Transformation in which he vituperated conservatives for privatizing common property resources. He writes, for example, that “allow[ing] the market mechanism to be the sole director of the fate of human beings” will “result in the demolition of society.”

Forty years later, in 1984, I was born.

I was born in 1984 and since the year of my birth the number of human bodies in the United States languishing under some form of state surveillance has ballooned by nearly 400% despite a U.S. population rising ten times as slowly.

I was born in 1984 and since the year of my birth the number of private corrections facilities has burgeoned by 4000%. I was born in 1984 and since the year of my birth the number of black men in prison has grown by 800%; 73% of people of color incarcerated since 1984 are non-violent, drug-related offenders.

I was born in 1984 and since the year of my birth the number of black men in college has withered by almost 50%. Today, there are some 820,000 black men in cells, but only 270,000 in dorms.

I was born in 1984, the year that incumbent President Ronald Reagan defeated Walter Mondale by nearly 18% in the national popular vote. No candidate since 1984 has managed to equal or surpass Reagan's electoral gulf. Perhaps we should repeal “right on red” laws?

I was born in October of 1984 and during that month a Republican controlled Senate under the leadership of George H.W. Bush, Howard Baker, and Strom Thurmond passed legislation allowing federal agencies to experiment with privatized corrections. Later that year the INS struck a deal with CCA, the Corrections Corporation of America, on whose Board of Directors Thurgood Marshall Jr. currently sits.

The relationship between the INS—now Citizenship and Immigration Services—and the CCA is critical to consider because it demonstrates the circuitous pathways between race, citizenship, containment, and ...

Mr. Irresistible: Yes, Mine is THIS big. |AP Photo/Dave Martin

Dumbfounded Herman Cain finds he’s not in Kansas anymore – storm-tossed and dislodged from his outsider “good guy” candidacy to front row Wicked Witch of the West.  A third, now visible victim of his puffed up, manly prowess testified Monday, dispensing the ugly skywriting that foretells a political drenching.  Overplaying his 15 minutes of infamy, Cain’s political honeymoon as straight-shooting restaurant wiz, quick-baked with sham character claims, is cycloning away.

Even if he stumbles along, what standing could he have now with women, let alone good churchgoing folks?  His vacuous non-solutions have been discredited far and wide, leaving only “good character” on his resume.  Now he’s a defensive sex predator who harassed women with overtures so crude he must have thought himself irresistible.

Topping off serial sexual belligerency is his serial tunnel vision – with such a transparently inept cover-up the focus shifts from his character flaws to his basic intelligence: is he simply dumbfounded or just dumb?  Here’s the classic rightwing vanity campaign, scornful of relevant knowledge, savvy organization in key states, even fundraising success.  Serves him right for ignorance about China’s nuclear arms, a blunder so monumental the NY Times’ Timothy Egan quipped with more wit than accuracy that Herman makes “Sarah Palin, with her eagle-eyed view of Russia from Alaska, sound like a Council of Foreign Relations scholar on a gasbag high.”   Well, not even Homer Simpson does ...

Editor's note/correction: The following proposal was written and proposed by the Politics and Electoral Reform group at Occupy Wall Street.

This proposal was developed by the Politics and Electoral Reform group at Occupy Wall Street between September and November 2011. It contains input from well over 100 individuals who attended group meetings in Liberty Plaza as well as many others from across the country who influenced the proposal through online discussions.  The document was produced through a collaborative writing process.  It was approved by the Politics and Electoral Reform group with full consensus support on November 6, 2011.

————–

We, the Western Civilization are the last vestiges of semi-autonomy; we see ourselves as Vestal Virgins keeping that flame, but in truth we are vestigial appendages that no longer serve any purpose whatsoever to our hegemonic host.

Now, that may seem like a mouthful of words, a contrived way to play out a pun, but it is not. The truth is plain to see.

Somehow, we wrapped our heads around it from our very inception as a Nation. The atrocities done the Peoples whose land we coveted were “Savages.” The Peoples of Africa were “Lazy Mud-people.” The Peoples of Russia were “Godless Communists.” Southeast Asia was full of “Cat-eating Gooks.” The Peoples of South America were “Violent Drug-dealers.” The People of the Middle east were “Raghead Jihadis.” Now, Africa again, is full of “Tribal Terrorists.”

We went along with it. We go along with it. We never asked what the Peoples of those Nations, the People themselves wanted. We just “knew” somehow, if we could make them more like us, they’d be better off, you see. We were the keepers of the flame of Democracy, Hard Work, The American Dream, McDonalds and Huarachi sandals too. If they weren’t so backward, such animals, they would see we were trying to help them. You know, they made us kill them, the idiots. We were Freedom Inc© weren’t we? The ants go marching one by one, hurrah, hurrah and Johnny got his Gun, by God.

We made the Wars look sexy, Shock and Awe in technicolor. We brought vaccinations and antibiotics to cure the diseases they got from us. We moved them out of tents living in harmony with nature and brought them into the sweatshops. We bombed their asses back into the Stone Age, by golly, a clean slate on which our new history would be written.

Were we the Virginal face of Freedom and Democracy, or the very Visage of the fiery demon of ...

Scene: The Oval Office

Time:  Daily briefing with senior staff

Speaker: The President, perplexed, pacing, nodding

Let’s talk politics today and re-election, no holds barred.  I arrive here every morning bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, flush with my perpetual audacity of hope, but lately my dander is up.  Maybe no one could preside over this fragmented country.  But to hover at 40% approval — with our wave of legislative triumphs second in modern times to LBJ — and under greater duress?  Who’d predict a year out our re-election would be in doubt – especially against this gang of has-beens, misfits, clowns, losers and wannabes?  If I didn't have my formidable self-esteem, I’d feel insulted [smiles, boyishly].

Look, I appreciate how staff plays to every audience, Tea Party aside – with a scattergun as wide as anything since Reagan.  That’s what made the Gipper impressive, capturing men and women, old and young, the right, the center, and blue collar Democrats.  Chockablock with anti-government fanatics Reagan never knew, we must still firmly stay the course we set from Day One – talk Democratic, rule Republican.

Talk about a tightrope presidency, staking out the center yet besieged by extremes.  When will grumbling left-wingers get why my being against the “dumb” Iraq war meant being gung-ho in Afghanistan?  Push-pull is the key, encouraging whatever wide voter projections fit our Rorschach regime. Don’t critics appreciate our finesse, taking multiple sides on major issues while deflecting attacks for flip-flopping?  Eat your heart out, Mitt.

Yet we announce the Holy Grail – withdrawal of U.S. troops from that interminable Iraqi quagmire ...

Condoleezza Rice was both National Security Advisor and Secretary of State under President George W. Bush. She was also an administration spokesperson who helped scare the American people into supporting the invasion of Iraq. She accomplished this by invoking the image of “mushroom clouds” incinerating the skylines of America. In doing so she gave credence to the false story that Iraq was a threat to the United States because it possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMDs).

Rice is presently on a lecture tour promoting her 734 page memoir entitled No Higher Honor (Crown, 1 November 2011). That is what brought her to the Belk Theater on the campus of Queens University in Charlotte, North Carolina on 25 October 2011. There she spoke to a packed house of 2000 people. Actually, what made this event notable was not the large numbers who had come to hear her, but rather that, among other things, Condoleezza Rice chose to speak about values.

According to Ms. Rice our present challenge “is not China or Brazil or India, and certainly not Europe. The challenge is the United States gone badly.” Well, she should know. Despite the fact that values are fluid concepts most people esteem the precepts underlying honest government and respect for the law. Most but not all, and it may very well be that Rice is not with the majority on this. There is no living group of individuals who have done more to undermine these sorts of crucial values than those who worked in the Bush Jr. White House. Truth in government, due process in the Justice System, personal protection from official spying, regulating economic greed and corruption, and a general respect for the Constitution and its Bill of Rights, you name it and they managed to trash it. And, of course, Condoleezza Rice was there throughout the entire eight your assault on those sorts of values.

Not surprisingly, in her Charlotte address Rice avoided these topics and instead ...

Steve Jobs was legendary for demanding accomplishments of his employees that seemed scientifically impossible to them.  They characterized him as living in what they termed a “reality distortion field.”  America’s GOP is currently mired in a reality distortion field of their own, but not with the productive upside that flourished at Apple.

Ignoring the reality that Americans are tired of costly, counterproductive wars, driven by disinformation and deceit, the GOP has launched war on the EPA.   To attack the EPA as “job killing” is as much a con game as was attacking Iraq for non-existent weapons of mass destruction.   Justifying themselves as wanting to eliminate regulations of “mass job destruction”, this year the Republican controlled House has passed 168 measures that would weaken or gut core provisions of the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts.   Regrettably, many conservative Democrats are playing along.

Almost by definition, conservatives always long for the good old days of decades past.  In pushing to abolish the EPA, they apparently are nostalgic for those good old days when the Cuyahoga River caught fire—seven times, when Lake Erie was devoid of fish, and when the air over Los Angeles was more appropriately chewed rather than inhaled.   But the idea that returning to the “glory” days of unrestrained pollution would bring us new jobs is as scientifically sound as advocating our health care return to leeches and bloodletting in the name of job creation.  A reality distortion field to be sure.

For less extreme lawmakers, Republicans or Democrats, to say, “We have enough regulations already, we can’t afford further environmental cleanup” is as absurd as my saying to patients, “Your family has had enough medical care already, we can’t afford to diagnose or treat any new diseases ...

As the revolutionary anti-plutocratic Occupy Wall Street movement traverses the country (and the world) perhaps we should pause for a moment to inventory our refrain. Put squarely, the formal deployment of the term “occupy” is both violent and imprecise. We radicals –particularly we white radicals— must recognize that “America” has been unjustly occupied for the past 500 years and we, in fact, tread on indigenous land. Our country was built on a condition of double theft. Therefore, instead of uncritically ratifying the language of “occupation” I suggest a more pointed and non-colonial shibboleth, that is, “De-Leverage Wall Street.” At the very, very least (and in the short term) we must agitate to “de-leverage wall street” by reducing its debt-to-equity ratio. The slogan is admittedly clunky and so I offer it with weighty reservation. Nevertheless, I argue that it is Wall Street’s unsteady debt-to-equity ratio that is predominantly responsible for our 20% rate of underemployment, our poverty rate of 15%, and a devastating 80% loss of wealth among black households since 2007. (White households lost about 20% of their wealth.) I assert that de-leveraging Wall Street must be the first step in a multi-tiered, variably registered approach to creating enduring material justice for workers, people of color, the homeless, radical leftists, and the poor (and for those who inevitably inhabit multiple social positions).

Perhaps we should be judged on our treatment both of prophets and profits. In 1848 Karl Marx published the Communist Manifesto. In it he famously noted that under conditions of unremitting capital accumulation “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind [:] the need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle ...

Like true religion that spawns compassion and charity, civic taboos essential to civilization are getting a bad rap.  Let us praise “good taboos,” not just displace bad ones – all those forbidden, unwritten prohibitions about sex, drugs, manners, dress, and speech.  What ninny, after all, spreads the family humiliation that Uncle George philanders, likes porn or exotic drugs, or drinks too much – even practices yesteryear’s horror, prefers men and/or socialism.  Only reactionaries think the shift from uptight Victorian prudery isn’t healthy, liberating natural inclinations and/or chemical addictions, even mental illness, from illegal status or revelatory of weak moral character, even wickedness.

Good taboos lubricate civilization but rational selection matters.  For the west, snakes evoke “evil” because one “serpent” in one yarn talked trash to Eve.  Really, a talking snake?  The incest taboo is universal like not marrying first cousins.  For two centuries this nation separated church from state and corporations from personhood – legalized taboos worth preserving.  Unlike Europe, much of the U.S. doesn’t have taboos against capital punishment, though mercifully not by stoning, hanging, firing squads, or the guillotine.  Yet.  Before W., this beacon on the hill forswore torture, contract hits on untried citizens, and pre-emptive strikes against non-aggressors, especially innocent women, children and old folks.  Obviously, when laws wither, taboos must rule.

Of course, I defend keeping traumatic reality from toddlers, the senile, and the know-nothing Tea Party.  “A little knowledge,” as they say.  But we’ve overdone it, squandering the blessings of solid, all-important taboos   – like not patently lying or dumping scurrilous propaganda that defy history, science, and the ...

Not too long ago I gave a talk on the Palestinian bid for statehood. In the audience was a Russian-Israeli expatriate who politely took exception to my criticisms of Israeli policies and behavior. His main point was that I could not credibly criticize the Israelis because I had not experienced what they had and did not know what they knew. Or, to put it in a more homey manner, I had not walked in their shoes. “Israelis have been trying to find solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian dilemma for over sixty years, so what gives you the wisdom to criticize them and tell them what they should do?” This is an old and often used objection and, if taken literally, would suggest that outside mediation is never possible.

My response to this was quite pointed: it is exactly because Israelis have been entangled in this dilemma for so long and, in addition, have passed off to themselves as well as others their hidden expansionist ambitions as “security” needs, that most of them are incapable of coming up with a just and equitable solution. They therefore very much need those with an outside and relatively objective view to critique their actions.

Essentially, most Israelis live in a “closed information environment.” This is so despite their claim to have a free media. That media may be technically free, but it is nonetheless dominated by the nation’s Zionist ideology and the political and social assumptions it expounds. Counter views may indeed exist, but they do so only as rare exceptions or at the margins. So consistent is the Zionist interpretation of things that, for the country’s Jewish citizenry, it now constitutes a “thought collective” and as such dictates the parameters of their thinking. Under such circumstances, it is only by standing outside this “thought collective” (as do a small number of clear sighted progressive folks on the Israeli margins) and looking in that one ...

Will the Righteous Right survive its inane scrum deciding which defective personality carries forth its backward-bounding banner?  True, the GOP message this season especially blends the vacuous and vicious, but that’s hardly stopped a resurgent national party, awash in money and media, from securing better hawkers.

Is the rightwing base so dumb not to realize that skewering its own frontrunners helps the vulnerable president they’re dying to depose?  And what poll-struck, bottom-dwellers – from Romney to Trump to Bachmann to Perry to Cain.  Why, if there were a bold, imaginative opposition party, I bet it could leverage such idiots spouting, well, idiocy.  Dream on.   

What’s clearly settled is the Obama re-election strategy – play down the unpopular reign of disappointments while spending a king’s ransom to vilify the last opponent standing, preferably a Texas Tea Party goon.  Thus, Obama’s strongest foe, Romney, gets scissored this weekend by the Obama team (as a ruthless, unprincipled flip-flopper) and by his own cohorts (as a ruthless, unprincipled cultist).   Irony alert, especially for this president, but let that bide.

GOP Cultists Galore

To sum up, non-Christian Romney may be shunned by good-hearted, torture-loving fundees whose non-cult thinking reads storms and floods as God’s wrath.  All the while, an incredible number of born-agains accept the ultimate cultist conflagration, the Rapture – entirely a 19th C. concoction, unmentioned anywhere in the literal Bible.  Let’s not ignore the Lone Star prophet “brutalized” for his faith, as Mrs. Perry explains her husband’s debate trials, and his own burning bush (just like Moses, fabled tribal-cult figure).

And as Rush Limbaugh piles on, dissing Mitt as “no conservative” and Perry as ...

If capitalism is in perpetual crisis, then so too is its ideological arm: the academic discipline of economics. For those analogically inclined, economists are to capitalism as priests are to Catholicism.

Forgive me this observation, vaguely playful: an economist is someone who gets rich by explaining to others why they’re poor. To this end I argue that the alleged value-neutral rhetoric marshaled by orthodox economists tends to obscure the field’s highly partisan thrust toward the upward redistribution of wealth (from which professional economists as a class clearly benefit) chiefly through the application of 1) rational choice theories and 2) efficient markets hypotheses. Yet despite their implementation of labyrinthine mathematical models, key economists at the London School of Economics (LSE) admitted in 2009 in a letter collectively authored to her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II that they had failed to prognosticate the current crisis because they somehow “lost sight of systemic risks” Excuse me?

But why should we be astonished by the failure of professional economists to account for systemic risk, that is, the probability of system-wide disintegration? The truth is that professional economists overwhelmingly employ neoclassical methodologies premised on the philosophical field of logical positivism, a late 19th century school of thought that swiftly severed epistemology (claims to truth) from axiology (claims to value). For instance, neoclassical economists reject Marxian notions of exploitation (or theft, coercion, colonization) and instead advance the idea that the distribution of social resources produced by market exchanges is innately fair and just when it is allowed to work without regulative friction. Positivism, therefore, provides the theoretical underpinnings for neoclassical economic theory by scientizing (and sanitizing) existence through the production objective generalizations that divorce information from meaning.

But historicizing the ...

October 6-9, 2011: ORC International Caravan Poll – Interviews with 1,005 adult Americans

An ongoing complaint of the mainstream media is that the Wall Street protestors and their kin in various cities throughout America lack a coherent agenda.  The right wing media has gone further and labeled the dissidents  “weirdoes” and “the usual assortment of tree-huggers and anti-American zealots” as well as emphasizing the lack of definable and agreed upon goals.  Of course it’s too early for these courageous and highly divergent group of concerned and patriotic citizens to articulate specific principles they can all agree upon.   But despite (maybe because of) the negative response from the far right, recent polls show there is wide support for the movement across the country.  Of those who have heard of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, 42% agree with the group’s positions, while only 27% disagree. An MSNBC poll, admittedly skewered because of that network’s liberal viewership, found that 89% of its respondents approved of the protest.

As the GOP “greed is good” presidential campaign continues its oblivious assertions that the Bush tax cuts should remain in place and that the wealthy are really the only “job creators” in the country, it becomes more and more difficult for many people to defend the colossal inequalities that become increasingly obvious with each passing day.  As

Tis’ the Halloween season.  Be afraid, very afraid.  Eric Cantor, Orrin Hatch, Roger Ailes, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity,  Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Karl Rove and Herman Cain want you to be very afraid of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement.  These politicians and pundits have called the OWS participants "badly educated," riot provoking, “dirty”, “lazy”, a “mob” of “anarchists”, “parasites”, “human debris”,  “marxists”, and “bizarre, aging hippies.”  Fox and Friends accused them of being “drug addicts.”  Glenn Beck warned, “They will come for you and drag you into the streets and kill us.”  Well, I intend to join this mob of parasites and soon to be violent killers at Occupy Salt Lake City.  This is how scary I am.

I’m “a drug addict” that’s never used drugs...ever.  I’ve never even had a drink of alcohol...ever.  Never smoked cigarettes or pot...ever.   I went on a mission for the Mormon Church (just like you did, Mitt).  

Despite my “laziness” I have a job, work about 55 hours a week, plus 20 more hours for a non-profit, unpaid.  Despite my being a “parasite” I make enough money that I want the government to raise my taxes.  Despite being “badly educated” I have advanced degrees and have spent the last 37 years studying and teaching medical science.  Despite my wanting to “drag you out into the street and kill you,” I’ve managed to spend many nights during those 37 years helping drag some of you from the streets and provide life saving care for victims of car accidents and gun battles.

Despite being “human debris” according to Rush Limbaugh, I’ve managed to stay married to the same person for 40 years ...

Mr. President: Despite fantasy media projections – imagining you the reincarnated Harry Truman – stubborn, historical reality intervenes.  Balderdash.  Viewed simply as strong leader commanding your own fate, you’re far short of JFK, LBJ, or Bill Clinton.  If similar to any modern Democrat, I posit misguided, beleagued Jimmy Carter – whose high rhetoric was likewise crushed when power politics unearthed rank inexperience.

But like pugnacious, risk-taking, courageous Truman?  Dream on.  Neither in style or substance do you approximate give-’em-hell Harry – not how you assail foes, nor fail to defend majority interest; not by taking risks and getting your way.  Frankly, Barry, you’re not giving anyone hell, certainly not the fringe – only indigestion to distraught leftwingers sniffing for alternatives.  And no violins, please, about onerous political inheritances.  Was yours worse than taking over for the legendary FDR, ending a world war, rebuilding the western world, confronting nuclear arms, communist blockades and the Cold War, or battling domestic economic upheavals plus headstrong rightwingers?    

No way.  Awash with monumental threats, Truman refused to cave, nor stagger from dread of defeat.  He took chances, even risked what you value over all – re-election.  Truman pushed a bold, costly Marshall Plan against high resistance, proposed a (failed) universal health plan than shames Obamacare, challenged economic royalists, and desegregated the military – offending racists everywhere, especially Dixie Democrats.Opportunities Squandered

Like ...

(I delivered the following remarks at U.C. Berkeley on October 12, 2011.)

As an anti-racist white ally dedicated to the “cause” I’ve come to believe that the only thing worse than white lies are white liars, particularly white liars whose race privilege supposedly inoculates them from falsity through colorblind appeals to transcendent truths like equity, freedom, and justice. Nothing more aptly describes my experience as a counter-protestor partaking in the anti-affirmative action bake sale recently hosted by the Berkeley College Republicans. Their protestation of SB 185 (a pro-affirmative action piece of legislation) by way of their “Increase Diversity Bake Sale”—one in which a sliding scale pricing structure explicitly indexed to skin color and gender identification was used to determine the cost of a cookie – provides unimpeachable proof that they’re adept at “speaking truth without context,” an aptitude primarily reserved for ideologues whose unflagging commitment to capital-T “truth” is inversely (and perversely) related to their disdain for historical forms of argumentation.

“Speaking truth without context” presents a very real threat to social justice workers because half-truths are just as lethal as the presentation of pure fallacy, but often more difficult to detect, diagnose, and treat. Come to think of it, the rudiments of affirmative action are approximated in the practice of baking, but it seems that at some point along the way Republicans forgot that the shape, texture, and taste of their cookies are invariably reflective of the ingredients used. That is, the properties of each cookie at the moment of consumption cannot be divorced from the ingredients that constitute them. Similarly, any discourse on affirmative action must underscore the concept of “present history,’ that is, the relationship of the past on the present. So, I hereby promise to offer my enthusiastic support to the Berkeley College Republicans in their rejection of SB 185 ...

OK, I might as well admit it.

When I first heard of the Occupy Wall Street initiative, I thought it was just a group of overfed and overeducated and underemployed “white” boys trying to get their own generational street cred. “New Millennial Hippies” (Mippies?) out to gain a little attention, smoke a little grass (or whatever they call it these days) and hopefully get laid by some arty-cutey from the Upper East Side or Jersey (Or both).

That was just the cynic in me talking. Deep down, the “better angel of my nature” was begging to be heard. But the devil in me still thought... as soon as the cops grab and twist a few arms, break some legs, spray a few faces with mace and kick a little ass, the kids would cry “foul, unfair, not nice” and scurry back home.

Maybe it’s because I remember standing on the corner of Chicago’s Michigan Avenue and Randolph, looking south, down toward the Conrad Hilton Hotel and deciding not to walk down past Grant Park. It was August, 1968 during the Democratic Convention. I was a 20-year-old “black” man who’d just moved out of Robert Taylor Homes, America’s largest housing project at the time, after scoring my first decent job – in the big time ad agency game.

Not that I didn’t feel for the hippies and yippies and Panthers getting their heads busted in the park. I was as philosophically on their side as I am on the OWStreeters’ today.  But I was no fool. I opted out for what became a 35-year career creating ads for the biggest ad agencies in America and their clients. Being one of the first and few “un-whites” in the corporate suites then was my version of contributing to the Civil Rights Movement, as Jesse would say – “in the suites, if not the streets”.

Which brings me – quite nicely – to my point. The Civil Rights Movement was one of ...

Broken and collapsed buildings remain in every neighborhood.  Men pull oxcarts by hand through the street. Women carry 5 gallon plastic jugs of water on their heads, dipped from manhole covers in the street.  Hundreds of thousands remain in grey sheet and tarp covered shelters in big public parks, in between houses and in any small pocket of land.  Most of the people are unemployed or selling mangoes or food on the side of every main street.  This was Port au Prince during my visit with a human rights delegation of School of Americas Watch – more than a year and a half after the earthquake that killed hundreds of thousands and made two million homeless.

What I did not see this week were bulldozers scooping up the mountains of concrete remaining from last January’s earthquake.  No cranes lifting metal beams up to create new buildings.  No public works projects.  No housing developments.  No public food or public water distribution centers.

Everywhere I went, the people of Haiti asked, “Where is the money the world promised Haitians?” 

The world has moved on.  Witness the rows of padlocked public port o lets stand on the sidewalk outside Camp St. Anne.  The displacement camp covers a public park hard by the still hollow skeleton of the still devastated St. Anne church.  The place is crowded with babies, small children, women, men, and the elderly.  It smells of charcoal smoke, dust and humans. Sixty hundred fifty families live there without electricity, running water or security. 

I talked with several young women inside the camp of shelters, most about eight feet by eight feet made from old gray tarps, branches, leftover wood, and pieces of rusty tin.  When it rains, they stand up inside their leaky shelters and wait for it to stop.  In a path in front of one home, crisscrossed with clotheslines full of tiny ...

Part I – What “Real Democratic Rights”?

In his speech to Congress on 24 May 2011 Prime Minister Netanyahu boasted that “Of the 300 million Arabs in the Middle East and North Africa, only Israel’s Arab citizens enjoy real democratic rights.” This is, of course, a variation on the oft cited claim that Israel is “the only democracy in the Middle East.” Leaving aside places like Lebanon and now potentially Tunisia and Egypt, one can ask just how “real” are these democratic rights the Prime Minister claims for Israel’s Arabs? Here is some recent evidence that speaks to this question.

1. At the end of September 2011 the Israeli government announced “a plan to displace 30,000 native Bedouin Arabs [all of whom are Israeli citizens]...from their homes [in the Negev].” This would constitute “the biggest dispossession plan of Palestinians issued by Israel since 1948. It would forcibly relocate about half of the Bedouin population from their existing villages, which are older than the State of Israel itself....”

Why should Israel do this to the Bedouin? Is it to facilitate their enjoyment of their “real democratic rights”? Well not quite. According to head of the Regional Council of Ramat Ha-Negev, a Zionist settlement in the region, the reason goes like this, “I want the Negev to be Jewish....Jewish settlement must grow, must continue.....What do you mean by ‘they [the Bedouin] also have rights’! You know what–after all this it is no longer possible to conceal the core problem, which is the struggle over the land. Who does this land belong to–us or them?”

2. At the Beginning of October 2011 leaders of the Jewish settler movement announced their ...

On October 6, 2011 Janell Ross, reporter for The Huffington Post, published an article entitled “Occupy Wall Street Doesn't Adequately Represent Struggling Black Population, Experts Say”, in which she decries the movement for “remain[ing] overwhelmingly white” and supports her rhetorical meanderings by relying heavily on the “expert” opinion of Bennett College president and noted Black economist Julianne Malveaux. Malveaux states that “organizers of Occupy Wall Street need to tap into the spaces where non-white people organize and discuss political and economic matters if they want to broaden the movement.” Fair enough. Malveaux’s cavil is pragmatic and therefore fairly easily rectifiable. Black activists already associated with Occupy Wall Street could consider publicizing the movement’s strategies, aims, and, above all, its relevance to the Black community in, what Melissa Harris-Perry calls “black counterpublics” like barbershops, ciphers spaces, or worship groups. Representatives of Occupy Wall Street must also articulate the core mission of the movement on electronic fora visited disproportionately by Black Americans like The Root, New American Media, Facebook, MySpace, or Colorlines.

Perorating mightily, Ross concludes that although “three years after the start of the recession, many Americans have lost their jobs, [unfortunately] many of the ones who have been disproportionately affected have not yet shown up in Zucotti Park.” Again, fair enough, but I contend that support for social movements can and must take many forms, only one of which is direct action in the streets. Black Americans may choose to remain steadfastly supportive from afar while refusing to join marchers. Although such a personal decision doesn’t require any legitimization, I nonetheless understand such a concern. The fraught relationship between the NYPD (or really any other “cop club,” both literally and metaphorically) and Black Americans is one marked by abuse and palpably racist ...

It’s a curiosity, a singular spectacle, to say the least – or a political farce, to say the most.  While weirder-than-thou Rethugs play whack-a-mole roulette – anointing, then shredding favorites – dispirited lefties dream up ways to press – even displace – a fallen incumbent.  Suckered by one media nutcase after another, the simpleminded, image-driven fringe pray for the perfect earthly redeemer for president.  Look, perfection rides in with the Rapture that will obliterate earthling voters and transcend an increasingly unchristian politics.   

A far more reality-based left rejects a painfully can’t-do, won’t-do, non-liberal, non-reformer, whose perpetual warfare, corporate-friendly welfare, and joblessness promise to finish off remnant liberalism.  That prospect quickens were this president, having trading off big mandates for today’s “absolute underdog” status,” to get trashed by a synthesized, tarnished GOP non-entity. 

Even though Obama betrayed liberalism for corporatism, he’s still tagged by extremists a loser socialist, squandering what polling a year ago presaged his likely re-election.  If this is calculated White House “pragmatism,” against the low-likes of Boehner or Cantor, let’s have plan B – and shoot the moon for anything vaguely progressive before 2012.  Remember that sleazy W., though destined to be savaged by historians, got 90% of his agenda passed – and cruised to a second term.  Why didn’t failure after failure not similarly impede W.’s calamitous ideology?

Defined by Deviants

Even more shocking, the Great Obama-Democratic Party slide comes against stunted political foes – cynical, greedy, sound-bitten, corporate bottom-dwellers.  With more vacant narcissism than presidential talents – yes, you ...

Is history getting too close for comfort for the fragile little American heart and mind? Their schools and their favorite media have done an excellent job of keeping them ignorant of what their favorite country has done to the rest of the world, but lately some discomforting points of view have managed to find their way into this well-defended American consciousness.

First, Congressman Ron Paul during a presidential debate last month expressed the belief that those who carried out the September 11 attack were retaliating for the many abuses perpetrated against Arab countries by the United States over the years. The audience booed him, loudly.

Then, popular-song icon Tony Bennett, in a radio interview, said the United States caused the 9/11 attacks because of its actions in the Persian Gulf, adding that President George W. Bush had told him in 2005 that the Iraq war was a mistake. Bennett of course came under some nasty fire. FOX News (September 24), carefully choosing its comments charmingly as usual, used words like "insane", "twisted mind", and "absurdities". Bennett felt obliged to post a statement on Facebook saying that his experience in World War II had taught him that "war is the lowest form of human behavior." He said there's no excuse for terrorism, and he added, "I'm sorry if my statements suggested anything other than an expression of love for my country." (NBC September 21)Then came the Islamic cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen, who for some time had been blaming US foreign policy in the Middle East as the cause of anti-American hatred and terrorist acts. So we killed him. Ron Paul and Tony Bennett can count themselves lucky.

What, then, is the basis of all this? What has the United ...

The Republican Party of today embodies two clashing frames of mind that could either bring it down after 166 years of life, or jog it a mite leftward to the moderate center, where it could readily survive as a viable opposition to the Democrats.  There’s an alternative scenario: a massive realignment of parties, in which the Republican remnants of this mighty collision collapse like a dying star into a minor planet of certifiable extremists and oddballs, which fades into the vastness of historic space.  One can see the major elements of this paradox in the struggling campaigns of Rick Perry and Mitt Romney, both confronting: practicality vs. rigidity, realism vs. dogma, pragmatism vs. ideology.

Psychiatrists classify this behavior of dueling absolutes as acute neurosis.  Rick Perry’s drive for the presidency is designed to win the GOP’s hard-right base, while satisfying the extremist oil-and-gas libertarians who fund him.  Perry now confronts a voters’ rebellion by angry elements within the party’s hard-right base, who despise his practical program to provide in-state college tuition to the children of illegal immigrants.  This pleases Texas’ large Hispanic voting bloc, while it avoids the social menace of a lost generation of rootless and angry Hispanic youth.  But the hard right wants Perry’s program repealed by radical voters who want to know: is he really one of us?

As for former governor Romney, his pragmatic, hard-headed policy in Massachusetts early in the last decade to close state tax loopholes for corporations brought many millions of lost dollars back into state coffers, but his “tax raising” operations have created resistance among the Republican true-believing anti-tax sect to candidate Romney’s drive for the presidency.  They can’t stomach his shape-shifting political identity: liberal to conservative on ...

Has anyone noticed that the political air is wafting rancid lately? That is the smell of modern barbarism. Modern barbarism is a malodorous umbrella concept. Underneath the umbrella are lots of fetid phobias, isms and behaviors: Islamophobia, homophobia, xenophobia, semi-fascism, scapegoating, stereotyping, bullying, libeling and a growing, aggressive intolerance of everything and everyone who is not to the liking of the modern barbarian. Here are some recent instances of this phenomenon.

Part I - Mistaking the Particular for the General

Michael Quigley, a Democratic Congressman from Chicago, made the New York Times on 24 September 2011. He made it by promoting the virtues of tolerance and diversity and lamenting the suffering that occurs when tolerance fails. Out and about in his Chicago district, he stopped in at a meeting of the American Islamic Conference. He made a short speech to the 100 or so conferees during which he said "discrimination comes in many forms, many shapes and many guises. You have my pledge to work with you to fight them, and I think it is appropriate for me to apologize on behalf of this country for the discrimination you face." Mr. Quigley was correct about the growing levels of Islamophobia that confront Muslim Americans. Islamophobia is a delusional mind-set which mistakes the general for the particular, which condemns an entire group (which happens to have a billion plus members) for the particular actions of a very few. There is no logic to such an overreaching generalization. It is irrational.

Within days of Mr. Quigley’s brief presentation he was "attacked harshly...in the conservative blogosphere...on radio and TV." There was "at least one death threat on a Fox news site that by week’s end was still not taken down despite ...

We Want… 1)...A direct constitutional amendment overturning the U.S. Supreme Court’s “Citizens United V. F.E.C” (February, 2010) decision which authorizes corporations to donate unlimited funds to political campaigns through the circuitry of 501(c)4 PAC’s.2)…The NYPD to return the $4.6 million donation it received from JPMorgan Chase in June, 2011. (The largess was provided at the very moment #OccupyWallStreet began publicizing its September 17th activities.3)…Increases on Federal Income Taxes levied against the wealthy. Raise the current highest marginal federal income tax rate beginning at $379,150 from 35% to 50%. (The tax rate during the Reagan era was 50%.) In addition, create more tax brackets for the richest Americans: $1 million / 60%, $10 million / 70%, $50 million / 80%. (The tax rate established by the conservative Eisenhower administration was 91%.)4)…Increases on Capital Gains Tax from 15% to 35% for those earning more than $1 million on stock investments. (The average U.S. family owns less than $50,000 of asset values; the Capital Gains Tax rate rested at 35% during George H.W. Bush’s presidency.)5)…The reinstatement of the Estate Tax to pre-Obama levels. The Estate Tax is levied against the wealthiest 2% of the population. In 2000 it was 55% and kicked in after $1 million. Today it is 35% and kicks in at $5 million.6)…The immediate passage of the Employee Free Choice Act introduced to Congress in 2009. The Bill would amend the National Labor Relations Act (1935) to allow employees to form, join, or assist labor unions. Further, the Bill would allow a union to gain legal recognition and to bargain with an employer if union officials collect signatures of a majority of workers.7)…The swift elimination of Wall Street bonuses until either the U.S. poverty and/or the U-6 unemployment rate drops below 3%. (A more ...

On September 17th #OccupyWallStreet emerged as a leaderless resistance movement against the U.S. finance industry. Since its inception in Zuccotti Park nearly two weeks ago thousands of citizens have taken to the streets in over fifty U.S. cities. And on September 23rd the coalition grew a bit larger when www.occupytogether.com was launched as “a central hub for all of the events springing up across the country in solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street protestors.” Perhaps we are witnessing the rumblings of the insubordinate self-assertion of a new generation of American youth who refuse to conflate consumption with compassion, money with change.

For weeks now I’ve been hearten by the vim and vigor of the restless multitude in my home city of San Francisco, but as we huddled together in the foyer of Chase Bank SF last Thursday singing protest songs I felt a bit embarrassed. I asked myself, is it possible that this entire movement is premised on a misdiagnosis of our current crisis? The afternoon was dominated by the indelible anaphora “Make Banks Pay, Make Banks Pay…!” But such an apothegm elides just about as much as it illuminates. Beyond the unconscionable rapacity of a handful of Wall Street executives, the banking industry by and large did exactly what the system required of it, it leveraged assets to generate liquidity. Liquidity, in this sense, refers to fictitious capital. Lending institutions typically loan around three times the value of their deposits on the assumption that depositors will never withdraw at the same time. This false assumption is precisely why Lehman collapsed.

And so it seems to me that repeating the exclamation “Make Banks Pay!” at top volume presumes that we’re in a financial crisis. This, I believe, is misguided.

The alleged financial crisis today is a symptom of a faltering economy, but the disease is capitalism. We are not enveloped in a ...

If his stumbling, not ready-for-prime-time worsens, Rick “Treat ‘Em Ugly” Perry will soon be cornered and dangerous.  That’s when flinty hardscrabble guys squint, then draw, pumping out enough audacity of rogue to win GOP primaries.  No more Mr. Smiley Nice Guy conservative, clinging to compassionate shreds – like educating immigrant kids, immunizing girls, pooh-poohing secession  – or not throwing in derringers with school lunches.  Hey, don’t 6th graders have drug, crime, bullying, fashion, and pocket money issues dying for resolution?

The power right anoints Perry the most “electable” fringe purist – so step aside, little crazy lady from Minnesota.  This strutting Texas Twister is the spunkiest hired gun to depose any weakling, city-slicker president.  Perry ain’t running for “debater-in-chief,” as he says, but commander-in-chief, able to deliver a Texas-sized, “deep, deep rudder” of leadership.  Is he talking pilot-in-chief? – an unfortunate metaphor as he founders, with rudderless debates, swamped by this field of GOP giants.

Even movie-star handsome from a big state can’t survive weird pot shots guaranteed to unhinge old folks – like declaring Social Security not just unconstitutional and a “monstrous lie” but a criminal “Ponzi scheme.”  Understatement doesn’t march through this cowboy’s resume.  Now grandma, having dodged Obama death panels, must reimburse the fed for years of illegal payments (already paid for).  Doesn’t knowingly being in receipts from a “criminal, Ponzi scheme” join you to the sham, an accessory after the fact, even a co-conspirator.  Even that sharpie, Sarah Palin, never threatened death panels to Social Security and Medicare.  Yowwee.

A Crusading ...

Allegedly in protest of California SB 185 -- a non-compulsory affirmative action bill currently awaiting Gov. Jerry Brown's signature --U.C. Berkeley College Republicans will host tomorrow morning what they're terming an "Increase Diversity Bake Sale." The group plans to implement a sliding scale pricing structure explicitly indexed to gender identification or skin color in determining the cost of a cookie. Baked goods will be sold to white men for $2.00, Asian men for $1.50, Latino men for $1.00, black men for $0.75 and Native American men for $0.25. All women will get $0.25 off those prices.

If SB 185 becomes law it would "authorize the University of California and the California State University to consider race, gender, ethnicity, and national origin, along with other relevant factors, in undergraduate and graduate admissions, to the maximum extent permitted by the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution, Section 31 of Article I of the California Constitution, and relevant case law."

Both sides, however--the architects of the bake sale and the state's lawmakers--fall short in their diagnoses and remedies for contemporary forms of race-based discrimination.

The Berkeley College Republicans have convincingly demonstrated that they know next to nothing about the genesis, propensities, or parameters of U.S. based "affirmative action" programs and policies. They fail to consider what affirmative action is called when its beneficiaries are white. One answer is social security, another is the G.I. Bill. Simply put, when racically predicated privileges are dispensed to white persons such policy becomes universalized and therefore rendered invisible. What then counts as affirmative action?

Let's take a brief look, for instance, at the monumental social programs of FDR's New Deal and Harry Truman's Fair Deal in the 1930's and 1940's. Programs falling under those rubrics not only discriminated against black people as racial faction, but actually ...

The political community called the Democratic Party has been stricken by aphasia. The consequences of muteness of leadership can be mortal.

Aphasia is the inability, periodically or totally, to speak.  The result in Congress is that the Tea Party is left to run the political show – by default.  The mandarins who program the Tea Party’s tactics from offstage hold the Democratic and Republican Parties hostage to their agenda of nihilistic obstruction.  The result is the near-total paralysis of the two-party system.

In this vacuum, the Koch brothers, libertarians Charles and David, create legislative havoc through their Tea-Party’s control of the House of Representatives.  And “Congress,” that co-equal branch of the government where laws are supposed to be made, is blamed by the public for its inability to do much in a time of national crisis.  However, Congress as an instrument  is   n o t  the  problem.  It’s the Tea Party, and the unelected masters who run and pay for it, who should be held publicly responsible.  But the Democrats, their aphasic state, mutely accept responsibility -- with their silence.  Latter-day Democrats have forgotten how to hold their rivals accountable.  They’ve lost the art of fiery political speech on the old-fashioned stump – to inform, to mobilize, to educate citizens through systematic, cohesive public communications on what’s going on and who’s to be held accountable for it.  Their silence is compounded by a great national silence.

Congressional Democrats should be naming and calling out the villains.  They should be arousing the populist passions of frustrated and angry Americans at the repeated obstruction of Tea Party members in Congress, and their directors, the Kochs and fellow libertarians.  They should be identifying the culprits, and naming them -- ...

Okay, ready for comic relief? Time to broadcast to still non-contributing newcomers why vigorous, new, open platforms, like NationofChange, are worthy of support, a bargain at a few bucks a quarter.

NationofChange doesn’t just do informative news, inspired rants, and lucid, well-reasoned, well-seasoned commentary.  You’ll also discover light entertainment now and again, satire, verbal fun and games.

Take this frivolous pleasantry, so clever it may well overcome tiresome Palin-fatigue (pushing two+ years!). I have no illusions, nor do I shilly-shally when looking for jokes: the internet must entertain or die. If online venues were truly morally-uplifting, or improved your jobs skills, they’d charge more.

Nader Cracks a Joke?

What seized me today was a laugh-out-loud guffaw when America’s perennial, third party, leftwing, crusading dilettante, Ralph Nader, made very small news. He cracked a joke. Well, I laughed, not the same thing. Look, I admire Nader’s reports and his refusal to sell out – qualifying him for most exclusive political club in America. Nader sticks to his pro-American, anti-war, anti-corporate, anti-crime spree crusades. Hear, hear.

What, though, did old Ralphie say that tickled my fancy, bereft for amusement – that Sarah Palin, America’s perennial, crusading rogue dilettante, is “a lot smarter than most people credit her.” Talk about your odd couple – culturally, politically, or intellectually. This juicy praise follows certain faux anti-corporate, anti-establishment blather from the Palin, which Nader awards more gravitas than ordinary sentient beings. Fetching con artists never quite mean what they say, and most outshine the Palin or she wouldn’t be found out so often – or so comically. Like Michele Bachmann, she’s become a parody of herself – death for politicians or bullying ...

Weeks ago I wrote an essay on America’s empathy crisis as the common denominator in our country’s hard right turn on a broad array of political issues.  The recent Republican presidential candidates debates revealed more than an empathy crisis.  The Tea Party audience of Sept. 12th’s debate revealed that for some of them callousness and selfishness are grossly insufficient to describe the depth of their inhumanity.One of literature’s and the movie screen’s most repulsive villains is Madam Defarge of Charles Dicken’s  A Tale of Two Cities.  She personified ruthlessness, revenge, and sadistic delight in other people’s pain, suffering and death.  Her ideological rigidity did not allow her to countenance any mercy.  Madam Defarge, meet your contemporaries, America’s Tea Party. My father was often the court appointed psychiatrist asked to evaluate the sanity of those accused of crimes, especially of high profile murders in Utah.  He interviewed the worst of the worst.  I remember in 1974 asking him about the accused killers in the “Hi-FI” murders, a brutal murder/robbery in a hi-fi store (that’s where you went to buy sound systems in case you are too young to know, or too old to remember) where several innocent people were tortured, raped and then shot by a pair of disturbed young thugs.In asking him about our justice system of jury trial, I will never forget his comment to me.  He said he would rather live in a society where nine out of ten murderers go free if that’s what it takes to make sure that an innocent man is not convicted or executed.  My dad was the anti-Rick Parry, and the rise of the Tea Party would make him roll over in his grave.Tea Partiers cheered when Rick Parry’s Guinness book of world records for state enacted executions was mentioned.  Parry, fresh from his stadium filled prayer ...

Part I - The Erosion Universal Jurisdiction

Back on 12 February 2011 I put out an analysis on the subject of Universal Jurisdiction. Here is the first paragraph from the piece:

“One of the really progressive acts that followed the end of World War II was the establishment of the principle of universal jurisdiction (UJ). UJ is a legal process that allows states that are signatories to various international treaties and conventions (such as the Geneva conventions) to prosecute alleged violators of these treaties, even when these violations are committed outside the country’s borders. This is particularly so if it can be demonstrated that the home government of the accused has no intention of bringing them to trial for the alleged offense. The assumption behind this principle is that the crime committed is so egregious as to be seen as a crime against humanity at large. In the wake of the Nazi Holocaust and other such crimes against humanity, UJ was accepted as a necessary and positive legal step by almost all Western nations.”

It has been 66 years since the end of World War II and the memory of the concentration camps has faded (except when invoked as a political tool by Zionists). Nor has the subsequent holocausts such as those in Cambodia, Rwanda and Bosnia been sufficient to keep the issue of crimes against humanity front and center in the governmental minds of the great powers. The historical fact is that such truly horrible crimes committed at the edges of the European world or beyond have never been seen as symbolically important in the same way the Nazi holocaust was. And so we cease to pay attention. That allows for the erosion of the safeguards against these crimes such as UJ.

Now we have proof of this process of erosion. On 15 September 2011

Considering how the fringe right enshrines its own perverse “survival of the fittest,” you'd think Tea Partiers would warm to Darwinian “evolution” – if only to justify concentrated wealth and power as “natural.”  “Whatever is, is right,” the poet Pope says, endorsing the great chain of being.   Is not Christian history one grand upward arc towards rapture and redemption – assuming fundamentalist dominion over mankind, subservient woman, dark-skinned foreigners, aliens, and nature's bounty?

Let contradictions reign: a righteous ruling class scorns modest “handouts” to poor, sickly minorities (the “morally weak”) but lives high on the hog with cheap, federalized mortgages, corporate welfare and subsidies, unending war profits and permanent defense monopolies, plus unemployment benefits, Social Security, and Medicare.  Of course the “profit-creators” all deserve princely treasures for they've worked to the bone for it.

Haves, after all, lord over have-nots for good, right and identifiable reasons, not from mere luck.  Did not 19th C. U.S. armies, defending federal railroad subsidies, “win the west” for good, pioneering Tea Party ancestors?  Scattered farmers and ranchers never would have defeated (or corralled) native Americans with single-shot rifles, nor later firmly locked out millions of competing immigrants – especially less protestant, less white, nor from northern Europe.

From slavery through Indian massacres, 20th C. imperialism and Japanese internment, American history is a march of big government brutality founded on two convictions: “might makes right” enhanced by “white makes right.”  This history culminates in all its wondrous contradictions with Tea Party fanatics – of late paying odd homage to obsolete Social ...

I enjoy PBS’s weekly science documentary NOVA -- well-conceived, well reported, well produced.  The series makes an important contribution to the people’s understanding and importance of scientific inquiry.  I recommend it highly.  Next time you view Nova, take note of the series’ contributors.  They include Howard Hughes Medical Center, Franklin Templeton Investments, and a single individual named David H. Koch.  Most viewers let the credits slide by.  Few bother to think about donor Koch,  let alone how to pronounce the name:  Kotch or perhaps Kosh?  The name of the seemingly enlightened Mr. Koch, actually pronounced like the soft drink, “Coke,” has little to do with the drink--ORr with scientific advancement. But, as principal funders of the Tea Party movement, their Trojan horse inside the federal government, David and his brother Charles have everything to do with the libertarian hijacking of the Republican Party and its right-wing propaganda and agitation network, through their lead sponsorship of the Tea Party It's their Trojan horse inside Party and the federal government.  Together the Kochs form the wealthiest individual opposition to enlightened democratic governance.

Among David and Charles are leaders of the American confederation of wealth, private and corporate.  The Kochs are among the wealthiest men in America. They sponsor twice-yearly conventions of the wealthy to discuss strategy and action on protecting American free enterprise and the gaining and retaining of unfettered wealth.  Supreme Court justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas have attended some of these events.  These two members of the highest court in America are objects of controversy over conflicts of interest at the highest levels of the federal judiciary, over their affirmative role in the Citizens United decision, which opened the floodgates to ...

If we take seriously Gandhi’s admonishment that poverty is the worst form of violence, then what are we to make of the 2010 poverty figures released by the Census Bureau earlier this week? The 2010 Income and Poverty Report serves as a weighty reminder of the depth and breadth of human suffering in the United States. Or does it? Although traditional economists marked the end of the Great Recession (two or more consecutive quarters of declining GDP) on July 1, 2009, the labor market has continued to disintegrate. Since late 2007 the U.S. has lost more than 8 million jobs. In fact, almost 700,000 were lost just this year at a time when unemployment rose from 9.3% to 9.6%. In sum: income dropped; poverty and unemployment rose.

According to the report an additional 2.6 million people dipped below the poverty line last year as the official poverty rate increased from 14.3% to 15.1%. The current rate represents 46.2 million people living in poverty in the United States. (The last time the poverty rate was higher was in 1983 when it reached a staggering 15.2%.) Mississippi had the highest poverty rate last year, at 22.7%, and New Hampshire had the lowest, 6.6%. Poverty rates rose to 9.9% (.5^) among white households, 27.4% (1.6^) among black households, 26.6% (1.3^) among brown households, and dropped from 12.5% to 12.1% among yellow households. (Recall that the original poverty threshold was derived in the mid-1950’s and is based on the measure of the food consumption of low-income families. Surveys from this era revealed that families spent about a third of their income on food and so the poverty threshold was calculated by simply tripling the value of the “economy food plan” for a given family size. Amazingly, with very few alterations, and with adjustments for inflation, this measure remains the official poverty measure to this day. Food consumption represents a much smaller share of family budgets than was the case fifty years ago while housing, ...

There is an interesting phenomenon which we can call "the political retiree’s confession." I don’t mean all those hyped memoirs, ghost written for all manner of high ranking ex-officials. Here I refer to statements by important political leaders and bureaucrats, either out of office or about to vacate their positions, publically describing what really needs to be done. For instance, what really needs to be done to obtain peace, or accurately pointing fingers at those obstructing peace. These statements can be shocking in their honesty, but curiously enough, are never made, much less acted upon, while the truth sayer is in a position of power. They come to us only with retirement or pending retirement.

For example, take former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. Olmert was Prime Minister from 2006 (replacing Ariel Sharon who had suffered a debilitating stroke) till early 2009. A few months before leaving office Olmert told the newspaper Yediot Aharonot that, in the end, Israel would have to return "almost all" of the West Bank to the Palestinians, including East Jerusalem. There was no other way to achieve peace with the Arab world. Olmert went on, "the decision we are going to have to make is the decision we have been refusing for 40 years to look at open-eyed....The time has come to say these things. The time has come to put them on the table." Of course "the time" oddly coincided with a period when the Prime Minister could not move this insight from theory into practice.

Now we have another example of this strange phenomenon. This time from the United States. According to Jeffrey Goldberg, the national correspondent for The Atlantic magazine, former ...

Hungarian philosopher and literary critic Georg Lukács once wrote that “ideology lags behind reality” and a glittering instantiation of his insight lay enmeshed in a report recently issued by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) entitled “New College Grads Losing Ground On Wages.” The illegitimacy of the jaunty meritocratic refrain “the more you learn, the more you earn” is unraveling…and in plain view. The insidiously conservative “myth of meritocracy” is oddly ratified by well-meaning liberals who, while acknowledging the falsification that inherence-based arguments level against it, continue to allow the internalization of meritocratic discourses within the context of personal educational attainment. Work hard in high school and you’re promised admission to college, they say. Work hard in college and you’re promised a job rife with middle class amenities that include, but aren’t limited to, a “fair” wage (Marx would argue that the phenomenon of a ‘fair’ wage is inherently impossible, but such a consideration is beyond the scope and intention of this piece), paid time off, a reliable pension, and health insurance. They don’t tell you that you’re also promised debt and “job lock.”

Is this why we go to college? Although a few Das Kapital toting young radical leftists may conceive of education as the practice of political and personal freedom by creating a “counter-hegemonic culture” capable of challenging the capitalist agenda and prefiguring new ways of consciousness and of self-organization, most youth simply associate college with the expectation of socioeconomic ascendency. (Conversation had at a recent high school reunion validates this anecdotally.) And according to the 1998 U.S. Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey, their assumption is right. In 1998 the annual earnings of a worker with a college degree was $45,400; and for a worker with a high school diploma alone, $30,400. Unfortunately, these data are outdated and new figures by the EPI ...

Congress resumes its polarized deliberations this week after the summer recess.  With the horrific ideology-driven storm over raising the debt ceiling behind them, has anything been learned by the Ultra-Cons on the value of old-fashioned compromise?  Or will Koch-driven Tea Party members complete the process of hijacking the Republican Party, wielding a hatchet and a hard line?

If today’s victorious shoot-from-the-lip Republican leaders still have any respect for their founding saint Abraham Lincoln, it would be well that they act on some of his wisdom: “The time comes upon every public man when it is best for him to keep his lips closed.”   I for one regret that we voters could not move events fast-forward to hear the unbending lip-flap of Mitch McConnell and his leadership buddies before they cast their ballots: “The mandate for change is directed at the other guys,” he growled just days after the G.O.P’s stunning victories.  That joyless machismo was softened by the ultra-con political manager Sal Russo’s Lincolnesque observation that "Most people recognize that you have to give to get sometimes."   Republican enforcer Rush Limbaugh was having none of it: “What is all this talk about compromise?  We've got nothing to compromise."  What’s with Rush’s “we?”  No one’s elected him to anything.

Hard-bottomed members of the Gritty Old Party had best remember three things: what happened to them in 2006 and 2008 can happen to them again in 2012.  The centrist voters who swing elections, including the one just past, didn’t vote for bully-boying by Al Capone or by Rupert Murdoch’s gunsels.  They voted for productive compromise-propelled progress on Capitol Hill, not more gridlock, with “No, No, a Thousand Times No” as their refrain.  Tough talk is hardly the ...

In the wake of the dubious UN investigatory report which all but exonerated Israel for its May 31, 2010 attack on the Mavi Marmara–an attack that killed 8 Turkish citizens and 1 Turkish-America–Turkey has downgraded its diplomatic relations with Israel and suspended all military cooperation. Ankara had little choice in this matter. The Israeli attack was egregious. It took place in international waters against an unarmed civilian vessel and was carried out in defense of a barbaric and illegal policy of collective punishment against one million Palestinians bottled up in Gaza by an Israeli blockade.For their part, the Israelis claim that they murdered the Mavi Marmara Turks in self-defense. I juxtapose the words self defense and murder quite purposefully, for the Turkish passengers were in the process of defending themselves from a violent assault when they were gunned down by Israeli soldiers who now describe their actions as self-defense. This scenario is a tragic parody of a hundred years of Zionist action in the Middle East. Having come to the region in the baggage train of an imperial occupying power (Great Britain) and successfully establishing themselves by evicting the native population (a process that is on-going), the Israelis define all acts of resistence to their aggression as attacks which require their defending themselves. The Mavi Marmara action fits neatly into this Zionist world of peculiar logic. In this sense, they turn the world upside down.The Turkish government will have none of this and demanded the minimum of decency from the Israelis–an apology and compensation. In so doing they stand for civilized behavior. The ...

As far near the edge as you can get on the far-out right wing, “super-patriots” are working overtime to poke a stout stick through the spinning spokes of this democracy – or, what’s left of it.  They have been hard at work, over a year before the 2012 presidential election, pushing hard to get new laws through state legislatures to suppress the votes of citizens who tend to vote the Democratic line.  At least a dozen states will insist that voters display photo IDs at polling places before they can cast ballots.  Other states are busily attempting to shorten voting hours, as well as the number of days voters may cast early ballots.  Both strategies are devised to curb the voting of the jobless, the young, minority voters, the needy, the ill, the elderly, all folks who lack the funds to pay for photo IDs, or the time to spend on voting lines on election day.

This tactic has been on the books of ultra-con orthodoxy since Republican politics went extreme in the 1980s during the Reagan years.  That’s when a pioneering far-right organizer, the late Paul Weyrich, got hefty donations from the likes of the Coors family and Richard Mellon Scaife, big spenders off their beer profits and the Mellon banking fortune respectively.  Weyrich began building a popular-front of hundreds of far-right activist organizations whose activities media have yet to begin reporting on.  Here’s what Paul Weyrich told a meeting of the religious right in Dallas in 1980 about the power of suppressing voter turnouts: 

“Many of our Christians have what I call the Goo Goo Syndrome: Good Government.  They want everybody to vote.  I don’t want everybody to vote.  Elections are not won by a majority of people, they never have been, from the beginning of our country, ...

Earlier today the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) released its 18th annual Executive Compensation Survey. According to the report, S&P 500 CEOs raked in $10.8 million in average compensation (including the value of new stock) during the 2009-2010 fiscal year. Researchers at the IPS say that this increase represents a 28% rate of income growth over fiscal year 2008-2009. Further, the gap between CEO and median worker pay at these same companies rose from 263-to-1 in 2008-2009 to 351-to-1 last year.

So while CEOs are making millions of dollars per year, how much is the “average U.S. worker,” (statistically speaking) taking home? Well, it might surprise you to know that the answer is difficult to find. Functionally speaking, the “average U.S. worker” doesn’t exist as a category of analysis against which policies related to public programming and/or and social support are based and justified. Try performing a Google search on “average personal income, U.S. worker” or “average personal income, American” and you’ll promptly be ushered to websites providing data on “average household income.” The Wall Street Journal tells us that “the median income” hovers around $49,000, Forbes, $50,000. But why does a ‘average personal income” search yield statistics from an entirely different category of analysis, namely, “average household income?"

As it turns out, the U.S. Census Bureau, along with a variety of other number-crunching agencies, calculates but doesn’t utilize the “median income in current dollars” as a viable unit of analysis for producing and delivering public services to our country’s citizens. Instead, the Census Bureau uses the category “median household income” as its basis to determine qualification for social services including, for instance, TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families). The hidden message: If you want to have any chance at achieving middle class status then you’d better get hitched, or at least, partner up with someone.

The ...

"Why are you attacking us? Why are you killing our children? Why are you destroying our infrastructure?"

– Television address by Libyan Leader Muammar Gaddafi, April 30, 2011

A few hours later NATO hit a target in Tripoli, killing Gaddafi's 29-year-old son Saif al-Arab, three of Gaddafi's grandchildren, all under twelve years of age, and several friends and neighbors.

In his TV address, Gaddafi had appealed to the NATO nations for a cease-fire and negotiations after six weeks of bombings and cruise missile attacks against his country.

Well, let's see if we can derive some understanding of the complex Libyan turmoil.

The Holy Triumvirate — The United States, NATO and the European Union — recognizes no higher power and believes, literally, that it can do whatever it wants in the world, to whomever it wants, for as long as it wants, and call it whatever it wants, like "humanitarian".If The Holy Triumvirate decides that it doesn't want to overthrow the government in Syria or in Egypt or Tunisia or Bahrain or Saudi Arabia or Yemen or Jordan, no matter how cruel, oppressive, or religiously intolerant those governments are with their people, no matter how much they impoverish and torture their people, no matter how ...

Part I - Entrapment as Government Policy

Here is an important question: What single organization is responsible for more terror plots in the USA than any other? Possible answers: Al Qaida. That would no doubt be the popular answer but it would be wrong. The KKK. Way past their prime, so that is not it. The Jewish Defense League. Good guess, but still not it. So what is the correct answer? It is the Federal Bureau of Investigation, AKA the FBI. Don’t believe me? Well, just read Trevor Aaronson’s expose entitled "The Informants" published in the September/October 2011 issue of Mother Jones.

Aaronson looked at over 500 terrorism related cases taken up by the FBI and found that over half of them involved the Bureau’s stable of 15,000 informants. Many of these are ex-felons and con men who are often paid well if their efforts result in an arrest and conviction. So what, you might say. Using informants to obtain information about criminal activity is an old and legitimate tactic. Yes, however, that approach to information gathering is not exactly how the FBI uses all of its informants. Indeed, the Bureau has a program, misnamed "prevention" which encourages its agents to get creative in the use of informants. How creative? Well, if they can’t find any terrorist activity going on, they have their informants instigate some. Where are they doing this? Mainly in our country’s Muslim communities.

According to the Mother Jones story the FBI has concluded that Al-Qaeda as an organization is no longer a major threat to the US. The threat now comes from the "lone wolf," the person who is angry at or frustrated by their life situation and open to the influence of terrorist rhetoric. Allegedly, the American Muslim community is full of these "lone wolves" just sitting out there fuming, ...

Who imagined less then three years ago -- of four giants battling for national office -- only Joe Biden would stand alone today, his reputation intact?  Well, not AS tarnished.  Yes, the least obnoxious deserves to run for president.

Of course, it's a trick question.  Noteworthy for rocking few boats, and no Alaskan ice flows, Biden's countless terms as an intellectually mediocre, party hack immunized him from the worst fallout of a failed presidency.  Charmingly gaffe-ridden, this average Joe ends up the most likeable of the crew, unsullied by displays of bad faith, broken promises, ineptitude, and, for Repugs, truly crass, off-the-wall pandering.   

But likeability doesn't cut the hard irony: Obama's uphill chances improve by dumping Biden for any beguiling Dem from Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, or Virginia.  Obama owns Delaware's three electoral votes, but hardly the others.  

McCain, Bottom Feeder

Greatly diminished, John McCain has self-detonated, the sham "maverick" pose now aptly trashed forever.  So frantic not to lose again, he seized every racist, nativist slingshot within reach.  McCain's the walking dead, any legacy soured by scurrilous, anti-Hispanic hallucinations.  And idiotic-Cheneyesque "bomb everyone" militarism.  Yes, McCain would have been worse -- and is, senility aside.

Which leaves us with Palin and Obama, so different in biography and personality, yet whose comparable, star-crossed destinies repay study.  What?  Who dares compare an illiterate, uncompromising, whining V.P. loser-quitter -- reduced to Twitter catcalling -- with an educated, Nobel Prized, smooth-talking, compromise-loving, stay-the-course presidential winner?

First off, Palin and Obama overlap as the young, attractive, inexperienced class of hustlers born nationally in ...

During a 1996 interview with Kuan-Hsing Chen the irreducibly brilliant cultural theorist Stuart Hall remarked that “What has resulted from the abandonment of deterministic economism has been, not alternative ways of thinking questions about the economic relationships and their effects…but instead, a massive gigantic and eloquent disavowal.”

A seemingly immovable fixture in most Cultural Studies literature today, especially those that explicitly address issues of social inequality or oppression, is the ritual critique of Marxism’s blindness to the social typologies of race and gender. Mid-century black intellectuals (almost exclusively men) and white feminists beginning of the 1970’s have excoriated Marxism for its failure to develop a robust analysis of racial and sexual oppression, for its alleged economism, and for its class reductionism. Soon after, particularly academic feminists, began to assert that a Marxian analytic was irredeemably irreconcilable with the contours and challenges presented by “new social movements.” As “new social movements,” emblematized by the Black Panthers, Young Lords, and Brown Berets, were systematically neutralized by the FBI’s COINTELPRO, (an organization whose original mission was the eradicate CPUSA from the country) scholarship on “new social histories” began to proliferate and people of color and women, in particular, agitated for the institutionalization of ethnic studies, black studies, and women’s studies programs around the United States. The emergence of publications like “Race, Sex, and Class” and the “Journal of Gender, Race, and Justice” as well as the popularization of theoretical paradigms like intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989) or standpoint theory (Collins, 1990) represented the materialization of work (literally) emerging from these newly established departments. Cultural Studies, the banner under which such disciplines currently fall, rightly emerged as an (inter)disciplinary alternative to the Humanities, ...

Four days ago French Prime Minister François Fillon announced plans to introduce a one-time tax on top earners as part of a package to stimulate aggregate demand and to reduce the national deficit. The proposed measures are slated for presentation in parliament this October. Whether or not such legislation is ultimately adopted, the United States could learn from the French. I toast the French for their willingness to confront a seemingly intractable economic situation with evenhanded policy premised on equity, evidence, and honesty.

Highlighting the impermanent nature of plans to tax France’s wealthiest individuals, Fillon explained that a contribution of 3% would be imposed on annual income (income tax) and an additional 1.2% on capital (capital gains tax) in excess of the 500,000 Euros, or the equivalent of $721,000 U.S.D. (Capital Gains Tax currently stands at 19% in France and 15% in the United States). According to a recent KPMG report emerging from the U.K., France would still sit outside the top-10 highest tax rates in Europe despite its proposal. Sweden has the highest rate of income tax at 56.6%, Denmark 55.4%, Netherlands 52% and the UK 50%, tied with Belgium, Austria and Finland.

Expected to generate in the vicinity of 200 million Euros ($290 million U.S.D.) in additional revenues for the state next year, the temporary levy will be abolished once the country’s deficit returns to 3% of gross domestic product (GDP). Framers of France’s multi-tiered plan aim to reduce the country’s public deficit to 5.7% of GDP this year, to 4.5% in 2012 and to 3% in 2013. While France has already adopted measures to reduce its public deficit while it rests at 5.7% of GDP, the United States has done very little to reduce ours which currently stands at 9.6% of GDP, and more importantly, to generate an aggregate revenue stream which will allow consumers to purchase goods and services that our economy is capable of producing.
Instead of levying a modest tax increase ...

Part I - Stretching the Definition of Anti-SemitismCan criticism of Israel, particularly a) criticism of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian people and b) criticism of the state ideology of Zionism that justifies that treatment, be labeled anti-Semitic? This is not a hypothetical query. An affirmative answer to this question is being advocated by influential Zionist lobbies in the United States. The question is of particular importance on the nation’s college and university campuses. In places like the University of California at Berkeley and Santa Cruz, and also at Rutgers University in New Jersey, Zionist students are now threatening to sue these institutions for failing to prevent an "atmosphere of anti-Semitic bigotry" allegedly created by the presence of pro-Palestinian student groups and faculty.One might ask if it isn’t a stretch to assert that protesting Israeli and Zionist behavior is the same as anti-Semitism? Common sense certainly tells us this is so. Unfortunately, we are not dealing with situations that are ruled by common sense. What we are facing here is the issue of ideologues bred to a specific perceptual paradigm and their insistence that others conform to it.Here is an example: Take an American kid from a self-conscious Jewish home. This kid does not represent all American Jewish youth, but does typify say 20% of them. He or she is taught about the religion and also taught about recent history and the near annihilation of the Jews of Europe. He or she is sent to Hebrew school, and maybe a yeshiva school as well. Most of our hypothetical student’s friends will be Jewish and of similar background. Between home, friends and school the student might well find him or herself in something of a closed universe. Throughout this educational process Judaism and its fate in the modern world is connected with Israel and its survival. The Arabs, and particularly the Palestinians, are transformed ...

Mathias O is 34 years old.  He is one of about 600,000 people still homeless from the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti.  He lives with his wife and her 2 year old under a homemade shelter made out of several tarps.  They sleep on the rocky ground inside.  The side tarp walls are reinforced by pieces of cardboard boxes taped together.  Candles provide the only inside light at night.  There is no running water.  No electricity.  They live near a canal and suffer from lots of mosquitoes.  There are hundreds of families living in tents beside him.  This is the third tent community he has lived in since the earthquake.

The earthquake made Mathias homeless when it crushed his apartment and killed his cousin and younger brother.  He and his wife first stayed in a park next to St. Anne’s Catholic Church.  Then the family moved to what they thought was a safer place, Sylvio Cator stadium.  They put up a tent on the lawn inside the stadium and stayed there for several months.  The authorities then moved them just outside of the stadium so the soccer team could practice.  They lived in a tent outside the stadium with 514 other families for over a year until they were ordered to leave in July 2011.  Each family was told they had to leave and were given 10,000 Goudes (about $250 in US dollars) to assist in their relocation.  Where did the 514 families go?  No one knows for sure.  About 150 families stayed together and live under tarps beside Mathias.  Some used the money to build new tarp shelters elsewhere and some used it for food.  The rest?  No one knows.  No one is keeping track.

When I asked what Mathias would like to say to the human rights community, he said, “The life of the people living in the tents is not a human life.  Our human rights are not respected.  No institutions are taking care of us, we are the ...

Don't look to Barry Goldwater or Milton Friedman, even Ronald Reagan, to explain why addled fundamentalists, like zombies surfacing from the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, disparage learning, expertise, and reason.  Every pitch-fork mob figures what it doesn't know will hurt them -- and the more foreign and un-American, the greater the threat to closed minds in diminished worlds.

After all, Tea Party gangs can't intimidate the "despotic" Federal Reserve like it does Obama or Congress.  Hear the whispers? What sort of alien name is Bernanke, anyway?   When disturbed and confused by complex reality, authoritarian personalities just say no -- then amp up the bullying mean-spiritedness.

Trust Groucho, the great philosopher of "Horse Feathers," to nail today's destructive negative feedback loop (singing):

Whatever it is, I'm against it.  No matter what it is or who commenced it, I'm against it.Your proposition may be good, But let's have one thing understood, Whatever it is, I'm against it.And even when you've changed it or condensed it, I'm against it.

While logicians posit "you can't prove a negative," don't tell Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann -- whose campaigns of fury are one long negative feedback loop.  Can deranged "nattering nabobs of negativism" (per Spiro Agnew) actually win a national primary by having no ideas, just being "hysterical hypochondriacs of history"? Against this TP crusade to dismantle the last century, the White House Weakling comes across as pitchman for positivism, a Pollyanna stuck arguing "things can't get worse" (as in, double-dip recession).

Yes, they can.  And will, with our national leaders.  Whatever -- ...

Note: Written in collaboration with Davida Finger, an esteemed Professor and associate at Loyola University New Orleans College of Law.

Six years ago, Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf coast.  The impact of Katrina and government bungling continue to inflict major pain on the people left behind.  It is impossible to understand what happened and what still remains without considering race, gender, and poverty.The following offer some hints of what remains.

$62 million.  Amount of money HUD and the State of Louisiana agreed to pay thousands of homeowners because of racial discrimination in Louisiana’s program to disburse federal rebuilding funds following Katrina and Rita.  African American homeowners were more likely than whites to have their rebuilding grants based on much lower pre-storm value of their homes rather than the higher estimated cost to rebuild them. Source:  Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center.

343,829.   The current population of the city of New Orleans, about 110,000 less than when Katrina hit.  New Orleans is now whiter, more male and more prosperous.  Source: Greater New Orleans Community Data Center. 

154,000.   FEMA is now reviewing the grants it gave to 154,000 people following hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma.  It is now demanding that some return the long ago spent funds!  FEMA admits that many of the cases under review stem from mistakes made by its own agency employees.  FEMA’s error rate following Katrina was 14.5 per cent.  Michael Kunzelman and Ryan Foley, Associated Press.

65,423.   In the New Orleans metropolitan area, there are now 65,423 fewer ...

The electromagnetic spectrum is a window on the real world in all its vast variety. In wavelength it ranges from 0.1 nanometers for gamma rays to long wave infrared waves of a 1000 meters. Humankind has invented instruments that can look out into the world at all of these wave lengths. However, when it comes to the human eye (our innate instrument for seeing) the perceptual range is very much smaller. The visible spectrum ranges from 400 nanometers (which appears to us as violet) to 700 nanometers (which appears to us as red). Leaving aside those who are blind, there are a number of defects that can limit our vision range even further.

Thus, without artificial aids, humankind’s ability to see the natural world and to understand the full range of what is real and operative is quite limited. Unfortunately, this phenomenon of restricted perception is not just physiological. Something akin to it seems to happen on the psychological level as well, inhibiting our sense of the world beyond familiar community and cultural wave lengths. A phenomenon that I call "natural localism" concentrates most people’s attention to the limited geographical area within which they live, work and study. Inside their local zone, people can have first hand knowledge, but they are also led (again quite naturally) to conform their views to those of their neighbors, their friends, their fellow workers, their religious congregations, etc. In many of these categories there will be personalities who stand out as leaders and they often have great influence in shaping the perceptions of local populations. Beyond their local zone most people know little of what is real. The rest of the world is, if you will, beyond the wave lengths they can see and understand. Many folks are simply indifferent to world beyond their own personal sphere. And, most of those who might periodically become interested in what is happening on the other side of the hill, will tend to go ...

What does it mean to “work across difference” in broad political contexts? And what types of political practices and theoretical devices best enable a translation from the private “me” to the collective “we?” I begin with a strikingly simple claim: the ways in which the “particular” is related to the “universal” is one of the most ubiquitous and persistent questions in human life. Cataloging and negotiating the eternally precarious relationship between “me” and “we” requires an analytic with sufficient flexibility; one nuanced enough to adjoin “human being” with “being human.”

My examination will therefore foreground three foundational questions: What is identity and how is it produced socially? To what ends it is politicized? And what are the contemporary limits of its politicization? Against the backcloth of these queries I historicize (and materialize) the emergence of identity politics and the cultural instruments available to render human difference politically legible. Further, I explore the ways in which well intentioned and allegedly emancipatory political projects problematically mirror the mechanisms and arrangements of power of which they are a product and which they profess to subvert. Here I consider how the politicization of private identities may, under certain circumstances, unwittingly rethread the very configurations and consequences of power it seeks to ameliorate.

I contend that in order to build more just, humane, and peaceful communities we must first, in the words of Judith Butler, “learn to see the frame to blinds us to what we see,” or, stated differently, we must lay bare the questions which our “answers” have hidden. The true vulgarity of commonsense ideological explanations lay in their ability to offer conclusions that adjust and obscure the original parameters of the social challenge. I argue that the frame within which all contemporary discourses on cultural politics exists is that of “late-modern, post-industrial ...

For Tea Party zealots it is impossible to utter, hear, read or write the words “freedom” and “liberty” too many times.  And of course to them the antithesis of freedom and liberty is the federal government, which they swear they will “take back.”  For them, taking back the government means restoring the freedom to not be able to afford health care, restoring the freedom to be unemployed without any unemployment insurance,  restoring the freedom to lose your home to mortgage fraud and your pension to criminal wall street bankers.  That doesn’t sound much like a “Party” to me, that sounds more like a nightmare.

Even though many of their devotees don’t realize it themselves, what the Tea Party Nightmare is actually selling is not freedom for you, but more freedom for corporate America to deny your freedom.   And this year no freedom is more important to the Tea Party Nightmare than the freedom for corporations to make you sick by polluting our air and water.  Every Republican presidential candidate and virtually every Republican Congressperson has joined the Tea Party Nightmare chorus in ranting against the EPA, and not just the EPA regulating greenhouse gases, but against everything the EPA does.  Michelle Bachmann, the Tea Party Nightmare’s charmingly oblivious and truly frightening presidential pin up girl, proudly wants to abolish the EPA.  Not to be out done, pistol packin’ Rick Perry sounds like he wants to torture everyone who works there and shoot it with his gun before he abolishes it. 

The 1979 movie China Syndrome brought to life the danger of a nuclear reactor melt down.  Within weeks the first of real life melt downs occurred at Three Mile Island, then Chernobyl, then Fukushima.   China is now in total environmental “melt down”, a new version of the China Syndrome if you will.  ...

Is there an invisible, resistive shell around this White House?  It's not like rogue Republicans obscure their slash-and-burn assault, nor shy away from telegraphing relentless, predatory, anti-federal punches.  That Texas-size policy contradictions erupt is, apparently, beside the point, if Iowa hayseeds count.  Logic and Tea Party politics were always mutually exclusive.

Why not a fetching Bachmann-Paul ticket?  Better still: Perry-Bachmann, winning the Old South, conservative, small-town Mid-west voters along with western-prairie GOP strongholds.  Just add FL, OH, and PA and they're in.  Right, a bevy of backwood, bonehead voters resolving America's complex of high-risk, high-tech challenges!  

When does deadlock not signal downfall, epitomized by our bipartisan default in leadership?  The list expands: we cannot win or end wars of choice any more, grow jobs (except overseas), nor fend off calamities -- from criminal banksters, oil spills, or mining accidents. What's "exceptional" now is our emerging "can't do" spirit -- can't do taxes, can't grow industries, can't do planning, can't exit quagmires -- now can't do compromise.  Paralyzed officials, by wariness or ignorance, staggers, risking bad credit and, worse, worsening credibility.   

Nearly as transparent and predictable as Tea Party nonsense is White House capitulation, seemingly crippled by letting a radical 20% minority dictate whether the entire federal government lives or dies.  This is an historic tipping point as, most tellingly, no outside forces or agents, human or natural, drive this fiasco, no new spending or real proposals (read: problem-solving) are being debated, and no pitiful cries from corporate overlords come forth: "Please, sir, more interest-free loans."   

Nothing Tiny about TP ...

 Part I - Education as Indoctrination

Over the last ten years there have been periodic outbursts of rage over the alleged anti-Semitic nature of Palestinian textbooks. Most of these episodes have been instigated by an Israeli based organization called the Center for Monitoring the Impact of Peace (AKA the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education). According to one Israeli journalist, Akiva Eldar, the Center does sloppy work. It "routinely feeds the media with excerpts from "Palestinian" textbooks that call for Israel’s annihilation...[without] bothering to point out that the texts quoted in fact come from Egypt and Jordan." The Center’s conclusions have been corroborated only by other Israeli institutions such as Palestinian Media Watch.

Not surprisingly, almost all independent investigations of the same issue have come up with very different conclusions. Non-Zionist sources such as The Nation magazine, which published a report on Palestinian textbooks in 2001, the George Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research, reporting in 2002, the Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information, reporting in 2004, and the U.S. State Department Report of 2009 all found that Palestinian textbooks did not preach anti-Semitism. Nathan Brown, a professor of Political Science at George Washington University, who did his own study on the subject in 2000, set out the situation this way, Palestinian textbooks now in use, and which replaced older ones published in Egypt and Jordan, do not teach anti-Semitism. However, "they tell history from a Palestinian point of view." It might very well be this fact that the Zionists cannot abide and purposefully mistake for anti-Semitism.

Here is another not very surprising fact. When it comes to choosing which set of reports to support, which set to take a public stand on, American politicians will almost always go ...

Whether or not V.P. Biden tagged the Tea Party "terrorists," sentient beings have dramatized this politics of crude intimidation with howls about ransom demands, guns-to-the-head-hostage-taking, blackmail and extortion.  Even the stolid NY Times' Joe Nocera condemned this "jihad against America" intent on "blowing up the country." 

We've gone way beyond states' rights on hot-button cultural fixations, even nullifying objectionable "liberal giveaways."  Does not the manufactured debt fallout -- nullification of government integrity -- demand strong adult retaliation before this unholy war impales the ultimate casualty -- it's the future, stupid?  What defines a third world debtor nation more emphatically than obsolete infrastructure, no new growth industries or updated labor force, paltry education and research commitments, no master environmental, regulatory and/or energy planning?  What distinguishes the Tea Party insurrection (and backers) from suicide bombers or unhinged shooters of House members or abortion doctors, is scope, funding, and organization -- plus collusion with a radicalized GOP and the 87 rogues the rightwing shoehorned into Congress.  

The first, worst casualty in this holy war -- all policy contradictions aside -- isn't just the truth but majority rule, the result of transforming government from gridlock to self-inflicted paralysis.  More or less, America was plodding along towards only moderate inequality when 2000 kicked off body blows against majority rule.  The radical Bush-Cheney gang viewed majority will as a problem simply open to manipulation, rarely the solution or heart of America. 

Follow this calamitous, anti-majority storyline: 1) the Supreme Court wrongly trumps the 2000 Florida election when installing a minority president (in popular vote) who ends up widely hated.  And ...

At 12:01am on Sunday over 45,000 Verizon employees in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states went on strike as a result of failed negotiations between workers and management on Saturday evening. The collective action has been initiated and organized by the Communications Workers of America (CWA).

Late last week management at Verizon Communications Inc. demanded that the workers accept a bevy of concessions. According to CNET, the company is attempting to “change employment contract terms to allow it to more easily fire workers, tie pay increases to job performance, halt pension accruals this year, and require union workers to contribute to health-plan premiums.” Most participating in the strike are field technicians whose base pay, by Verizon’s own admission, begins at $19,864/yr. Meanwhile over the past year, Ivan Seidenberg, the company’s CEO has witnessed his compensation burgeon by more than 4% to $18.1 million. Know this: Seidenberg accrues, on average, 947 times more than the field technicians he employs.

Critics of the strike argue that slashing worker benefits is a necessary cost-saving measure during difficult financial times. Perhaps; but how then does Verizon explain its demands in light of its record profits? Verizon’s quarterly report released on January 10, 2011, claimed that that its profits nearly doubled from the same point in 2010 ($4.65 billion compared to $2.37 billion). Then, on April 21, 2011 Bloomberg reported that the company’s profits “more than tripled after Verizon began offering services on Apple’s iPhone. If these figures aren’t troubling enough, Verizon paid an effective corporate tax rate of 19.2% last year, a rate significantly lower than my federal income tax rate and I’m a graduate student.

What makes this story so remarkable is precisely that it isn’t. Whether it’s Verizon or Boeing or Starbucks the capitalist mantra has changed very little over the past few centuries: privatize profit, socialize debt. Repeat. Is it ...

“Under capitalism, the only thing worse than being exploited is not being exploited.” –Michael Denning

From the perspective of “labor”, the callous contradiction inherent to capitalism is that its very configuration guarantees exploitation by appealing to the language of economic propriety; after all, who would object to the prospect of full employment?! And from the angle of “capital,” one could say that it takes money to take money.

After six months of “wageless life” my father was very recently offered (and accepted) a position at a reputable engineering firm. His good fortune, however, belies the chilly and cheerless figures released last week by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) concerning the state of working America. According to the July 2011 monthly Employment Situation report drafted by the BLS there are 25.1 million workers who are either unemployed or underemployed last month. Further, the labor market is now 11.1 million jobs below the level needed to restore the pre-recession employment rate of 5.0% in December 2007. And, according to research conducted by the Economic Policy Institute we would need to add roughly 400,000 jobs every single month for 4 years to return to our pre-recession unemployment rate by 2015. A sanguine aspiration like this would require a job growth rate of 350% our 2011 monthly average.

Last Friday’s BLS report shows the addition of 117,000 jobs in July, a rate of job growth that all but preordains persistently high unemployment. (We need to add at least 125,000 jobs per month to achieve parity with workforce entrants.) The report also indicates a paltry decline in the unemployment rate from 9.2% to 9.1% which is attributable entirely to a drop in labor force participation, not an increase in the percentage of workers with jobs.

Unfortunately, the labor force participation rate (the ratio of working-age adults to those with jobs) also declined to 63.9% in July, its new low of the recession. Surprisingly, ...

While the train wreck of the phony debt ceiling crisis occupied the media and voters for much of the last several weeks, public health and the environment were quietly being mugged in the back alley on Capital Hill by a ruthless gang of Tea Party Congressmen armed by a cabal of dirty energy corporations, chief among them Koch Industries. But this mugging will have permanent consequences for all Americans, including diminished quality of life, more cancer causing contamination of your water, dirtier air, poorer health, shorter life spans, and higher medical bills. Yes, you and your family are going to take a quite hit for the Koch Brothers team. But it will provide more billions in profits for these Titans of fossil fuel which is their noble contribution to “shared sacrifice.”

Multiple tactics and weapons are being used in this mugging. Contradicting every study that’s ever been done, the Tea Party gang started labeling the EPA, and its enforcement of the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, “job killing” to persuade voters there was something sinister about environmental protection. Then they started their legislative machinations, like attaching dozens of “are you kidding me?” riders to the appropriations bill that funds the EPA.

Those riders include such gems as allowing uranium mining on the door step of the Grand Canyon, with the likelihood of contaminating the lower Colorado River and the drinking water for 30 million people. Mind you that right now the federal government is spending a billion dollars to clean up 50 year old uranium tailings near that same Colorado River at Moab, Utah. Other riders are as deranged and senseless as blocking the tougher fuel standards the Obama ...

Among the nuttiest theories about radiation is that it is good for you. Yes, radiation is good for you—it exercises the immune system.

That’s what some nuclear scientists claim. They call it the “hormesis radiation” theory. These scientists don’t just want to minimize or even flatly deny the deadly impacts of radioactivity—they want people to think it’s healthy.

An advocate of the “hormesis radiation” theory was scheduled to peddle the theory today before the U.S. Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site-Citizens Advisory Board.

The DOE’s Savannah River Site is a radioactive mess—310 square miles in South Carolina—that includes the Savannah River National Laboratory and five now closed nuclear reactors. It’s been used through the years to produce plutonium and tritium for nuclear weapons, plutonium to power NASA space probes, and now seeks to make plutonium-based MOX fuel for nuclear power plants, and do other things nuclear. It is in an area of South Carolina which has a large minority population. It’s been designated a high-pollution Superfund site.

But Dr. Clinton R. Wolfe, executive director of Citizens for Nuclear Technology Awareness, wasn’t planning to simply comfort the 25-person advisory board with the “hormesis radiation” theory as regarding the radioactive muddle where they reside.

The topic of his talk was; “A Perspective on Radiation Exposure and the Fukushima Disaster.” People in South Carolina—indeed around the world—have become more aware of and concerned about radioactivity because of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex disaster.

Wolfe, like many in his group, is a product of the system of DOE national nuclear laboratories. He was at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where the atomic bomb was developed, specializing in work with plutonium, then worked ...

On July 9 I took part in a demonstration in front of the White House, the theme of which was "Stop Bombing Libya". The last time I had taken part in a protest against US bombing of a foreign country, which the White House was selling as "humanitarian intervention", as they are now, was in 1999 during the 78-day bombing of Serbia. At that time I went to a couple of such demonstrations and both times I was virtually the only American there. The rest, maybe two dozen, were almost all Serbs. "Humanitarian intervention" is a great selling device for imperialism, particularly in the American market. Americans are desperate to renew their precious faith that the United States means well, that we are still "the good guys".

This time there were about 100 taking part in the protest. I don't know if any were Libyans, but there was a new element — almost half of the protesters were black, marching with signs saying: "Stop Bombing Africa".

There was another new element — people supporting the bombing of Libya, facing us from their side of Pennsylvania Avenue about 40 feet away. They were made up largely of Libyans, probably living in the area, who had only praise and love for the United States and NATO. Their theme was that Gaddafi was so bad that they would support anything to get rid of him, even daily bombing of their homeland, which now exceeds Serbia's 78 days. I of course crossed the road and got into arguments with some of them. I kept asking: "I hate that man there [pointing to the White House] just as much as you hate Gaddafi. Do you think I should therefore support the bombing of Washington? Destroying the beautiful monuments and buildings of this city, as well as killing people?"

None of the Libyans even tried to answer my question. They only repeated their anti-Gaddafi vitriol. "You don't understand. We have to get rid of Gaddafi. He's ...

You probably don’t know that another act of hostage-taking by Republicans is underway. They have shut down the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to help Delta Airlines in its battle to keep its workers from voting in a union. This is costing the government $200 million a week, more than 4,000 FAA employees have been furloughed, and as many as 87,000 construction workers and other contractors around the country are being laid off. The agency has been shut down for more than a week and so far the Republicans have refused to let it open before Congress leaves town for the summer. All this apparently so one company can keep employees who want a union from winning an election.

The FAA is the agency that regulates and overseas civil aviation. That is airports, airlines, pilots, employees, air traffic control, and other components of our aviation system. But the agency has been shut down. FAA inspectors and others are working without pay and paying for their own job-related travel. The shutdown is keeping the FAA from collecting federal taxes on airline tickets at a cost of $200 million in revenues each week even as the country struggles with deficits. Republicans said they don’t like deficits, but they clearly hate working people more – this shutdown adds $30 million a day, over $200 million a week to deficits.

A Shutdown Engineered For A Company

Drop someone off at the airport here and you’ll be searched three times before getting into the parking lot. Kabul is a city of sandbags and armed men, both on foot and in big, shiny, assertive, urgently-honking vehicles. In Kabul much life is lived opaquely — behind barbed wire and thick metal doors and high walls.

Early on we are told that, according to the Red Cross, the area is enduring the worst security situation in 30 years. Those with a stake in how things are dread the talked-about (and fanciful?) departure of international forces – of the invaders and occupiers — for fear of civil war. Some seem to prefer the devil they’ve come to know this past excruciating decade to other devils harder to predict, harder to identify.

Our little delegation is severely restricted in our movements – we keep a low profile: we don’t linger outside those high walls. We stay inside until our driver arrives and then quickly hop in the van. We may not even be able to get beyond Kabul – a tan, dusty, decaying, sprawling town with what must be some of the densest, scariest, least regulated traffic on the planet. (Not once in our two weeks here have we stopped for a red light.)

Do we avoid venturing forth from the clipped lawns and rose gardens of our guest house compound? Hardly. We are blessed with our unflappable driver, who with preternatural reflexes plunges us into the swirling traffic. And, especially, we are blessed with our interpreter and mentor, “Hakim” – the Singaporean ...

It ain't easy being the last eternal optimist caught in this week's thicket of appalling, if inevitable melodrama.  Who doubted the finale, a last-second ceasefire that left no principled adults standing?  But unmitigated disaster has only one payoff for non-combatants, namely, the invaluable lessons alert survivors learn.  If there are any . . . lessons or survivors.  When only confusion stalks the land, then let us feast on the going fare.  Perhaps "optimism" overstates, depending in part on those guilty of self-inflicted failure learning from their own myopia.  Since "you can't fix stupid," history is no great solace.   Yet, I've unearthed five positives to cap our weeks of national immolation.

1) Federalism, beholden to logic, planning, or evidence, is functionally dead.   We no longer have to fret about becoming a banana republic as Tea Party monkeys tipped the scales, colluding with scared Dems who can't say No.   No low-growth system, nostalgically democratic or otherwise, survives the current amalgam of mendacity compounded by squandering wealth on wars and subsidies, amplified by revenue shortfalls, and topped off this month with smug weasels running after their tails. Less tethered to historic bases, whether liberal Dems or risk-averse, money crowd Repugs, Washington reminds me of the guy who botched his own suicide: dazed after shooting himself, he's puzzled both about the bleeding and the splitting headache.

Tea-Vandals Go for Broke

2) Clearer than before, the Tea-vangelist GOP (the New Vandals) have cemented how they will fixate every social, cultural, scientific, intellectual and political decision into absolute, doctrinaire terms, infused with inerrant divine chatter.  What the debt ceiling face-off reinforced is that give-no-ground, moralistic extremism extends far beyond ...

On the 26th of July, 2011 Robert Serry, The United Nations Special Coordinator for the Middle East peace process appeared before the UN Security Council. Mr. Serry is a career Dutch diplomat and had led the Middle Eastern Affairs Division of the Dutch Foreign Ministry. There is every reason to believe that he knows what he is talking about. He told the Security Council that the "peace process," that is the political process allegedly seeking a negotiated settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, had reached a stage of "profound and persistent deadlock." Attempts to resume negotiations are "extremely difficult" he said. And, "in the absence of a framework for meaningful talks, and with Israeli settlement activity continuing, the Palestinians are actively exploring approaching the UN." That is actively considering asking for UN recognition of Palestine as a sovereign state within pre-1967 borders.

Mr. Serry’s description of the negotiations seems pretty straight forward. The two sides are stalemated. And, as the Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat noted, this stalemate follows negotiations that have stretched out over at least 20 years. Indeed, we know that in the most recent phase of these marathon negotiations the Palestinian team had dropped just about all of their original demands. Erekat told U.S. Middle East envoy George Mitchell, that the Palestinian negotiators had done everything but "convert to Zionism." And yet, the Israelis scorned the Palestinian’s offered compromises. As Mr. Serry indicated, Israel’s settlement of Palestinian land continues. In fact throughout this entire 20 year process colonization has gone on unabated. And, of course, all of it is illegal under the Geneva Conventions. One of the reasons that restarting any negotiations is so "extremely difficult" is that the Palestinian side has insisted that, as a prerequisite for any new talks, Israel ...

Perhaps the pre-eminent task of philosophy today is to challenge the veracity of ideological constructs through processes of demystification. That is, rather than providing pedestrian resolutions to complex social contradictions, it is possible to argue that philosophy must be operationalized to illustrate that our perception of a problem can itself constitute the problem. Answers cannot exist a priori because they are engendered through the posing of questions. Any correct social diagnosis, therefore, must be tethered to the correct conceptualization of extant verifiable symptoms. Inadequate solutions to social antinomies reflect first the inadequacy of the ...

U.S. Constitution, 14th Amendment, Sec. 4: "The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payments of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned."  Congressional Democrats argued Wednesday if "public debt" cannot be questioned, the debt ceiling debate is a total charade, outdoing other GOP frauds.  

Read the text, Tea Baggers!   Public debt, authorized by law, which "shall not be questioned" -- lacks ambiguity, even neatly referencing the suppression of emboldened "insurrections" that defy federal authority!   How can Obama miss this bountiful double-bagger -- like Lincoln, he'd be defending the Constitution and taking down a rebellion.

Were President Obama to abide by the letter of the Constitution and take the 14th (instantly, like taking the 5th), he'd solve the whole debt problem in one fell swoop -- pleasing Wall Street, Democrats, Republicans, pensioners and Medicare doctors alike -- including, by my own private statistical count, 92% of Americans ready for the next melodrama over symbolism.  Of course, that much courage takes more backbone than is yet revealed by this wariest of presidents, but my audacity of hope springs eternal.  "Yes, you can" read the Constitution, Mr. President, with the strict literalism of bible-bangers.   Just do it.

Right off, all federal obligations would be covered, our enormous paper debts redeemed by our most sacred document.   No mess, no fuss, no clean-up.   The Treasury would have more way more law on its side than 9/10s of what presidents do, even were goofy libertarians to rush into court. At the worst, way in the future, the Supreme Court might whine about ignoring precedent (though debt ceilings arrived after WWI, not with Founding Fathers). ...

 I'm sure everyone reading this already knows that our "debt crisis" is a mirage, a canard manipulated by the radical right wing who are theologically devoted to allowing society's rich to become even more so. Our supposed spending problem is nothing more than a "We won't tax the rich no matter what" problem. The media has played along; Pres. Obama and many of the Democrats are also playing along. And the political barometer has taken yet another sharp lurch to the right. But while we don't really have a debt crisis, we do have an empathy crisis and it's the empathy ceiling that has come crashing down on us and desperately needs to be raised.

Recall that in campaigning for the presidency in 2000, George W. Bush actually advertised himself as a different breed of conservative, a "compassionate conservative". I'm under no illusion that this was anything other than Karl Rove branding "W" solely for the purpose of electability. (I went to high school with Karl ...

 bishopfeed:“I don’t think we’ve lost the marriage issue at all. Even framing the question that way shapes the answer in a wrong direction, because the language of a debate conditions how we think. If we concede the language, we concede the issue. I do think we’ve been allowing ourselves to lose the marriage debate for years, rooted in our confusion about individual and community rights, and our fear of being portrayed as “against” other people. Catholic teaching on sexuality and marriage is for human dignity; it is for human happiness and the virtuous development of family and society. It is “against” only those behaviors that undermine those goals. When people try to frame Catholic belief as an intrinsic hostility for individual persons or groups, they are not being honest.”—Archbishop Charles Chaput (Philadelphia-designate)If the church’s teachings were really for “human happiness and the virtuous development of family and society,” they wouldn’t be against homosexuality. Nothing about loving someone of the same sex precludes a person from being happy (in fact it often goes hand in hand), and certainly nothing about it stops familial development. It is the height of hypocritical deception to say that people pointing this out are the dishonest ones- shame on you, Archbishop Charles Chaput. I’m glad you’re out of Denver- don’t come back.

  The plan includes many odious measures, including changes to Social Security that would cut benefits by $1,300 per year. It would institute caps on discretionary spending through 2015, and lays out the amount by which individual agencies need to reduce their budgets (without identifying particular programs).But according to Coburn, it doesn’t really matter which programs get cut, because, as he told Al-Jazeera English, it’s only people who are “sucking off the program” that are going to feel any change:COBURN: The point is where’s the efficiency in that? The actual service going to people isn’t going to decline, the people sucking off the program are going to be the ones that lose.Tom Coburn, a Republican from Oklahoma, states that the billions of dollars in cuts won’t actually effect the “service going to people”, but will only effect those terrible freeloading poor!

For the last 5 weeks, I’ve lived and worked with the Muslim Peacemaker Teams and my host, Sami Rasouli. Tomorrow I fly back to Minneapolis.It has been an eye-opening and life-changing experience. The many Iraqis that I’ve met have invariably been welcoming, generous, and kind. This despite the fact that the illegal U.S. occupation of Iraq continues, and despite the death and destruction that my country has brought to theirs.My visit was very different than the “visit” of most Americans. I came to Iraq as an unarmed guest seeking to build respectful relationships between people. My American counterparts in military uniforms came to Iraq armed to the teeth, seeking to storm the country into submission.American soldiers are still here and Iraq is still an occupied, “war-torn” country. When Sami and I visited Baghdad, he said, “Look what’s happened to this city. It was such a beautiful place when I visited it growing up.” Now buildings are destroyed or riddled with bullet holes. Concrete walls and military checkpoints divide neighborhoods. Garbage and rubble are everywhere and roads are in disrepair.Among the most frustrating effects of the war and U.S. occupation are the lack of electricity, which comes and goes every couple of hours, and the lack of clean water. The American occupiers and the Iraqi government have not yet been able to restore basic services.Despite the death and destruction of the war (at least 100,000 Iraqi civilians dead, perhaps more than 1 million), daily life continues and Iraqis are working hard to rebuild. In the English class that I helped teach, Sami and I taught the word “resilience” to our students. It was ironic that we were the teachers.As Iraqis work to end the occupation and begin to rebuild, Sami and MPT are doing critical work to help ensure that what is rebuilt is a peaceful, nonviolent civil society. The sectarianism ...

If there’s one general insight that has stayed with me from the IR501 (International Relations and Religion) course I took in grad school, it’s that categories suck. “Christian,” “American,” “Arab,” “Muslim,” “Liberal,” “Friend,” etc. serve an important purpose of helping us order the complex information we process every day, but they also simplify and homogenize that complexity.One example is the category of “Iraqi” in American media. When the majority of printed pictures of Iraqis portray “terrorists” or scenes of death and destruction, “Iraqi”–which is an incredibly diverse category–can be reduced to “violent terrorist” in the minds of those who digest media uncritically.During my month here in Najaf, my host Sami Rasouli has introduced me to many Iraqis who don’t fit the category, “Iraqi” (as it has been defined in America). For the sake of exploding / adding nuance to that category, I’d like to share a little about a few of these people. They have invariably been generous, welcoming, and kind—perhaps better descriptors for the category of “Iraqi”–but they are also diverse. 

Part I – Facing the WorldIt was the Scottish poet Robert Burns who, in a 1786 poem, wrote “O would some power the gift to give us to see ourselves as others see us, it would from many a blunder free us.” That gift is now ours in the form of modern polling technology but, alas, Burns underestimated our abilities to turn a blind eye to its revelations and continue our blundering ways. Here is a recent example.The respected polling company Zogby International recently conducted one of its periodic “Arab Attitudes” polls measuring, among other things, the popularity of the United States in the Arab Middle East. This one was conducted between the middle of May and the middle of June, 2011 and involved 4,000 face-to-face interviews in six countries: Morocco, Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. The results are not pretty. As 

 History doesn’t repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme.Last week the inimitably irreverent and openly gay sex columnist, Dan Savage, published an article entitled “Marcus Bachmann’s Big Gay Problem” in which he straightly suggests that “gaydar is for real.” Amid his sauciness, Savage cites a 2008 Tufts University study in which psychologists Nicholas Rule and Nalini Ambady showed 90 faces to 90 participants in random order and then asked them to judge the subject’s “probable sexual ...

The time for U.S. withdrawal from Iraq is coming closer. In December of 2008 the Iraqi parliament approved the negotiated Status of Forces Agreement that set a deadline of the end of 2011 for all American troops to leave the country. However, just like someone who starts to beg off a promise when the time for action approaches, U.S. officials are now expressing second thoughts.Back on May 24th outgoing Defense Secretary Robert Gates said he “favored extending the American presence, noting that the Iraqi military will need help with logistics, intelligence and defending its airspace and that a continued U.S. military presence will send a ‘powerful signal that we’re not leaving, that we will continue to play a part.’” We will continue to pursue “our role in the region.” Considering that we have known for some time that the Iraq war was waged for false, contrived reasons and thus constitutes the same sort of criminal behavior (the waging of illicit and unnecessary war) that was prosecuted at Nuremberg after World War II, it is difficult to know just how Gates defines “our role.” To date in Iraq, that role has equaled the removal of one dictator (who we once supported) at 

Let's imagine that Wall Street investment banker and long-time Social Security foe Peter Peterson had $1 billion in government bonds (also known as "IOUs"). Suppose that he decided to sell them. According to Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post's fact checker, this would create a burden for the U.S. government.This sale of bonds would displace other bonds that the United States might want to sell in the financial market. This would lead to higher interest rates on U.S. debt. Therefore Mr. Peterson is contributing to our deficit problem.That may seem more than a little silly to readers, which it is. Yet, this is the same way in which Kessler says that Social Security will be creating a fiscal burden. The program has bought $2.6 trillion in government bonds which are part of the $14.3 trillion debt subject to the debt ceiling. It will be relying on the interest from these bonds to pay for some benefits for then next decade, just as Mr. Peterson may use interest from government bonds that he holds to pay for his living expenses or funding his anti-Social Security agenda.After 2022 the program will begin selling off its bonds. This will have the same effect on the market as if Mr. Peterson were selling his bonds. In Peterson's case he will directly sell his bond into the market, in the case of the Social Security program it will sell a bond to the government which will have to get the money by selling a new bond in the market (unless it raised taxes or cut spending to cover the price of the bonds).Kessler also gets wrong the baseline for the projected longer-term shortfall for Social Security. After 2036 the program is projected to only have enough money to pay a bit less than 80 percent of scheduled benefits. However, if the law is never changed, then the program would only pay the ...

Originally posted at the GuardianThe conventional wisdom among the current generation of school reformers is that bad teachers are to blame for the failure of many of our children to learn. Applying this logic to the current debates over the budget and the economy, we should be pointing a big finger of blame at the media.As survey after survey shows, the vast majority of the public are incredibly ignorant of the most basic facts about the budget and the economy. If we treated their teachers in the media the way the educational reformers treat public school teachers, few economics and budget reporters would have jobs.One needs only to pick up a newspaper or turn on the television to get examples of thoroughly awful reporting. When we hear pledges to reduce the projected deficits over the next 12 years by $2 trillion or $4 trillion, how many people have any clue how large these reductions are relative to projected spending or projected GDP over this period? (The $4 trillion figure is 8.7 percent of projected spending and 3.7 percent of GDP.)How about that $14.3 trillion figure? That’s a really big number, really scary. So is just about every number connected with the United States budget. We are a huge country with a huge economy. Competent reporters would focus on this being about 90 percent of U.S. GDP.Is that big? Well the debt-to-GDP ratio was over 110 percent after World War II. The United Kingdom had debt-to-GDP ratios of more than 100 percent for much of the 19th century as it was establishing itself as the world’s pre-eminent industrial power.Japan has a debt-to-GDP ratio of more than 220 percent of GDP and can still borrow in financial markets long-term at interest rates of less than 1.5 percent.  So, what’s the problem? ...

Robert Samuelson did one of the great pox on both your houses pieces at which the Post excels. He criticized the right, as personified by Grover Norquist, for being unwilling to raise taxes. Then he trashed my friends at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities for refusing to produce a balanced budget, which he argues would have to show large cuts in Social Security and Medicare.Those of us who don't work for the Post, and therefore are free to speak honestly about the deficit, know that the whole long-term deficit problem is the story of the broken U.S. health care system. If the United States paid the same amount per person for its health care as people in any other wealthy country we would be looking at long-term budget surpluses, not deficits.Of course the short-term deficit story is about the downturn caused by the collapse of the housing bubble, which the Post apparently still has not noticed.

Usually it is the politicians who use euphemisms to try to conceal the impact of their policies. However, the Washington Post decided to help them along in a front page article when it twice referred to Social Security "changes" that could be part of the budget agreement.Of course "changes" don't reduce the deficit unless they are cuts. President Obama and the congressional leadership were discussing plans to cut Social Security. These cuts are likely to be very unpopular, so it is likely that they would rather have the public not realize that they were debating cuts to Social Security.Since the Post's editorial position also supports cuts to Social Security, the paper apparently decided to help the politicians along in this effort. This is why the Post is known as Fox on 15th Street.Interestingly, the Post never once referred to tax "changes," rather than increases. It even allowed Don Stewart, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s deputy chief of staff for communications, to refer to "massive tax increases," without pointing out that none [thanks Jim A.] of the tax increases put forward by President Obama would raise taxes above their late 90s level when the economy was adding 3 million jobs a year.Washington Post reporters have the time to look up tax increases and assess their importance. Washington Post readers do not.

Eight years after she went, Strauss-Kahn's French accuser says she didn't know what it meant. If what I have read about the charge of attempted rape now being brought against Strauss-Kahn in France is correct, eight years ago a young French woman agreed to meet Strauss-Kahn alone in an apartment that was not his address. She claims that, despite her protests, Strauss-Kahn persisted in sexually aggressive behavior. She construes, or perhaps misconstrues, his behavior as attempted rape.
If the woman's account is true, there is an innocent interpretation. By agreeing to the meeting, she sent a signal that she did not intend to send and which Strauss-Kahn interpreted, or misinterpreted, to mean that she was sexually available.
If this is the story, a French court would realize that, however frightening it was for the young woman, it was a misunderstanding and not an attempted rape. Strauss-Kahn would be guilty of boorish behavior, but this is not yet a crime.
French skepticism would explain why the charge lay dormant for eight years and came to life on the heels of the New York case, which has now fallen apart. The certainty with which the New York police, prosecutor, and American media initially treated Strauss-Kahn's guilt created credibility for the French woman's accusation. Certainly, the prospect of Strauss-Kahn's conviction on the New York charges would give a French lawyer more confidence in the French woman's story.
I offer this not as an excuse for Strauss-Kahn, who is much too horny for his own good, but as an innocent explanation of an event that also has non-innocent explanations.
For example, according to the French press, Strauss-Kahn predicted that his favorable standing in the election polls would result in Sarkozy, or the interests behind him, paying a woman one million euros in order to bring sex charges against him in order to knock him out of the presidential race.
We also know from press ...

I know we are not supposed to say "lie" in Washington, but this is really get tiresome. There was no report from President Obama's deficit commission. The rules under which the commission could issue a report were very clear. It had to have the support of 14 of the 18 members in a vote that took place by December 1, 2010. There was no vote taken by that date, although 12 of the 18 members did indicate their support for a report produced by the commission co-chairs, Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, on December 2.This means that there was no commission report. Therefore, when Dan Balz tells Washington Post readers about the recommendations of the deficit commission, he either has no clue what he is talking about or he is deliberately deceiving Washington Post readers. If he wants to be honest, he is welcome to refer to it as a report of the co-chairs and to even point out that the report had support of 12 of the 18 commissioners, but it is simply not accurate to describe it as a report of the commission.Btw, the headline of the piece describes the failure to reach agreement on a big deficit reduction package as a "lost opportunity." Those reading through the piece would find that one element of this lost opportunity is the failure to raise the age of eligibility for Medicare. Wow, just think, if only Speaker Boehner and President Obama could have gotten their act together people aged 65 and 66 could now be paying for their own health care. We're all really going to regret this lost opportunity.

Over the last two and a half weeks, my host Sami and I have visited a number of medical facilities in Iraq: the public hospital in Najaf, a prosthetics and orthotics center, and the public hospital in Nasriyyah. All confirmed the disastrous human cost of the Iraq War.Since 2003,  at least 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died as a result of the U.S.-led war. Some estimates put the number at over 1 million. Iraq’s “health has deteriorated to a level not seen since the 1950s,” seventy percent of children suffer from trauma-related symptoms, and there are perhaps five million orphans in Iraq–almost half of the country’s children.During my first week in Najaf, Sami and I visited As-Sadr Hospital, the public hospital in Najaf. A number of doctors at the hospital will travel to Minneapolis this fall as part of the Sister City relationship between the two cities. Sami’s brother-in-law, Dr. Amer Majeed, met us at the hospital x-ray room.The hospital was crowded. It is one of 18 hospitals that Saddam built across the country–one in each of Iraq’s 18 provinces. After 2003 it was renamed from “Saddam Hussein Hospital” to “As-Sadr Hospital.” Like all public hospitals in Iraq, treatment at the hospital ...

As Naked Capitalism's Yves Smith points out, the GOP doesn't give a damn about the deficit or the debt ceiling  This is all just political games. See Debt Ceiling Hypocrisy, Naked Capitalism (cross posted from Credit Writedowns) (July 7, 2011). here's an excerpt.During the Bush administration, when a budget surplus tuned to deficit and debt piled up, Republican leaders in Congress voted to raise the debt ceiling 5 times, increasing the limit nearly $4 trillion. We’re talking about Speaker John Boehner, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl. Combined, they voted 19 timesfor a debt ceiling increase without complaint or conditions.When the 2001 and 2003 and 2004  Bush tax cuts were passed, the GOP KNEW that the cuts would cause huge record setting deficits.  When they were passed and the war costs for Bush's wars of choice raged on, the GOP KNEW that this would result in huge, unprecedented budget deficits. 

Let me repeat the title.They're bamboozling usAnd Obama is betraying us. Obama is failing to use his bully pulpit to shame the GOP with its ridiculous attempt to double-down on failed right-wing friedmania economic fundamentalism.  See Joseph Stiglitz, The Ideological Crisis of Western Capitalism, Commentary, Project Syndicate  (July 6, 2011) (Hat Tip, Mark Thoma at Economist's View).  Sitglitz notes what I have often pointed out--that friedmania is a failing ideology, yet the GOP is pushing that failed ideology, based on ridiculous and proven-wrong assumptions about human society, to the brink, arguing for austerity when we need stimulus, tax cuts when we need tax increases (at least on the wealthy), and more military when we need to end our endless wars and get smart.  Says Stiglitz:Even in its hey-day, from the early 1980’s until 2007, American-style deregulated capitalism brought greater material well-being only to the very richest in the richest country of the world. Indeed, over the course of this ideology’s 30-year ascendance, most Americans saw their incomes decline or stagnate year after year. ...I was among those who hoped that, somehow, the financial crisis would teach Americans (and others) a lesson about the need for greater equality, stronger regulation, and a better balance between the market and government. Alas, that has not been the case. On the contrary, a resurgence of right-wing economics, driven, as always, by ...

Part I – Civil Society Movements vs. Corrupt Politics

When it comes to the struggle against Israel’s policies of oppression there are two conflicting levels: that of government and that of civil society. The most recent example of this duality is the half dozen or so small ships held captive in the ports of Greece. The ships, loaded with humanitarian supplies for the one and half million people of the Gaza strip, are instruments of a civil society campaign against the inhumanity of the Israeli state. The forces that hold them back are the instruments of governments corrupted by special interest influence and political bribery.

Most of us are unaware of the potential of organized civil society because we have resigned the public sphere to professional politicians and bureaucrats and retreated into a private sphere of everyday life which we see as separate from politics. This is a serious mistake. Politics shapes our lives whether we pay attention to it or not. By ignoring it we allow the power of the state to respond not so much to the citizenry as to special interests. Our indifference means that the politicians and government bureaucrats live their professional lives within systems largely uninterested in and sometimes incapable of acting in the public good because they are corrupted by lobby power. The ability to render justice is also often a casualty of the way things operate politically. The stymying of the latest flotilla due to the disproportionate influence of Zionist special interests on U.S. and European Middle East foreign policy is a good example of this situation.

There are small but growing elements of society which understand this problem and have moved to remedy it through organizing common citizens to reassert influence in the public sphere. Their efforts constitute civil society ...

In 2004, corporate lobbyists successfully lobbied for a doozy of a corporate tax break--after already getting years of tax deferral on their offshore profits (oftenprofits that should have been taxed in the US, for which companies had dreamed up transfer pricing schemes  to move the profits offshore, such as selling IT properties to their offshore subsidiaries at a claimed third-party comparable price, even though they would NEVER really sell it to any third party so it was truly priceless), they got added to the deferral tax break a near-zero 'repatriation' tax break.  As CTJ notes (see below) this was a downright ridiculous reward to the very corporate tax dodgers who had intentionally kept profits offshore to keep from paying tax and then paid an army of lobbyists to get them the tax break they wanted to bring it back. The republicans in control of the House and Presidency at the time claimed it would be a big job booster--they even named the disastrous bill that enacted that and myriad other corporate tax breaks (the wish list that corporations had been vying for going on 20 years) the "American Job Creation Act".  HAH!  The joke was on Congress and the workers who bore the brunt of the job cutting by these same corporate giants.  Of course, the bill did nothing of the sort.  Some of the biggest repatriation dollars went to share buybacks (ie, benefited the wealthiest amongst us that make up the investor class) while tens of thousands of workers were laid off.  Hewlett-Packard was a prime example.Repatriation was a flop,that is,  for everybody except the managerws and wealthy investors who own most of the financial assets in the country and are pushing the corporatist agenda that is dominating the GOP and ...

On Wednesday, June 29th, Fatin al-Jumaily and her husband Wathiq drove from Karbala to Sami’s house in Najaf to pick me up. I met Fatin last August when she came to Minneapolis as a featured Iraqi artist in the exhibit, The Art of Conflict. Her paintings and presentations in Minneapolis focused on the experience of women in the Iraq War. She and Wathiq came to pick me up in Wathiq’s brother’s car, a 2007 Hyundai, because it has air conditioning and their’s doesn’t.

On the way to Karbala we were stopped at one check point. The army officer asked about me and Wathiq said I’m an American Muslim going to visit the shrines in Karbala. I’m not Muslim, but the army officer let us pass without further questions. Later that evening I saw that people from all over the world, including some from the West, come to Karbala to visit the shrines.

We arrived at Fatin and Wathiq’s house around 6 pm. They are poor and have a very humble house, but Fatin prepared snacks (we ate dinner much later) and they had gifts waiting for me–a set of headphones and a planner with a calendar and maps of Iraq. We talked about Fatin’s students (she’s an art teacher at a public school close to their house) and her hope to continue her education in art history. A couple of years ago her students sent letters and art drawings to a school in Minneapolis as part of the Letters for Peace program of the Iraqi and American Reconciliation Project.

After about an hour we left the house to visit the shrines. Fatin and Wathiq live about 5 minutes from the shrines by car, but the two neighborhoods are very different. The streets near Fatin and Wathiq’s house, like many streets in Karbala and Najaf, are broken, bumpy, and narrow. Often there are large obstacles in the middle of the road, such as a pile of dirt, that must be avoided. Garbage and rubble line the ...

On May 29, 2003, a group of American peacemakers left Baghdad for Amman, Jordan. In the middle of the desert, they blew a tire and flipped into the ditch, injuring several of the passengers. Weldon Nisly, a Mennonite pastor from Seattle, was one of those injured. He recalls what happened next: “Some Iraqi men in a car speeding the other direction saw us and stopped to help us while U.S. bombers flew overhead. These Good Samaritans quickly put us in their car and took us to a small clinic in Rutba, where an Iraqi doctor and his medical team treated us.

The Americans were in Iraq with the goal of “getting in the way of war.” Weldon says, “We wanted to help the world see the war through Iraqi eyes.” The medical care given by the people of Rutba, a dusty town in western Iraq, did both: their story of generosity is now the subject of an upcoming book and film, called “The Gospel of Rutba,” and their actions “got in the way” of the discourse of the Iraq War. Theirs is an alternative story involving Iraqis and Americans working for peace.

The Americans who were treated by the people of Rutba—Weldon, Shane Claiborne, Cliff Kindy, and others—were deeply moved. Besides working on a film and book, Shane Claiborne and “The Simple Way” raised money to purchase 12 chlorine generators for Rutba, a town with little access to clean water. In May of this year, Sami Rasouli, Director of the Muslim Peacemaker Teams, traveled to Rutba to deliver the chlorine generators. Sami reports that the people of Rutba were happy and grateful for the gift of friendship.

After driving the seven hours from Najaf, a predominantly Shiite town in Iraq, to Rutba, a Sunni town, Sami was welcomed and hosted by local citizens and Mayor ...

The national discussion on budgetary matters and proper expenditures of the federal government is enormously distorted.  The right repeats 'free market' mantras as though they are the answer to all problems, but doesn't acknowledge the very failures of that free market system that landed us in the Great Recession and kept us there out of the right's insistence on tax cuts as a major part of the pitiful economic stimulus package put together in the early days of the Obama administration and refusal to allow tax increases that are required to fund important programs that every American cares about.We are being bamboozled to believe that we "have to" cut Social Security and Medicare and other aid packages, that we 'have to' cut public employees' benefit packages, and on and on.  Brute capitalism is taking over, as corporations are treated as though they were living people with speech rights (tomfoolery that results, under the right-wing activism of Scalia, Roberts, Alito and Thomas, from the foolish original Supreme Court decision equating spending money to support political speech as equivalent to engaging in speech).None of this is true.  So it is worth reading a book by Ha-Joon Chang, "23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism" (Bloomsbury Press 2010).  Chang's introduction is a good riff on the problems with Friedmania (free market economic theory) and worth excerpting here.The global economy lies in tatters.  While fiscal and monetary stimulus of unprecedented scale has prevented the financial meltdown of 2008 from turning into a total collapse..., the 2008 global crash still remains the second-largest economic crisis in history, after the Great Depression... [A] sustained recovery is by ...

If I could publicly ask our beloved president one question, it would be this: "Mr. President, in your short time in office you've waged war against six countries — Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and Libya. This makes me wonder something. With all due respect: What is wrong with you?"
The American media has done its best to dismiss or ignore Libyan charges that NATO/US missiles have been killing civilians (the people they're supposedly protecting), at least up until the recent bombing "error" that was too blatant to be covered up. But who in the mainstream media has questioned the NATO/US charges that Libya was targeting and "massacring" Libyan civilians a few months ago, which, we've been told, is the reason for the Western powers attacks? Don't look to Al Jazeera for such questioning. The government of Qatar, which owns the station, has a deep-seated animosity toward Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and was itself a leading purveyor of the Libyan "massacre" stories, as well as playing a military role in the war against Tripoli. Al Jazeera's reporting on the subject has been so disgraceful I've stopped looking at the station.
Alain Juppé, Foreign Minister of France, which has been the leading force behind the attacks on Libya, spoke at the Brookings Institution in Washington on June 7. After his talk he was asked a question from the audience by local activist Ken Meyercord:

"An American observer of events in Libya has commented: 'The evidence was not persuasive that a large-scale massacre or genocide was either likely or imminent.' That comment was made by Richard Haass, President of our Council on Foreign Relations. If Mr. Haass is right, and he's a fairly knowledgeable fellow, then what NATO has done in Libya is ...

Six days in Iraq and not one Humvee, tank, fighter jet, military escort, or intelligence report. Not one minute inside the Green Zone or between the miles-long walls of American military bases. Hosted by my friend and colleague, Sami Rasouli, I live in Najaf, a city two hours south of Baghdad. At the invitation of Sami, I came here to live and work with the Muslim Peacemaker Teams (MPT), a group of Iraqi peacemakers.Sami and I know each other through our jobs at partner non-profit organizations–Sami at MPT and I at the Iraqi and American Reconciliation Project (IARP). The two organizations are based in the Sister Cities of Minneapolis, USA and Najaf, Iraq. They work together to rebuild peaceful relationships between Americans and Iraqis and support nonviolence in both countries.Since its founding in 2004, MPT has accomplished a lot. It has provided clean water to over 27,000 Iraqi students and promoted national unity through friendly soccer matches across Iraq.  It held community roundtable meetings to discuss the new constitution in 2005 and helped stem the spread of cholera in 2007 through hygiene education. Recently MPT began hosting Americans to live and work in Iraq as an alternative model of peaceful coexistence. This project is small compared to the scope of the American war on Iraq, but it is dissent against the hegemonic discourse of war. It is an affirmation that we are still brothers and sisters and that war does not have the final say.My visit to Iraq is very different from the “visit” of most Americans. I came to Iraq motivated by the principles of MPT and IARP, an unarmed guest seeking to build respectful relationships between people. My American counterparts in military uniforms–while perhaps motivated by misinformed ideals of protecting their country–came to Iraq armed to the teeth, seeking to storm the country into submission.On my first day in Iraq, I met no sergeants or lieutenants. I met a nuclear ...

Society (etymology): 1530’s, “friendly association with others, group of people living together" from Fr. societe, from L. societatem

Progressive cultural and social theorists broadly define neoliberalism as a political project emerging in the 1970’s both consolidating and camouflaging the interests of wealthy white men in the global north by appealing to the supposed value-neutral notions of individual freedom, personal responsibility, the privatization of public services, and the free market. Although helpful, such a construal problematically elides the fraught relationship between neoliberalism and social collectivism. That is, is the dogma of neoliberalism and the social practice of collectivism antithetical to one another? To this end I’d like to explore conceptualizations of neoliberalism from a slightly different, but mutually compatible, angle. For the purpose of this examination I will define neoliberalism as
1) the practice of rarefied socialism for elite white men and
2) a program of the disciplined destruction of collectives organized and inhabited by women, people of color, and the laboring classes who are effectively forced into a situation of authoritarian free-market capitalism.
In this sense, then, neoliberalism constitutes a social agenda intent on uprooting collective structures that may mitigate the realization of pure market logic. Neoliberalism, therefore, is both causative and consequential in that it strategically vitiates any and all collective structures that could be marshaled against it in service of creating a world oriented toward, in the words of Bourdieu, “the rational pursuit of ends collectively arrived at and collectively ratified.” Society and collectives, according to neoliberals, either 1) do not exist (a la Thatcher) or ...

Nuclear power requires “perfection” and “no acts of God,” we were warned years ago. This has been brought home by the ongoing disaster caused by the earthquake and tsunami that struck the Fukushimi Daiichi nuclear plant complex, the flooding along the Missouri River in Nebraska now threatening two nuclear plants, and the wildfire laying siege to Los Alamos National Laboratory, the birthplace of atomic energy.Earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, fire—these and other disasters will inevitably occur. Add nuclear power with its potential to release massive amounts of deadly radioactive poisons when impacted by such a disaster, and it is clear that atomic energy is incompatible with the real world.There’s no perfection in human beings or in technology. Accidents will happen. And there will always be natural disasters—we can’t eliminate them. But we can—and must—eliminate atomic energy.Nobel Prize-winning physicist Dr. Hannes Alfven explained in 1972 in declaring his strong opposition to nuclear power: “Fission energy is safe only if a number of critical devices work as they should, if a number of people in key positions follow all their instructions, if there is no sabotage, no hijacking of the transports, if no reactor processing plant or reprocessing plant or repository anywhere in the world is situated in a region of riots or guerilla activity, and no revolution or war—even a ‘conventional one’—takes place in those regions. The enormous quantities of extremely dangerous material must not get into the hands of ignorant people or desperados. No acts of God can be permitted.” Dr. Alfven was writing in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.“Nuclear power is an unforgiving technology. It allows no room for error,” wrote Carl J. Hocevar of the Union of Concerned Scientists in 1975. Hocevar had earlier been an engineer working on reactor ...

My first day in Iraq was marked by warm welcome after warm welcome. (And not because the temperature was 110 degrees.)I flew out of Amman, Jordan at 1 am on Sunday morning, June 19, and arrived in Najaf an hour and a half later. My host, Sami Rasouli, was waiting for me. The airport staff was polite and curious: Where are you from? Welcome to Najaf, hope you enjoy our city! What are you doing in Najaf? Where did you learn Arabic? Ma’a Salaama (with peace/goodbye)!After I gave the visa officer my documents, it was a quick process to approve my entry into Iraq.Sami’s brother-in-law picked us up and drove us through Najaf to Sami’s house. It was early morning after a sleepless night, but it was a first chance to catch up with Sami (I last saw him in snowy Minneapolis during his visit there this winter). Sami is charismatic and warm with a hearty sense of humour, and I quickly felt at ease. He pointed out new construction, Kufa University (which has an official relationship with the University of Minnesota), government buildings, roads to Karbala and other nearby towns, and places where our mutual friends live. We reached Sami’s home at 5 am.After a few hours of sleep, we woke up for breakfast with Sami’s family. Sami’s wife Suaad had prepared eggs, bread with cheese or honey, rolls, tomatoes and cucumbers, fruit, and tea. Though more reserved than her husband, Suaad also welcomed me with a big smile and impeccable hospitality. She is very patient with my broken Arabic and careful to make sure I have everything I need.Sami and Suaad have two sons, Redha, 9, and Omar, 3. Redha is quiet and can speak good English when he chooses. On my second day in Najaf we played a game of Candy Land that I brought with me as a gift. Almost every card he drew sent him ahead only 1 or 2 spaces or back to Gumdrop Mountain or Candy Cane Forest, but he didn’t complain. Omar is the most energetic 3-year old I’ve ever seen. I made the mistake of ...

Haiti experienced a major earthquake January 12, 2010. Tens of thousands died, estimates range from 65,000 to 230,000 people killed. About 2 million more people were displaced. Haiti was already the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere with a per capita income of about $2 a day. Seventeen months later, Haiti remains deeply wounded. The numbers below give an indication of some of the challenges that remain for the Haitian people.

Housing

570,000 people in Haiti have moved back into 84,000 buildings which are heavily damaged and marked by engineers as “yellow” because they may collapse in foul weather or in the event of another tremor. USAID Draft Report 2011. “I see little children sleeping next to the heavily cracked walls every day,” said one of the experts quoted in the USAID report.

465,000 people have moved back into 73,000 buildings that are so terribly damaged they are designated for demolition and are categorized as “red” because they may fall at any moment. USAID Draft Report 2011.

Homeless

250,000 to 800,000 people in and around Port au Prince Haiti are still living under flimsy tents or tarps where water and electricity are scarce, security is poor and people are exposed to diseases. UN Report – January 2011 and USAID Draft Report 2011.

166,000 people living in tents have been threatened with evictions, nearly one in four of the people living under tarps and tents. International Organization for Migration, April 2011.

1000 people were illegally evicted at gunpoint from three tent camps in the Delmas suburb of Port au Prince during one week in May 2011. They are part of a series of illegal evictions of over 50,000 homeless people in Haiti in the last several months. June 16, 2011 human rights complaint filed with the Inter American Commission on Human Rights by IJDH, CCR, BAI and Trans ...

The global nuclear industry and its allies in government are making a desperate effort to cover up the consequences of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. “The big lie flies high,” comments Kevin Kamps of the organization Beyond Nuclear.Not only is this nuclear establishment seeking to make it look like the Fukushima catastrophe has not happened—going so far as to claim that there will be “no health effects” as a result of it—but it is moving forward on a “nuclear renaissance,” its scheme to build more nuclear plants.Indeed, next week in Washington, a two-day “Special Summit on New Nuclear Energy” will be held involving major manufacturers of nuclear power plants—including General Electric, the manufacturer of the Fukushima plants—and U.S. government officials.Although since Fukushima, Germany, Switzerland and Italy and other nations have turned away from nuclear power for a commitment instead to safe, clean, renewable energy such as solar and wind, the Obama administration is continuing its insistence on nuclear power.Will the nuclear establishment be able to get away with telling what, indeed, would be one of the most outrageous Big Lies of all time—that no one will die as a result of Fukushima?Will it be able to continue its new nuclear push despite the catastrophe?Nearly 100 days after the Fukushima disaster began, with radiation still streaming from the plants, with its owners, TEPCO, now admitting that meltdowns did occur at its plants, that releases have been twice as much as it announced earlier, with deadly radioactivity from Fukushima spreading worldwide, and with some countries now changing course and saying no to nuclear power, while others stick with it, a nuclear crossroads has arrived.“No health effects are expected among the Japanese people as a result of the events at Fukushima,” the Nuclear Energy Institute, the nuclear industry trade group, flatly declared in a statement issued at a press ...

“Remember, we can change the world. Or at least Long Island,” Nora Bredes, former executive director of the Shoreham Opponents Coalition, just wrote on her Facebook page. With her message was a New York Times article about a massive demonstration 25 years ago this month protesting the Shoreham nuclear plant.

“More than 600 protesters were arrested here today after 15,000 demonstrators gathered,” the piece began. The headline noted it was “One of the Largest Held Worldwide” against nuclear power.

Because of demonstrations, legal challenges, political initiatives and other actions by organizations and individuals, and work by Suffolk County, state and local officials, the Shoreham plant was stopped.

Two months before that June 1986 demonstration, the Chernobyl nuclear plant catastrophe occurred in the former Soviet Union clearly showing the deadliness of nuclear power, despite the claims of nuclear promoters—including on Long Island—that it was safe.

Now, the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plants in Japan has again proven the lethality of nuclear power. A baseline for how many people will likely die from Fukushima radiation is provided by a 2009 book published by the New York Academy of Sciences, “Chernobyl: The Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment.” Using medical data from between 1986 and 2004, a team of eminent European scientists concludes that 985,000 people died worldwide from the radioactivity discharged from Chernobyl. And the Fukushima disaster involved not one but a cluster of nuclear power plants and is ongoing with radioactivity still streaming out and spreading worldwide.

But the nuclear Pinocchios are still at it.

Last week, the Nuclear Energy Institute, the nuclear industry trade group, held a press conference in Washington at which it issued a statement asserting: “No health effects are expected among the Japanese people as a result of the events at ...

I leave today from Minneapolis for Najaf, Iraq, where I will live for a month. After a few days in Amman, Jordan, I’ll stay in Najaf until July 20 to work with the Muslim Peacemaker Teams (MPT) and its director, Sami Rasouli. MPT is a non-profit organization supporting human rights and nonviolence in Iraq.I’ll be in Najaf as part of the Iraqi and American Reconciliation Project (IARP), where I have worked for the last three years. IARP uses art, education, health, and cultural exchange programs to support reconciliation between Iraqis and Americans. It’s an organization that works to rebuild relationships broken by war.I’ll also be traveling as a Minneapolitan to my Sister City of Najaf, carrying a letter from Minneapolis Mayor RT Rybak to Najaf Governor Adnan Al-Zurufi. Minneapolis and Najaf became Sister Cities in 2009, establishing a city to city friendship and initiating professional and personal citizen connections. Since then, 5 delegations of doctors, city officials, engineers, academics, artists, and others have traveled from Najaf to Minneapolis. I’ll be the 2nd delegation (both 1-person) from Minneapolis to Najaf (you can read about the first delegation here).Many of my friends and relatives have asked why I’m going on this trip. From my limited knowledge, Iraq remains torn by American-led war and sanctions. It has left the spotlight of American media. But I am not going as a “war correspondent” to report on the devastation of war, and I am not (I hope) going with an American-centric perspective. I want to meet in person the Iraqis ...

Ever since the Great Recession shook the foundations of the U.S. economy, President Obama has been promising recovery.  Evidence of this recovery, we were told, was manifested in the massive post-bailout profits corporations made. Soon enough, the President assured us, these corporations would tire of hoarding mountains of cash and start a hiring bonanza, followed by raising wages and benefits. It was either wishful thinking or conscious deception. The recent stock market meltdown has squashed any hope of a corporate-led recovery.The Democrats fought the recession by the same methods the Republicans used to create it: allowing the super rich to recklessly dominate the economy while giving them massive handouts. This strategy, commonly referred to as Reaganomics or Trickle Down Economics, is now religion to both Democrats and Republicans; never mind the staged in-fighting for the gullible or complicit media.When it becomes obvious to even the President that the economic recovery never existed beyond the bank accounts of the rich, questions will have to be answered. Why, for example, did nobody in either political party foresee the disastrous consequences of the bailouts? Not only did the U.S. deficit drastically increase but the same U.S. corporations that caused the recession were given reinforcement for their destructive actions, ensuring that it would continue unabated.In his book, Crisis Economics, Nouriel Roubini outlines the insane response to the recession by Republicans and Democrats. Because both parties simply threw money at the banks and hedge funds instead of punishing them, a condition of "moral hazard" was created, meaning, that banks would assume another bailout would come their way if they destroyed the economy again -- too big too fail, remember? Roubini explains how the Democrats allowed the "too big" banks to get even bigger; how Wall Street salaries based on short-term profits went unregulated; ...

 Ever since the Great Recession shook the foundations of the U.S. economy, President Obama has been promising recovery.  Evidence of this recovery, we were told, was manifested in the massive post-bailout profits corporations made. Soon enough, the President assured us, these corporations would tire of hoarding mountains of cash and start a hiring bonanza, followed by raising wages and benefits. It was either wishful thinking or conscious deception. The recent stock market meltdown has squashed any hope of a corporate-led recovery.     The Democrats fought the recession by the same methods the Republicans used to create it: allowing the super rich to recklessly dominate the economy while giving them massive handouts. This strategy, commonly referred to as Reaganomics or Trickle Down Economics, is now religion to both Democrats and Republicans; never mind the staged in-fighting for the gullible or complicit media.     When it becomes obvious to even the President that the economic recovery never existed beyond the bank accounts of the rich, questions will have to be answered. Why, for example, did nobody in either political party foresee the disastrous consequences of the bailouts? Not only did the U.S. deficit drastically increase but the same U.S. corporations that caused the recession were given reinforcement for their destructive actions, ensuring that it would continue unabated.     In his book, Crisis Economics, Nouriel Roubini outlines the insane response to the recession by Republicans and Democrats. Because both parties simply threw money at the banks and hedge funds instead of punishing them, a condition of "moral hazard" was created, meaning, that banks would assume another bailout would come their way if they destroyed the economy again -- too big too fail, remember? Roubini explains how the Democrats allowed ...

On May 31st Florida's superlative thug, Gov. Rick Scott (R), signed an executive order requiring all adult applicants for cash benefits from Florida’s welfare system to be tested for drugs. The bill impacts over 233,000 Florida residents receiving cash benefits from the state. Those who fail the test on their first attempt will become ineligible for welfare for a year. And a second failed test will render them ineligible for welfare for three years. Gov. Rick Scott, mind you, campaigned on a platform of less government…laughably ironic. Most of the reporting on this issue, as you likely have come to expect, has ranged from vacuous to fatuous with very little intervening substantive analysis. Surprising? No. Problematic? Yes. Scott’s executive order sufficiently confirms the notion that so-called “middle class” Americans (mostly white) are intransigently suspicious of the intentions, merit, intelligence, and cultural practices of poor folk, the overwhelming majority of which are citizens of color. Need proof? Take just one look at the strategies by which Gov. Scott continues to justify his bill. When interviewed by CNN on June 5th Gov. Scott cited studies showing that "people that are on welfare are higher users of drugs than people not on welfare.” Scott's claim is has its "basis" in a study conducting in 2000 by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services which finds that 9.6% of people in families receiving some type of government assistance reported recent drug use, compared to 6.8% among people in families receiving no government assistance at all. The reliability of this study is dubious because 1)it's over a decade old and 2) the categorical unit of analysis utilized in this study is “families receiving some type of government aid,” which is significantly more expansive than those exclusively receiving ...

An April 2011 study conducted by the non-partisan Economic Policy Institute entitled "The State of Working America's Wealth," found that roughly 25% of all American households had zero or negative net worth in 2009. For black households, the figures are, as expected, more bleak. The EPI founds that in 2009 nearly 40% of black households had zero or negative net worth. And finally - and worst of all, in my view - the study concludes with the finding that in 2009 the median net worth of black households reached a devastatingly scant $2,200 (dropping from $10,000 in 2006), while the net worth among white households was $97,900, or 45x that of black households. Stop and think about this figure for a second...$2,200??? Such an illustration, of course, challenges President Obama's soaring rhetorical claims that "there is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America -- there’s the United States of America." (Although this phrase originally appeared in Obama's 2004 keynote address at the Democratic National Convention, he continues to repeat it to this day.) His lack of targeted policies - policies organized under the banner of mitigating opportunity and outcome disparities premised on race, class, and gender (to name a few)- are simply the political instantiation of a deeply distorted ideological vision. And so we're left with essentially two options: Our president is either 1) diluted by his premature vision of post-raciality or 2) willfully ignoring those who are unlikely to contribute financially to his re-election campaign. I ask you to pick your poison...

Read the study here.

Throughout this brief exploration I endeavor to situate John Rawls’s theory of “public reason” against the conceptual backcloth of Jurgen Habermas’s “deliberative democracy” and Robert Putnam’s “bridging” and “bonding” tactics for group identity formation. I will then apply these aggregate insights to 1) the thorny nettle of web personalization, 2) the problematic of political self-enclosure, and 3) the notion of confirmation bias by assessing their indeterminate roles both in facilitating and forfending coalition building across difference, or, what in my view amounts to the sine qua non for ensuring a healthy democracy premised on the fact of human difference. To this end, I propose two interrelated questions: 1) What is at stake democratically in an era of the self-effacing proliferation of web personalization programming? And, 2) how might we understand the seeming contradiction between the democratization (form) and deep political segmentation (content) endemic to the algorithmic function of political persuasion mapping on the Internet?

In John Rawls’s 1997 article entitled “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited” he contends that “the idea of public reason belongs to a conception of a well ordered constitutional democratic society...and the form and content of this reason--the way it is understood by citizens and how it interprets their political relationship --is part of the idea of democracy itself” (2). Rawls further suggests that the single most basic feature of democracy is “the fact of reasonable pluralism," or the unavoidable presence of a plurality of conflicting “comprehensive doctrines” - religious, philosophical, moral, and therefore, political. Jurgen Habermas appropriates portions of Rawls’s argument to demonstrate that the utilization of public reason in political discourse must always remain in service of ...

In the 2006 satirical science fiction comedy, Idiocracy, the protagonist Joe Bauers, “Mr. Average American", is selected by the Pentagon for a top-secret hibernation program. Forgotten, he awakens 500 years in the future, to discover a society so incredibly dumbed-down that he's easily the most intelligent person alive and their only hope for survival.With the Republicans bullying their way through state and federal legislation, the movie has become prophetic to the point where the only thing that isn't believable is that this devolution will take another 500 years. Idiocracy already has its living, fire-breathing poster child, Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), the ranking Republican and former chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.You may remember Rep. Barton as the Congressman who on behalf of the American people apologized to the CEO of British Petroleum, Tony Hayward, for having our Gulf of Mexico get in the way of Hayward's oil spill. "I apologize. I do not want to live in a country where any time a corporation does something that is legitimately wrong, is subject to some sort of political pressure. [It] amounts to a shakedown, so I apologize."How about Barton’s grasp of CO2 as a greenhouse gas? “It’s odorless, colorless, tasteless, doesn’t cause cancer... there’s nobody that’s ever been admitted to a hospital because of CO2 poisoning. Hell, “CO2 is in our Coca-Cola!”Even better is Barton's explanation of how wind power could speed up climate change. "Wind is God’s way of balancing heat. Wind is the way you shift heat from areas where it’s hotter to areas where it’s cooler. Wouldn’t it be ironic if in the interest of global warming we mandated massive switches to energy, which is a finite resource, which slows the winds down, which causes the temperature to go up? Now, I’m not saying that’s going to ...

Ever since the start of nuclear technology, those behind it have made heavy use of deception, obfuscation and denial--with the complicity of most of the media. New York Times reporter William Laurence, working at the same time with the Manhattan Project, wrote a widely-published press release covering up the first nuclear test in New Mexico in 1945, claiming it was nothing more than an ammunition dump explosion. The Times and Laurence went on to boost nuclear power for years to come (Beverly Deepe Keever, News Zero: The New York Times and The Bomb).

A central concern of nuclear promoters, as Rosalie Bertell writes in her book No Immediate Danger: Prognosis for a Radioactive Earth, has been: "Should the public discover the true health cost of nuclear pollution, a cry would rise from all parts of the world and people would refuse to cooperate passively with their own death." In the U.S., nuclear industry and government nuclear agencies lied after the accident at Three Mile Island. In the Soviet Union, government lies flowed after the catastrophe at Chernobyl. There have been cover-up after cover-up of the smaller accidents in between (Harvey Wasserman and Norman Solomon, Killing Our Own, The Disaster of America’s Experience with Atomic Radiation; Jay M. Gould and Benjamin A. Goldman, Deadly Deceit; Low-level Radiation, High-level Cover-up).

The nuclear enterprise, with its army of PR people, has had little trouble through the years manipulating a largely compliant media, a major component of which it has owned: Westinghouse owning CBS for many years, and General Electric, NBC. And this continues in the still-unfolding nuclear disaster in Japan.

Media coverage of the Fukushima nuclear power facility disaster has ranged from dreadful to barely passable. Much of the reporting about the threats of nuclear power and the impacts of radioactivity has been outrageously poor, as journalists and their talking-head experts have parroted the assurances of Japanese ...

With the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear plant catastrophe having arrived, and with the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear complex still unfolding—and radioactivity continuing to spew from those plants—some people are asking: can nuclear power be made safe?

The answer is no. Nuclear power can never be made safe.

This was clearly explained by Admiral Hyman Rickover, the “father” of the U.S. nuclear navy and in charge of construction of the first nuclear power plant in the nation, Shippingport in Pennsylvania. Before a committee of Congress, as he retired from the navy in 1982, Rickover warned of the inherent lethality of nuclear power—and urged that “we outlaw nuclear reactors.”

The basic problem: radioactivity.

“I’ll be philosophical,” testified Rickover. “Until about two billion years ago, it was impossible to have any life on Earth; that is, there was so much radiation on earth you couldn’t have any life—fish or anything.” This was from naturally-occurring cosmic radiation when the Earth was in the process of formation. “Gradually,” said Rickover, “about two billion years ago, the amount of radiation on this planet…reduced and made it possible for some form of life to begin.”

“Now, when we go back to using nuclear power, we are creating something which nature tried to destroy to make life possible,” he said. “Every time you produce radiation” a “horrible force” is unleashed. By splitting the atom, people are recreating the poisons that precluded life from existing. “And I think there the human race is going to wreck itself,” Rickover stated.

This was Rickover, a key figure in nuclear power history, not Greenpeace.

The problem is radioactivity—unleashed when the atom is split. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s a General Electric boiling water reactor such as those that have erupted at Fukushima, or the Westinghouse pressurized water design, or Russian-designed plants like Chernobyl, or the “new, improved” nuclear plants being ...

Radiation from Japan is now detectable in the atmosphere, rain water and food chain in North America. Fukushima reactors are still out of control and hold 10 times more nuclear fuel than there was at Chernobyl, thousands of times more than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The official refrain is, “No worries here, perfectly harmless.” Our best scientists of the previous century would be rolling over in their graves.

In the 1940s many of the world’s premier nuclear scientists saw mounting evidence that there was no safe level of exposure to nuclear radiation. This led Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atom bomb, to oppose development of the hydrogen bomb.

In the 1950s, Linus Pauling, the only two-time winner of the Nobel Prize, began warning the public about exposure to all radiation. This opinion, ultimately endorsed by thousands of scientists worldwide, led President John F. Kennedy to sign the nuclear test ban treaty.

In the 1960s, Drs. John Gofman, Arthur Tamplin, Alice Stewart, Thomas Mancuso and Karl Morgan, all researchers for the Atomic Energy Commission or the Department of Energy, independently came to the conclusion that exposure to nuclear radiation was not safe at any level.

The government terminated their services for coming up with what Dr. Gofman called the “wrong answer,” that is, the opposite of what the AEC wanted to hear. The top Russian nuclear physicist in the 1960s, Andrei Sakharov, also a Nobel Prize winner, and Vladimir Chernousenko, who the Soviet Union placed in charge of the Chernobyl cleanup, are among other international experts who drew similar conclusions.

To distract from the danger of man-made radioactivity, we hear from nuclear cheerleaders that watching TV and airline travel also expose us to radiation. True, although they never mention that flight crews have higher rates of breast and skin cancer. ...

People can now get free copies of my book "Cover Up: What You Are Not Supposed to Know About Nuclear Power" -- with a new updated preface I've written in the midst of the ongoing Fukushima nuclear power disaster.

Just go to www.thepermanentpress.com and you will see the book displayed on the homepage--and a box to click on and have the book downloaded at no cost.

What I emphasized in putting the book together was printing actual documents, as facsimiles, documents from the nuclear industry and government nuclear agencies. I believed that would be a good way to counter the Atomic Pinocchios and their lies -- something we're being intensely hit with now as the nuclear propagandists try to cover-up the consequences of the Fukushima disaster.

For example, in recent days I received an email asking for the source of the line in a government report that a major nuclear plant accident could involve an area the size of the state of Pennsylvania. It is on Page 9 of Cover Up, exactly as it appears in a government report titled "WASH-740-update" -- "the possible size of the area of such a disaster might be equal to that of the State of Pennsylvania." This projection is repeated over and over again in this report about the consequences of nuclear power plant accidents that was done by Brookhaven National Laboratory and kept secret for years. It was written a little more than a decade before the Three Mile Island accident.

By pasting down portions of such reports on the flats from which the book was printed, between narrative, I hoped to empower people by providing them with primary documents and thus make them fully aware of the truth about nuclear power -- and give them tools to refute the snow-jobs and the lies.

Marty and Judy Shepard of The Permanent Press had the guts to put out the book while publishers in New York refused claiming at the time that they didn't think interest ...

Today marks exactly a month since the nuclear power disaster in Japan began. Along with the ongoing discharges of radioactivity from the Fukushima nuclear plant complex, there has been a largely outrageous flow of media coverage.

Brian Williams on NBC Nightly News on April 6th asked a good question: “And what about all that water, the many million gallons of it, highly radioactive, dumped in the Pacific Ocean for days on end—and we’ve all been told it will dissipate. But how can this not be harmful?” he queried correspondent Miguel Almaguer.

The question might have been good but the response to it, Almaguer’s report, was far from that. He presented a talking head expert, Luca Centurioni of Scripps Institution of Oceanography, who said: “No, there is no immediate danger.” (Centurioni’s background, according to his resume posted on the Internet, reflects no background in radioactivity.)

“The bottom line,” said Almaguer, “experts are in agreement there’s no threat to our water or our food.” He added: “And as you can see Brian, California’s coastline is as beautiful as ever.” Radioactivity, of course, is invisible.

Or consider Charles Osgood on “The Osgood File” on CBS radio on April 1—stressing that there was nothing to fear but fear. Indeed, he played President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s declaration in 1933 that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” That might have been a reasonable reassurance amid the Depression. But here were the first indications of radioactivity having come to the U.S. from Japan.with radioactive iodine being “found in milk in the states of California and Washington,” noted Osgood.

But, he quickly added, “the contamination is described as miniscule, posing no threat to the public.” To bolster that assertion he presented Blair Thompson, “spokesman for the Washington Dairy Products Commission.”

“Radiation can be a scary word, but I think it’s important to remember that actually we live surrounded by ...