James Clay Fuller

This blog has moved

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 00:18:00 +0000

This blog is now located at http://blog.jamesclayfuller.com/.
You will be automatically redirected in 30 seconds, or you may click here.

For feed subscribers, please update your feed subscriptions to
http://blog.jamesclayfuller.com/feeds/posts/default.

Pricing most people out of the ballpark

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 15:39:00 +0000

If you live in Hennepin County, in Minnesota, you probably need to read this.

If you live in Minneapolis, in Hennepin County, you do need to read this, unless you're one of the minority of residents who have followed the stories of local sports stadia very carefully and in detail.

If you live anywhere in the United States that has or is likely to get a professional sports franchise, it would be a good idea to read this.

If you're a pro baseball or football fanatic who reads this, don't bother to scream at me. I've heard it all before.

If you're a fan but not a fanatic, someone who enjoys seeing a game in person now and then, you'd probably better read this and then begin to figure out what you'll do instead of attending the occasional baseball or football game.

If you are a sports writer or broadcaster, button your lip. I don't have time for your self-serving, franchise-serving crap.

Now then:

The new Minnesota Twins stadium – they want us to call it a “ball park,” not a stadium – is open for business.

It obviously is going to make the Pohlad family, heirs of the late multibillionaire Carl Pohlad, even richer.

It also is going to make it much more difficult, and in very many cases impossible, for average Minnesotans to attend a few ballgames each season. Today's modern sports stadia are playgrounds for the wealthy, or at least those who are "well off," not places of relaxation and entertainment for the masses.

We pay, but we don't get to go to the games, or at least not often.

Minnesota Public Radio estimated that the new stadium will increase the team's revenues by somewhere between $40 million and $60 million per season. Estimates by various organizations put the team's previous revenue at somewhere around $158 million a year – but those estimates are entirely unreliable.

The Minnesota Twins, the Pohlad family, have never opened their books to anyone, even when demanding, and getting, public financing for their new playpen.

No business other than a professional sports business, could get away with that, but the owners of sports franchises pull it off regularly. There is no reason whatever to believe anything they say when they are poor-mouthing in order to get tax money poured into their pockets. They will provide no demonstrable facts to support their claims.

Local sports writers, and some from other towns, fairly drool in their awkward sonnets about the joys of outdoor baseball and the new stadium. They've also been extremely harsh in criticisms of anyone and everyone who does not equally share their pants-wetting ecstasy over the new playground, which is why I feel no need to be polite to or about them. Twins owners are happy, the sports writers are happy; they know which side of their bread is buttered and who provides the sweet spread.

The team's television broadcasters obviously have been ordered to promote the new stadium with every other breath. Through every game they natter and natter and natter about it's supposed wonders to the degree that I have taken to watching games mostly with the sound off. I find their constant excessive praise not only irritating but downright infuriating. It reminds me, always, of the fact that as a resident of Hennepin County, I am paying an additional tax to increase the wealth of the Pohlads.

A few other people have told me they have the same hostile reaction to the unrelenting stadium blather.

The new stadium cost somewhere around $544 million. Again, don't trust the figures. The real cost may be considerably higher and we, the major funders, may pay more than we've been told will be “our share.”

Residents of Hennepin County are paying roughly two-thirds of the total cost through a small sales tax attached only to purchases within that county, my county.

State law required that any such sales tax had to be approved in a referendum of county residents. However, polls showed that county taxpayers would reject a stadium tax by a wide margin, so the Minnesota Legislature, led by rural-area legislators whose constituents are not paying, voted to allow the special sales tax without a referendum. A majority of Hennepin County commissioners, perhaps eager to have their names in stone or bronze somewhere in the stadium and obviously eager to please the area's big-money cabal, agreed to the supremely underhanded deal.

So now we have a new outdoor ball stadium.

In Minnesota.

This has been a very unusual and early spring. All of the games in the new facility have been played as scheduled. That will not be the norm over the years, unless our climate has changed permanently.

In a normal year, we can expect numerous games to be rescheduled in spring and fall, and others to be played in conditions so miserable that only a handful fanatics will attend. We can expect players to be injured – throwing hard when temperatures are too low, slipping on wet and perhaps even somewhat icy grass.

The Minneapolis StarTribune reported recently that the average ticket price for a Twins game this year is 45 percent higher than last year. The newspaper said the average cost of a non-premium ticket for a major league game – that's throughout the major leagues -- is now $26.74, but the average price ticket price for a non-premium Twins game is $31.47.

“Premium” means games in which teams that actually have a chance to make the playoffs play, and, of course, those played by the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox, which command even higher prices.

Here a confession: I am a baseball fan. I love the game. It is the only thing increasingly silly ol' George Will and I have in common: We agree that it is a beautiful, graceful, mentally and physically demanding sport. My wife shares my love of the game. We spend an undoubtedly absurd number of hours in front of a television set, watching Minnesota Twins games, playoff games, the World Series.

Over the past decade or a bit more, I have attended about a half dozen Twins games a year, the first few years with a couple of old friends, in more recent years mostly with my wife.

This year, my wife will go to two games, one with a woman friend who bought the tickets and another with me. I will attend only the one game this year, and it may be the only game I see in person for several years. Or, we may go to Kansas City some time this summer, as we have done once a year in recent years, and if we do we'll probably go to a Royals game.

My two kids and their families gave me a $100 Twins gift certificate for my birthday. I spent about two and a half hours on the team's Web site, trying to purchase tickets in a decent location for one game. Finally found some in a location not nearly as good as the area from which we have watched games at the old stadium, the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome, along the third base line. Total cost for two tickets, out by the outfield, $120. I didn't buy them.

As expected, people are turning out in droves to see the new playground. That always works for three or four seasons before people realize that no matter how pleasant a stadium, the price is simply too high.

I continued to search and at last located two available seats on the first base side of the field up in the air, just short of the point where you start to be in danger of altitude sickness, for a weekend day game against a team that will not be a contender this year. I ordered them.

As I ordered them I discovered that in addition to the stated seat price I would be paying two admittedly small fees -- $3.50 and $1.50, as I recall -- for “handling” and something else equally as vague. Total cost $87.

That's without transportation costs, or any food or drink. Total cost for the outing obviously will be well over $100. For two to see a baseball game against a noncontender. In mediocre seats.

Obviously the average working couple with, say, two children, is not going to take their kids to a baseball game and sit in such seats. Their total cost for the one game would be somewhere around $200 to $225, without souvenirs or a program. And that's if they live in the area and aren't paying for a room somewhere.

So how about the “cheap” seats?

Well, unsold seats in the least expensive parts of the stadium are hard to find in this inaugural year. But suppose that family of four hit on four available seats, at the least expensive level, for a game they can attend.

I just found some seats available for a Thursday noon game – our working family would have to take the day off – for $15 apiece. There aren't many of them. The seats are very high, beyond the foul pole in right field. So: Family of four, parents taking day off work, $60 for tickets. Then transportation, which means either parking or public transportation. Figure $20 for that, conservatively. Throw in lunch and soft drinks, maybe peanuts later, another $40, very conservatively. Total cost for a weekday noon game against a noncontending team: $120. And that is, I stress, cheaper than most folks could manage.

How many games do you think that working family will attend in a year? What if Dad works in a warehouse and Mom is a clerk at Wal-Mart? What if one of them is laid off part of the year?

On the other hand, the new baseball stadium has about 60 luxury suites, some seating as many as 30 people, more seating 12 people. Prices for one game for those suites range from only $3,250 for a smaller suite during a non-premium game to $7,500 for a big suite when the Yankees are in town. Those are the prices shown on the Twins Web site.

Of course, the big suites come with a very nice spread of food and drink.

Those suites are one of the main reasons I and my fellow Hennepin County residents are paying a long-term extra sales tax. Increased seat prices just because we have a new stadium is the other main reason. They bring the Pohlads one hell of a pile of money.

From the git-go, Emperor Vespasian intended spectacles at the Colloseum in Rome to be free, and Emperor Titus, who finished the great construction, stuck with that program. Payback to the taxpayers. Romans got free tickets to watch gladiators die. Minnesotans have to pay through the nose to watch fly balls die in the wind coming in from beyond left field.

Oh, lest I forget: Zygi Wilf, owner of the Minnesota Vikings is demanding a new football stadium or, of course, he'll move the team.

Anyone who thinks he'd be able to move them under current conditions is a plain damned fool, but let that pass for now.

About 20 Minnesota legislators met with Zygi – another very, very rich man, of course – a couple of weeks ago. Many in the Legislature are ready to play ball with him. Of course.

Various financing schemes call for lots of public money for a new football playground. This time, in fact, some of the scheme's backers are looking to lay the whole public-financing burden on residents of Minneapolis alone.

Ladies and gents, this is the damnedest racket outside of war and banking. The public, or some of the public, pays for the stadia, which produce enormous income for team owners, and at the same time much – by now probably most – of the public is priced out of those same facilities. Baseball and football have become largely recreations of the well-off and rich, subsidized by the poor and the the majority of the middle class, who have other demands on their income.

Recently, I attended an opera presented by a very good company. The cost was only marginally higher than the price of a baseball game in Minneapolis.

While you're contemplating the joys of outdoor baseball in Minnesota, I'd like to talk to you about a nice condo in Florida....

U.S. gun nuts help Mexican drug gangs

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 21:55:00 +0000

Many people are talking about the threat of violence against politicians who don't follow the Fox Party line.

Most of the talkers, pundits and appalled citizens don't know the half of it. The danger to this country goes beyond simple murder.

The threat, unmistakable but somewhat masked, has been around at least since Barack Obama was elected president. People have shown up wearing guns near places where Obama spoke, and we've all seen the gun-nut signs carried by dozens of strutting would-be cowboys at all of the tea-party rallies around the country.

Then we had the House of Representatives vote on the Democrats' health bill and the threats became more overt. People screamed racial and sex-related slurs at members of Congress – egged on by Fox Party members of Congress, we must note. Democratic members of Congress have received countless overt threats to their lives and the lives of their families since then. (Oh, yeah, and a few Republicans stepped up to say “me, too” but offered little evidence to back up their mostly dubious claims. But even if the threats were aimed equally at Democrats (that is, Corporatists) and Foxes, that doesn't make them in the least acceptable.)

Many of us expect the threats of violence, aided by such “respectable” politicians as Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann and a bunch of other right wing loudmouths, to turn to action at some point. There are a lot of crazies roaming free in this country and a very high percentage of them are armed. It's highly probable that someone is going to be killed or at least wounded.

Yet, folks, the violence we're likely to experience in the foreseeable future is relatively light compared with the horrors experienced almost daily by the people of Mexico.

The facts have been greatly muted by the corporate media in this country, but the plain truth is that American gun nuts bear a major share of the responsibility for the horrific bloodshed below the border.

In 2009, Mexico reported 7,724 deaths related to wars between drug gangs and between drug gangs, police and other Mexican government officials, according to a report in Foreign Policy in Focus. Several agencies reported that there were about 2,000 gang-related killings last year in the near-border town of Ciudad Juarez alone, and 227 more were killed in that city in January of this year. The vast majority of the killings have been by gunshot.

Last month (March, 2010), shooters involved in the illegal drug trade killed a pregnant American consulate worker and her husband in Juarez, and shot and killed the husband of another U.S. consulate employee and wounded two of the couple's children. A number of American diplomats and other employees, most of them working near the U.S. border, have been threatened.

Several times last year, entire neighborhoods, and even entire towns, have been the sites of pitched gun battles between drug gangs and between such gangs and Mexican police. Innocent men, women and children often are among those killed and wounded in the violence.

We, the American people, bear a substantial responsibility for the terrible bloodshed, and not only because Americans buy almost all of the drugs processed and sold by the Mexican gangs.

Mexico's gun laws are stronger than ours. Mexican citizens can legally own firearms, but there are tighter controls on the kinds of weapons, the number and the personal histories of gun owners. There is much closer watch on gun dealers in Mexico than there is here.

Gangsters don't give a damn for such laws, of course. But even for them, buying guns – especially military-style weapons that have no purpose other than killing human beings – is difficult. Or, rather, it would be were it not for the fact that they can get anything they want in the way of weaponry just over the border in the United States.

The International Action Network on Small Arms said in a report on weapons trafficking in Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean that there were about 6,600 gun dealers very close to the Mexican border on the U.S. side. Last year, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton put the number at 6,800. The Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University said in an April 2009 report that the number was about 6,700.

Two weeks ago as I write this, I saw on television an interview with Mexican President Filipe Calderon Hinojosa. Colderon maintained that the actual number of weapons dealers in the U.S. hard by the border with Mexico, now is closer to 10,000.

That ties closely with the fact that government agencies on both sides of the border say that almost 90 percent of the weapons used by Mexico's out-of-control drug gangs come from this country. A report by the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) a little more than a year ago said that the agency has cooperated with Mexican authorities in tracing as many as possible of the firearms recovered from, confiscated from or abandoned at crime scenes by members of drug gangs. They were able to trace 87 percent of such weapons to this country, the ATF said.

The U.S. State Department said that Mexican authorities seized almost 40,000 illegal firearms from criminals in 2008. About 90 percent of those guns originated with U.S. dealers, the department reported.

Some of the people reading this are no doubt wondering why they haven't heard any of this from their hometown newspapers and television stations, or even from networks and cable news outlets.

There have been a few scattered stories on the gun trafficking across the border, but just a few, and not prominently placed. Most newspapers and radio and television outlets reported the murders of the U.S. consulate employees, but none that I saw tied the murders to cross-border gun peddling. Broadcast reports were the usual few seconds and focused on the fact that those killed worked for our consulate. The New York Times has mentioned the traffic a few times, notably in connection with statements from Secretary Clinton, but most other newspapers have been silent on the subject.

I'll give you one guess on the reason for the silence in this country.

Yes, of course: Fear of American gun nuts, the National Rifle Association, the gun lobby and politicians tied to that crowd.

Obviously, the peddling of weapons to Mexican drug gangs is highly profitable. Remember, 40,000 recovered weapons in 2008 alone, and nobody knows how many still in the hands of gangsters, but certainly many times that 40,000 figure. And there are thousands of sales to drug peddlers every day along the border. Money, money, money.

America's gun makers are going to protect that highly profitable business every way they can, and that inevitably means stirring up the knuckle draggers who front for them in every battle in the stupidly mistaken belief that they are “protecting our Second Amendment rights.”

Ain't no one going to git my guns unless they pry 'em outta my cold dead fingers, etc., etc., etc.

There doesn't seem to be any hope that the damn fools will ever figure out that they're being used to protect the manufacturers' and sellers' profits and that no one ever seriously has suggested that sporting guns be forbidden in this country.

And, boy are the industry-manipulated boobs loud and nasty on this trumped up campaign.

Gun-nut blogs and web sites are wild on the subject. You want to stand back if you click on one of them or you may get sprayed with the spit that seems almost literally to be sprayed from mouths of gun crazies when someone raises the topic of peddling to Mexican murderers – and the guys behind this traffic make sure someone raises it frequently.

The major point, when you get past the usual obscene and often barely literate ravings, is that it just ain't so. They know that because someone on another Web site said so, and they believe every lie they're told, no matter how absurd. The industry plays the suckers like Itzhak Perlman plays a fiddle.

Never mind the reports that have been produced by several government agencies on both sides of the border. The guns aren't coming from this country because...well, because...because one former ATF officer who devotes most of his waking hours to a gun blog and the “cause” of guns says they're not, and because Fox News says they're not, and what more proof do you need.

There are all sort of theories on the gun-nut Web sites and in their magazines about where the guns going to Mexico originate.

The theories often are in conflict, but it doesn't matter; if you're a true believer, you'll pick the one you like, or believe two conflicting theses at the same time. In a trawl through the gun sites a few months ago and again a few days ago, I found at least half a dozen claims about where the Mexican drug gangs' guns “really” are coming from.

Most of the theorists place the source in rotten, commie Europe, of course, although at least a couple said the main source is in Asia. Turkey was mentioned at least once, I recall, and France at least a couple of times since most red-blooded John Wayne wannabes hate France for reasons they probably can't recall any more.

Oh, yeah. A little casual checking produced the unsurprising fact that a lot of the writers of articles “disproving” the reports of gun peddling from this country have close ties to the gun industry and/or the NRA.

There are two terrible situations here.

One, obviously, is that gangsters have taken control of substantial pieces of our neighboring country and are murdering and maiming innocent citizens at the same time they are shipping countless tons of narcotics into this country.

The other is that much of our government and, even more, the corporate-owned “news” media in this country are so afraid of the gun nuts that they won't make a serious effort to tell the American public what is going on, so that the relatively sane majority can force our politicians to stop the mayhem. And it would take force, given the cowardice of our politicians when the gun nuts start howling.

Americans who live in a world based on reality owe it to our country to spend at least a little time exploring the fantasy world of the gun culture. You have to know how far beyond reality those people are to fully understand the danger they pose to our society and our form of government.

They rage at any group and any individual who proposes even the mildest of controls on the worst of weaponry. Their words and their imagery are typical of barroom bullies, and like barroom bullies they sometimes yell themselves into positions where they almost have to strike out or look cowardly to their drinkin' buddies.

Since well before his election as president, Barack Obama is the next thing to the Devil himself in the world of gun worshippers. Some even – literally – declare he is the Antichrist. (Of course, many ordinarily liberal politicians and civic leaders have been identified recently as the Antichrist by some wing nut or another, so the distinction isn't quite as great as it once was.)

During the 2008 presidential campaign, someone in Gun Fantasy World declared that Obama was the greatest danger to gun ownership in the history of this nation, and that has been taken as gospel in that weird world ever since. The originator undoubtedly was someone with the gun manufacturing/selling industry, since the entire industry is rabidly right wing, but we'll never know the source.

It matters not a bit that Obama has never made the slightest move or uttered the tiniest suggestion that Americans should lose their sporting guns, and any hints that he might favor some control on the distribution and ownership of weapons meant only for killing people have been extremely weak. In Gun Fantasy World, nevertheless, the belief that he spends most of his time plotting to confiscate guns is unquestioned.

Go look. You need to. Here's a good starting point, which leads to other sites, most of them relatively on the mild side as gun sites go; those will lead you to others: http://www.dmoz.org/Society/Issues/Gun_Control/Pro-Gun_Rights/

Meet the folks at a Minnesota tea party

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 20:52:00 +0000

By Lydia Howell

While the Tea Parties get significant funding from Dick Armey's Freedomworks, it's a mistake for progressives to write off this conservative movement as just “Astroturf.” We need to ask who the people are who show up at the various stops of the Tea Party Express.

I went to the April 8 Tea Party rally at the Minnesota State Capitol in St. Paul, hoping to find out.

Two different leftists I know see at least some of the people in the Tea Party movement as white working-class people legitimately angered by a government that's abandoned them to a fate of lost jobs, foreclosed homes and the sense of a bleak economic future for their children. There may be some truth to that idea, though neither speech makers nor the people I interviewed April 8 spoke of lost jobs. Primarily, they spoke of taxes, deficits and government spending. At least half of the people there appeared to be of retirement age.

The Tea Parties seem to have been seeded in the rubble of the September 2008 financial meltdown and the Wall Street bailouts that began during the Bush Administration, yet the speakers and the crowds at Tea Party rallies date their dissatisfaction from the election of President Obama and a Democratic majority in Congress.

All of the people at the rightist rallies roundly reject the Democratic health care law call for its repeal.

As the confusing legislative process lumbered along—and Democrats in Congress made more and more anti-progressive “compromises” to get Blue Dog Democrats' votes (and, one suspects, fulfill promises to insurance companies)-- progressives also opposed or at least questioned some aspects of the health insurance bill.

Theoretically, with doubts from both sides, Tea Party people and progressives could open a dialogue. The same could go for the bailout of banks and financial institutions. Common ground seems possible.

But, there are some very real obstacles to such engagement between the Right and progressives.

People at the Minnesota Tea Party rally appeared to oppose ANY health insurance reform, simply repeating the idea that it's an encroachment of “big government” into a “free market system.”

For conservatives, government regulation of big insurance or pharmaceutical corporations has been translated into “Government telling YOU what to do,” as exemplified by the Democrats' individual mandate to buy health insurance. All felt that the mandate—the state forcing people to buy insurance-- is unconstitutional.

Only one 30-something man, who identified himself as Wyatt, noted that, “They could tax you and give you health care and that would be within the bounds of the Constitution. But, they didn't go that way.”

Many opposed the stimulus bills, as much as the bailouts—but did so in the belief that stimulus spending is “out of control government spending.” Most people I talked with felt that the bailed-out auto companies and banks have been “nationalized”--that the government now owns them! This, too, was seen as “big government” encroaching where it shouldn't go at all.

Government employees are the sames as lazy people on welfare in the eyes of the Tea Party rally crowd. In what I think is another attack on unions, the ridiculous claim was made that “average government workers make $70,000 and average private sector workers make $40,000.”

That reminded me of last year's bashing of auto workers with the lie that they all make $70 an hour and, now, the blaming of teachers' unions for public schools that have “failed”.

No speaker on April 8 mentioned the millions of dollars a year paid bank executives, hedge fund managers or health insurance CEOs and no one referred to their bailouts or subsidies.

It appears that for the Tea Party people, class rage runs horizontal and that it is fueled by a kind of “crabs in a barrel” petty envy. Is that by design of Tea Party leadership to make worker solidarity impossible? If stagnating wages and job insecurity are a main root of the Tea Party movement, that's been mis-directed into 21st century red-baiting of President Obama as a “socialist” -- another concern repeated over and over.

It's obvious that many Tea Party people imbibe daily propaganda that plays fast and loose with the facts; their world-view is defined by Fox News pundits Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly. They often appear to get their talking points, called "analysis," from right-wing talk radio -- especially Rush Limbaugh – and to worship Sarah Palin, taking her slogans as their own. Often, their answers to my questions simply parroted the words of right-wing broadcasters. When pressed to be more specific about any issue the response was bewilderment, followed by irritation or outright anger.

To be blunt, all but a couple of Tea Party people were unable to express in any specific terms what their anger is about, what the actual issues or concerns they have are. They voice sentiments along the lines that “Obama is ruining the country” or that immigrants are hurting us and some referred to a nasty rap song, “Press One For English,” but they could offer no specifics to back their feelings.

Iconography of the American Revolution, the Founding Fathers, “Don't Tread On Me” and American flags were in evidence at the April 8 rally. The Tea Partiers are besotted with a kind of "independence" that claims to "need nothing from nobody"--even when a great many Tea Partiers who are 65-plus rely on Medicare and Social Security. At least a third of the crowd the other day obviously were people who are age-eligible for those government programs. Yet one sign and many speakers talked of “unearned entitlements”.

No doubt, the ralliers themselves as "deserving" but, many of the rest of us, in their view, are not.

Such a cold view is the result of 40-plus years of Republican hammering against all social programs, especially those that might benefit some people of color and a kind of alien other called the "urban poor."

It appears that compassion isn't high on the Tea Party's list of Christian virtues (although religion was rarely cited, except for God to bless America and the troops). A large part of their animus to health care reform in general seems to echo this view of mitigated autonomy for white people like themselves and "boot-strap Darwinism" for “the Others.”

There was a sense that sweeping statements against Obama AS Obama, is latest code for racism.

If unemployment continues to rise and as poverty increases among whites, will this skewed outlook shift towards a broader coalition? It's hard to say, since for most of the United States' existence, white working-class and lower middle-class people usually have been more likely to deal with economic anxiety or displacement by closing ranks against others based on race and citizenship status.

It would take a hell of a lot of education by progressives to get most Tea Party people to recognize that corporate elites are the problem, not people of color and the poor. Tea Party people seem to have completely internalized the old Calvnistic notion that “The Rich are God's Chosen People,” translated for the 21st century as “the infallibility of the free market.” They seem to have no understanding at all of why financial markets melted down in September 2008; instead of seeing the banksters' bailout as the problem, they think that the Obama Administration has “taken over” the banks and is refusing to lend to small businesses.

Like fellow white working-class Kansans that Thomas Frank tried to understand in his book "What's The Matter With Kansas?", this movement sometimes feels like a throwback to 40 years ago.

It's as if Richard Nixon's so-called "silent majority" is most angry about a lost Golden Age of unquestioned “American greatness,” unquestoned white male authority and the pre-civil rights era. One speaker on the stage mentioned his “earliest political action standing up to forced busing in the 1970s,” an obvious allusion to ending racial segregation of the country's schools. The Minnesota rally was all white (with the exception of one hired African-American singer), but, let's be fair: very few people of color show up at Minnesota's anti-war rallies either.

One poster read “We Are Not White, Black, Hispanic. We Are Americans.” The Obama as “witchdoctor” posters were not in evidence. I suspect that the undoubtedly well-paid political operatives organizing the Tea Party Express are doing a better job these days of public relations when it comes to racism.

As well documented in polls, most white Americans always continue to deny, as they always have, that racism is a problem—claiming “there's no discrimination” as far back as 1960. In a time claimed to be “post-racist,” with an African-American in the White House, that denial may be stronger than ever. While they raged against deficits from President Obama's economic stimulus plan or health bill , these Minnesota tea partiers were oblivious to deficits run up over eight years by George W. Bush's wars and to the massive tax cuts we've seen for the wealthy. Asking them about the Bush years of $3 trillion wars and deficits brought only blank faces and silence.

While I don't believe that the Tea Party Movment is “all about raicsm,” as some say, I do think that racism and a white fear of a loss of privilege are parts of the subterranean anger fueling the movement.

If we're honest, we can see that any significant step forward for people of color—especially African-Americans—has been followed by a backlash. The election of Barack Obama, immigration from non-European countries, and more visibility of people of color in pro sports, entertainment and government positions coupled with very real economic pain and uncertainty among white people seems to be creating just such a backlash, made sharper by the Great Recession.

Another point progressives might wish to take heart in is Tea Party people's concern about our Constitution, which was alluded to many times in speeches and signs --one read “Stop Shredding Our Constitution.” However, when asked about illegal spying on Americans, torture or other issues that clearly involve the Constitution, issues progressives have raised since early in the Bush administration, the response was indifference.

“In terms of national security, I support whatever keeps us safe and out of another tough situation like 9/11,” said Doug of Faribault -- a sentiment many echoed.

Besides the insurance mandate and gun ownership, Tea Party people can't tell you how the Constitution is being harmed, asserting, “I just know that Barack Obama and the Democrats are doing “unconstitutional things.”

For awhile, progressives could simply make fun of the Tea Party movement. That's not prudent now that death threats, vandalism and a violent atmosphere are emerging from the movement and from its first cousins, the militias and white supremacist groups who have significantly grown in number since Obama's election.

Public opinion polls show a significant sense that neither of the two corporate-sponsored political parties represent the interests of everyday working people--and there's a growing exodus from both parties. A third way needs to be born.

If progressives stay on the sidelines, supporting a Democratic Party that serves Wall Street and corporations as much as the Republicans ever did (or merely stay silent), then, the field is left wide open to the kind of reactionary, racist rage that periodically has bubbled over into violence throughout U.S. history in every economically and socially-challenging time since the Civil War.

To be blunt about it, white working class anger always has been be used to bolster the status quo. It always is mis-directed against immigrants, racial minorities and GLBT people to the advantage of economic elites, who are the real problem.

There's a long history of white working class anger being expressed in hate crimes, lynchings and assassinations. From decades of KKK terrorism to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights movement activists, to todays' violent hate crimes against Mexican immigrants, there's plenty of evidence that such violence is all too possible—especially, during economic hard times.

Recent death threats and vandalism against Democratic members of Congress, with Republicans barely willing to acknowledge the violence, much less denounce it, makes real tragedies all too imaginable.

I didn't see any sidearms or shoulder pistols on the lawn of the State Capitol in St. Paul. One man I talked with had a sign, saying “Damn right I've got a gun!”--a sentiment he passed off as “just messing with the people who think all Tea Party folks are armed.” Another man next to him chimed in “Just one?” and the man with the sign, smiled and said “Well, just one the government knows about.” Asking him if he was reassured by the recent Supreme Court decision which struck down the Washington,D.C. gun ban as unconsitutional and that another case overturning Chicago's 27-year handgun ban is imminent did not seem to reassure him.

All facts to the contrary, the right wing believes that “In Obama's Amreica, the liberals want to take your guns.”

Ultimaelty, what I came away with was that 90 percent of the people I talked with were mired in a frightening morass of ignorance. They were unable to articulate even their own concerns in any concrete way, but, merely repeated slogans about “freedom” or “big government is taking over”. They were oblivious to all facts that contradicted what Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and their Tea Party leaders have put forth.

This level of ignorance—especially among people who are armed -- is terrifying in its implications.

If progressives had made death threats to Republican members of Congress or came to anti-war rallies with guns, you can bet we'd have been labeled “terrorists” and certainly arrested. Is law enforcement taking right wing threats seriously?

Of course, the Tea Party Express ended its rally with tributes to “the troops fighting for our freedom:” Gold Star mothers telling how their sons died in Iraq. Taps came over the loud speakers followed by a Toby Keith-type country-rock patriotic tune. Militarism and blind nationalism blanketed the crowd and at that point I left. One person in a crowd of 500 can't point out that U.S. soldiers aren't dying (and killing) for “our freedom” but, for transnational oil companies and the domination of other people's countries.

Progressives must at least try to re-channel some Tea Party people's rage towards those who have ripped all of us off for over the past 30 years. Progressives can point out who actually has skimmed off more and more of the wealth produced by workers' increasingly productive labor.

We can try to challenge the anti-tax fever that's gripped Tea Party folks by asking, “Do you want decent schools, parks, libraries and other basic infrastructure for your children--as was the case when you were grewing up?” We can point out that 30 to 40 years ago, corporations paid far more of their fair share than they do today, and that created the infrastructure that now crumbles.

We can challenge them to see that all of us deserve that American Dream of a decent life, and that the zero-sum game that's been played since the 1970s is hurting the vast majority of us while a tiny elite grabs more and more of the country's wealth. We can take on deficits by putting forth the necessity to re-consider national priorities and to move away from war.

Spending a couple of hours with the Tea Party Express, proved the truth of early 20th century labor organizer and anarchist, Emma Goldman's observation that, “Ignorance is the most dangerous element in society.” We can offer the Tea Party people a strong cup of coffee to wake them up to reality, but, I suspect that only the Tea Partiers under 35 might be willing to take a drink.

Lydia Howell is an independent, journalist, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, winner of the Premack Award for Public Interest Journalism in Minnesota. She hosts "CATALYST: Politics and Culture" on KFAI Radio in the Twin Cities.

Liberals lose to Fox Party, Corporate Party

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 22:59:00 +0000

Hardly anyone seems to have noticed, but a major realignment of American political parties is almost complete.

Perhaps more than a few people have noticed, but if so they're keeping their observations pretty much to themselves. Could be that some folks simply don't want to believe what they see.

Another possible reason for the silence is that the new alignment all but entirely freezes out very large segments of the American population, a fact that gives politicians and power brokers strong reasons for trying to keep anyone from noticing.

Progressives are shut out by design.

Chris Hayes, Washington editor of The Nation magazine, observed on the Rachel Maddow show on MSNBC Television Wednesday night (March 31, 2010) that “everybody in Washington hates liberals.” Democrats, he added, “believe with Rahm Emanuel that they can do what they want and liberals have to keep voting for them because they have nowhere else to go.”

The theme of that brief discussion between Maddow and Hayes was that “everybody in Washington” is busy doing the work of the rich and powerful, and liberals, who keep demanding that other things happen, are an annoying, if ineffective, impediment to such work.

Hayes is far from the first person to make such observations.

But old-line conservatives also are marginalized and some have been pushed out. Conservatives and the nice, polite folks I think of as carriage liberals have no choice but to step out into the cold with the outspoken progressives or go on doing what they've been doing for years now – giving their money and their votes to people who despise them and routinely screw them over.

One needn't belong to the Guild of Seers and Prognosticators to recognize that they'll go on playing sucker for quite a while yet, probably until they are no longer needed by those who exploit them. It's hard to accept that you've been conned, harder still to realize there is no place for you in the political life of this America.

Progressives, to be clear, are left entirely without a functioning party, with only a bare, literal handful of spokesmen in Congress and no more, if that, in most state legislatures or even on city councils and school boards. Nobody wants them, except for any campaign contributions they might stupidly hand over, and nobody pays them any heed.

Genuine conservatives, as opposed to right wing activists and dupes, are only marginally better off. There are more conservatives than true liberals in Congress and other legislative bodies these days, but those people are so intimidated and cowardly they rarely say or try to do anything that might actually benefit the public, which means their presence is useless. Anyway, the extreme right is shoving them off the cliff now, just as progressives were launched into the ether by the “New Democrats” in the early 1990s. Many of those still in Congress are electing not to run again.

A two-minute history:

Democrats were mostly liberals –- what we now call progressives -- at least from the presidential years of Franklin Roosevelt until the right began to get a firmer hold on both parties in the 1980s. Maybe the 1970s. Dixiecrats –- the racist, Deep South element of the Democratic Party -– raised a lot of hell and prevented black Americans, especially, and working Americans from making all the progress they should have made up into the 1960s, but they couldn't prevent many progressive economic and humanitarian programs from being established, nor did they push policies that benefited the rich at the expense of the average working American.

Republicans through most of my life, which began in the mid 1930s, were “pro-business” and tended to want to slow or stop programs and policies that strengthened those who worked for a living. Some, but not all, were adamantly against Social Security and Medicare and other “safety net” programs.

At the same time many Republicans had generally humane views of how the country should work –- or, at least, Republicans in progressive states such as Minnesota had such views. There were some throwbacks to the Gilded Age, of course; there were people such as Prescott Bush and the rest of the very rich, very right wing crowd that tried to stage a coup against Roosevelt, and others who fought with all the power they could muster against civil rights for anyone who was not white and male.

And, organizations such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and (at least through the 1950s) the National Association of Manufacturers, always fought to reinstate rule of the United States by a plutocracy. But the majority of Republicans were humane conservatives right up to the point that Ronald Reagan took the presidency and sold a new, harsher form of government to a by then mostly ignorant and self-focused public.

But during the 1950s, Republican President Dwight Eisenhower, top U.S. and allied general of World War II, ran a mostly benign administration and warned eloquently of the growth of the “military-industrial complex.”

By the time we got Reagan, the lyrics of the new National Anthem had become “Me, Me, Me,” the sole important goal of the Republican' Party's chief supporters was “more,” and greed had become the country's major defining characteristic.

Not everyone bought it, of course, but the attitudes were sold hard by major media and the people who controlled the bulk of the country's wealth. Most Americans thought it was great.

A bit later we got another Republican, George H.W. Bush, son of Prescott, who started a little war and helped greatly to ramp up corporate influence in government as well as continuing to promote the belief that greed is good.

Finally, then, a nominal Democrat -– but it was Bill Clinton, who sold out the country's poor through “welfare reform” and otherwise took Republican policies and amplified them. Clinton is known to this day by many people as “the best Republican president since Eisenhower.”

Then came George W. Bush, son of George H.W., grandson of Prescott, who embraced the power of wealth and deliberately and through lies and subterfuge got us into two apparently endless wars. He established the United States in the eyes of he world as a brutal international bully that embraces torture and has no use for rule of law.

Now it's Barack Obama, a Democrat who dealt away any chance at real health care reform and is dealing away any chance for genuine economic reform and everything else that progressives might value. He has put Wall Street men in charge of overseeing Wall Street, bankers as overseers of bankers. Obama is a corporate man all the way.

In plain fact, the Democratic Party is in the hands of people quite considerably to the right of most popular Republicans of Dwight Eisenhower's day.

Some of them, such as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid, who now is busy stripping down the jobs bill, can talk a liberal game while at the same time making end runs for the Corporate Team.

There are many nominal Democrats in Congress such as Minnesota's Amy Klobuchar, a corporate player all the way. She's good at the little apple pie issues, taking care of individual kids who've been harmed in some way and legal aliens who are being mistreated by our often out-of-control immigration service, but she almost openly disdains progressives and turns a blind eye to causes such as real health care reform, protecting unions from right wing onslaughts and reregulation of financial institutions.

Klobuchar made no commitment on health care until it came time to vote for the water-weak bill that passed. She flashed a virtual middle finger at constituents who complained about that. Her response to letters from constituents who demanded she stand for real reform was a long boilerplate letter that was sheer, disdainful gibberish and took no stand at all.

The dozens of Democrats like her in the Senate and the many more in the House work for the corporate elite. They unquestioningly do the bidding of the Israel lobby and the National Rifle Association and other outfits willing to pay large in campaign funds, especially if such groups are capable of getting their mindlessly loyal followers to scream at and threatened politicians who don't automatically do their bidding.

In truth, the Democratic Party should now be called the Corporate Party.

And the Republicans?

If we're to get real, we have to call it what it now unmistakably is: The Fox Party.

More and more pundits, reporters, writers and long-time political observers –- not all of them from the political left by any means -– are openly stating what should be an obvious fact: The Republican/Fox Party has no internal leadership.

It takes its cues, its positions, its “talking points” not from members of Congress and former members of Republican administrations or from any party organization or collection of Republicans but from outsiders, most especially from the screamers and hate mongers employed by Rupert Murdoch and Fox News, the little would-be tyrant-makers vying to be the next Joseph Goebbels.

In so doing, the Republican Party has adopted an almost openly racist stance and a vehemently anti-labor position. It supports a vendetta against the country's poor, and an abusive position against gays, immigrants and anyone else it can use for hate objects to distract a fearful public from the real agenda: the dismantling of democracy and the establishment of a plutocracy in the United States.

It takes a “screw you” approach to the middle class. Many in the middle class -– confused, very badly educated and made more ignorant by Fox and other, less vicious but entirely vacuous news media -– lap it up and beg for more.

It is one of the biggest displays of masochism in human history, but most of those being beaten down won't realize what's happened until they become aware, too late, that their hides have been flayed from their bones.

The parallels between the United States of 2010 and Italy and Germany of the 1920s are far too great to be dismissed. A relative handful of nasty and even evil people have found ways to make brutal policies and stances seem like simple and reasonable solutions to complex problems.

Most people in this country, with its system of training employees rather than educating citizens, never learned that ideas that can be explained with a slogan, especially when they are sold through hate and the victimizing of some segments of the population, are always designed to benefit a handful at the top and will sooner or later, make everyone else victims.

Until George W. Bush sat in the White House, I never thought to see such a move to fascism again anywhere in the western world, let alone in my own country, but that is where we're heading.

Rational, thinking, humane citizens already are almost locked out of the political system. It seems very likely that the rise of the extreme right will continue at an accelerating pace, growing ever harsher. It's also a sure bet that humane conservatives and, even more, the carriage liberals will continue in denial, rather than engage in any meaningful opposition until the right is in complete control.

We have the Corporate Party and the Fox Party and the public thinks, or pretends, we're still living in the age of Democrats and Republicans.

A shocking number of the sanest people I know are seriously looking at moving out of the country, and on reflection I have to say that may be the smart move.

What does Murdoch want?

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 20:42:00 +0000

What does Rupert Murdoch want?

Murdoch, as almost every literate person around the world knows, is the ruler of News Corp., a media empire without borders, operating in more than 50 countries.

He owns roughly 200 to 300 newspapers, from local weeklies to major dailies. He owns more magazines than I've had time to count. He has at least 15 movie and television production studios, and broadcast, satellite and cable outlets, both entertainment and news-oriented, in the United States, Britain, Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Turkey, Georgia, Israel, Latvia, Israel, Italy, New Zealand, all over Latin America, Germany, Spain, China and more.

And, he controls the misnamed Fox News, the cable television outlet that spews nothing but right wing propaganda 24 hours a day throughout the United States.

This is your duty as a citizen: Take a deep breath and try to watch and listen to Fox for a half hour or so at a time, at various times of day. More if you can stand it. You'll rarely catch even a single story that is not twisted to fit an extreme right view of the world.

Don't take my word for it or accept that the widely-held view is correct; screw up your courage, batten down your brain and watch. And remember that nothing that happens in the Murdoch empire is done without his approval; he doesn't personally vet every story, of course, but he approves the tone and the approach and the views expressed.)

Many of Murdoch's other outlets in this country, and the several I have seen abroad, also push listeners, viewers or readers to the right, but generally more subtly. Even the entertainment outlets tend to lean a bit to the right in the films and shows they feature. Most of the rest feature mindless crap, often with an adolescent and smarmy sexual twist.

The Fox News in-your-face style, with shouting obvious propagandists such as Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh, apparently is rooted in the belief that the American audience for the lies it sells is too ignorant and stupid to absorb anything even slightly subtle.

That's probably an accurate assessment.

The Wall Street Journal, which always leaned to the right in its editorial and op-ed pages, was highly respected for its fair presentation of news until Murdoch got hold of it in 2007. (Confession: I wrote many news articles for the Journal as a freelance contributor in the 1970s and '80s; I was often assigned stories by the paper's editors.) Since Murdoch took over the Journal, the editorial/op-ed views have gone even farther to the right -– extreme, some might say, at least in some cases –- and the right wing views of the owner have crept into news operations at an accelerating rate.

Murdoch is not one who does anything for what he thinks is the public good. Even a quick look at his life reveals a man whose only real interests are himself, his wealth, self-promotion and, especially, power. An Australian by birth and most of his life, he became a citizen of the United States quite obviously because to do so would benefit his empire.

(No doubt he took the classes and the tests sitting side by side with people who fled places like Somalia and Georgia and Serbia in search of a merely violence-free life. Yeah sure, you betcha.)

A young Orson Welles could have turned the Murdoch story into a wonderful movie about the son of a small-time Australian newspaper publisher who rose to enormous wealth and aimed to rule the world.

But Rupert Murdoch is 79 years old as of March 11. While he may not quite believe in his own mortality –- many megalomaniacs before him have had the same blind spot –- he cannot believe he's actually going to live long enough to, in fact, be the behind-the-scenes ruler of much of the world.

Murdoch arguably already is the most powerful man in the world. He certainly influences many powerful people and undoubtedly controls some, and he can reasonably be said now to control one the the two biggest political parties in the United States through the people who work for him at Fox News, but he doesn't yet simply lay down the law here, or even in Australia.

Is that what he wants? To rule?

I don't know. I do know that in addition to being enormously powerful, he is enormously dangerous to countries that want to live by rule of law, and to people who want to live where ordinary men and women have influence through democratic processes. He's pushing the rule of the rich for all he's worth, and in financial terms he's worth almost unimaginable sums.

Setting the stage for a political murder

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 03:42:00 +0000

Someone's going to get killed.

More specifically, it is all but certain that someone prominent, probably a member of Congress or a family member or aid of a member of Congress, will be physically attacked and quite possibly murdered soon by a fanatical right-wing knuckle dragger.

It's entirely possible that several people, or even many people, as in Oklahoma City in 1995, will be slaughtered by one or some of the cretins who feed their rage on right wing radio and television and the speeches of Republican hate mongers in and out of Congress.

President Barack Obama and his family certainly are not safe, despite the heightened efforts of the Secret Service.

In truth, the hysterical right wing militia movement that inspired Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and his helper, Terry Nichols, was infinitely weaker than today's extremist movement in terms of numbers of people, money, media support and complicity at high levels of political life.

If there were a handful (certainly no more) Republican nuts in Congress egging on the militia madmen in the 1980s and early 1990s, they didn't begin to reach the numbers of unscrupulous Republicans who now encourage the “tea partiers” and their like to ever more irrational and more violent rhetoric and, as the shouting escalates, to action.

The nearest thing we've seen to this out-of-control mob since the Civil War was the racist backlash to the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Then, too, there were hundreds of thousands of enraged haters looking for a chance to maim and kill, or at least hoping that torturers and killers would come forth to attack black activist Americans and their white allies.

Inevitably, some of the sickest of that lot did step forward, seeking to be heroes to the other crazies.

Sometimes, we must remember, they succeeded in murder –- the murder of children, the murder of people who just happened to be where the haters struck, sometimes the murder of good people who believed in and worked toward racial equality. The child-killers were just as proud of themselves as were those who tortured and killed civil rights activists, and they received just as much support within the “community” of racists.

Most Americans have seen reports of the actions of demonstrators against the Democrats' health care bills over the past week or three, and the actions taken by right wing creeps since the main bill passed and was signed into law by the president. But a quick refresher on just a few of the actions:

* The “tea party” boobs chanted “Kill the bill, nigger, Kill the bill, nigger” at several black members of Congress. Rep. John Lewis of Georgia, a genuine hero of the civil rights movement, was spat upon as well as called nigger by the self-styled “patriots.”

* Some of the “good Americans” screamed “faggot” at Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts, on at least two occasions.

* House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and more than a dozen other Congressional Democrats have received apparently serious threats against their lives to the degree that security around them has been greatly increased.

* Pelosi and several other Democrats were called “communists” and “socialists” and other nonsensical names by wild-eyed screamers. They had to be protected from the mob when entering the Capitol of the United States to do their jobs.

* A right wing blog gave out the home address of Rep. Tom Perriello in Charlottesville, Va., only it wasn't the congressman's home. It was the home of his brother Bo. The dimwitted blogger invited people to drop by the house and “express their thanks” to the congressman for voting for the health care bill. Someone deliberately cut a gas line to the house, an act that might easily have led to an explosion, destruction of the home and even death for its inhabitants. (In Minnesota, we know the danger; two houses here have blown up in the past three weeks as a result of accidentally cut gas lines.) Fortunately, nobody was injured and the house itself wasn't damaged.

* Even Bart Stupak, the rabid antiabortionist from Michigan, has received many apparently serious death threats since voting for the health bill –- something he did only after he got triple assurances that no federal money will be used to pay for abortions (a stipulation that already was in the law).

* Rep. Randy Neugebauer, a Republican from Louisiana, shouted “baby killer” at Stupak in the House chamber after Stupak said he would vote for the health bill. Neugebauer soon claimed he meant the bill, not Stupak, but no one bought that. Then the Louisiana boob sort of apologized for his egregious breach of House decorum –- and turned around within 24 hours and made that breach into a fund-raising TV commerical for himself. That's a nasty little trick that seems to be becoming a standard Republican money-maker, in fact. Joe Wilson, the “You lie” guy did the same thing.

* A brick was thrown through the glass door of New York Rep. Louise Slaughter's Niagara Falls office, and since then a reportedly large number of other Democrats have been threatened with bricks through home and office windows.

* Rep. Anthony Weiner of New York, an outspoken proponent of a single-payer health care system, got a letter the FBI said “could be interpreted as threatening.” The letter contained a quantity of an unidentified white powder.

* Here in Minnesota, Reps. Betty McCollum of the 4th district and Keith Ellison of the 5th district have received specifically threatening letters. Sens. Al Franken and Amy Klobuchar also have been threatened. (Doesn't take much to set off the vicious right wing nuts, obviously; Klobuchar voted for the health bill, but she was a belated and apparently reluctant supporter of the legislation.)

Republican politicians have almost openly encouraged such behavior. They continue the incitement, and, with an eye on this fall's elections, have gone even farther with their crowd-stirring lies and overheated rhetoric than before.

As reported by the Washington Post, Republican members of Congress made outrageous statements to protesters and on the floor of the House during the run-up to health bill passage. (Some other outlets also reported some of the same and other statements and actions, but in general the corporate media treated the offending and offensive Republicans with a gentleness one would not see were the miscreants Democrats.)

Republicans put photographs of former Democratic members of the House on the chairs of present Democrats. The photos were of people who lost their seats in 1994 -– the obvious implication being that because of the health bill, the Democrats are on their way out this year. Most high school students would have more dignity and a greater sense of decorum.

Republican Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee said that with the health bill “freedom dies.” Texas Republican Ted Poe of Texas brayed that the Democrats are “on the path of tyranny.” Mike Rogers of Michigan yelled that the Democrats were pulling “dirty deal after dirty deal.” Devin Nunes of California claimed Democrats are just like Soviets and shouted that the House should “Say no to totalitarianism.”

And let's not forget the Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives applauding right wing protesters in the galleries as they shouted similar things to disrupt House proceedings.

And then a bunch of Republicans went out onto the House balcony to play to the protesters outside. Buck McKeon of California, Rob Bishop of Utah and Mike Turner of Ohio waved signs saying “Kill the Bill,” the Post noted. (Much of this was shown on television.) Mary Fallin of Oklahoma, Geoff David of Kentucky and Bill Bosey of Florida held up a “Don't Tread on Me” flag and then six or seven other Republicans went out onto the balcony waving “Kill the Bill” signs.

Fallin was quoted afterwards as saying “that's kind of fun.”

When asked about their supporters shouting racist and homophobic slurs at their fellow members of Congress, some Republicans pulled almost comically long faces -– some looked like they were barely succeeding in holding back laughs -- and said such behavior was naughty, with about that much vehemence.

A couple of Republicans in leadership jobs actually said that using the vilest of racist and homophobic slurs is “reprehensible.”

Since the weekend, even as Republicans went into a calculated pout in the Senate, preventing both routine and some very important committee hearings from going forward, they and their totally unrestrained mouthpieces in radio and television -– their real leaders, actually -- have been escalating the rhetoric in an unmistakably deliberate effort to incite their ignorant followers to even greater hysteria.

All you have to do to hear what's going on is to turn on Fox (I can't say Fox “News”) when Limbaugh or Beck or one of the network's Extremist Babes is on.

One example from my neck of the woods: Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, who seems never to have made contact with truth or reality, said in 2008 that she was very concerned that Barack Obama “may have anti-American views.” She also once asked that someone investigate members of Congress to find out “whether they're pro-American or anti-American.”

Wednesday (March 25, 2010), Bachmann spoke at an event closed to the press --a device increasingly used by Republicans to prevent the general public from hearing the nuttier things they say to the true believers. It nevertheless came out that Bachmann said “I had very serious concerns that Barack Obama had anti-American views, and now I look like Nostradamus.”

That's the pitch, and Republicans keep hammering it without qualm or any reference to truth or ethics. Their story, increasingly vehement, increasingly false, is that Democrats are anti-American, anti-patriotic, out to destroy our country, to turn it into a communist totalitarian gulag, etc., etc.

The Republican act is playing very well to the tea partiers and their sympathizers, by the way. Newspapers in the South and places such as Missouri and Kansas reported honestly on the racial and homophobic spewings of the health bill protesters. But look up the stories on their Web sites, and then look at reader responses – and be ready to gag or weep.

Those I looked at drew very large numbers of notes from people who, along with echoing the slurs, dismissed the reports of the vile behavior by claiming that those who objected to the racism and homophobia were smearing the protesters.

The Republican Party and its office holders are encouraging the racist, homophobic, anti-feminist passions that are at the very heart of and essential to this ugly, distorted “patriotic” movement of the ignorant, the fearful and the misled.

Somewhere, some mentally lame believer in Limbaugh/Beck/Palin/Bachmann et al almost surely will make a bid to become a hero of “the movement” by murdering one or more of its perceived enemies. In their view Democrats and liberals are, after all, an enemy out to destroy their America.

And those who have incited the mobs and are inciting them still will cluck their tongues and say the killer or killers were acting on their own and nobody could condone such an act. Oh, indeed no. Some of them will also mention, in the next breath, that one can nevertheless understand why the killers are so angry given the anti-American thrust of the Democrats.

In fact, some Republicans already are saying just that, smoothing the way for the crimes to come.

If they come, when they come, we must not lose track of who is responsible, nor let them skate free of that responsibility.

Obama, Democrats sell us out

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 05:42:00 +0000

On Friday, March 12, 2010, going into a weekend in which it was assumed that final deals would be cut among the White House and Senate and House Democrats on the form of the 2010 health care “reform” bill, it became unmistakably clear that Senate Democrats and the Obama White House were maneuvering desperately to kill any remaining chance that a public option would become part of the bill.

They were in charge, but some members of the House of Representatives and some citizen organizations were making the situation uncomfortable, and presenting at least some threat of exposure.

So the White House and Democratic senators were at the same time trying to make it appear that they wanted the public option but -- oh me, oh my, oh dear -- just couldn't make it happen. Well, working to give that appearance to the more gullible segments of the public and to the carriage liberals who cover their ears and eyes while chanting that we must support Obama and the Democrats in all that they do. And, of course, the corporate news media will buy the act.

It was frustrating and, finally, embarrassing to listen to Chris Hayes, Washington editor of The Nation magazine, and Rachel Maddow talk about the supposed dilemma on Maddow's MSNBC television show Friday evening.

Hayes, who obviously understood exactly what was going on, kept saying that it just didn't make any sense that the Democrats weren't going to pass a bill with a public option. He called it terribly frustrating. He said in two or three ways that the Democrats could pass a public option if they want it; the votes should be there, the method is there. He repeated a couple of times that polls and other evidence make it clear that a solid majority of Americans want a public option, and that they elected Obama and other Democrats in part to give them that choice.

Maddow made similar noises and kept asking Hayes what was going on, and why wouldn't the Democrats give the American people the public option they they want. She almost certainly understood the situation as well as he did, yet neither one of them would clearly state the obvious truth:

The people who hand out corporate campaign money do not want a public option.

It would cut substantially into corporate profits, which will grow insanely by means of a “reform” bill without a true public option. Neither the White House nor Senate Democrats will act contrary to the wishes of those who have the big money. (Neither will House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, if she can help it, by the way, but she'll give in if there's major pressure from other House members.)

Obama made it clear a long time ago that he will give the corporations what they want on health care, and to hell with what the people need. He all but publicly guaranteed weeks ago that there will be no public option.

Corporations, including health insurers and pharmaceutical giants, will spend even more millions of dollars this year and in future years to buy politicians. All rules against such spending were removed Jan. 21 by the five-man right-wing majority on what we must now call the Extreme Court.

Neither the Obama White House, ruled to a large extent by this president's own Turd Blossom, Rahm Emanuel, nor most Senate Democrats are prepared to upset people who wield that kind of power.

Hayes did note correctly on Friday's Maddow show that many of the 41 senators who signed what amounts to a letter of intent to vote for a bill containing a public option did so only on the assumption that such a bill would not come to a vote.

That undoubtedly is true of Minnesota's Amy Klobuchar, who crawls on her belly for big campaign bucks and who refused to commit to any specific health care reform proposal until last week when, with Minnesota Democrats yelling at her, she reluctantly signed the letter. It would be revealing to know what she said to her corporate funders about that, and what assurances she provided them.

There's a tiny chance that public exposure of Democrat maneuvering could bring us a public option by the tiniest of majorities, but the odds are akin to those against winning a major lottery jackpot.

The simple truth is, we've been sold out.

That's how it works in 21st century America, and even more so since Jan. 21.

Corporate killers: truths we won't face

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 19:18:00 +0000

There is no essential difference between an American health insurance company and the American and Italian Mafias.

There is no substantive difference between a big pharmaceutical corporation and a Mexican or Colombian illegal drug cartel.

There is no qualitative difference between New York and Chicago mobs and Blackwater (Xe) and most of the other pieces of the profiteering “defense” industry.

If you work for any such organization you are, in a rational moral sense, equal to a button man, a contract killer, a bag man, a dealer selling drugs to kids on street corners or a mob lawyer.

Of course, if you work for one of the deadly but legal organizations, you no doubt have covered yourself in ignorance and denial of how evil they are. Given the fact that they are legal, you can justify your involvement to your own satisfaction. Maybe.

Yes, I mean those statements literally.

Seeing that, many Americans would immediately identify me as a left-wing nut, an extremist, and quite possibly dangerous. Even many who think the tea party loonies are just slightly off center would have no hesitation in calling me a radical and probably crazy.

In reading those opening four statements, many who think of themselves as “liberals” will suck in their breath a bit and think to themselves that I have, at least, wildly exaggerated the situation. Some will feel unease in the chest or gut, or wherever they usually first register fear and uncertainty. They will not under any circumstances associate themselves with what I have said.

The United States of America, even more than most other countries and much more than many, is built on myths. One of the most false of those myths is that this is a benign country, one that cares for its people and all the peoples of the world. Another is that we are a brave nation, willing to fight and die for justice and humanity.

In fact, and the fact is plain if you dare to face it, this is a country that is entirely self-centered, eager to grasp wealth wherever it is available, more than willing to do terrible harm to those who might try to get some piece of what our ruling elite desires.

And this is, at the same time, a cowardly country, peopled in majority by the constantly fearful.

More than anything else, this country and its people quake before uncomfortable truths, truths that lay bare our grasping and selfishness, our cruelty and, especially, our legions of fears. We won't admit them or talk about them, our “media” will not acknowledge their existence. We are terrified by the fact that we are afraid.

And so what I said in those first four sentences of this little essay will be rejected by almost everyone who reads them.

They are true nevertheless.

Our insurance corporations and pharmas and arms industries profit enormously from death and mayhem. That is established fact.

More criminally, they increase their profits by increasing the suffering of others, and they do that through the use of every tool at their disposal. They cheat and lie to their customers and to the government (which knows it is being lied to and does nothing in response). They do everything in their power to avoid doing what they have promised to do, to avoid paying what they legitimately owe, and they are extremely successful at that avoidance. That also is established fact.

And by avoiding what they've promised to do, in refusing to deliver what they have claimed they would deliver, they cause death and enormous physical suffering, not to mention financial ruin, for the people they claim to serve. That, too, is established fact.

Everyone in this country knows that you are extremely lucky to actually get a health insurance company to pay what it has promised if and when you get seriously ill. We know, every one of us, that insurance companies regularly come up with phony excuses for not paying –- you had a “pre-existing condition” or you somehow brought your suffering on yourself or, or, or... They took your money until you needed to use your insurance; they won't pay but they won't give back what you paid them over years, perhaps many decades.

The cases run to the hundreds of thousands, probably the millions. We all know it, because documented examples of such corporate behavior are reported all over the country daily.

A few days ago as I write this, Rachel Maddow talked about this on her MSNBC television show. I was disappointed, even offended, though, by her repeated statement that paying out on the insurance they sold “is not the business” of the insurance companies. They are “not in the business of paying,” she said again and again. “They are in the business of taking our money and making profits.”

She was right, of course, but she was very wrong to accept this as just the way things are.

To take money and use dirty tricks and hide behind laws that they paid to have written (or have written themselves) and to cause people to suffer and die and sink into homeless poverty as a result is, in a moral sense, as criminal as selling cocaine and heroin at school doors or forcing children into sex slavery.

The death and the physical agonies and the ruined lives are equally terrible whether the cause is cocaine or heroin or the withholding of a needed medication or the refusal to pay for treatment of cancer.

To sell needed pharmaceuticals at multiples sometimes hundreds of times the cost of making them, and to withhold supplies to those who cannot pay those outrageous prices, certainly is as criminal, in a legitimate if not legal sense, as fostering addictions and then charging users prices that demand they commit other illegal acts in order to pay to feed their habits.

And don't buy the pharma claims that they need the money for research. Get the facts. Governments pay for most pharmaceutical research. That legal drug prices in this country are set at what should be criminal levels is easily demonstrable: The same drugs that are sold in this country are sold by the same companies all over the world for prices that often are no more than a small fraction of what we pay. The proof is easy to find; it's been reported over and over.

They sell to us at insane prices, and refuse us the drugs if we can't pay, simply because they can get away with it here; the drug companies write the laws that affect their industry.

Push back your conventional American acceptance of all things corporate and think about this: Doing things deliberately that kill and maim and cause great suffering in order to profit is what it is, whether done under the umbrella of an outlaw gang or a legal corporation. People get just as dead, their physical agonies are just as horrible, the poverty caused is just as real.

As for the war racket: I shouldn't have to go into great detail about the likes of Blackwater. It was created by a gang of professional killers and given its source of income – from our tax dollars -- by a bunch of politicians who were friendly with its founders. It serves no legitimate purpose. What it does legitimately should be done by our military. Those things were done by our military until the Bush gang came along. That the company routinely acts criminally has been shown over and over; just go to Google.

Of course, in America, if something is legal, as the profit-sucking activities of the insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies are legal, we accept it as legitimate. We might complain, but we don't really do anything. We still see the executives of those corporations as outstanding individuals, because we admire wealth above all else. We think it's fine if our neighbors work in jobs that, for example, consist of finding ways not to pay policy holders who now need their insurer to deliver what was promised.

We also honor our legislators and our judges. But the great majority of our legislators are no better than cops who take bribes from gangsters to look the other way as arms and drug deals are perpetuated on our streets. A large and growing number of our judges –- up to and including the majority of five on what we used to call the Supreme Court –- are on an exact moral par with judges who take direct payments from the New York mob or the Russian mafia.

What they do may be “legal” since they wrote the laws, but it is criminal in the true sense.

That's the way it is in America.

Apparently most Americans approve, since they don't choose to do anything to bring change.

-------------------------------

At some point, we should talk about treason.

Some on the right no doubt would call me a traitor should they happen on my little essay on corporate criminality. But, believe it or not, treason is defined not as opposing corporations or corporate rule but as “acting to overthrow one's government or to harm or kill its sovereign” or “a violation of allegiance to one's sovereign or state.” -- Random House Webster's College Dictionary.

So unless you regard corporations as sovereign – which, come to think of it, many Americans do – opposition to the criminal behavior of corporations is not treason.

But, given the true, traditional and dictionary definition of treason, this country needs some serious discussion of the activities of politicians who push our country into war for the sole purpose of profit for the economic elite.

We should talk about a major political party that is openly and uncompromisingly dedicated to making our government fail -– with the help of some equally dedicated but slightly less open members of the other major party.

We should talk about a growing segment of our judiciary -– and most especially the five-member majority of our highest judicial body -– which ignores the oaths it swore on Bibles in which the members claim to believe and has dedicated itself to tearing down the Constitution of the United States in order to benefit that same tiny elite.

Perhaps another time.

State Republicans can crush people, too

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 22:28:00 +0000

March 1, 2010

The Minnesota House of (you may laugh) Representatives failed Monday (today) to override a veto by right wing Gov. Tim Pawlenty of funding for General Assistance Health Care, a program that provides, until now, health care for poor people, mostly elderly, children and many military veterans. The vote was 87 to override, 46 against – 3 votes short of the two-thirds majority needed to override.

Very quickly, off the top of my head:

I attended the “rally” at the Minnesota State Capitol this afternoon in support of a House override of Gov. Tim Pawlenty's veto of a bill to continue GAMC (a health-care program for the poor.)

Would guess about 150 – 200 people showed up to stand around outside the front door to the House chamber and, eventually, wander around the nearby halls. Ran into my state rep., good guy Frank Hornstein, in the hall outside the chamber. He told me that the Dems already knew the Republicans were taking a page from Congressional Republicans and voting as a block – no exceptions – to prevent an override. Republican minority wins again.

I was allowed into the House gallery and listened to what is loosely called “debate” for about half an hour. The stench of hypocrisy, combined with the stink of Republican smugness and the sounds of weak Democratic whining disgusted me and I left.

If you want to go on believing that “representative democracy” works, do not actually listen to what passes for debate in a legislative body.

Republican side was best represented by Rep. Tony Cornish, who is chief of police of Lake Crystal, Minn., a very small town in Blue Earth County in southern Minnesota.

The stylish Rep. Cornish – really nice, well cut sports jacket and what appeared to be razor-cut hair -- declared that he and other Republicans have “no need to be ashamed” of refusing to override the veto nor of supporting Pawlenty's decision to stop funding GAMC. “We can't afford to take care of everybody,” he declared with jutting jaw. Besides, funding health care for the poor “hurts other people” by forcing them to pay more taxes, he said.

The representative of – who the hell are this guy's constituents? -- also said he would “not be intimidated” by the very quiet people out in the halls and warned other Republicans against being intimidated. Very brave. Those elderly veterans and mostly gray haired matrons probably looked pretty dangerous to a tough cop.

Cornish also objected to frequent references to god and Biblical dictates of caring for others from Democrats. Cornish said he would put his church attendance record up against that of any other member of the House. He added that “I have a heart, too,” but he offered no evidence to support that contention.

I had to agree with him on the god references. It was a sad display by the Dems. They offered few real arguments for supporting GAMC and sounded merely pouty; they already had surrendered.

The other major argument, made by less forceful Republicans, was that there shouldn't be an override “because negotiations with Gov. Pawlenty and Republicans” are still continuing. That's eyewash for the press, soundbites for television. The Republicans have stuck, just like in Congress, and consider “negotiations” to mean the other side surrenders all.

Oh yeah: Cornish said most plainly something that came more obliquely from other Republicans: If people are going to use the Bible for justification of actions like supporting GAMC, then they have to stand by (his opinion) Biblical bans on abortion and gay unions and other things Republicans don't like.

Comment: Forget the old sausage-making analogy. I've seen the making of sausage. It doesn't come close to being as ugly or nauseating as the process of legislating for the rich and against the vast majority of citizens. It's not even as off-putting as the weak-kneed performance of Democrats when confronted with strong opposition from the right.

I used to subscribe to the common feeling, when seeing or hearing of someone's suffering because of great illness, severe injury or financial disaster: “I wouldn't wish that on anybody.”

Well now I do wish it. The right wing sociopaths will never concern themselves with the pain of the poor until their own insulation, or perceived insulation, is stripped away. So I will rejoice every time one of those heartless bastards is taken down by the kind of misery that afflicts so many who are not as well protected by relative wealth, family and other resources.

The exceptionalism of such people will prevent them from learning anything even if they are hit by physical or financial disaster, of course. When it happens to others, it is deserved, or at least a result of their own imprudence. When it happens to them, members of the smug right, only then does it become truly unfair, a victimization.

Another day that will live in infamy

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 22:46:00 +0000

“...and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
-- Abraham Lincoln, Nov. 19, 1863; “The Gettysburg Address.”

It's a good idea, I think, to take out a sizable piece of white paper and write on it in bold, black lettering this date: January 21, 2010. Then, with or without frame, hang it somewhere in your home where you will see it daily.

If you're clever with computers, perhaps you can get yourself a presentable printout to frame. You might want to add a simple elucidation. The piece of printer paper I've pinned temporarily to the wall in my office carries, under the date, the words “Roberts court kills U.S. democracy.”

I was angry and hurried when I did that. The date may be sufficient. The truth is that the court merely injected the final, fatal dose of poison into the veins of a representative democracy that already was critically sick. It will be a lingering death, probably with occasional spurts of what look like potential returns to health.

January 21, 2010.

It is a date as important as any we were required to memorize as school children. It is far more significant than the ubiquitous 9/11. The latter is a political expedient, a rallying cry for demagogues who lead their thoughtless followers by means of fear and lies. January 21, 2010 is a day on which, truly, this country changed drastically for the worse, and probably for the remainder of its existence.

That is not exaggeration, not hyperbole, as I trust Americans are beginning to realize.

Some people, supporters of the power of wealth and the tweedy sort of (figuratively) pipe sucking academics who want always to appear serene and ever so objective, dismiss the importance of the court decision on the grounds that corporations already have so much power a little more won't make much difference.

One answer to that is that, yes, corporations – that is, the highest level of corporate executives – have too much political power. We need to take away some of that power. If members of a gang carrying knives confront us on the street and demand everything we have, we don't immediately go to our government and plead with it to provide the gangsters with guns because they are inadequately armed.

Another answer is that the decision by the Corporate Five on the court is, without question, a signal to those whom they serve that even the thin gloves they wear now can come off. Whatever the corporate leaders choose to do to win and hold decisive power over our government, presumably short of open physical intimidation, this court will support. If representative democracy is to function in this country, we cannot allow that.

If, as I now hope, there is a rebellion – I do hope for a bloodless rebellion – in this country, that date will be the rallying cry. If, as is almost certain, there is no rebellion, it will be the date we will have to point to as the day that signaled that there was no future for government “of the people, by the people and for the people.”

The next two articles below deal in more detail with the Extreme Court's decision of Jan. 21, 2010.

Extreme Court wrote law it wanted

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 22:27:00 +0000

On Jan. 21, 2010, the Supreme Court of the United States handed the members of a tiny, almost exclusively male club the ability to amplify their already too-powerful voices in the country's political arena to the point that they can, at will, drown out all other voices.

Corporations, which is to say top-level executives, have the right to spend unlimited amounts of company money to support candidates of their choice in political campaigns, the court said.

Members of that little club -– membership determined solely by massive wealth -- don't even have to be citizens of the United States.

By acting through businesses incorporated in this country, an oil sheik from Saudi Arabia or the government of China can have more to say about who is elected to run our government than millions of U.S. citizens, as individuals or groups. Money absolutely determines who is elected to office in this country of half-educated, television-benumbed, badly led voters.

Right wing pundits and various Pollyannas to the contrary, that is not hyperbole. It is fact. If you are not one of the elite, but find your glass still half full, the content of that glass is poisoned Kool-Aid.

The decision to allow unfettered campaign spending by corporations was committed by five proud right wing activists among the nine justices.

Make that four proud right wing activists and one man, Thomas, who always votes with them for unfathomable reasons that appear to be rooted in constant rage.

The decision hangs on a legal fiction, the personhood of corporations, that was almost accidentally arrived at in the nineteenth century and gradually and carelessly strengthened over the years. Even so, the doctrine of corporate personhood never until Jan. 21, 2010, meant what the court of Chief Justice John Roberts said it means.

Justice Roberts and the court's other warriors of the right made a carefully calculated move to advance their political and social goals. Legal experts not financially and ideologically attached to right-wing organizations widely agree that the case that was the basis for the decision, Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission, did not call for such a far-reaching conclusion.

In its ruling, the court overturned roughly a century of precedent -– numerous previous rulings that allowed Congress to establish restrictions on corporate spending on political campaigns.

The majority explained the hurry-up by claiming the situation was a “legal emergency” but offered no serious explanation or evidence to support that claim.

To get to where they wanted to go, Roberts and Co. took a case that, in the eyes of numerous Constitutional law experts I've heard and read, begged to be decided on a quite narrow, technical question. Instead, the court made a sweeping declaration that all restrictions on corporate campaign spending are illegal.

It was in such a rush that, as the New York Times said, it moved “at breakneck speed,” giving lawyers just a month to prepare their briefs on a complex issue -– much less than is usual -– and even held hearings during its vacation period.

Roberts and his group had something it wanted to do, and it's logical and reasonable to conclude from their actions that they knew what that was before they read the briefs or heard the arguments.

The court majority made law, it did not interpret law.

It's members haven't admitted political motivation, of course, nor will they. There simply is no other rational explanation for what occurred.

Look at the players in this tragic farce:

Roberts was known to openly favor the interests of corporations and very wealthy individuals over the interests of ordinary citizens long before his appointment by George W. Bush to the Supreme Court.

As a judge, Roberts took at least two questionable stands against environmentalists and for corporations accused of polluting the environment and breaking environmental laws. As a lawyer he worked pro bono (taking no fee) to break a Colorado state constitutional amendment protecting gay rights. He was closely involved for some time with the right-wing Federalist Society but during his confirmation hearings denied ever being a member. His decisions and his activities as a lawyer show him as a fighter for the powerful and dismissive of individual rights. Roberts was a legal adviser to Jeb Bush during the election debacle of 2000, helping him to find ways to give the Florida vote to Bush's brother George.

At his confirmation hearings in 2005, the unmistakably smug Roberts repeatedly testified, often sporting his trademark smirk, that he would be “conservative” in deciding matters of law and very, very respectful of precedence. He lied and, given his behavior since joining the bar, it was obvious that he lied. He already personified the “activist” judge. Millions of us were disgusted with Democrats who joined in the 78-22 confirmation vote.

In 2000, Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy and Clarence Thomas voted to hand the presidency to George Bush in what was, obviously to almost all of America, a purely political decision. No further detail is needed.

The fifth vote in January to give corporations complete freedom to buy elections was cast by Samuel Alito Jr., a George W. Bush appointee. During his confirmation hearings four years ago, Alito also promised, falsely, to interpret law, not make it, to be respectful of precedence and to be anything but political in his consideration of law. Since joining the court, he has taken an unfailingly right wing approach and brought new energy to the term “activist judge.”

Much has been written about Alito's obvious anger and mouthing of the words “not true” (I lip-read it as “simply not true”) when President Obama criticized the court's January decision during his state of the union speech. I half expected Alito to add “boy” to the sentence.

But in truth, Roberts' reaction was more telling: Roberts sat tall and smirked; he had won for the rich and powerful, those he clearly sees as the country's rightful rulers, and he damned well took pride in that. Watch the video.

Even retired Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, a conservative who has been deeply reluctant to criticize the court, allowed the other day that the Jan. 21 decision was not a good one and that one result is likely to be “an increasing problem for maintaining an independent judiciary,” because big-money interests undoubtedly will greatly influence the elections of judges.

The Roberts majority maintained in its ruling that to keep corporations from unrestrained campaigning for specific candidates is contrary to the First Amendment right of free speech.

That's false on the face of it, because the individuals who make up a corporation -– U.S. citizens, anyway -– have and always have had as much right as anyone else to speak up on behalf of politicians they favor and against those they don't like. Forbidding direct corporate participation in campaigns does not in any way limit the rights of those living, breathing individuals.

I can publicly declare that Minnesota's absentee governor, Tim Pawlenty, is a heartless servant of billionaires and send contributions to any candidate who runs against him. Brian Moynihan, CEO of Bank of America, can say that Barack Obama is a revolution-seeking Marxist and can contribute to the campaign of anyone who runs against the president. That was true before this court decision. He and I and you and Aunt Sophie all had those rights and have them still.

Our Supreme Court now says, however, that Moynihan and others of the Corporate Rich Guy Club have rights that go a thousand times beyond your rights and mine and those of Aunt Sophie. They have a right to blare their opinions so loudly that other voices disappear under the din.

Not so incidentally, the Moynihans of the world get to decide who they shout for and against with the corporate loudspeakers. Under the law written by Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas and Alito, there is no requirement that the super rich guys at the top of big corporations have to consult their employees or even their shareholders on which politicians to back.

Big business is fond of claiming in its advertising that “we are our people” or some such crap. Have any of you who have worked for corporations ever been consulted by the top-tier executives about what political stances the company should take?

Shareholders, including those who hold shares through mutual funds, have real financial stakes in corporations. I've owned corporate shares in small quantities since I was in my early 20s. I've yet to have any executive or representative of any company ask my permission before spending corporate millions to lobby for or against various bills and laws.

The Supreme Court did not explain why top-level corporate executives have a “right” to spend your money and mine to buy politicians they favor, even though we may oppose those politicians.

(That raises some very interesting questions about what corporate stock ownership really means, but don't look for any straight answers anytime in this century.)

Why do corporations have First Amendment rights? the naïve citizen asks.

Because, the Roberts court says, it is established through much law and many decisions that in the United States, a corporation has the legal status of a person.

Only that ain't true.

Supporters of the Jan. 21 decision are disingenuously claiming that the four dissenters to that decision admitted in the dissent that corporations have such “personhood” status. Actually, the minority noted clearly that corporations have a “limited” status as persons. The majority conveniently forgot about the limitations.

The economic royalists also deliberately overlooked another fact pointed out by the court's dissenters: That numerous court decisions going back to the 1880s, but especially since 1908, have affirmed that Congress has the right to bar corporations from many political activities.

In fact, the establishment of the doctrine of corporation as person has a murky and dubious history. The first declaration of that doctrine apparently was made by one Supreme Court justice, Morrison Remick Waite, in 1886.

Despite the fact that the U.S. Constitution makes no mention of corporations, Waite issued his opinion in a lawsuit involve a county and a railroad. The decision was rendered without the court hearing arguments on the case, according to the book “The Post-Corporate World, Life After Capitalism” by David Korten. Other researchers agree.

In fact, Waite's decision, to be found on http://laws.findlaw.com/us/118/394.html states flatly that “the court does not wish to hear argument on the question” of whether corporations are entitled to “equal protection of the laws.” Equal to the protections offered individuals, that is. That decision referred to the Fourteenth Amendment, not the First.

Some reports and histories say that Waite's solo declaration may then have been amplified by a court reporter, who wrote that the Constitution, “which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations.”

In any case, the “personhood” of a corporation is undeniably a fiction. A corporation cannot serve on a jury, cannot hold public office, cannot be drafted into the military, does not go to jail for crimes committed –- and, in fact, neither do its officers, generally. Murders have been committed on behalf of corporations, but no corporate executive has ever been executed or sentenced to life in prison for those capital crimes.

A corporation cannot have all of the privileges of citizenship if it does not bear all the responsibilities of citizenship.

If the law does not recognize that simple fact, then the law is wrong and must be changed. If the Supreme Court refuses to recognize the reality, then the court should be somehow overturned, through legislation, through an alteration of the Constitution and/or through impeachment of the justices who denied the truth of the law for political reasons.

Up to now, the court has maintained that the rights of corporations are limited and can be further restricted “when there is compelling national interest” in establishing restrictions.

Preservation of the integrity of our electoral system would appear to be a compelling national interest.

But...Don't expect politicians, Democrat or Republican, to act. Certainly they will not move for impeachment. Almost as surely, they will do nothing to reestablish limits on corporate campaign spending; there probably aren't more than 40 members of Congress, both houses, willing to displease corporate funders to that degree.

We sink or swim without the help of politicians.

We'll pay for the court's excess

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 22:14:00 +0000

“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of the state and corporate power.”

...Benito Mussolini, founder of Italian fascism.

Government officials and the armies of pundits will not admit it – at least not in public – but the plain truth is that representative democracy in the United States is all but dead.

It will take a bit of time before it turns entirely to dust and collapses, but it is no more than a decaying zombie. By late this year, the advancing mortification will be unmistakable to anyone with clear eyes. By the middle of 2012, even the boobs will be able to see what's going on, if they care.

Mouthpieces for corporations and the economic elite are out and about now, cool and smiling, telling Americans that the widespread concern and anger over the U.S. Supreme Court's Jan. 21 decision that allows corporations to spend without restraint on political campaigns is greatly exaggerated.

Haughty and dismissive of critics, they sneer at the supposedly gaga liberals who say the decision is a disaster for democracy.

Given the fawning respect right-wing spokesmen get from todays faux reporters, and given the corporate-owned “news” media's disdain for liberals, the public undoubtedly will come rapidly to accept their message for a time, even as our governmental system disintegrates.

Who are you going to believe, your own eyes or the beautifully dressed, handsome, smooth talkers on television?

Americans choose television every time; that's part of how we got here.

Attack ads work. Unanswered and inadequately answered attack ads work absolutely. A massive campaign advertising a vicious darling of the right as a sweet fellow who has only your interests at heart also works, though not quite so well.

The Supreme Court has told the world's corporations that they may spend whatever it takes to overwhelm the voices of liberalism, that they are free to buy and control government in this country.

In fact, the consequences of the court's poisonous decision inevitably will be far broader and far worse than acknowledged by any of the politicians and pundits whose comments I've seen or heard.

* Many people are predicting a flood of corporate-financed attack ads against any politician who stands against anything any major business interest favors.

Of course they are right, though the flood may not be quite as bad this year as it surely will be in following years. It's a fair guess that many and perhaps most giant corporations, completely unleashed for the first time in the modern media era, will test the water this year, and refrain from a total assault across the country.

They'll want to figure out whether there will be a consumer backlash if they go too far – and figure out what is “too far.” They'll want to know how much honest reporting the vestiges of news operations will do on their activities and how much they can keep from the public. They'll want to conduct polls and other research to calculate finely just how far they can go.

And, probably, some executives will simply be intimidated at first by the freedom, uncertain of how to use it, like hormone-driven teenagers together in a safely private place for the first time. Learned inhibitions will hold back natural desire for awhile, but probably not for long.

Many millions of corporate dollars will be spent on the 2010 campaign, but they may be only a fraction of what will be poured into the elections of 2012 and thereafter, at least until the corporate hold on government is so complete as to be dent proof. After that, the political frontmen will have to work harder for a smaller share of the wealth, I'd guess.

* An inevitable result of the court's obviously political decision is one I've yet to hear anyone speak of: The disdain and, in truth, contempt it brings on the court itself.

Throughout my longish life, Americans have revered the Supreme Court even when we haven't agreed with its decisions. We have accepted it as the final arbiter of what our government can and cannot do, what we as citizens may and may not do. The 2000 decision to give the presidency to George W. Bush even though he did not win election did much harm to the court's standing with the public.

In the end, though, we accepted that patently partisan decision in the expectation that the court eventually would return to operating for and under law.

In fact, it has become even more politically motivated – remember how Republicans used to rail about “activist judges?” -- and millions of us hold the “justices” who participated in the Jan. 21 fraud in utter contempt. Three of the justices who handed the presidency to Bush also voted with the majority in the Jan. 21 travesty, thus demonstrating their fealty to ideology over law. We are justified in our contempt.

Reverence for the court? Not again for decades, if ever. It is just another right wing political body. When it screws us over, we must try to fight back, and if that means greatly reducing the court's power, so be it. If it takes altering the Constitution, let's try to do it. The court deserves no more referential treatment than any other piece of Republican party machinery.

This may well weaken the rule of law in this country. It is not our fault, but the doing of the court itself.

* Approximately 85 percent of all judges in America are elected. A majority of even the voting public ignore judicial races, and either don't vote or simply vote on the basis of name recognition. Incumbents always win unless they have achieved public attention through some egregiously bad behavior. But judicial campaigns still cost money.

It is henceforth amazingly easy, and pretty cheap, comparatively, for the corporate elite to buy our judges on all levels. Despite false protest from the right, it's extremely difficult now for individual citizens or even groups of citizens to win a legal fight against a large corporation. The businesses can afford to drag things out, to use the best legal help money can buy, to overwhelm the lowly citizen.

You can see how much easier that will be when the corporations have purchased the benches for those who sit upon them. Prepare your farewells to any vestiges of an honest judicial system.

* An obvious corollary to the point above is that businesses will be more eager to challenge citizens in court, and to challenge any regulatory law or, say, laws protecting employees or consumers from corporate wrongdoing. The likelihood of a corporate win in any such case will rise dramatically as soon as the hired judges are in place.

* In every story about the court decision, the corporate media equates “corporations and unions” as though they are equal players on the political field. Even the nuttiest of the teabaggers probably doesn't believe that, but it goes on. Labor unions can't raise one twentieth of the money that corporations can, and the unions are becoming weaker by the day as the right presses attacks against them.

Soon we'll see more stories equating MoreOn and other Internet-based liberal organizations with corporations and their trade organizations. The great majority of the public also will see that fiction for what it is. Labor unions and all of the money-raising liberal organizations together cannot raise half of what just one of the lobbying industries can spend on a campaign. To insinuate that they can play dollar for dollar against the combined powers of the pharmaceuticals, insurers, war industries, mining industry, lumber industry, and all the rest is wildly absurd.

But that's how the corporate press plays it; it must work for them to some degree.

* Although I've been avoiding most other comments on the Jan. 21 decision until I complete this piece, I am aware that while recognition was a little slow, a number of people now have pointed out that the Supreme Court – Justice Anthony Alito's insolence to the contrary – has opened the door to heavy foreign involvement in our electoral process. Hell, it blew away the door and the wall it hung in.

Aramco, the American subsidiary of Saudi Oil, is now free to play in our elections; it is a duly-registered American corporation. Several American corporations are owned by the government of China, and that country has pieces of many others. Bin Laden Construction operates legally (and as far as I know legitimately) in this country. So does an oil company in which the Bush family and the bin Laden family share ownership. Yes, really. The list is extremely long.

As Greg Palast of Greg Palast.com put it Jan. 22, “There is nothing that stops, say, a Delaware-incorporated handmaiden of the Burmese junta from picking a Congressman or two with a cache of loot masked by a corporate alias.”

Heavy spending by foreign interests, including foreign governments, to elect people who are favorable to them, or can be paid to be favorable to them, is certain. It will happen.

* Let's lump these: The essential facts are the same from a political standpoint. Among things that will not happen in Congress – or that will be reversed – because of massively increased corporate control of elections are these: Passage or enforcement of laws governing health and safety of workers; employee rights in labor organizing; laws requiring overtime pay; laws governing discrimination in employment because of sex, race, religious affiliation and sexual orientation; meaningful regulation of financial institutions; genuine health care reform; laws allowing reimportation of prescription drugs; serious regulation of insurance companies; meaningful improvement in laws governing the environment, clean air, clean water, preservation of wildlife habitat; protection of wilderness areas from lumbering and mining, and any other protections of natural resources against exploitation by corporations.

There will be some things done for show, and some existing laws will be enforced at their present levels for a while, but as corporate power grows, even those things will be pushed aside as unnecessary.

Some people do and will doubt that corporations would move forcefully in the mentioned areas. I do not understand that doubt. They are all situations on which corporations and their industrial associations have spent millions of dollars for lobbying. Why would they not press forward now that their advantage is greatly increased?

* The corporate world, often in alliance with the religious right, has been shoving its nose farther and farther into the tent of public education for decades. Look for that to accelerate. The corporate elite, as the brilliant comedic social commentator George Carlin long ago pointed out, does not want an educated American public. They want a trained workforce, able to run the machines that remain in this country, and to keep the books and stock the shelves; the last thing they want is millions of citizens capable of critical thought. Involvement in education will accelerate.

Even before the Jan. 21 decision, the religious anti-intellectuals of Texas had a big and growing effect on the contents of textbooks used throughout this country. The religious right controls the Texas Board of Education and Texas has a unified textbook purchasing system. If Texas wants science out and statements favorable to the religious right in a book, it often gets in or the publisher loses sales to all of Texas. In most areas, local school boards make book-buying decisions; a publisher will sell to all of Texas, even if it loses sales to local districts here and there. And the creationists are pushing again, even in places such as my native, generally educationally liberal Minnesota.

Corporations are happy to ally with the religious right if both get the kind of teaching they want. The children of the corporate elite do not go to public schools.

* Eventually, the relationship of the corporate elite and the religious right will change, but the shift probably will take a long time. The corporate hierarchy – highly educated, for the most part, and arrogant beyond measure – are, in private, extremely contemptuous of the spitting, shouting preachers and their bumpkin followers. The religious nuts are useful to the corporatists yet, but as the latter grow in open power, they'll undoubtedly get tired of catering in any way to people they see as hugely inferior. But we may be talking decades before an open split occurs.

* The “two party system” will continue. It's a handy fiction that keeps much of the great uninformed public relatively happy. Liberals will be almost entirely out, however. Not a huge change, since the billions of dollars in corporate lobbying money has long given the edge to right-leaning politicians. Now, however, we'll see the start of more and more openly dismissive treatment of genuine liberals who want public office. Give us exactly what we want or forget being elected to anything, the corporations will say, and they will be served. Liberals, already scarce, will become an almost extinct breed in the world of elected office.

* Let's not forget one of the biggest and worst of certainties resulting from the ability of corporations to buy elections: Settle down to perpetual war, people. War is immensely profitable, and profit is why we've been in Iraq for so long, and why we'll be there for some years yet and why we'll be in Afghanistan for many years yet and why we are almost certain to get into yet another unwinnable, perpetual war if and as the Iraq killing winds down. It's incredibly easy in this day of Fox Nooz and bent politicians and right wing preachers to drum up public support for yet another holy war, and with Congress bought and paid for, there's no stopping it. “We have always been at war with East Asia.”

The only thing George Orwell got wrong in “1984” was the year.

* There is a flood of ideas pouring out now from many irate liberal commentators, organizations and a few politicians. There are several small pushes now for Constitutional amendments. The public won't get behind any of them in meaningful numbers. The American public is past caring about much except taxes and, in a substantial minority, guns and Gawd.

Several bills have been suggested, some of them very sensible. Alan Grayson, the rich liberal from Florida, has introduced five bills, all of which would alleviate the situation to some degree. They won't pass, almost certainly won't even get hearings. Members of Congress are looking at who will contribute to their re-election campaigns and who might pour in millions against them.

Fageddaboudit.

* Speaking of corporate spending and legislative attempts at blocking corporate power in campaigns, one noble attempt looks like it should work, if it gets enough coverage from the corporate media. That is an attempt to bar corporations that have federal contracts from using their money to support political candidates. It is a supremely rational and righteous plan, and should run through Congress...maybe even with the support of two or three Republicans. Except...

The Roberts court still sits at the top of the pile. Given their history, there seems little to no chance that the five pimps would allow such a law to stand. If it comes to a test, they will do what they did on Jan. 21 – decide their course in advance and in favor of corporations over citizens and then create law to cover their decision.

* There already is a major rush from liberal organizations to raise money to fight the corporate takeover of elections and to combat right-wing candidates. Do what you like on that. I'm going to save my money to be used as best we can for the survival of my family. MoveOn, TruthOut, Progressive Democrats of America, Credo and all the rest, taken together, can't put as much money into a campaign as any two of the biggest insurance companies and one pharma. Goldman Sachs alone can outspend any six of the liberal organizations and not even have to reduce its executive bonuses.

Some people, not all of them corporate toadies, say now that the Jan. 21 decision to allow corporations to run free in the field of electoral politics won't bring much of a change from what we have now, because corporate money, dispersed by lobbyists, already pretty much runs Congress.

Yes, it does to a disgusting degree. But there have been some restraints. Now and then overreaching lobbyists and even some of the people they've bribed, have gone to jail or lost their Congressional or statehouse sinecures.

The new situation means that the corporations and their lobbyists don't have to risk illegal activity or worry about possible opposition. They can simply buy Congressional seats, and state legislative seats and judgeships.

This is Benito Mussolini's dream come true. In fact, it goes beyond his realistic dreams. And it's done without a drop of blood being shed or any need to face the anger of the leaders of the world. Quiet and clean, like a good mob hit.

Dems really are that dumb

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 21:00:00 +0000

It finally became clear – a fact so obvious that I kept looking past it for other explanations for why Barack Obama and the Congressional Dumbocrats have accomplished so little of what the majority of Americans want.

Big campaign contributions aside, they didn't understand. In fact, they lacked and still lack even the beginnings of understanding of why they were elected.

Locked into the circular nonsense support system within the Beltway, and within the party hierarchy, they didn't even begin to grasp that America wanted real change, not just the promise of change.

They thought it was as it has been for decades: People like or dislike your campaign promises and style, but they don't actually think things will be substantially different after an election. In fact, the pols hold, we, the people, don't want anything but the color of the paint to change.

Now the White House and the Dumbocrats are flailing helplessly, at a total loss as to why they have dropped so far so fast. In the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, they are trying desperately to continue in the belief that only the far left wanted big shifts in policy and practice.

They didn't believe we really wanted the wars to end. They didn't believe we wanted the bankers and Wall Street truly brought to heel, and that dainty wrist slaps wouldn't begin to satisfy an angry public. They didn't think we were even aware of the continuing loss of civil liberties, loss of things such as habeas corpus, let alone believing that we wanted rights restored. They didn't take seriously demands for equal treatment of gays. They certainly didn't believe that we, the great majority, wanted big money out of the lawmaking process.

They were absolutely certain that if they went on as usual, the liberals would line up again and yet again to vote for them because, as Rahm Emanuel said, “Where else are they going to go?”

I'm sure most of the people who read this thing understood all that long ago. I didn't really get my head around it until, after an exchange of emails with my excellent state representative, I went downstairs to fix myself some lunch a couple of days ago. Sitting at the kitchen table I had one of those forehead slapping moments.

My God! They really didn't understand and still don't!

So now an obviously bewildered Barack Obama has summoned his campaign staff to return and begin selling him again to the American public. And Congressional Democrats already are putting themselves into position to lie down under the wheels of the very-minority right wing machine. Surrender is their first response to the slightest hint of adversity.

Meanwhile, the White House still is full of revolving-door Wall Streeters, and Obama is still – still, for heaven's sake! -- talking nonsense about bipartisanship and cooperation with the Dirty Dogs.

Meanwhile, the public is enormously angry and growing daily more angry but, in its ignorance of how things work, aiming its anger mostly in the wrong direction and supporting the very people who intend them the most harm.

Folks, there is little chance for a cure of idiocy on this level.

Given the Jan. 21 decision of the five warriors for the oligarchy on the Supreme Court, make that no chance.

_______________

Given the state of things, please consider taking the action recommended in the short essay immediately below this one. It is one of the very few actions you can take that could actually weaken the power elite to at least a small degree. Close your accounts with any of the giant banks; dump their credit cards and get some from smaller issuers. Please.

Take a little bite out of big banks

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 03:03:00 +0000

A group of people that includes Arianna Huffington has begun what appears to be a genuine grassroots movement to cut the “too big to fail” banks down to a more reasonable size.

Huffington isn't promoting herself on this campaign, at least not in a big way. She's apparently letting the thing build on its own, among anonymous citizens who see the logic and act, and pass the word to their friends.

Soon after I discovered the existence of the movement, a friend mentioned in an email that he and his partner are moving all of their funds from one of the giant robber banks with which they done business for many years to a credit union. That gives strength to the sense that this is a movement that may catch on; the friend had only just heard of the wider movement of which I speak.

It's a lovely idea. The required actions are cost-free and would take the average person very little time. That doesn't mean that average, almost terminally lazy American will do it, of course, but I'd like to think enough people will act to bite a few million dollars from the incomes of the made men of banking.

Simply withdraw any funds you have in the big banks and move the money to smaller institutions, and replace credit cards from the big banks with others issued by smaller organizations. There are many smaller banks, community banks and credit unions that can use your business and will better use your money.

You're fully protected by federal deposit insurance from losses up to $250,000 in a small bank just as you are in a big one

Credit unions and many community banks still are lending to consumers and to small businesses, while the big banks are hoarding their resources and slipping much of the money into the pockets of their executives.

It really is easy. Aside from big-bank credit cards, I did it more than two decades ago. Almost all of my banking is done through my credit union. I was lazy about the credit cards, but I'll have dumped the big-bank cards within the next seven days, and it's taken less effort than a walk around the block.

Top executives of Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America appeared before a Congressional committee Jan. 13, 2010, and recited their bland, we-don't-really-mean-it mea culpas. Most people didn't see their tightly scripted appearances because increasingly feeble television news operations can do only one news story at a time, and – rightfully, if they can do only one – the story of the week was Haiti. That saved the bankers from another explosion of public anger.

To make action easier, Huffington and the other people who started this thing -– they describe themselves as a group of friends who came up with the plan during a dinner conversation -- have created Moveyourmoney.info, an apparently amateur-made Web site.

If you don't know of a credit union for which you are eligible for membership, or don't know how to find a community bank, the Web site has a place to type in your zip code. Then click, and you'll get a list of community banks in your area. There is no charge.

I'd add a caution, though:

The people who created the site obviously can't know the country community-by-community. When I tried out the list of banks for my area, several of the names that came up were branches of TCF Bank. No one who cares about honest politics or social justice would do business with a TCF Bank. The organization is the feudal playground of an extreme right winger who was for a time chairman of the Minnesota Republican Party and who often spouts Cheney-like pronouncements through the local media.

But several alternatives were offered, fortunately. Do check out the banks on theMoveyourmoney.info list, before moving your money. That takes only minutes.

Do it.

Teaching how not to think

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 19:39:00 +0000

The biggest laugh of my week came from the front page of the New York Times Sunday (1/10) business section.

No kidding.

At the bottom of the page was the beginning of a rather long story about how some business schools are beginning to change their curricula to incorporate – prepare yourself for this – lessons in critical thinking!

Times writer Lane Wallace began with a breathless description of how a decade ago Roger Martin, then the new dean of Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, had a “Eureka moment” when he realized that the highly successful principal of a local elementary school and a hotshot lawyer tied to investment banking used essentially the same thought process in their jobs.

They both “thrived by thinking through clashing priorities and potential options, rather than hewing to any pre-planned strategy,” Wallace gushed.

The great moment led Martin to a conclusion that was, at the time, a revolutionary concept in the world of educating the world's future corporate leaders.

That conclusion, getting serious broader attention only since the dumbest guys in the room (my phrasing, not the admiring Mr. Wallace's) brought us to the brink of economic collapse, is “a feeling that people need to sharpen their thinking skills, whether it's questioning assumptions or looking at problems from multiple points of view,” in the words of David A. Garvin, a Harvard Business School professor who co-wrote a book on “Rethinking the M.B.A.: Business Education at a Crossroads.”

So help me, I'm not making this up. You can find it in the gray pages of the mighty New York Times.

The article went on to say that some business educators are seriously considering that elements of a liberal arts education might be good for their students – notably the parts of such an education that lead people to think about the situations with which they are faced and consider a variety of possibilities for explaining and dealing with those situations. Why, it is suggested, one might even question the usual, clear corporate roadmap for dealing with every and any question.

Wow!

A few of the educators are even talking about “understanding cultural contexts,” said reporter Wallace. Well, that is, the folks at Stanford's graduate business school are talking about that. Some.

A bit more than half way through his report, however, Wallace admitted that such thoughts “are far from universal” among business educators. The sturdy people at the University of Chicago, for example, ain't havin' any of that there touchy-feely stuff; they're sticking to the straight and narrow: crunch the numbers and act according to corporate guidelines and never mind about putting things in context and examining potentially different ways of acting.

Wallace then quoted a couple of sources who suggested that no more than 25 percent of accredited business schools actually are considering different ways of looking at business, themselves and the world. And from further descriptions, it appears that there's something of a hitch in the thinking of those in the minority of schools actually making or proposing some changes.

The writer of the article didn't describe it as a hitch, however. I do. And it is this: Rather than actually trying to increase the critical thinking skills of their students, the schools “open to change” are trying to devise a new formula to replace the present ones. They call it “design thinking” and they've begun classes in it.

It's hysterical. You gotta laugh. No other way to avoid crying.

Beginning more than 35 years ago, while I was a full-time business and economics writer, dealing daily with the top levels of American corporate management and often with the supposedly great thinkers among America's economists, I began to complain to my colleagues about the terrible intellectual rigidity and lack of moral base I regularly encountered among the growing number of corporate leaders who held advanced business degrees.

It wasn't long before I started predicting that MBA programs – beginning with that of Harvard, the model for all the others in this country – would bring this country and it's economy to ruin or to a new form of corporate-led facism, or both.

My colleagues responded that while they also saw problems brewing, I was exaggerating the dangers. They didn't see what I thought I saw: a major cultural shift toward absolute amorality in business.

That shift should now be apparent to everyone. Don't try to hold your breath until the corporate world begins to move back toward some level of ethical behavior.

The new Reid flap: Pure B.S.

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 17:32:00 +0000

This country is drowning in bullshit.

Please forgive the crudeness, but no other term quite conveys the necessary level of contempt for deliberate, nonsensical phoniness.

The hottest “news” story at the moment is an absurd flap over comments made two years ago by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and his new apology for stating some simple, obvious facts at that time.

Reid suddenly was pilloried in the corporate media a couple of days ago for statements made during the early stages of the presidential campaign to the effect that Barack Obama might become the USA's first black president in part because he was “light-skinned” and had “no Negro dialect unless he wanted to have one.” The stories continue to run; see the New York Times, page one, on Sunday, Jan. 10, 2010, and any network or cable news show at any time, day or night.

Use of the long-outdated word Negro was pretty dumb, but other than that Reid's observations were unmistakably accurate.

We're told that Obama and Reid got together and the senator apologized to the president for his remarks and the president accepted the apology because he knows Harry is a good guy and not a racist.

If we could get a transcript of that conversation, I'm guessing that they shook their heads together over the reaction to the comments and that Obama chided Reid a little for being silly enough to say something that could be twisted by the scandal mongers, Republicans and the dimwits of the press into being racist.

It's simply, sadly fact: In this country, a really dark-skinned black man could not have been elected president. It is equally fact that Obama has no touch of black dialect unless he chooses to, and then he injects it subtly and beautifully into his speech.

I hope someone brings out a video, but it almost certainly won't happen: Some time after his election, Obama spoke to an almost entirely black audience at some large event. May have been an NAACP meeting, may have been a convention of another mostly black group. I wish I could remember the specifics, but cannot.

At any event, the speech was televised. As Obama spoke, I said to my wife: “Hey, listen. He's talking black.” Her attention had been elsewhere; she stopped, listened for just a minute and said, “Yes, he is.” And he was. The rhythm of his sentences was different, pronunciations were slightly altered, certain sounds were stretched. It was fairly subtle, but unmistakable.

For the record: I do not say these things as insult to the president. On the contrary, I rather admired how well and how easily he changed his speech, and it made perfect sense to me as one who knows quite a lot about politics – as much sense as his dropping those black-community cadences when speaking to a bunch of white guys in $5,000 suits.

Beyond that, judging from my own fairly broad circle of acquaintances and friends, and knowledge of others who are selectively flexible in their speech, I'd lay very big bucks that millions of middle class black Americans can and do exactly the same thing with their speech, depending on locale and present company at any given time.

Reid simply made a quick, clear, honest observation. That it has become a big hoohaw is pure bullshit. But then, so is about 95 percent of political discourse in this country, at least as reported in the corporate media.

Even the underpants bomber was wearing out as a point of fixation for the talking models on television “news,” and they needed something else that would help them avoid real journalism for a few days.
------------------------------------
One other observation: Throughout my youth, in my part of the country, “Negro” was a word that acknowledged ethnicity without carrying negative connotations. It may have been used differently elsewhere, but here in the north central part of the country it was a respectful word, and so it also was on radio, television and in newspapers.

Though I have no problem with black people shifting their preference to other terms, and have shifted along with them, I think some of the complaints from younger blacks about the word Negro stem from lack of historical perspective and, frankly, from the arrogance of youth which crosses all ethnic borders: Anything of an earlier generation which is not the same as their usage and taste is stupid, ugly, etc., etc.

The routine of government lies

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 17:20:00 +0000

We, the public, cannot trust our government to tell us the truth about any major event affecting our lives.

Let me qualify that. Some government agencies, such as the Congressional Budget Office, that have thus far remained largely nonpartisan, routinely tell truth, even uncomfortable truth. The White House, Congress and its members and all the agencies controlled by the military, “intelligence” outfits and other self-serving bodies, such as “Homeland Security,” routinely lie to the public.

The greater the importance of an event to the public, the more certain it is that we will be fed lies.

Almost everyone knows that, though we seldom state it so bluntly, or even face it so openly in our own minds. It's one hell of a frightening fact: Our government lies to us, often outrageously, more often than it tells us the truth. The bigger the event, the more likely that government will offer us monstrous lies.

“America does not torture.” Yeah, right.

(Yes, we expect that of modern American politicians, but it's still hard to face when we're talking about The Government.)

We recognize that only the hopelessly naive believe the entire official stories of the murder of John F. Kennedy, the events that got us into Vietnam in a big way, the absurd Cheney/Bush story of our reasons for invading Iraq, and countless other events big and small.

I don't mean that the Kennedy assassination was engineered by the Pentagon, or that the FBI killed Martin Luther King. I don't mean that Dick Cheney and his evil cohort engineered the horrors of Sept. 11, 2001; I do defy you to find reason to believe the official stories are accurate and real. “Faith” doesn't count.

What I mean, simply, is that the lies and coverups are so numerous and in many cases so obvious that we who value truth simply must recognize that we don't know and probably never will know what happened in event after event.

Often the coverups obviously are created simply to save some bumbling fool's ass, or hide the gross incompetence of a group of politicians or crony appointees. (Heckuva job, Brownie.) Usually, we're denied certain knowledge of some stupid error, rather than knowledge of a deliberate crime, although it would be unrealistic to suggest that the lies never cover real crimes, even capital crimes.

All of which is by way of leading up to what seems to me very probably another government lie that the great majority of Americans have accepted without quibble.

I don't think we know, nor do I think we'll ever know, what really happened at Fort Hood on Nov. 5, 2009.

Quickly: No, I do not believe the shootings of military personnel and civilians was part of a terrorist attack plotted by some group in Iran or Pakistan. I do not believe that Major Nidal Hasan had accomplices. It seems quite clear that the man was desperately mentally ill, that he started the thing by himself, and probably with little planning beyond some wild imaginings within his fevered brain.

It's also obvious that the Army should have recognized the depth of Hasan's illness and done something about him, and it, long before he began shooting. The Army's feeble excuses – akin, as numerous people have noted, to the Catholic Church's weak excuses for not stopping child abusers within the ranks of its clergy – hardly are strong enough to be taken seriously as coverup.

However, there are big problems with the official story of Nov. 5.

Hasan, a psychiatrist, a doctor, is not a known marksman with a handgun or any other weapon. As a medical man, he probably spent very little time – as in almost none – on weapons ranges honing his shooting skills. Sketchy stories of his early life give no indication that he grew up with guns or used them regularly, if at all, during his youth.

Our “news” media, always ready to swallow the official take on any story, has never asked about that, so far as I can tell. I can find no evidence that they've sought Hasan's military weapons records – which by now could easily be falsified in any case, though questions immediately after the shooting might well have produced records we could trust. I've not heard nor seen a single reference to anyone checking to see if Hasan was known at private shooting ranges.

But, the official story is that this doctor, this unpracticed shooter, walked into a building on Fort Hood and within the space of approximately 10 minutes shot and killed 13 people and wounded another 30.
Reports said he carried two handguns, but later reports by several agencies quoting military sources suggested that he used only one of the two pistols.

As someone who did grow up with guns, who fired shotguns and rifles and sometimes handguns from the time I was 9 or 10 until my early 20s, my first reaction was “Ain't no way.”

My present take is exactly the same.

Even assuming the man was a cold, calm shooter and not the emotional and mental wreck all the reports show him to be, that is a very unlikely, though not quite impossible, outcome. Even if that cold, calm shooter was highly practiced, an absolute ace with handguns, 13 dead and 30 wounded in not quite 10 minutes is an unlikely result. Rambo movies are not reality, or anything close to it, people.

Say that the emotional and mental wreck we know Hasan to have been used just one gun and 43 dead and wounded becomes what I would say is a practical impossibility, though others certainly will disagree.

We can presume that the people who were shot, and those who avoided being shot, were not standing calmly, facing Hasan and awaiting their turns to be slaughtered. They were running, ducking, hiding, probably yelling and rolling and generally making a hell of a terrified fuss. And remember that he would have been distracted by at least a couple of attempts to take him down.

Immediately after the shootings there were some suggestions in television reports that some of the victims were or may have been shot by military people and/or police officers trying to get Hasan. Very quickly, however, those suggestions simply stopped. The curtain dropped with a thud. No one mentioned the possibility again after a surprisingly short time – a matter of hours.

So far as I've been able to find, no one has even hinted at the possibility of “friendly fire” deaths or injuries since then.

It seems very likely to me that some of the dead and/or wounded were shot accidentally by people other than Hasan. In fact, under the circumstances that have been presented to us, I can't believe anything else. Some military people or police or both – scared, confused, probably panicked – shot carelessly or stupidly and hit innocent people.

As coverups go, this is very far from being the worst. If what I think happened is correct, the official story has been doctored almost certainly to protect well-meaning people who were badly trained or emotionally and mentally ill-suited to handle such an emergency. They were not up to the task they took on, and the military cannot bring itself to admit that it's people were, at best, incompetent, unqualified to deal with the terrible mess they found themselves in.

We're being lied to again. And a government that lies to us to protect incompetents and to save reputations certainly has no qualms about lying to us to cover its deliberate crimes.

The New York Times reported on Dec. 9, 2009, that the FBI has named its former director, William H. Webster, to conduct an “independent” review of the bureau's handling of information about the Fort Hood shootings. Not of the incident itself, mind you, but the FBI's own handling of information – i.e. what it told us.

Anyone here believe Webster is going to say anything other than that the FBI was generally brilliant in its providing the government and the public with accurate information on a confusing situation?

I didn't think so.

Now we are confronted with another situation – and apparent attempt to blow up an airliner as it approached Detroit -- that is guaranteed to provide us with more official stories that we cannot trust.

But worse than that: We now have a "news media" that lacks competence and, anyway, has no interest in pursuing the big stories or getting at the truth.

We want truth. We are not likely to get it, on this or any other event that reflects badly, however correctly, on our government or its various cops, spooks, military or guns for hire. We are not likely to get it on any major event that would require a difficult and/or lengthy pursuit by well trained and dedicated reporters; those are so rare as to be effectively nonexistant.

Past time to follow the health care money

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 17:22:00 +0000

Industries that profit hugely from America's health care scam – notably insurance companies and pharmaceutical makers, but others as well – have spent massive sums to prevent any genuine reform of the non-system.

Many news and even some of the pseudo news outfits have reported what those companies spent and are spending to lobby against reform.

The Washington Post, CNN, New York Times and others said repeatedly during the fall that the profiteers were laying out $1.5 million a day to make sure we don't get affordable health care for all Americans. No doubt the expenditures have increased over the past month or so.

Estimates of the total spent by the profiteers on anti-reform lobbying go to more than $500 million since last spring.

CNN noted back in September that the expenditures to that point would cover top-drawer insurance for more than 30,000 Americans for one year. By now that number has to be 35,000 Americans.

But...

A very important set of facts has never been reported, so far as I can find. None of the badly educated, largely untrained stenographers who have replaced reporters seems even to have asked the big questions:

Exactly where is all the money going? Precisely how is it being spent? Who's collecting what the insurers and pharmas are paying?

Much of the money goes into the personal bank accounts of the lobbyists, of course.

The Guardian, a Brit news operation that does a better job of covering Washington than most U.S. news outfits, reported during the fall that the various health care industries had deployed a total of six (count them, six) lobbyists for each and every member of Congress. Of course, that's on average; some of the few unbought liberals may get only one or two or none at all, and Joe Lieberman probably has eight or nine brushing off his chair as he sits down for lunch while three others spread his napkin on his lap and four more serenade him. If you have a precious possession, you cherish it.

However, it is clear, on the face of it, that not all the money is being paid to lobbyists just to talk to members of Congress, sing them lullabies and massage them with expensive oils and ointments.

So where is the money going? To “charities” favored by legislators with power? To campaign funds? To wives and siblings and girlfriends under various ruses? To “nonprofit” employers of said wives, siblings and girlfriends? To PACs that saddle the various members' favorite hobby horses?

C'mon, “news” people. Where the hell is the money going, exactly? And I do mean exactly.

If the expenditures for lobbying are declared, and obviously a large percentage of the total is declared, then it is possible to find out who is being paid what.

___________________________________

Oh, and while we're at it, why do the corporate “news” media generally ignore the fact that Hadassah Lieberman, Joe's wife, has spent most of the past ten years or so as a highly-paid lobbyist for the major pharmceutical companies? She was director of policy, planning and communications for Pfizer, one of the biggest drug makers, and then a lobbyist for the pharma industry until quite recently. Before getting in the health care biz, she was a research analyst for Lehman Brothers, the big investment house that collapsed in 2008.

Her activities are highly relevant and should be noted in every story about his gun-for-hire activities.

And why don't the purported news outfits include in reports on the Senate farce the fact that the wife of Sen. Chris Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat who was involved in writing the Senate's bill, is on the boards of directors of three health care corporations and for a time sat on the board of a subsidiary of AIG, the government funds gulping insurance giant?

And why hasn't anyone made a big splash by reporting on the stock in pharmaceutical, insurance and other health care companies owned by members of Congress? Democraticunderground.com stated way back in June that more than 30 “key” members of Congress owned substantial amounts of stock in pharmas and that some are directors of drug companies.

I come near to weeping sometimes for what has happened to the craft to which I devoted my entire working life.

Here again, at least for a while

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 18:05:00 +0000

Back around the end of May, I decided to take some time off from this blog and from other public writing, except for occasional letters to the editors of various publications. Initially, I did not intend to stay away for quite so long.

First, I knew that I was heading into a ridiculously busy summer, filled with many house guests and travel. We had one period of more than a month during which we had house guests continuously.

(Yeah, even if you love 'em, it can make you a little crazy.)

More importantly, it was time to step aside from the daily crises and distraction issues and try to figure out what's really going on in this mess of a country, which now can be accurately described as the world's largest and most powerful banana republic. It's official policies frequently are incoherent and often are patently irrational; it is almost ungovernable, yet swarms with authoritarian politicians, clerics and other demagogues eager to tell others how they should govern or be governed. It is greatly burdened with politicians too cowardly or too venal to act as they should.

It's very easy to get caught up in the latest, the almost daily scandals and hot stories –- what really is the significance of the fact that Tiger Woods cheated on his wife or that Sarah Palin is using her persona as a political Paris Hilton to make millions? -- and fail to see the massive changes taking place in our government and society. A lot easier, as well, to avoid facing those changes directly.

Americans are given to watching the ripples and entirely missing the shifting of the tides.

Even the health care battle is largely trivialized, while the real importance of that battle – important beyond even the question of whether Americans ever will get decent, affordable health care – is ignored.

Through the summer and fall, I read, listened and came to several mostly unhappy conclusions. Now, for awhile, I'll write again.

Yes, I know. Who gives a damn? I'm nobody and what I have to say doesn't matter.

I don't imagine myself to be a great pundit. Usually, only a few hundred people – very rarely a few thousand – ever see what I write. I'm a hick from the sticks, lacking a PhD and lacking a major newspaper or syndicate to inflate my importance. So read it or don't. At least I'll be able to consolidate my gleanings and get the conclusions down so that I can stop spending most of my waking hours ruminating on things over which we, the people, no longer have much power.

The first couple of articles to follow probably will not be on the really big subjects, but rather on things that offer clues to where we're going on the life or death issues.

jcf

Quiet shifts in the body politic

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 17:50:00 +0000

There are shifts in the body politic that are as yet not generally recognized, and some of them suggest that a major political realignment may be brewing.

I'm not talking phony astroturf movements, or bubba teabaggers being led by their noses to do the dirty work of right wing billionaires. Not even referring to the sometimes reported but poorly documented disaffection of a badly-defined “moderate” element of the electorate.

Even occasional news media references to an obviously enraged but unfocused non-bubba portion of the population don't quite get at what may be an important shift in political perceptions. So many angry people are just angry without having any clear sense of who is doing what to them; they know they're being screwed, but are more likely than not to blame the wrong people, because the flood of misinformation and lies from corporation-controlled “news” media, Fixed News and talk radio overwhelms a limited ability for critical thought.

An old friend of mine personifies the real change I think is happening, that has to some extent already happened.

He and I became friends in early childhood, which is to say more than 65 years ago. His parents were distinctly upper crust in our small town/suburb. His father was a banker. I was distinctly from the wrong side of the tracks. His mother openly disapproved of our friendship and would allow us to play together, other than at school, only rarely and only if she could keep a close eye on me. Guess she thought I'd steal his toys, or the silverware.

He is a calm fellow, an ideal member of any committee or board, always seeking to get things done while seeing to it that no one is offended or left out.

I tend to be more volatile, much less patient, and recognized years ago that I am not suited to committees. I don't do committees any more.

Yet we have been friends all these years. We get together with our spouses about once a month, sometimes more often. We spend a long weekend with two other couples every summer, fishing, cooking together, ambling through country shops and such. My old friend and I are both deeply interested in history; the two of us went to France a couple of years ago to tour Normandy invasion sites, museums and cemeteries.

I am a lifelong political liberal, considered myself a Democrat until just three or four years ago. My friend was a solid, active Republican until a couple of years ago or so. He held municipal office as a Republican. He was on a first-name basis with Republican governors and members of Congress. His political support was recognized and valued by those Republican politicians.

My working life was spent as a journalist, including 30 years with a metropolitan daily newspaper. I, too, was on a first-name basis with rich and powerful people in business and politics, though the relationships were more arms-length, as they were supposed to be.

So, for 50 or 60 years we argued occasionally, politely and respectfully, about government, business and politics.

Now we don't -- or if we do, it's about minor details rather than the big picture.

I am no longer a Democrat. My old friend is no longer a Republican. We are both appalled at what we see in government and politics.

A few evenings ago, we and our spouses had dinner together, with another couple. The third couple is a male-female odd couple. The lady is vaguely liberal. While a decent sort on a strictly personal level, the man is far right on all things having to do with politics and government. An ex-marine, he believes all wars in which the United States is involved are just wars or we wouldn't be in them. He believes that the Cheney torture program was justified, that maybe there really were “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq, that our economy would be perfect if government would just get out of the way, stop collecting taxes and let corporations do whatever they choose to do without interference.

That right-winger was quickly backed into confused silence the other night during a discussion of war, health care, the deteriorating condition of our beloved state of Minnesota and related topics. My old friend, the (until fairly recently) lifelong Republican. and I, the (until fairly recently) lifelong Democrat, argued from the same positions, arrived at separately. We each had loads of facts and details to support our shared belief that politicians of both major parties are ignoring the welfare of the American public, doing the bidding of the very rich at our expense and are generally pursuing inhumane and devastating policies.

The failure of this country to provide basic health care for millions of its citizens sickens that old Republican just as it sickens me. Domestic spying, use of cruel anti-gay propaganda to build support for a right-wing agenda, unnecessary wars, slavish catering to right wing Zionists and Cubans in Florida anger him as they anger me.

We disagree still on some details. Would this or that tax be right and appropriate, should this or that regulation be adopted? But the disagreements are not on basic points, and left to discussion we could work out the details. (Compromise. An interesting word. You can find it in a dictionary. It does not mean capitulation by one side in a dispute.)

Of course, my former Republican friend is just a single individual, as am I. But I know a large and growing number of former Democrats very like me, and I know several former Republicans who are very like, or increasingly like, my lifelong friend.

I also know adherents of both big parties who have gone to extremes -- especially, I must say, on the right -- but they are far fewer than those who are looking for some way to bring us back to a rational and democratic form of government.

We're not talking what the idiot press calls “moderates,” by the way. As near as it can be defined, that just means rightist Republicans who call themselves Democrats. The shift is not to radicalism, but it is to “the left” -- toward humanism and humanity, away from the amorality of the corporate world and corporate-controlled politicians.

It may be late, but the realignment is happening. If we are too late to save American democracy, at least we will be a pain in the butt to the oligarchy that seems close to establishing itself as the country's government.

Daring to challenge St. Obama

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Sat, 23 May 2009 13:18:00 +0000

People who are unhappy with some of the moves, or failures to move, by President Obama are being told, in effect, to sit down and shut up.

“Give the man a chance,” someone inevitably says when we complain that Obama's economic advisers are members of the same crowd that brought us our economic troubles –- most of them frequent passers through the revolving door between Washington and Wall Street jobs paying well upward of $1 million a year.

The same message is practically shouted when we note that the Obama economic program protects the very wealthy, helps the Wall Street and banking moguls consolidate their power (and become even more “too big to fail”) and ensures that more jobs are lost and that the incomes of those of us who are not enormously rich will continue to slip and that our economic perches become ever more precarious.

“Just wait. We'll see how it works out,” we're told when we point out that Obama has given the National Rifle Association it's latest boost toward arming the entire population –- or at least the far right side of the population –- by bowing without even a complaint to the latest ploy that allows the carrying of concealed weapons in national parks.

“Stop whining; would the alternative have been better?” we are asked when we note that Obama's approach to the Middle East, our ongoing senseless wars and the taking and treatment of prisoners around the world seems to be acceptance of Dick Cheney's policies. (And, boy, are the right wing fruit cakes warming up their voices to crow over that fact; the letters already are starting to appear in newspapers all over the country. See New York Times letters page for May 20 for one example.)

Health care? Self-proclaimed “liberals” and, especially, “moderates” are telling us to shut our pie holes when we object to the fact that single payer, government-run health care was taken “off the table” from day one of the Obama administration. Those already prepared to name schools after the young president snarl when we point out that the plans being espoused by Obama and the Democrats in Congress are at bottom little more than profit-assurance programs for insurance companies and pharmas.

Well, gang, I'm not going to shut up, and neither are a host of others who are paying close attention to the Washington dance.

Do you think the rich guys are keeping quiet and waiting to “see how it plays out?” Do you think the bankers –- who have been using millions of our tax dollars to lobby Congress since the moment they got the TARP checks –- are patiently waiting to see what Obama and their stooges in Congress do about the economy? Is the arms industry not talking constantly into the ears of their servants in government? Has AIPAC been silent since last November?

Well, gee, how about all the “progress” Obama and the Dems have made on things like –- uh, well, say protecting us from credit card predation?

If you believe the credit card moves really benefit us, I want to tell you about a number of deals I can offer you, for just a piddling fee, on bridges, land, insurance, mortgage refinancing and anything else you may want.

I'm sick to death of being taken and having no ability to do anything about it, so maybe it's time I join the takees.

Gee whiz golly gosh: Congress, with Obama's backing, intends to restrict credit card interest rates to –- what is today's number? Maybe 28 percent? Wow, what a deal huh? Meanwhile the banks are paying their suckers –- that is, customers -– as much as 3 percent in some cases. Even a point or two more for dollars you're willing to tie up for several years. Yessiree, a hell of a deal.

Also banks supposedly will be limited in when and how much they can jump the interest rates they charge on cards. Maybe.

But here's what people who don't know the banking game probably don't realize: In return for taking such punishment, the banks plan to bring back annual fees for the right to carry their credit cards. They intend to drop most or all of their “incentive” programs such as providing frequent flyer miles. They've said so; read the business pages.

The banks come out ahead. We pay fees for the right to buy on credit and pay interest rates that throughout history, up to the past few decades, were illegal (and even brought physical punishment up to and including death) in all societies throughout the world. The banks lose the costs of administering those bothersome incentive programs –- which came about, anyway, only because there was some competition among banks and other institutions for credit card accounts.

With the consolidation in the financial rackets brought about by the economic collapse and the resulting bailout and help -- actually, demand -- by government for further mergers, competition has been made all but obsolete. The big financial outfits still standing can carve up the credit card market with only minor squabbling. There is no further need for those costly competitive gambits.

Isn't it interesting that come high tide for them or low, the political right pitches and fights and demands and attacks for what it wants?

The left, when it wins an election or three, says “Let's be moderate” and “Let's see how it plays out,” and clears the field for the armies of the right to surround our politicians. And we go incrementally forever rightward. In or out of office, the right, the hugely rich, the Powers That Be, fight on. They gain three steps, perhaps the liberals take us back one, and then the right moves another three toward their goals.

Oh, you say, but we're making such wonderful progress on some important issues. We have stem cell research back, and it's obvious that prohibitions against gay people marrying will, in a few years, have gone the way of laws against interracial marriages, for example.

True, and those are good things. But they never were issues for the rich and powerful, who only went along with the religulous right on such things because those people were useful for a time. The wild-eyed preachers and their followers are much weaker now than they were even five years ago –- they'll be back, of course, but not for quite awhile -– and so the rich can get rid of them in the same way that they scrape muck from their boots after a stroll around the stable yard.

The rich have no religion but power and privilege, and they're still in charge. Our society is far, far to the right of where it was 50 years ago on all things that matter to the very rich and powerful, and we are still losing power and wealth to them. Jobs are still leaving the country, either abroad or into the ether. There is less economic security every day for the poor and middle class. The real powers of the country are effectively slicing away at health care, education, employee rights, safety protection for workers.

But, gee, “Shut up and give the man a chance.”

Meanwhile, let's see if you can find the pea under one of the three cups I will place on this little table....

Guns: Pimping for a dirty business

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 22:50:00 +0000

You have to give America's increasingly extreme political right great credit in one area.

Its propagandists, the ones it has right now, are the best at flaying facts and selling disinformation since things went belly up for Joseph Goebbels 1945.

The best of the best –- or, from a moral standpoint, worst of the worst -– are those who directly serve the makers and peddlers of military-style guns and other people-killing devices, the profiteering promoters of murder on a massive scale. In that, too, they have much in common with Dr. Goebbels.

They get great help from our cowardly politicians -– which is to say almost all of our politicians -– and from an equally cowardly press and a whole bunch of ignorant suckers among the American public, but that is largely a testament to their skill.

In late March, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton went farther than is usual for a U.S. official in admitting that our country bears substantial responsibility for the growing power and brutality of Mexico's drug cartels. Specifically, she admitted the obvious fact that demand for drugs in this country fuels the growth of the mobs and the less-known fact that the drug gangs get the bulk of their weaponry from suppliers in the United States.

The second piece of information, on weapons, was confirmed by Janet Napolitano, secretary of Homeland Defense.

Clinton's statement may have taken what passes for courage in American politics, unpleasant truths being widely regarded as untouchable. Few facts could more clearly demonstrate the political power our elected officials have granted those who produce and promote violence for profit.

Although there was little or no coverage in the establishment media, a couple of other people in the new Obama administration already had made such acknowledgments. The gun racket had anticipated Clinton's admission.

Fox Propaganda, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and various other screaming sociopaths were ready, of course, but their rants were predictable and dull. Everybody who can walk and chew gum had to have known in advance what they would say: Weak-kneed liberals apologizing to criminals, what we need is armed troops standing three feet apart along the entire border, it's all the fault of them furriners, and look-out-folks-they're-gonna-take-your-guns-away.

When it comes to carrying water for the murder businesses, those people are useful, but minor players. The gun nuts go elsewhere for the authoritative word on what they should think.

Their secret decoder rings are set for the National Rifle Association and dozens upon dozens of Web sites and blogs narrowly aimed at the kind of suckers who have bought into the fictions about impending gun confiscation and the need to be prepared for a socialist or fascist coup.

(Beck, for one, doesn't seem to know the difference between socialist and fascist, and it's a good bet that a high percentage of those who take him seriously are equally in the dark on that point and many other points of fact.)

So I looked in on several of the aluminum hat gun nutter sites, the ones that carry articles, and sometimes ads, about what body armor to buy and where to buy it, and rant after rant about the dire threat of a dictatorship of the left. The official position of the death peddlers became obvious within half an hour. The “talking points” had to have been distributed before Clinton's statement got it's brief flurry of coverage.

In a nutshell here they are, without most of the boilerplate rhetoric about “Mainstream Media's huge disinformation campaign to demonize the American gun owner,” etc., etc., ad nauseum:

-- The attempt to slow the flow of weapons to Mexican criminals will, as Michael Gaddy of LewRockwell.com assured his readers, morph into 'the war on guns'” planned by President Obama. (Fact: Obama has always taken a “moderate” -- that is, rather weak -- stance on guns and gun control.)

-- Obama administration people are pushing the idea that the weapons going into Mexico are coming from America's private gun owners. (Fact: No such claim has even been implied, let alone stated. Absolutely nobody, other than the wing nuts, is talking about individual American gun owners shipping their weapons to Mexico.)

-- And -– booga booga booga -– the real supplier of weapons to the drug gangs is the U.S. government, using the Mexican government as a middle man. (Too absurd for any rational person, but readily believed in the gun worshippers subculture. Government conspiracy, doncha know.)

In the hands of Gaddy, who describes himself as an army veteran of Vietnam, Grenada and Beirut, that translates to, “Our corrupt government, cooperating with Mexico's equally corrupt government, has embarked on a campaign to deprive American citizens of the means to defend ourselves from tyranny, screening their own involvement in arming violent criminal drug cartels.”

(One could assume from Gaddy's fantasy that Barack Obama is not only a secret Muslim and a citizen of some other country but also a secret employee of the drug cartels, specializing in armament.)

-- But the main story, put forth by one Ralph Weller of Gun News Daily, who claims to know all this because he “lived and worked in Mexico in a border town for about five years,” is that all of the assault rifles, machine pistols, hand grenades and other murder tools in the hands of Mexico's drug pushers are from “Europe, China, Russia and South America” or “they came from illegal arms manufacturers in India or Pakistan.” Take your pick, apparently; the two theories about source are presented separately within the same essay.

For added spice, Weller's piece charges that, rather than weapons going from the United States to Mexico, the opposite is true, that “illegal full-auto weapons and grenades” are flowing along with drugs from Mexico to this country. That creative claim appears to be unique to Weller at this point.

Weller's article, which carries no attribution for any statement and not a single checkable fact, has been picked up by more than a dozen other right-wing and/or gun nutter Web sites that I saw. I'd be very surprised if there aren't many more I didn't see. Those I got into all presented it as absolute proof that arms are not going to Mexico from this country and that the claim is just groundwork for a government attempt to seize Americans' god-given guns.

I tried to find reliable information on Weller's identity and background, but biographical information, other than a brief paragraph he apparently wrote, doesn't seem to be available. There was another Ralph Weller, a ranking executive of Otis Elevator Co., but he died in 1995, and I could find no link between him and the above-quoted water boy for the gun peddlers.

Most of the gun-nut sites push the idea that President Obama is a very busy man, hatching a great plot to take all guns away from all American civilians.

In truth, Obama is very timid about taking on the gun nuts. If you check his positions and statements going back to his days in the Illinois Legislature, it becomes clear that he's never called for a ban on guns, never even hinted he wants handguns made illegal. He has –- take a deep breath now -– suggested that handguns should be registered and that assault weapons and armor-piercing ammunition should be permanently banned.

Obama, to the horror of the gun nuts, also has suggested (nothing more) that we should return to a prohibition against carrying concealed weapons and the closing of a loophole that allows private sale (including at gun shows) of all kinds of weapons and ammunition without any record or registration of the weapons and buyers.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, the NRA, which speaks from Olympus in the minds of those who dwell in the gun-nut world, created a wholly fictional claim that Obama had a “ten-point plan” to alter the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. The NRA said Obama will “ban the manufacture, sale and possession of handguns” and also “ban the use of firearms for home self defense.”

The aluminum hat crowd believes that with greater certainty than it believes the sun rises in the east.

---------------------------

When Ralphy, the young hero of a wonderful movie titled “A Christmas Story,” got his first, greatly anticipated message from Little Orphan Annie after he at long last received his secret decoder ring, he was outraged, and threw the ring away.

The message: “Don't forget to drink your Ovaltine.”

It's a great pity the wing nuts and gun freaks, not to mention members of Congress, don't have the same ability to recognize and reject business-sponsored crapola.

---------------------

Lest anyone mistake me: I grew up with firearms.

My father lived for fishing and, especially, hunting. It was his great passion. But he lost a leg to a careless fool of a hunter when he was 18, and his “good foot” carried a piece of a bullet lodged there thanks to the idiocy of yet another careless hunter. Neither of the people who shot him were in his hunting party at the time of the incidents. He would not tolerate the slightest carelessness with a gun of any type, and twice that I can recall, he chased people from the field on the sheer strength of his anger -– no physical threats made or implied.

I owned both a rifle and a .410 shotgun by the time I was 11. I gave up hunting in my late teens almost entirely because of the dangerous behavior of other hunters. I continued to target shoot now and then for many years. I have nothing against well-behaved hunters, certainly nothing against people who use guns for target shooting, skeet and other non-lethal sport. If it were convenient, I might be one of them.

But as one who spent many hours of my youth in the field, I can see absolutely no legitimate civilian use for military-type semiautomatic and automatic weapons, let alone bazookas, rocket launchers and other types of iron designed specifically for the killing of human beings. The same goes for armor-piercing ammunition. I'm somewhat ambivalent on handguns. There obviously are many people who should not have them, and a considerable body of research shows that, despite NRA propaganda to the contrary, a vast majority of innocent citizens who think they can defend themselves and their homes with such weapons are deluding themselves and asking for trouble.

Guns 2: The hidden business

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 22:35:00 +0000

When Hillary Clinton declared in March that weapons are flowing from the United States to Mexico's drug cartels, you'd have thought she'd revealed that madwoman Ann Coulter is a drag queen, rather than stated a fact well known to law enforcement people and many others on both sides of the border.

(About Coulter: You didn't know? Where did you think Bill O'Reilly goes when he's not in the Fox Propaganda studio?)

There was hardly a newspaper that didn't carry the Clinton story on the front page, and, for a day or two, no television faux news station that didn't use it at least twice an hour.

In fact, the simple admission of the gun trafficking was hardly more shocking than Clinton's acknowledgment that demand from the U.S. is what put the drug mobs in business and keeps them rich.

The coverage faded quickly in establishment news outlets, however, leaving only the occasional uninformed television “reporter” or Fox flunky to ask some minor Obama administration official whether the president wants to “confiscate the guns of private citizens.”

Clinton's statement should have been the kickoff of big-time investigations of the gun-peddling business by at least a couple of news organizations. But that wasn't going to happen. The quick fade to black was as predictable as a Rush Limbaugh tirade. The gun trade is a dung pile very carefully avoided by establishment news outfits.

Just in case, though, I waited for a couple of weeks after the Clinton pronouncement to see if, just maybe, some news outlet, some small, surviving group of real journalists. would seek answers to the painfully obvious questions: Where do the weapons come from and who's selling them to Mexican killers? (A longer but still incomplete list of other necessary questions is included below.)

Hasn't happened, of course.

American newspapers and broadcast news presenters have avoided crossing gun makers and sellers since before I got into the news trade, and that's about 50 years ago. They were afraid to take on the killing business even before the National Rifle Association became almost entirely a propaganda and lobbying agency for the murder business and before it gained genuine political power through what often is delicately described as “distribution of wealth.”

No, I can't explain it. Like anyone else out here, I can only guess.

Every so often during my 30-year tenure on what was, through most of those years, a very good metropolitan daily newspaper, I pitched the idea of probing the gun manufacturing and selling rackets. More often than not, my bosses acted as though I were soundless and invisible. I got no response at all, neither aye nor nay. Once or twice, I was told -– as happened on other possible subjects occasionally -– that such an investigation would take too much work, too much time; the newspaper couldn't afford to have me or any other reporter devote that much effort to one subject.

If I pointed out that we did occasionally devote much time and work to a single story (or series of stories), the response was that afore-mentioned silence and invisibility. Although I could hear myself and see myself in mirrors, and co-workers could see and hear me, the bosses didn't seem to be aware of my presence.

Most of the time, I think the excuses were exactly what I was told, when I was told anything, but after years of periodically making the pitch, the scenes began to have an unpleasantly eerie feel.

The thing is, nobody else in this country did the obvious gun stories either.

During my career I did a number of “big” stories that my bosses were reluctant to embark upon. The stories that met with initial reluctance almost always involved unpleasant facts about some business or group of businesses – often businesses that purchased substantial amounts of advertising.

The reluctance of editors to take on such subjects was understandable. If we produced information that made some business guys sweat, the editors took much heat.

Sometimes, inevitably, reporting turns up information to show that what you thought might be something illegal or exploitive of the public or otherwise rotten actually is at least acceptable, if not benign. The work you put in on the subject is therefore “wasted,” though I never saw it that way.

Yet far more often than not, if I or another reporter had solid grounds for wanting to dig into something, we got a green light.

Not on the gun racket, though.

You might wonder what made me think the gun business -– manufacture and large-lot sales -– needed examination. It's the same sort of thinking that has led to countless journalistic investigations:

There are far more guns in this country and elsewhere in the world than there are legitimate users. Hunters, skeet shooters, competitive target shooters, hobby shooters, have all the guns they can use, and street gangs, drug cartels, terrorists and all sorts of ugly and evil people have many, many more guns than are required by or could be used by all of the legitimate users in the world.

Production of guns exceeds legal or legitimate purchases by multiples, though we don't really know by how much.

We need numbers. How many of what types of guns are made, how many of those can be shown to have been sold to legitimate users? Where have the rest gone? Who has them? How did they get them?

The gun business and its apologists like to talk about “stolen” guns arming the gangs and such in this country. But how many guns actually are taken in known thefts, and how does that match up with the armories of drug gangs, street gangs and all the other brutal thugs? On the face of it, it is obvious that the criminals have many more guns than have shown up on lists of stolen property. Perhaps someone needs to explain to people in the gun trade that they should lock up their inventory.

Terrorists around the world, war lords and small strongman governments, the Italian Mafia and the Russian Mafia and lord knows how many other mafias are armed to the teeth, despite prohibitions of weapons sales to those people by almost all established governments. So who is making the hundreds of thousands of weapons those large-scale thugs acquire in such numbers, and who is selling them? Do gun makers “lose” 40, 50, 80 percent of their production out the back door? Really? They have no effective security? Or, alternatively, they just “don't know” who's buying half or more of what they produce?

Show me a legitimate business of any size that doesn't know what it produces, what it sells, what it has in inventory and who its buyers are. If you know one, and they do show up from time to time, it will not be in business long. And it won't have been profitable for long, let alone for centuries.

What use to private citizens are automatic weapons, assault rifles, rocket launchers, antiaircraft rockets, body armor, armored vehicles and other killing devices obviously designed solely for the killing of human beings? Who makes those, who sells them and who are the buyers? Really, who are the buyers -– age, background, income, and psychology. (Dangerous ground, but on the face of it there are some seriously disturbed people stockpiling extremely threatening weaponry. Right here in the U.S. of A. Read the gun blogs)

Oh, yes: Who gets how much profit from such things? And which politicians get how much in “campaign contributions” from the people who make the profits?

About the gun bloggers' claim that the bloodthirsty mobs are getting their guns from illegal manufacturers in, say, Pakistan or India: Really? A bunch of little tin-shed copyists, presumably without heavy manufacturing equipment, are turning out machine guns and assault rifles and other sophisticated weapons by the millions? And they can't be located and shut down?

Those are just some of the questions that have popped into my head at various times, making me believe that some capable journalists -– there are some left, though their numbers are dwindling rapidly -– really need to look hard look at the weapons business.

Wish I could say I expect that to happen.

Guns 3: Dangerous people

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 22:01:00 +0000

This country needs to take a really good look at its semi-underground gun culture.

It probably needs two such investigations, one by some official organization, preferably under Congressional sponsorship, and one by a team, or several teams, of thorough and courageous journalists -– if such can still be found.

Both probes would have to be separate from the even more immediately needed hard looks at the business of manufacturing and selling the kinds of weapons that have as their only purpose the killing of humans. To try to combine serious investigations of the weapons business and the culture of gun nuts who, knowingly or not, front for the killing industries would be simply too big, and too likely to confuse issues.

The American gun culture harbors a lot of seriously disturbed people who, I strongly believe, are of more immediate danger to us, individually and collectively, than any group of overwrought religionists camped among the stony hills and valleys of Pakistan or Afghanistan.

Just seek out their publications and Web sites and read what they say, especially in comments posted with articles about supposed government plots to ban guns, or keep ammunition off the market, or the attempts they are absolutely certain “Barack Hussein” -- a frequent usage -- is going to make to ban all firearms in this country. You'll find a lot of calls for armed revolution and reminders that if anyone crosses them, “we have guns.”

“Maybe it's time to revolt and rid this union of socialists and communists, peacefully if possible but with force when all else fails,” said “Kevin, a Gun Owner” on “KeepAndBearArms.com. He also suggested that House Speaker Pelosi “is an outright idiot, she should be tarred and feathered and sent packing on a rail.”

On the same site, someone identified only as Tim quoted J.Edgar Hoover at length, warning of “a defiant, and lawless communist party, which is fanatically dedicated to the Marxist cause of world enslavement and destruction of the foundations of our Republic.”

In fact, the belief in an international communist conspiracy to take over the United States, abetted by Jews and civil rights organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union, is alive and well in the world of gun nuts.

The rants quoted above are among the more civil I saw. Some sites are little more than collections of obscene, hate-filled ravings against practically everyone who can in any way be called “liberal,” with special attention these days for Barack Obama. The president frequently is characterized as an agent of Islam, plotting to destroy the united States. I'm none too delicate about “bad” language, as regular readers know, but I would not quote here much of what I've read recently on the gun-nut Web sites.

There are a whole lot of potential Timothy McVeighs out there, folks, and since November 2008 election they seem to have shaken loose all the bolts that held them, however tenuously, to the floor of reality.

We need reporters to start digging and to report back to the public on who those people are and what they're really about -– and what they're about is not simple support for “Second Amendment rights,” despite the propaganda put out for general consumption.

What most people know of the gun culture, of course, is the National Rifle Association, which generally is seen as a benign supporter of hunters and sport shooters and from a liberal point of view, a somewhat over-zealous defender of “Second Amendment rights.”

A bit of nosing through books and current information on the Web suggests strongly to me –- supporting an impression I've had since I was a kid who did a lot of shooting and hunting -– that the NRA is a well-structured front for the gun makers and peddlers. Not the “defense industry,” but the people who provide the millions of weapons that magically find their way into the hands of huge criminal organizations, terrorist organizations, drug cartels and various other violently criminal mobs.

It is a machine for the production of brilliant propaganda, obfuscations, lies and double talk, and perhaps the biggest and most successful organizer of ignorant, paranoid suckers since the Third Reich died in a bunker.

Sporting guns and pheasant hunting ain't in it folks, and though many of the NRA's less involved members and adherents think of it as a support organization for sportsmen, it hasn't made a very serious effort to operate on that front for quite awhile now.

Oh, it still supports gun-safety programs for youth and such things, but those pretty much run themselves with volunteers, and don't seem to occupy much of the attention of the organization's paid operatives.

Also, it's simple fact that only the most paranoid of gun nuts think there is even the remotest possibility that any politicians in this country are out to take away hunters' shotguns and rifles. We all know that is never going to happen, and the vast majority of us would object powerfully if anyone tried.

Nope. What the NRA is about -– listen to any of its officers' speeches, catch interviews with them on TV, read any of their numerous articles –- is defending the “right” to purchase man-killing weapons and their ammunition. AK47s and bullets designed to tear up the insides of a living being hit by them, are not useful in the world of skeet shooting or hunting, folks. They're not much use, either, to a competitive shooter. Skiers don't carry fully automatic guns on their backs in the biathlon.

NRA officials dance delicately around the purpose of advanced human-killing weaponry. They generally turn the inevitably timid questioning of reporters on that subject to DEFENDING THE SECOND AMENDMENT. (Yeah, that's generally spoken in the verbal equivalent of capital letters.)

We have a RIGHT to “bear arms,” doncha see, and what might be done with them is something we shouldn't really discuss.

Quick fact: The NRA often trumpets the fact that it was founded in 1871. What it is less noisy about is the other salient fact about its beginnings: It was from its first day focused on supporting the ownership of military weapons by those whom we might now characterize as right-wing and anti-government. The organizers and officers of the organization through its early years were downright disdainful of “sportsmen,” historians say. Guns were for support of a certain way of life.

Some people connect the early organization with the Ku Klux Klan, but, to date, I haven't seen any evidence to that effect.

What is a demonstrable fact is that the NRA regularly puts out the most blatant lies imaginable to stir up its members and other gun nuts and make them and the wider public believe that good, honest folk are in danger of having their guns taken away. Any suggestion of regulating the manufacture and sale of any kind of weapon is taken as such a threat.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, the NRA blatantly lied about Barack Obama in its publications, in advertising and in every media it uses. The organization claimed that the then-candidate had a “10-point plan” to strip Americans of their guns. The claim was entirely fiction. Obama always has taken a very soft approach to gun control, suggesting only registration of handguns and restrictions on the sale of military style automatic weapons. He doesn't go anywhere near far enough for most liberals.

It's safe to say that most NRA members, and many others, still believe that Obama is a would-be confiscator of guns.

But the NRA is far too soft for the real gun nuts. They often rail on the Web sites of other gun organizations about the NRA's willingness to occasionally, and very slightly, compromise with Congress when it comes up with some toothless plan to keep heavy weapons out of the hands of the blatant madmen.

(I just read an on-line debate on whether people who have been diagnosed with severe mental illness should be prevented from obtaining weapons. The pros and cons seemed fairly evenly divided. Some writers thought “rights” come first, some allowed that maybe certain kinds of diagnoses should preclude gun ownership – although in such cases, the people in question should be locked up anyway.)

The thing is, the Second Amendment debate is phony.

What most of the country believes now – that there is an honest question of whether that amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees individuals the right to own whatever weapons they choose to have – is false.

That even most people who hope for some gun control believe it is an open question is the NRA's greatest success -– a triumph of false propaganda, a tribute to Joseph Goebbels assertion that some lies are too big not to be believed by an ignorant public.

Go to http://www.fair.org and look for a September/October 1996 article by Howard Friel, headlined “How the NRA Rewrote the Constitution.” You may have to go to an archives or advanced search page to find the article.

What it says, clearly and with considerable grounding, is that courts, including appeals courts, in this country have issued what the writer designates “an unbroken chain” of decisions over (then) six decades ruling that the Second Amendment does not confer an individual right to possess firearms. That “well regulated militia” mentioned in the amendment means exactly what it appears to mean.

The U.S. Supreme Court has never directly addressed individual gun ownership, at least not until the recent decision of the Bush court to strike down Washington, D.C.'s strong gun control law. But that decision, declaring the Washington regulations “over broad,” avoided the central issue of what the Second Amendment really means. It left room for substantial restrictions on gun possession and use.

With a substantial number of Bush appointees on the bench now -– some of them, such as torture promoter Jay Bybee, with worse than doubtful qualifications -– the legal battle may get rougher before long.

In the meantime, you will observe that our captive establishment news media inevitably behave as though the NRA interpretation of the law -– a false interpretation -– is correct or at least probably correct. They never, and I do mean never, mention the long history of judicial decisions declaring that there is no individual right to weapons.

But, a reminder: Very few Americans, and no politicians I know of, want to take anyone's sporting guns away. As for some of the psychotic paranoids whose writings I've been reading on the gun sites: we have to talk about strongly controlling the kinds of heavy-duty military weapons they favor.

Ken Poplawski, who killed three Pittsburgh policemen April 4 with an AK-47, was a guy very like those who spew hate daily on numerous gun-lover Web sites. As noted in Salon.com on April 7, he “believed that the United States was controlled by a secret Jewish cabal that had a master plan to abrogate freedom of speech and use the U.S. military to police Americans.”

I saw that very proposition mentioned five or six times on gun-lover sites the day I wrote this essay.