The Tea Party and Goldman Sachs: A Love Story

Posted on July 6, 2011 by MZR

Posted on Jul 5, 2011

By Robert Scheer

Face it. We live in two nations, sharply divided by an enormous economic
chasm between the super-rich and everyone else. This should be an obvious fact
of life for most Americans. Just read the story in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal
headlined “Profits Thrive in Weak Recovery.” Or the recent New York Times story
pointing out “that the median pay for top executives at 200 big companies last
year was $10.8 million,” a 23 percent gain over the year before.

In the midst of a jobless recovery, those same corporations are sitting on
more than $2 trillion in reserves, refusing to invest in this country, as
increasing percentages of their profits are garnered in tax-sheltered operations
abroad. And the bankers who caused the economic meltdown have turned against
President Barack Obama, who saved them; instead they favor a tea-party-dominated
Republican Party that seeks to limit any restraint on corporate greed while
destroying the ability of state and federal governments to bring some measure of
relief to ordinary folk.

The whole point of the tea party is to focus concern over our stagnant
economy on something called “big government” while ignoring the big corporations
that have bought the government as an accessory to their marketing strategies.
Big government is big precisely because it now exists primarily to make the
world safe for multinational capitalism, whether through a bloated defense
budget, trade pacts like the North American Free Trade Agreement, or monetary
policies that serve the interests of the largest companies.

It was their lobbyists who got Congress to end sensible regulations of
financial shenanigans, and now, with the new tea party members of Congress as
their most stalwart allies, they are yanking the teeth from the very mild
regulations that Obama got through the last Congress. As The Associated Press
reported: “Congressional Republicans are greeting the one-year anniversary of
President Barack Obama’s financial overhaul law by trying to weaken it, nibble
by nibble.”

It is nothing short of demagogic for the Republicans to be complaining about
the debt when it was the radical deregulatory policies that they pursued which
caused all that governmental red ink in the first place. What a hoax to pretend
that teachers’ pensions or environmental protections are responsible for a debt
that increased by 50 percent as a direct consequence of the banking collapse.
Yet they want to gut even the tepid regulations that became law under the Obama
administration, foaming at the mouth about sensible regulation as job killing
when it is the uncontrolled greed of Wall Street that is at the root of our high
unemployment.

Congressional Republicans are cutting funding for the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission as if those already underfunded agencies are centers of anti-business radicalism. The CFTC is run by former Goldman Sachs partner Gary Gensler, who, back when he was in the Clinton Treasury Department serving under another onetime Goldman leader, Robert Rubin, teamed up with Republicans in Congress to gut financial regulation. He is one of the Obama regulators who has managed to delay even the minor controls that the Dodd-Frank law requires for the still wildly out-of-control $600 trillion derivatives market.

What a joke that the tea party assertion that radicals have taken over the
Obama government is embraced even by lobbyists for Goldman Sachs, whose former
executives have populated the Obama administration as widely as they did the two
previous administrations. All they are missing this time around is that they
didn’t get to have one of their own named as treasury secretary, as was the case
in both the Clinton and Bush cabinets.

This week, the Los Angeles Times reported on Goldman’s renewed lobbying
efforts in Washington aimed at watering down what remains of the promise of
Dodd-Frank. True to Washington tradition, Goldman has hired Michael Paese, a
former top staffer for the “liberal” Rep. Barney Frank to head its Washington
operation, which last year spent $4.6 million lobbying Congress to soften the
bill, a task now made far easier with Goldman’s tea party allies in the new
Republican-dominated House. As the Times noted, “Goldman has spent much of its
money on hired guns from major Washington lobbying firms, including former
Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) and former House Minority Leader
Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.).”

Between the faux populism of the tea party and the army of sellout
ex-congressional staffers and politicians from both parties, the Washington fix
is in. Short of hitting it big on a lottery ticket, the vast majority of
Americans are sentenced to a future of lowered expectations, insurmountable
personal debt and dismal job prospects.

They may not know it, however, thanks to the constant propaganda from a
corporate culture dominated by images of a classless nation in which all consume
the delights of the American dream, from the perfect smartphone to the perfect
pill for bladder control, while merrily hacking away on the perfectly manicured
golf course of one’s fantasies.

 

Click here
to check out Robert Scheer’s new book,
“The Great American Stickup: How
Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main
Street.”

Keep up with Robert Scheer’s latest columns, interviews,
tour dates and more at www.truthdig.com/robert_scheer.
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Gone With the Papers

Posted on June 27, 2011 by MZR

Posted on Jun 27, 2011

 


By Chris Hedges
I visited the Hartford Courant as a high school student. It was the first
time I was in a newsroom. The Connecticut paper’s newsroom, the size of a city
block, was packed with rows of metal desks, most piled high with newspapers and
notebooks. Reporters banged furiously on heavy typewriters set amid tangled
phone cords, overflowing ashtrays, dirty coffee mugs and stacks of paper, many
of which were in sloping piles on the floor. The din and clamor, the incessantly
ringing phones, the haze of cigarette and cigar smoke that lay over the feverish
hive, the hoarse shouts, the bustle and movement of reporters, most in
disheveled coats and ties, made it seem an exotic, living organism. I was
infatuated. I dreamed of entering this fraternity, which I eventually did, for
more than two decades writing for The Dallas Morning News, The Washington Post,
The Christian Science Monitor and, finally, The New York Times, where I spent
most of my career as a foreign correspondent.
Newsrooms today are anemic and forlorn wastelands. I was recently in the
newsroom at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and patches of the floor, also the size
of a city block, were open space or given over to rows of empty desks. These
institutions are going the way of the massive rotary presses that lurked like
undersea monsters in the bowels of newspaper buildings, roaring to life at
night. The heavily oiled behemoths, the ones that spat out sheets of newsprint
at lightning speed, once empowered and enriched newspaper publishers who for a
few lucrative decades held a monopoly on connecting sellers with buyers. Now
that that monopoly is gone, now that the sellers no long need newsprint to reach
buyers, the fortunes of newspapers are declining as fast as the page counts of
daily news sheets.
The great newspapers sustained legendary reporters such as I.F. Stone, Murray
Kempton and Homer Bigart who wrote stories that brought down embezzlers, cheats,
crooks and liars, who covered wars and conflicts, who told us about famines in
Africa and the peculiarities of the French or what it was like to be poor and
forgotten in our urban slums or Appalachia. These presses churned out raw lists
of data, from sports scores to stock prices. Newspapers took us into parts of
the city or the world we would never otherwise have seen or visited. Reporters
and critics reviewed movies, books, dance, theater and music and covered
sporting events. Newspapers printed the text of presidential addresses, sent
reporters to chronicle the inner workings of City Hall and followed the courts
and the police. Photographers and reporters raced to cover the lurid and the
macabre, from Mafia hits to crimes of passion.
We are losing a peculiar culture and an ethic. This loss is impoverishing our
civil discourse and leaving us less and less connected to the city, the nation
and the world around us. The death of newsprint represents the end of an era.
And news gathering will not be replaced by the Internet. Journalism, at least on
the large scale of old newsrooms, is no longer commercially viable. Reporting is
time-consuming and labor-intensive. It requires going out and talking to people.
It means doing this every day. It means looking constantly for sources, tips,
leads, documents, informants, whistle-blowers, new facts and information, untold
stories and news. Reporters often spend days finding little or nothing of
significance. The work can be tedious and is expensive. And as the budgets of
large metropolitan dailies shrink, the very trade of reporting declines. Most
city papers at their zenith employed several hundred reporters and editors and
had operating budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The steady decline
of the news business means we are plunging larger and larger parts of our
society into dark holes and opening up greater opportunities for unchecked
corruption, disinformation and the abuse of power.
A democracy survives when its citizens have access to trustworthy and
impartial sources of information, when it can discern lies from truth, when
civic discourse is grounded in verifiable fact. And with the decimation of
reporting these sources of information are disappearing. The increasing fusion
of news and entertainment, the rise of a class of celebrity journalists on
television who define reporting by their access to the famous and the powerful,
the retreat by many readers into the ideological ghettos of the Internet and the
ruthless drive by corporations to destroy the traditional news business are
leaving us deaf, dumb and blind. The relentless assault on the “liberal press”
by right-wing propaganda outlets such as Fox News or by the Christian right is
in fact an assault on a system of information grounded in verifiable fact. And
once this bedrock of civil discourse is eradicated, people will be free, as many
already are, to believe whatever they want to believe, to pick and choose what
facts or opinions suit their world and what do not. In this new world lies will
become true.
I, like many who cared more about truth than news, was pushed out of The New
York Times, specifically over my vocal and public opposition to the war in Iraq.
This is not a new story. Those reporters who persistently challenge the
orthodoxy of belief, who question and examine the reigning political passions,
always tacitly embraced by the commercial media, are often banished. There is a
constant battle in newsrooms between the managers, those who serve the interests
of the institution and the needs of the advertisers, and reporters whose loyalty
is to readers. I have a great affection for reporters, who hide their idealism
behind a thin veneer of cynicism and worldliness. I also harbor a deep distrust
and even loathing for the careerists who rise up the food chain to become
managers and editors.
Sidney Schanberg
was nearly killed in Cambodia in 1975 after staying there for The New York Times
to cover the conquest of Phnom Penh by the Khmer Rouge, reporting for which he
won a Pulitzer Prize. Later he went back to New York from Cambodia and ran the
city desk.  He pushed reporters to report about the homeless, the poor and the
victims of developers who were forcing families out of their rent-controlled
apartments. But it was not a good time to give a voice to the weak and the poor.
The social movements built around the opposition to the Vietnam War had
dissolved. Alternative publications, including the magazine Ramparts,
which through a series of exposés had embarrassed the established media
organizations into doing real reporting, had gone out of business.
The commercial press had, once again, become lethargic. It had less and less
incentive to challenge the power elite. Many editors viewed Schanberg’s concerns
as relics of a dead era. He was removed as city editor and assigned to write a
column about New York. He used the column, however, to again decry the abuse of
the powerful, especially developers. The then-editor of the paper, Abe
Rosenthal, began to acidly refer to Schanberg as the resident “Commie” and
address him as “St. Francis.” Rosenthal, who met William F. Buckley almost
weekly for lunch along with the paper’s publisher, Arthur “Punch” Sulzberger,
grew increasingly impatient with Schanberg, who was challenging the activities
of their powerful friends. Schanberg became a pariah. He was not invited to the
paper’s table at two consecutive Inner
Circle dinners held for New York reporters. The senior editors and the
publisher did not attend the previews for the film “The Killing Fields,” based
on Schanberg’s experience in Cambodia. His days at the newspaper were numbered.
The city Schanberg profiled in his column did not look like the glossy ads in
Rosenthal’s new lifestyle sections or the Sunday New York Times magazine.
Schanberg’s city was one in which thousands of citizens were sleeping on the
streets. It was one where there were lines at soup kitchens. It was a city where
the mentally ill were thrown onto heating grates or into jails like human
refuse. He wrote of people who were unable to afford housing. He lost his column
and left the paper to work for New York Newsday and later The Village Voice.
Schanberg’s story was one of many. The best reporters almost always run afoul
of the mandarins above them, a clash that sees them defanged and demoted or
driven out. They are banished by a class of careerists whom the war
correspondent Homer
Bigart dismissed as “the pygmies.” One evening Bigart was assigned to write
about a riot, drawing from the information provided by reporters on the scene.
As one reporter, John Kifner, called in from a phone booth rioters began to
shake it. Kifner relayed the distressing bit of news to Bigart, who, sick of the
needling of his editors, reassumed Kifner with the words: “At least you’re
dealing with sane people.”
Those who insist on reporting uncomfortable truths always try the patience of
the careerists who manage these institutions. If they are too persistent, as
most good reporters are, they become “a problem.” This battle, which exists in
all newsrooms, was summed up for me by the Los Angeles Times reporter Dial
Torgerson, whom I worked with in Central America until he was killed by a land
mine on the border between Honduras and Nicaragua. “Always remember,” he once
told me of newspaper editors, “they are the enemy.”
When I met with Schanberg in his apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side he
told me, “I heard all kinds of reports over the years that the wealthy patrons
of the Metropolitan Museum of Art would often get to use the customs clearance
provided to the museum to import personal items, including jewelry, which was
not going to the museum. I can’t prove this, but I believe it to be true. Would
the Times investigate this? Not in a million years. The publisher at the time
was the chairman of the board of the museum. These were his friends.”
But Schanberg also argues, as do I, that newspapers prove a vital bulwark for
a democratic state. It is possible to decry their numerous failings and
compromises with the power elite and yet finally honor them as important to the
maintenance of democracy. Traditionally, if a reporter goes out and reports on
an event, the information is usually trustworthy and accurate. The report can be
slanted or biased. It can leave out vital facts. But it is not fiction. The day
The New York Times and other great city newspapers die, if such a day comes,
will be a black day for the nation.
Newspapers “do more than anyone else, although they left out a lot of
things,” Schanberg said. “There are stories on their blackout list. But it is
important the paper is there because they spend money on what they chose to
cover. Most of the problem of mainstream journalism is what they leave out. But
what they do, aside from the daily boiler plate, press releases and so forth, is
very, very important to the democratic process.”
“Papers function as a guide to newcomers, to immigrants, as to what the ethos
is, what the rules are, how we are supposed to behave,” Schanberg added. “That
is not always good, obviously, because this is the consensus of the
Establishment. But papers, probably more in the earlier years than now, print
texts of things people will never see elsewhere. It tells them what you have to
do to cast a vote. It covers things like the swearing in of immigrants. They are
a positive force. I don’t think The New York Times was ever a fully committed
accountability paper. I am not sure there is one. I don’t know who coined the
phrase Afghanistanism, but it fits for newspapers. Afghanistanism means
you can cover all the corruption you find in Afghanistan, but don’t try to do it
in your own backyard. The Washington Post does not cover Washington. It covers
official Washington. The Times ignores lots of omissions and worse by members of
the Establishment.”
“Newspapers do not erase bad things,” Schanberg went on. “Newspapers keep the
swamp from getting any deeper, from rising higher. We do it in spurts. We
discover the civil rights movement. We discover the women’s rights movement. We
go at it hellbent because now it is kosher to write about those who have been
neglected and treated like half citizens. And then when things calm down it
becomes easy not to do that anymore.”
The death of newspapers means, as Schanberg points out, that we will lose one
more bulwark holding back the swamp of corporate malfeasance, abuse and lies. It
will make it harder for us as a society to separate illusion from reality, fact
from opinion, reality from fantasy. There is nothing, of course, intrinsically
good about newspapers. We have long been cursed with sleazy tabloids and the
fictional stories of the supermarket press, which have now become the staple of
television journalism. The commercial press, in the name of balance and
objectivity, had always skillfully muted the truth in the name of news or
blotted it out. But the loss of great newspapers, newspapers that engage with
the community, means the loss of one of the cornerstones of our open, democratic
state. We face the prospect, in the very near future, of major metropolitan
cities without city newspapers. This loss will diminish our capacity for
self-reflection and take away the critical tools we need to monitor what is
happening around us.
The leaders of the civil rights movement grasped from the start that without
a press willing to attend their marches and report fairly from their communities
on the injustices they decried and the repression they suffered, the movement
would “have been a bird without wings,” as civil rights leader and U.S. Rep. John Lewis said.
“Without the media’s willingness to stand in harm’s way and starkly portray
events of the Movement as they saw them unfold, Americans may never have
understood or even believed the horrors that African Americans faced in the Deep
South,” Lewis, a Georgia Democrat, said in 2005 when the House celebrated the
40th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act. “That commitment to publish the truth
took courage. It was incredibly dangerous to be seen with a pad, a pen, or a
camera in Mississippi, Alabama or Georgia where the heart of the struggle took
place. There was a violent desperation among local and State officials and the
citizens to maintain the traditional order. People wanted to keep their
injustice a secret. They wanted to hide from the critical eye of a disapproving
world. They wanted to flee from the convictions of their own conscience. And
they wanted to destroy the ugly reflection that nonviolent protestors and camera
images so graphically displayed. So when the Freedom Riders climbed off the bus
in Alabama in 1961, for example, there were reporters who were beaten and
bloodied before any of us were.”
Our political apparatus and systems of information have been diminished and
taken hostage by corporations. Our government no longer responds to the needs or
rights of citizens. We have been left disempowered without the traditional
mechanisms to be heard. Those who battle the corporate destruction of the
ecosystem and seek to protect the remnants of our civil society must again take
to the streets. They have to engage in acts of civil disobedience. But this time
around the media and the systems of communication have dramatically changed.
The death of journalism, the loss of reporters on the airwaves and in print
who believed the plight of the ordinary citizen should be reported, means that
it will be harder for ordinary voices and dissenters to reach the wider public.
The preoccupation with news as entertainment and the loss of sustained reporting
will effectively marginalize and silence those who seek to be heard or to defy
established power. Protests, unlike in the 1960s, will have a difficult time
garnering the daily national coverage that characterized the reporting on the
civil rights movement and the anti-war movement and in the end threatened the
power elite. Acts of protest, no longer covered or barely covered, will leap up
like disconnected wildfires, more easily snuffed out or ignored. It will be hard
if not impossible for resistance leaders to have their voices amplified across
the nation, to build a national movement for change. The failings of newspapers
were huge, but in the years ahead, as the last battle for democracy means
dissent, civil disobedience and protest, we will miss them.

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100 Days

Posted on June 22, 2011 by MZR

June 22, 2011

 

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

There is something crazy about what is going on in our country today. Our fiscal condition continues on an unsustainable path, the European currency is heading for a crackup, the Arab world is in the midst of a crackup, unemployment is creeping upward and basically our two parties are telling us that they will not make the reforms that we know are necessary because it would involve too much pain and could imperil their chances of winning the presidency in 2012.

Ever since President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s legendary “First 100 Days” in office — which stabilized a country ravaged by the Depression — the first 100 days of every president have been used as a measuring stick for success. That’s over. I’ve said this before, and I believe it even more strongly today: We’ve gone from the first 100 days to the “Only 100 Days.”

Really — it feels as if Barack Obama had 100 days to push through the basics we needed to stabilize the economy and then lay the basis for his one big initiative — health care reform — and then he was preparing for the midterms, and then he was recovering from his midterm losses and then he was announcing his re-election bid and then, judging from all the Republicans who have declared for the presidency already, the 2012 race got started. As such, the chances of the two parties successfully doing something big, hard and together to fix the huge problems staring us in the face are very small — unless the market or Mother Nature imposes it upon them.

Therefore, let us all now hold our breath and hope that nothing really bad happens until the next president has his or her 100 days in early 2013 to take a quick shot at fixing the country before getting ready for the 2014 midterms and 2016 elections.

There is no way that America can remain a great country if the opportunities for meaningful reform are reduced to either market- or and climate-induced crises and 100 working days every four years. We need a full-time government, and instead we’ve created a Congress that is a full-time fund-raising enterprise that occasionally legislates and a White House that, save for 100 days, has to be in perpetual campaign mode.

To get elected today, politicians increasingly have to play to their bases and promise things that they cannot possibly deliver (5 percent annual growth for a decade) or solutions to our problems that will be painless for their constituencies (we’ll just raise taxes on the rich or we’ll just cut taxes even more) or to keep things just as they are even though we know they can’t possibly stay that way without bankrupting the country (Social Security and Medicare benefits).

The truth is, we need to do four things at once if we have any hope of maintaining American greatness: We need more stimulus to keep the economy from slipping back into recession. But we need to combine that stimulus with a credible, legislated, long-term plan for cutting spending and getting the deficit under control — e.g., the Simpson-Bowles deficit-reduction plan. And we need to raise new revenues in order to reinvest in the sources of our strength: education, infrastructure and government-funded research to push out the boundaries of knowledge.

That’s right. We need to do four things at once: spend, cut, tax and invest. And unless we do all four at once we’re not going to break out of our slow decline. But to do all four at once will require a new hybrid politics, which does not conform to the political agenda of either major party.

The Democrats are ready for more stimulus but have refused to signal any serious willingness to cut entitlements, like Medicare, that we know are unsustainable in their present form. The Republicans are all for spending cuts but refuse to accept any tax increases that we need to pay for the past and invest in the future. So what we’re basically saying as a country is that unless the market or Mother Nature make us pay, we are going to hand this whole bill over to our children.

Maybe it is just my friends, but I find more and more people completely disgusted by this situation and looking for a serious Third Party candidate who could run in 2012 and deliver the shock therapy to the corrupt, encrusted, two-party duopoly now running the show in America.

Such a Third Party would have a simple agenda: 1) Inject a short-term stimulus. 2) Enact Simpson-Bowles. 3) Shrink our presence in Afghanistan. 4) Raise automobile mileage standards. 5) Impose a gasoline tax to pay for a massive increase in government-supported scientific research and a carbon tax to pay for new infrastructure and stimulate clean-power innovation.

Do I think such a Third Party can win in 2012? Not likely. But it doesn’t have to win to be effective. If such a party attracted substantial voters on such a platform, it would shape the agendas of the Republicans and Democrats. They would both have to move to attract these voters by changing their own platforms and, in so doing, might even create a mandate for the next president to govern for an entire term — not just 100 days.

 

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This Hero Didn’t Stand a Chance

Posted on June 20, 2011 by MZR

Posted on Jun 20, 2011

 


By Chris Hedges
Tim DeChristopher is scheduled to be sentenced in a Salt Lake City courtroom
by U.S. District Judge Dee Benson on July 26. He faces up to 10 years in prison
and a $750,000 fine for fraudulently bidding in December 2008 on parcels of
land, including areas around eastern Utah’s national parks, which were being
sold off by the Bush administration to the oil and natural gas industry. As
Bidder No. 70, he drove up the prices of some of the bids and won more than a
dozen other parcels for $1.8 million. The government is asking Judge Benson to
send DeChristopher to prison for four and a half years.
His prosecution is evidence that our moral order has been turned upside down.
The bankers and swindlers who trashed the global economy and wiped out some $40
trillion in wealth amass obscene amounts of money, much of it provided by
taxpayers. They do not go to jail. Regulatory agencies, compliant to the demands
of corporations, refuse to impede the destruction unleashed by the coal, oil and
natural gas companies as they turn the planet into a hothouse of pollutants,
poisoned water, fouled air and contaminated soil in the frenzied quest for
greater and greater profits. Those who manage and make fortunes from pre-emptive
wars, embrace torture, carry out extrajudicial assassinations, deny habeas
corpus and run up the largest deficits in human history are feted as patriots.
But when a courageous citizen such as DeChristopher peacefully derails the
corporate and governmental destruction of the ecosystem, he is sent to jail.
“The rules are written by those who profit from the status quo,”
DeChristopher said when I reached him by phone this weekend in Minneapolis. “If
we want to change that status quo we have to step outside of those rules. We
have to put pressure on those within the political system to choose one side or
another.”
DeChristopher, whose defense is being assisted by the website Peaceful Uprising, knew the
government would be auctioning off public land in a sale in Salt Lake City,
where he had gone to college. He knew it was wrong. He knew he had to do
something. But he did not know what. So he did what all of us should begin to
do. He showed up.
“I went there with the intention of standing in the way of the auction,” he
told me. “I had no idea what that would look like. I thought I might give a
speech or yell something. It was right after the guy threw a shoe at Bush.
That was on my mind. I went there and at the front desk they said, ‘Would you
like to be a bidder?’ I said, ‘Yes, I would.’ I was still thinking when I signed
up, ‘OK, I’ll sign up to be a bidder so I can get inside and make a speech.’ It
wasn’t until I got inside the auction room that I saw I had a huge opportunity
to stand in the way of the auction. I had been preparing myself over the course
of 2008 in a general way to take that level of action. I had been building up
that commitment. I was looking for the opportunity at that point. I was ready to
capitalize on it. I had prepared myself for it.”
But what he had not prepared himself for was the way the justice system would
be stacked against him. It became clear during the selection of the jury that he
did not stand a chance. As the prospective jurors entered the court, activists
handed them a pamphlet printed by the Fully
Informed Jury Association. It said that jurors had a right to come to any
decision based on the evidence and their consciences.
“When the judge and the prosecutor found that out, the prosecutor,
especially, flipped his shit,” DeChristopher said. “He insisted that the judge
tell the jurors that this information was not true. The judge pulled most of the
jurors in[to] the chambers and questioned them one at a time. He talked about
what was in the pamphlet. He said that regardless of what the pamphlet said it
was not their job to decide if this is right or wrong, but to listen to what he
said was the law and follow that even if they thought it was morally unjust.
They were not allowed to use [their] conscience. They were told they would be
violating their oath if they decided this on conscience rather than the evidence
that he told them to listen to. I was sitting in that chamber and could see one
person after another accept this notion. I could see it in their faces, that
they had to do what they were told even if they thought it was morally unjust.
That is a scary thing to witness in another human being. I saw it in one person
after another brought in the courtroom, sitting at the end of a long table in
front of the paternalistic figure of [the] judge with all the majesty around
him. They accepted it. They did not question it. It gave me a really good
understanding of how some of the great human atrocities happened with the
consent of the population, that people can accept what is happening, that it is
not their job to question whether any of this is right or wrong.”
As the trial began, the judge refused to let DeChristopher’s defense team
inform the jury that the auction was later overturned and declared illegal. The
judge also refused to let the defense team inform the jury that DeChristopher
had raised the money for the initial payment and offered it to the Bureau of
Land Management (BLM), which then refused to accept it.
“We weren’t able to tell the jury either of those things,” he said. “They
never knew that the auction was overturned. They never knew I offered the BLM
the money. They were told over and over by the judge they were not allowed to
use their conscience. When the verdict came it was not a surprise.”
“When our Founding Fathers created the jury system they called it the best
defense against legislative tyranny,” he said. “They expected that if the
government was passing laws that were out of line with the values of the
community, then people would break those laws and take their case before a jury
of their peers who would decide whether or not that person’s actions were
justified. That was the system our country was founded upon. That shifted
radically as the role of the jury has been minimized in our criminal justice
system. Juries are no longer given the opportunity to weigh all the factors of a
case and are specifically told they are not allowed to use their conscience. It
is not their job to decide if things are right or wrong. This is a drastic
departure from the system that was originally created in this country.”
When I asked DeChristopher why he did not work within the system, perhaps by
backing a progressive Democrat, he answered that “if there was such a thing I
might consider it.”
“I don’t see anyone in our political system advocating for significant
change,” he said. “I haven’t ignored the political system. I paid attention when
the Waxman-Markey
[cap and trade] bill was being debated. I saw that there was a Republican
amendment that if energy prices in any region of the country ever go up by more
than 10 percent the whole bill is null and void. In other words, if the survival
of our children ever costs more than about $300 a year per household, we are
going to stop and give up. Both sides debated for over an hour whether it would
or not ever cost $300. But there was no one who ever stood up and said maybe the
cost was worth it, maybe that was too low a price to put on the heads of your
children, maybe it was immoral to put any price on the heads of our children.
There was no one standing up and addressing the severity of climate change.”
DeChristopher helped organize a grass-roots campaign in an unsuccessful
effort to unseat five-term U.S. Rep. Jim Matheson of Utah.
“I saw after the experience with the Waxman-Markey bill that our Blue Dog Democrats
in Utah had to go,” he said. He worked for candidate Claudia Wright in a
campaign that split the delegate vote and forced a runoff primary.
“There is value in working within the democratic system, but first we need to
create a democratic system,” he said. “When we ran Claudia Wright it started
with a Craig’s List ‘help wanted’ ad for a ‘Courageous Congressperson.’ We
pulled together a panel of longtime activists who were well respected in Utah
representing various issues, from environmental issues to peace and justice to
LGBT rights, labor, immigration rights and health care. That panel held public
interviews at the Salt Lake City Library with all the people who had applied to
the Craig’s List ad. Everybody from the district was invited and got to vote in
instant runoff voting. That is how we came up with that candidate. We started
from scratch.”
“If we were going to have a democracy, what would it look like? That was one
experiment,” he said. “Craig’s List is probably not the ultimate answer. But we
started from the acknowledgement that if we want to work within the democratic
process we had to build it first.”
DeChristopher, who is 29, admits he was “cautiously optimistic” during the
2008 presidential campaign.
“I saw that nothing Obama was saying was actually good enough in terms of the
climate crisis,” he said. “There was a faint hope in me that perhaps he was
saying what he needed to say to get elected and then he would turn out to
actually be a progressive.”
He heard Naomi Klein give a talk shortly before the election. She told her
listeners that if Barack Obama was a centrist and the center was not good enough
to defend our survival then our job was to move the center.
“That resonated with me,” DeChristopher said. “That was where my thinking at
the time was. We as a movement had to move the center. That is another reason I
turned to civil disobedience. I was looking to do something beyond what was
considered acceptable to shift those boundaries, to create more space where
people could be more aggressive without being on the radical edge.”
“The chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said what we do
in the next two or three years will determine our future, and he said that in
2007 and we didn’t do anything,” he said. “A lot of folks like Jim Hansen admit it off
the record, but won’t say it publicly, that it is actually too late for any
amount of emission reductions to prevent some sort of collapse of our industrial
civilization. That certainly doesn’t mean all is lost. It means we are in a
position where we are definitely going to be navigating the most intense period
of change humanity has ever seen. What that means for us is that it really
matters who is in charge during that intense period of change. It means that
things are going to be desperate.”
“Generally in desperate times those in power do desperate things to hold on
to their power in the name of order and security,” he went on. “That is when
things have gotten really ugly in the localized examples of collapse that we
have in history, whether they were economically induced as in Germany in the
1930s or environmentally induced as in Darfur. Rather than an opportunity for
mass reflection, which it could be, where we could say we had this coming
because of fundamental flaws in the way we structured our society, that maybe
greed and competition were not the best values to base everything off of, rather
than doing that, it is much more common in those historical examples to say,
‘Oh, it was because of those people.’ A class of people was scapegoated. The
powerful said, ‘Those are the people who are causing our problems and if we take
it out on them we can maintain order and security for the rest of us.’ That is
when things get really ugly and dehumanizing.”
“We are starting to see hints of that already with the rather minor ripples
that we have been having in the past few years with the economic situation,” he
said. “Rather than admit the fundamental flaws, many of those in power have
said, ‘Oh, it is because of those immigrants that are taking people’s jobs, or
those Arabs, or those unions, whoever the scapegoat is, to try and vilify
someone. What we are on track for are much larger ripples than we have had in
the past couple years with the economic problems. If we go into that collapse
with our current power structure and a world run by corporations, where we have
ignorant and apathetic people who are afraid of their own government and think
their job is to do what they are told, even if they think it is immoral, that is
when things can get really ugly. If we go into that collapse with an awakened
and educated population that views it as their role to create the society they
want and hold their government accountable then we have the opportunity,
whatever hardships we might face, to actually build a better world on the ashes
of this one.”
“Our strategies must be to not only change our energy system and food system,
but to change our power structures,” he said. “We shouldn’t be looking for the
big corporations running the show to become a little greener and cleaner. We
should be overthrowing those corporations running our government. Our job as a
movement is not just to reduce emissions; while we still need to do that, we
also have this other challenge of maintaining our humanity through whatever
challenges lie ahead. This is much more abstract and foreign to this
movement.”
“Civil disobedience puts us in a vulnerable position,” DeChristopher said.
“It puts us in a position where we are refusing to be obedient to injustice.
Civil disobedience puts us in a position where we are making a risk and possibly
making a sacrifice to stand up against that injustice. It also puts us in a
position where with that vulnerability we see how much we need other people.
This is something I have experienced over the past few years as people have come
out of nowhere to support me, to make actions more powerful and to help me
personally get through this experience and grow from it. Appreciating these
connections is one of the most important parts of resiliency. A lot of the
unwillingness to take bold action is coming from a disempowerment that comes
from a lack of connection. When we view ourselves as isolated individuals it
does not make sense to stand up to a big powerful institution like a big
corporation or big government. It is not until we gain the understanding that we
are part of something much bigger that we feel empowered to take those necessary
actions. This is a self-reinforcing cycle. The more we stick our neck out the
more connected we become and the more empowered we become to do it again.”
DeChristopher, who attends a Unitarian church in Salt Lake City, comes out of
the religious left. This left, defined by Christian anarchists such as Dorothy
Day, Philip Berrigan and his brother Father Daniel Berrigan, as well as Dr.
Martin Luther King, takes a moral stance not because it is always effective but
because it is right, because to live the moral life means that there is no
alternative. This life demands a commitment to justice no matter how bleak the
future appears. And what sustains DeChristopher is what sustained the religious
radicals who went before him—faith.
“The connection to a religious community for me is a big part of the
empowerment,” he said. “From talking with a lot of the old Freedom Riders and
other folks in the civil rights movement, it was in the church community that
people found the strength and the faith that, no matter what happened to them
when they sat at that lunch counter or got on that bus, there would be another
wave of people coming behind them to take their place and another wave behind
that and behind that. And that is part of what is missing from the progressive
community today. Part of my belief system is an appreciation of our
connectedness to the natural world, the interconnected web of life of which I am
a part. I am not an isolated individual, and this understanding is what empowers
me, but also in a more direct way in that I am connected to the church community
who I knew would support me. Sitting in that auction when I was deciding to do
this I was thinking about whether anyone would support me. The people I knew
would have my back were in the church. That helped drive me to action.”
And because of that he understands that any resistance can never succumb to
the temptation of violence.
“Violence is the realm our current power structure is really good at,” he
said. “They are eager to play that game. Any opportunity we give them [to use
violence], they will win. That is the game they win at. The history of social
movements in this country shows that we are far more powerful with nonviolent
civil disobedience than we are with what our audience considers to be
violence.”
“Once our actions are deemed to be violent then that justifies repressive
tactics on the part of the government,” he said. “With a nonviolent movement we
are still inviting a strong reaction from the government or ruling authorities.
We are inviting a powerful reaction against ourselves. But it undermines the
moral legitimacy of our current government. That is the path we need to pursue.
Rather than reinforcing their legitimacy we need to undermine their legitimacy.”

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Justice Goes Global

Posted on June 15, 2011 by MZR

June 14, 2011

 

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

You probably missed the recent special issue of China Newsweek, so let me bring you up to date. Who do you think was on the cover — named the “most influential foreign figure” of the year in China? Barack Obama? No. Bill Gates? No. Warren Buffett? No. O.K., I’ll give you a hint: He’s a rock star in Asia, and people in China, Japan and South Korea scalp tickets to hear him. Give up?

It was Michael J. Sandel, the Harvard University political philosopher.

This news will not come as a surprise to Harvard students, some 15,000 of whom have taken Sandel’s legendary “Justice” class. What makes the class so compelling is the way Sandel uses real-life examples to illustrate the philosophies of the likes of Aristotle, Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill.

Sandel, 58, will start by tossing out a question, like, “Is it fair that David Letterman makes 700 times more than a schoolteacher?” or “Are we morally responsible for righting the wrongs of our grandparents’ generation?”  Students offer competing answers, challenge one another across the hall, debate with the philosophers — and learn the art of reasoned moral argument along the way.

Besides being educational, the classes make great theater — so much so that Harvard and WGBH (Boston’s PBS station) filmed them and created a public television series that aired across the country in 2009. The series, now freely available online (at www.JusticeHarvard.org), has begun to stir interest in surprising new places.

Last year, Japan’s NHK TV broadcast a translated version of the PBS series, which sparked a philosophy craze in Japan and prompted the University of Tokyo to create a course based on Sandel’s. In China, volunteer translators subtitled the lectures and uploaded them to Chinese Web sites, where they have attracted millions of viewers. Sandel’s recent book — “Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?” — has sold more than a million copies in East Asia alone. This is a book about moral philosophy, folks!

Here’s The Japan Times describing Sandel’s 2010 visit: “Few philosophers are compared to rock stars or TV celebrities, but that’s the kind of popularity Michael Sandel enjoys in Japan.” At a recent lecture in Tokyo, “long lines had formed outside almost an hour before the start of the evening event. Tickets, which were free and assigned by lottery in advance, were in such demand that one was reportedly offered for sale on the Web for $500.” Sandel began the lecture by asking: “Is ticket scalping fair or unfair?”

But what is most intriguing is the reception that Sandel (a close friend) received in China. He just completed a book tour and lectures at Tsinghua and Fudan universities, where students began staking out seats hours in advance. This semester, Tsinghua started a course called “Critical Thinking and Moral Reasoning,” modeled on Sandel’s. His class visit was covered on the national evening news.

Sandel’s popularity in Asia reflects the intersection of three trends. One is the growth of online education, where students anywhere now can gain access to the best professors from everywhere. Another is the craving in Asia for a more creative, discussion-based style of teaching in order to produce more creative, innovative students. And the last is the hunger of young people to engage in moral reasoning and debates, rather than having their education confined to the dry technical aspects of economics, business or engineering.

At Tsinghua and Fudan, Sandel challenged students with a series of cases about justice and markets: Is it fair to raise the price of snow shovels after a snowstorm? What about auctioning university admissions to the highest bidder? “Free-market sentiment ran surprisingly high,” Sandel said, “but some students argued that unfettered markets create inequality and social discord.”

Sandel’s way of teaching about justice “is both refreshing and relevant in the context of China,” Dean Qian Yingyi of Tsinghua’s School of Economics and Management, explained in an e-mail. Refreshing because of the style and relevant because “the philosophic thinking among the Chinese is mostly instrumentalist and materialistic,” partly because of “the contemporary obsession on economic development in China.”

Tsinghua’s decision to offer a version of Sandel’s course, added Qian, “is part of a great experiment of undergraduate education reform currently under way at our school. … This is not just one class; it is the beginning of an era.”

Sandel is touching something deep in both Boston and Beijing. “Students everywhere are hungry for discussion of the big ethical questions we confront in our everyday lives,” Sandel argues. “In recent years, seemingly technical economic questions have crowded out questions of justice and the common good.  I think there is a growing sense, in many societies, that G.D.P. and market values do not by themselves produce happiness, or a good society. My dream is to create a video-linked global classroom, connecting students across cultures and national boundaries — to think through these hard moral questions together, to see what we can learn from one another.”

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It’s Not About You

Posted on May 31, 2011 by MZR
May 30, 2011
By DAVID BROOKS

Over the past few weeks, America’s colleges have sent another class of graduates off into the world. These graduates possess something of inestimable value. Nearly every sensible middle-aged person would give away all their money to be able to go back to age 22 and begin adulthood anew.

But, especially this year, one is conscious of the many ways in which this year’s graduating class has been ill served by their elders. They enter a bad job market, the hangover from decades of excessive borrowing. They inherit a ruinous federal debt.

More important, their lives have been perversely structured. This year’s graduates are members of the most supervised generation in American history. Through their childhoods and teenage years, they have been monitored, tutored, coached and honed to an unprecedented degree.

Yet upon graduation they will enter a world that is unprecedentedly wide open and unstructured. Most of them will not quickly get married, buy a home and have kids, as previous generations did. Instead, they will confront amazingly diverse job markets, social landscapes and lifestyle niches. Most will spend a decade wandering from job to job and clique to clique, searching for a role.

No one would design a system of extreme supervision to prepare people for a decade of extreme openness. But this is exactly what has emerged in modern America. College students are raised in an environment that demands one set of navigational skills, and they are then cast out into a different environment requiring a different set of skills, which they have to figure out on their own.

Worst of all, they are sent off into this world with the whole baby-boomer theology ringing in their ears. If you sample some of the commencement addresses being broadcast on C-Span these days, you see that many graduates are told to: Follow your passion, chart your own course, march to the beat of your own drummer, follow your dreams and find yourself. This is the litany of expressive individualism, which is still the dominant note in American culture.

But, of course, this mantra misleads on nearly every front.

College grads are often sent out into the world amid rapturous talk of limitless possibilities. But this talk is of no help to the central business of adulthood, finding serious things to tie yourself down to. The successful young adult is beginning to make sacred commitments — to a spouse, a community and calling — yet mostly hears about freedom and autonomy.

Today’s graduates are also told to find their passion and then pursue their dreams. The implication is that they should find themselves first and then go off and live their quest. But, of course, very few people at age 22 or 24 can take an inward journey and come out having discovered a developed self.

Most successful young people don’t look inside and then plan a life. They look outside and find a problem, which summons their life. A relative suffers from Alzheimer’s and a young woman feels called to help cure that disease. A young man works under a miserable boss and must develop management skills so his department can function. Another young woman finds herself confronted by an opportunity she never thought of in a job category she never imagined. This wasn’t in her plans, but this is where she can make her contribution.

Most people don’t form a self and then lead a life. They are called by a problem, and the self is constructed gradually by their calling.

The graduates are also told to pursue happiness and joy. But, of course, when you read a biography of someone you admire, it’s rarely the things that made them happy that compel your admiration. It’s the things they did to court unhappiness — the things they did that were arduous and miserable, which sometimes cost them friends and aroused hatred. It’s excellence, not happiness, that we admire most.

Finally, graduates are told to be independent-minded and to express their inner spirit. But, of course, doing your job well often means suppressing yourself. As Atul Gawande mentioned during his countercultural address last week at Harvard Medical School, being a good doctor often means being part of a team, following the rules of an institution, going down a regimented checklist.

Today’s grads enter a cultural climate that preaches the self as the center of a life. But, of course, as they age, they’ll discover that the tasks of a life are at the center. Fulfillment is a byproduct of how people engage their tasks, and can’t be pursued directly. Most of us are egotistical and most are self-concerned most of the time, but it’s nonetheless true that life comes to a point only in those moments when the self dissolves into some task. The purpose in life is not to find yourself. It’s to lose yourself.

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One Lawman With the Guts to Go After Wall Street

Posted on May 18, 2011 by MZR

Posted on May 18, 2011

By Robert Scheer

The fix was in to let the Wall Street scoundrels off the hook for the enormous damage they caused in creating the Great Recession. All of the leading politicians and officials, federal and state, Republican and Democrat, were on board to complete the job of saving the banks while ignoring their victims … until last week when the attorney general of New York refused to go along. 

Eric Schneiderman will probably fail, as did his predecessors in that job; the honest sheriff doesn’t last long in a town that houses the Wall Street casino. But decent folks should be cheering him on. Despite a mountain of evidence of robo-signed mortgage contracts, deceitful mortgage-based securities and fraudulent foreclosures, the banks were going to be able to cut their potential losses to what was, for them, a minuscule amount.

In a deal that had the blessing of the White House and many federal regulators and state attorneys general—a settlement probably for not much more than the $5 billion pittance the top financial institutions found acceptable—the banks would be freed of any further claims by federal and state officials over their shady mortgage packaging and servicing practices and deceptive foreclosure proceedings.

At the same time, the SEC and other federal regulatory bodies are making sweetheart deals with the bankers to close off accountability for creating and collecting on more than a trillion dollars’ worth of toxic mortgage-based securities at the heart of the nation’s economic meltdown—a meltdown that has seen the national debt grow by more than 50 percent, stuck us with an unyielding 9 percent unemployment and left 50 million Americans losing their homes to foreclosure or clinging desperately to underwater mortgages. On top of which an all-time high of 44 million people are living below the official poverty line and fewer new homes were started in April than at any other time in the past half century. With housing values still in free fall, we continue to make the bankers whole. 

As Gretchen Morgenson reported in The New York Times, the Justice Department division responsible for checking for fraud in the bankruptcy system has found a widespread pattern of deception by banks foreclosing homes, and she concluded: “So an authoritative source with access to a lot of data has identified industry practices as not only pernicious but also pervasive. Which makes it all the more mystifying that regulators seem eager to strike a cheap and easy settlement with the banks.” 
Not really surprising given both the enormous hold of Wall Street money over the two major political parties and the revolving door through which executives travel between firms like Goldman Sachs and the top positions in the U.S. Treasury Department and elsewhere in the government. The financial crisis occurred only because Republicans and Democrats passed the laws that Wall Street lobbyists wrote ending reasonable banking industry regulation installed in the 1930s in response to the Depression. And when the greed they enabled threatened the foundations of our economy, under Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, it was the bankers who were assisted into lifeboats that had no room for ordinary people.
 
Not surprising then to find all of the power players in on the latest deals: the Obama administration that had bailed out the banks but not troubled homeowners; the regulators and Fed officials who all looked the other way when the housing bubble was inflated; and the state attorneys general who backed away from going after the perpetrators of robo-signed mortgages and other scams used to foreclose homes.

But now Schneiderman has a chance to derail the deals, given that he is supported by the state’s tough 1921 Martin Act, which one of his predecessors as New York state attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, had used to good advantage in exposing the financial behemoths that are so heavily based in New York. The Wall Street Journal describes the Martin Act as “one of the most potent prosecutorial tools against financial fraud” because, as opposed to federal law, it doesn’t carry the more difficult standard of proving intent to defraud.

Last week, it was revealed that Schneiderman’s office has demanded an accounting from Bank of America, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs as to the details of their past practice of securitizing those mortgage-based packages that proved so toxic. Maybe he will fail against such powerful forces, as did Spitzer and later Andrew Cuomo, but it is a test worth watching, since no one else, from the White House on down, seems to be concerned with holding the bailed-out banks accountable for the massive pain and suffering they inflicted on the public.

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The Obama Deception: Why Cornel West Went Ballistic

Posted on May 16, 2011 by MZR

Posted on May 16, 2011

By Chris Hedges

The moral philosopher Cornel West, if Barack Obama’s ascent to power was a morality play, would be the voice of conscience. Rahm Emanuel, a cynical product of the Chicago political machine, would be Satan. Emanuel in the first scene of the play would dangle power, privilege, fame and money before Obama. West would warn Obama that the quality of a life is defined by its moral commitment, that his legacy will be determined by his willingness to defy the cruel assault by the corporate state and the financial elite against the poor and working men and women, and that justice must never be sacrificed on the altar of power.

Perhaps there was never much of a struggle in Obama’s heart. Perhaps West only provided a moral veneer. Perhaps the dark heart of Emanuel was always the dark heart of Obama. Only Obama knows. But we know how the play ends. West is banished like honest Kent in “King Lear.” Emanuel and immoral mediocrities from Lawrence Summers to Timothy Geithner to Robert Gates—think of Goneril and Regan in the Shakespearean tragedy—take power. We lose. And Obama becomes an obedient servant of the corporate elite in exchange for the hollow trappings of authority.

No one grasps this tragic descent better than West, who did 65 campaign events for Obama, believed in the potential for change and was encouraged by the populist rhetoric of the Obama campaign. He now nurses, like many others who placed their faith in Obama, the anguish of the deceived, manipulated and betrayed. He bitterly describes Obama as “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats. And now he has become head of the American killing machine and is proud of it.”

“When you look at a society you look at it through the lens of the least of these, the weak and the vulnerable; you are committed to loving them first, not exclusively, but first, and therefore giving them priority,” says West, the Class of 1943 University Professor of African American Studies and Religion at Princeton University. “And even at this moment, when the empire is in deep decline, the culture is in deep decay, the political system is broken, where nearly everyone is up for sale, you say all I have is the subversive memory of those who came before, personal integrity, trying to live a decent life, and a willingness to live and die for the love of folk who are catching hell. This means civil disobedience, going to jail, supporting progressive forums of social unrest if they in fact awaken the conscience, whatever conscience is left, of the nation. And that’s where I find myself now.”

“I have to take some responsibility,” he admits of his support for Obama as we sit in his book-lined office. “I could have been reading into it more than was there.”

“I was thinking maybe he has at least some progressive populist instincts that could become more manifest after the cautious policies of being a senator and working with [Sen. Joe] Lieberman as his mentor,” he says. “But it became very clear when I looked at the neoliberal economic team. The first announcement of Summers and Geithner I went ballistic. I said, ‘Oh, my God, I have really been misled at a very deep level.’ And the same is true for Dennis Ross and the other neo-imperial elites. I said, ‘I have been thoroughly misled, all this populist language is just a facade. I was under the impression that he might bring in the voices of brother Joseph Stiglitz and brother Paul Krugman. I figured, OK, given the structure of constraints of the capitalist democratic procedure that’s probably the best he could do. But at least he would have some voices concerned about working people, dealing with issues of jobs and downsizing and banks, some semblance of democratic accountability for Wall Street oligarchs and corporate plutocrats who are just running amuck. I was completely wrong.”

West says the betrayal occurred on two levels.

“There is the personal level,” he says. “I used to call my dear brother [Obama] every two weeks. I said a prayer on the phone for him, especially before a debate. And I never got a call back. And when I ran into him in the state Capitol in South Carolina when I was down there campaigning for him he was very kind. The first thing he told me was, ‘Brother West, I feel so bad. I haven’t called you back. You been calling me so much. You been giving me so much love, so much support and what have you.’ And I said, ‘I know you’re busy.’ But then a month and half later I would run into other people on the campaign and he’s calling them all the time. I said, wow, this is kind of strange. He doesn’t have time, even two seconds, to say thank you or I’m glad you’re pulling for me and praying for me, but he’s calling these other people. I said, this is very interesting. And then as it turns out with the inauguration I couldn’t get a ticket with my mother and my brother. I said this is very strange. We drive into the hotel and the guy who picks up my bags from the hotel has a ticket to the inauguration. My mom says, ‘That’s something that this dear brother can get a ticket and you can’t get one, honey, all the work you did for him from Iowa.’ Beginning in Iowa to Ohio. We had to watch the thing in the hotel.”

“What it said to me on a personal level,” he goes on, “was that brother Barack Obama had no sense of gratitude, no sense of loyalty, no sense of even courtesy, [no] sense of decency, just to say thank you. Is this the kind of manipulative, Machiavellian orientation we ought to get used to? That was on a personal level.”

But there was also the betrayal on the political and ideological level.

“It became very clear to me as the announcements were being made,” he says, “that this was going to be a newcomer, in many ways like Bill Clinton, who wanted to reassure the Establishment by bringing in persons they felt comfortable with and that we were really going to get someone who was using intermittent progressive populist language in order to justify a centrist, neoliberalist policy that we see in the opportunism of Bill Clinton. It was very much going to be a kind of black face of the DLC [Democratic Leadership Council].”

Obama and West’s last personal contact took place a year ago at a gathering of the Urban League when, he says, Obama “cussed me out.” Obama, after his address, which promoted his administration’s championing of charter schools, approached West, who was seated in the front row.

“He makes a bee line to me right after the talk, in front of everybody,” West says. “He just lets me have it. He says, ‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself, saying I’m not a progressive. Is that the best you can do? Who do you think you are?’ I smiled. I shook his hand. And a sister hollered in the back, ‘You can’t talk to professor West. That’s Dr. Cornel West. Who do you think you are?’ You can go to jail talking to the president like that. You got to watch yourself. I wanted to slap him on the side of his head.”

“It was so disrespectful,” he went on, “that’s what I didn’t like. I’d already been called, along with all [other] leftists, a “F’ing retard” by Rahm Emanuel because we had critiques of the president.” 

Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to the president, has, West said, phoned him to complain about his critiques of Obama. Jarrett was especially perturbed, West says, when he said in an interview last year that he saw a lot of Malcolm X and Ella Baker in Michelle Obama. Jarrett told him his comments were not complimentary to the first lady.

“I said in the world that I live in, in that which authorizes my reality, Ella Baker is a towering figure,” he says, munching Fritos and sipping apple juice at his desk. “If I say there is a lot of Ella Baker in Michelle Obama that’s a compliment. She can take it any way she wants. I can tell her I’m sorry it offended you, but I’m going to speak the truth. She is a Harvard Law graduate, a Princeton graduate, and she deals with child obesity and military families. Why doesn’t she visit a prison? Why not spend some time in the hood? That is where she is, but she can’t do it.”

“I think my dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men,” West says. “It’s understandable. As a young brother who grows up in a white context, brilliant African father, he’s always had to fear being a white man with black skin. All he has known culturally is white. He is just as human as I am, but that is his cultural formation. When he meets an independent black brother it is frightening. And that’s true for a white brother. When you get a white brother who meets a free, independent black man they got to be mature to really embrace fully what the brother is saying to them. It’s a tension, given the history. It can be overcome. Obama, coming out of Kansas influence, white, loving grandparents, coming out of Hawaii and Indonesia, when he meets these independent black folk who have a history of slavery, Jim Crow, Jane Crow and so on, he is very apprehensive. He has a certain rootlessness, a deracination. It is understandable.”

“He feels most comfortable with upper middle-class white and Jewish men who consider themselves very smart, very savvy and very effective in getting what they want,” he says. “He’s got two homes. He has got his family and whatever challenges go on there, and this other home. Larry Summers blows his mind because he’s so smart. He’s got Establishment connections. He’s embracing me. It is this smartness, this truncated brilliance, that titillates and stimulates brother Barack and makes him feel at home. That is very sad for me.”

“This was maybe America’s last chance to fight back against the greed of the Wall Street oligarchs and corporate plutocrats, to generate some serious discussion about public interest and common good that sustains any democratic experiment,” West laments. “We are squeezing out all of the democratic juices we have. The escalation of the class war against the poor and the working class is intense. More and more working people are beaten down. They are world-weary. They are into self-medication. They are turning on each other. They are scapegoating the most vulnerable rather than confronting the most powerful. It is a profoundly human response to panic and catastrophe. I thought Barack Obama could have provided some way out. But he lacks backbone.”

“Can you imagine if Barack Obama had taken office and deliberately educated and taught the American people about the nature of the financial catastrophe and what greed was really taking place?” West asks. “If he had told us what kind of mechanisms of accountability needed to be in place, if he had focused on homeowners rather than investment banks for bailouts and engaged in massive job creation he could have nipped in the bud the right-wing populism of the tea party folk. The tea party folk are right when they say the government is corrupt. It is corrupt. Big business and banks have taken over government and corrupted it in deep ways.

“We have got to attempt to tell the truth, and that truth is painful,” he says. “It is a truth that is against the thick lies of the mainstream. In telling that truth we become so maladjusted to the prevailing injustice that the Democratic Party, more and more, is not just milquetoast and spineless, as it was before, but thoroughly complicitous with some of the worst things in the American empire. I don’t think in good conscience I could tell anybody to vote for Obama. If it turns out in the end that we have a crypto-fascist movement and the only thing standing between us and fascism is Barack Obama, then we have to put our foot on the brake. But we’ve got to think seriously of third-party candidates, third formations, third parties. Our last hope is to generate a democratic awakening among our fellow citizens. This means raising our voices, very loud and strong, bearing witness, individually and collectively. Tavis [Smiley] and I have talked about ways of civil disobedience, beginning with ways for both of us to get arrested, to galvanize attention to the plight of those in prisons, in the hoods, in poor white communities. We must never give up. We must never allow hope to be eliminated or suffocated.”

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Humanity Hitting the Resource Ceiling

Posted on May 14, 2011 by MZR

By Stephen Leahy

UXBRIDGE, Canada, May 12, 2011 (IPS) – Better living through using far fewer material resources is the only possible future, experts agree. Humanity is pressing up against the limits of a finite planet to provide resources like water, oil, metals and food, according to a new report released Thursday.

Higher resource consumption levels will be prohibitively costly or simply impossible, warns the report by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

“Global resource consumption is exploding. It’s not a trend that is in any way sustainable,” said Ernst von Weizsäcker, co-chair of UNEP’s International Resource Panel.

“We must realise that prosperity and well-being do not depend on consuming ever-greater quantities of resources,” said von Weizsäcker.

The world is running out of cheap and high quality sources of some essential materials such as oil, copper and gold, the supplies of which, in turn, require ever-rising volumes of fossil fuels and freshwater to produce, the report found.

During the 20th century, the rate of resource use has increased twice as fast as the increase in global population. Now, resources are being consumed at an even greater rate and are on pace to triple by 2050, the report calculates. Except there simply aren’t enough resources left on the planet to manage that.

The average person in Canada or the United States currently consumes 25 tonnes of key resources every year, while a person living in India and in most African countries uses just four tonnes, the report found.

Industrialised countries need to reduce their consumption by making significant reductions in waste and major improvements in the efficiency with which they use resources. At the same time, developing countries need to create new low-carbon, super-efficient resource use pathways for their economic development.

Developing countries have to change their idea of what development means in a resource-scarce world. They need to forge a new resource- efficient, low carbon development path, said Mark Swilling of the Sustainability Institute at the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa.

There is a pressing need for sanitation in much of Africa, but instead of building expensive Western-style water treatment infrastructure, countries can use their wetlands and natural vegetation to provide the same service, Swilling, a co-author of the report, told IPS.

“We will miss out on these kinds of opportunities if we follow Western development patterns,” he said.

Public infrastructure is the biggest determinant of future energy and resource use, said Marina Fischer-Kowalski of the Institute of Social Ecology in Vienna.

North America’s infrastructure, including transportation, sanitation, food production and so on, are all high-energy, high-material-use systems, said report co-author Fischer-Kowalski. They were designed with the assumption of never-ending access to cheap and plentiful energy and resources. Efficiency improvements can be made but it is more expensive and limits to what can be done.

“Our report calls for an urgent rethink of the links between resource use and economic prosperity,” Fischer-Kowalski told IPS.

At a bare minimum, wealthy countries need to freeze their per capita consumption and help developing nations follow a more sustainable path, recommends the report, “Decoupling natural resource use and environmental impacts from economic growth”. Decoupling means disconnecting economic growth from increasing use of material resources.

Economic theory has long linked rising economic development as measured by Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to increasing resource use. However, countries like Japan and Switzerland have far higher GDP per capita than Australia but they use just 25 percent of the natural resources per capita that Australians use.

Japan has an explicit goal of becoming a “sustainable society” focused on low carbon, the reduction, reuse and recycling of materials, and harmony with nature. The government has successfully focused on increasing resource productivity and minimising negative environmental impacts, the report found.

Germany aims to double energy and resource productivity by 2020. China has declared it will build an “ecological civilisation” with resource and environmental concerns as top priorities.

‘Decoupling’ is a way of getting away from using the GDP to measure growth and development, said Swilling. Since GDP is a measurement of economic activity, disasters like Hurricane Katrina or even a traffic accident increase GDP.

“GDP measures everything except those things that really matter to people,” he said.

This shift to decoupling “will require require significant changes in government policies, corporate behaviour, and consumption patterns”, the report concludes with considerable understatement.

Right now, Africa is being hard pressed to sell off its primary resources to foreign interests. Many African states are becoming increasingly dependent on the cash that exports of minerals, timber and food bring. Meanwhile the rising costs of such resources are driving “land grabs” across the continent, where corporations and foreign states are buying or leasing vast tracts of land, said Swilling.

“Grabbing cheap land in Africa has become a popular sport,” he said.

Over 50 million hectares of African land has been acquired by foreign interests in the last 10 years, according to Oxfam and the International Land Coalition, an NGO tracking the issue. That’s more farmland than Canada has.

Much of Africa’s soils are degraded and need rehabilitation, not exploitation, said Swilling. Food prices are going to rise and this is going to cause havoc in the future.

“Countries need to see their farmland and soil as a strategic priority, as part of their national security,” he said.

While land grabs rightly captures media attention, most of Africa’s export revenues come from selling off its mineral resources. That has to be carefully monitored and at the very least those revenues need to be invested in education and training and the creation of a manufacturing sector, said Swilling.

Education is crucial, agreed Fischer-Kowalski. “Investment in human capital is the key to being able to do more with less,” she said.

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Bull Durham

Posted on April 28, 2011 by MZR

Annie Savoy

  • [Opening narration] I believe in the Church of Baseball. I’ve tried all the major religions, and most of the minor ones. I’ve worshipped Buddha, Allah, Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, trees, mushrooms, and Isadora Duncan. I know things. For instance, there are 108 beads in a Catholic rosary and there are 108 stitches in a baseball. When I heard that, I gave Jesus a chance. But it just didn’t work out between us. The Lord laid too much guilt on me. I prefer metaphysics to theology. You see, there’s no guilt in baseball, and it’s never boring… which makes it like sex. There’s never been a ballplayer slept with me who didn’t have the best year of his career. Making love is like hitting a baseball: you just gotta relax and concentrate. Besides, I’d never sleep with a player hitting under .250… not unless he had a lot of RBIs and was a great glove man up the middle. You see, there’s a certain amount of life wisdom I give these boys. I can expand their minds. Sometimes when I’ve got a ballplayer alone, I’ll just read Emily Dickinson or Walt Whitman to him, and the guys are so sweet, they always stay and listen. ‘Course, a guy’ll listen to anything if he thinks it’s foreplay. I make them feel confident, and they make me feel safe, and pretty. ‘Course, what I give them lasts a lifetime; what they give me lasts 142 games. Sometimes it seems like a bad trade. But bad trades are part of baseball – now who can forget Frank Robinson for Milt Pappas, for God’s sake? It’s a long season and you gotta trust. I’ve tried ’em all, I really have, and the only church that truly feeds the soul, day in, day out, is the Church of Baseball.
  • [narrating] Baseball may be a religion full of magic, cosmic truth, and the fundamental ontological riddles of our time, but it’s also a job.

[edit] Crash Davis

  • [to Nuke] Your shower shoes have fungus on them. You’ll never make it to the bigs with fungus on your shower shoes. Think classy, you’ll be classy. Win 20 in the show, you can let the fungus grow back and the press’ll think you’re colorful. Until you win 20 in the show, however, it only means you are a slob.

[edit] Dialogue

Ebby: [After he has challenged Crash to a fight] I don’t hit no man first.
Crash Davis: All right, then… [throws him a baseball] …hit me in the chest with that.
Ebby Calvin LaLoosh: I’d kill you!
Crash Davis: Yeah? From what I hear, you couldn’t hit water if you fell out of a fucking boat. [the crowd that has gathered gawks] Come on; right here, right in the chest.
Ebby Calvin LaLoosh: No way!
Crash Davis: C’mon, Meat! Throw it! You know you’re not gonna hit me, cause you’ve already started to think about it, eh? Thinkin’ about how embarassing it would be to miss in front of all these people, how somebody might laugh? Come on, ‘rook, show us that million-dollar arm. ‘Cause I got; oh yeah, I got a good idea about that five-cent head of yours.
[LaLoosh throws the ball and misses Crash by several feet, breaking a window]
Crash Davis: Ball four.
Ebby Calvin LaLoosh: Who the hell are you, man?!
[LaLoosh charges at Crash, who drops him with one punch to the face]
Ebby Calvin LaLoosh: Good punch…
Crash Davis: I’m Crash Davis; I’m your new catcher, and you just got lesson number one; Don’t think. You can only hurt the ball club.
Annie: Millie, you’ve got to stay out of the clubhouse. It’ll just get everybody in trouble.
Millie: I got lured.
Annie: You didn’t get “lured”. Women never get lured. They’re too strong and powerful for that. Now say it — “I didn’t get lured and I will take responsibility for my actions”.
Millie: I didn’t get lured and I will take responsibility for my actions.
Annie: That’s better.
[…]
Annie: Well let’s get down to it, honey — how was he?
Millie: Well, he fucks like he pitches. Sorta all over the place
Annie Savoy: These are the ground rules. I hook up with one guy a season. Usually takes me a couple weeks to pick the guy – kinda my own spring training. And, well, you two are the most promising prospects of the season so far, so I just thought we should kinda get to know each other.
Crash Davis: Time out. Why do you get to choose?
Annie Savoy: What?
Crash Davis: Why do you get to choose? I mean, why don’t I get to choose, why doesn’t he get to choose?
Annie Savoy: Well, actually, nobody on this planet ever really chooses each other. I mean, it’s all a question of quantum physics, molecular attraction, and timing. Why, there are laws we don’t understand that bring us together and tear us apart. Uh, it’s like pheromones. You get three ants together, they can’t do dick. You get 300 million of them, they can build a cathedral.
[Crash laughs]
Ebby Calvin LaLoosh: So is somebody going to go to bed with somebody or what?
Annie Savoy: Honey, you are a regular nuclear meltdown. You better cool off. Ha ha, ha ha!
[Crash gets up to leave]
Annie Savoy: Oh, where are you going?
Crash Davis: After 12 years in the minor leagues, I don’t try out. Besides, uh, I don’t believe in quantum physics when it comes to matters of the heart.
Annie Savoy: What do you believe in, then?
Crash Davis: Well, I believe in the soul. The cock, the pussy, the small of a woman’s back, the hanging curve ball, high fiber, good scotch, that the novels of Susan Sontag are self-indulgent, overrated crap. I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. I believe there ought to be a constitutional amendment outlawing AstroTurf and the designated hitter. I believe in the sweet spot, soft-core pornography, opening your presents Christmas morning rather than Christmas Eve and I believe in long, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses that last three days. [pause] Goodnight.
Annie Savoy: Oh my. Crash…
Ebby Calvin LaLoosh: Hey, Annie, what’s all this molecule stuff?
Crash Davis: Relax, all right? Don’t try to strike everybody out. Strikeouts are boring! Besides that, they’re fascist. Throw some ground balls – it’s more democratic.
Ebby Calvin “Nuke” LaLoosh: [to himself] What’s this guy know about pitching? If he’s so good how come he’s been in the minors for the last ten years? If he’s so good how come Annie wants me instead of him?
Crash Davis: [turns back] Oh, hey, and another thing, Meat. You don’t know shit, all right? If you wanna make it to the bigs, you’ll listen to me. Annie only wants you so she can boss you around, got it? So relax! Let’s have some fun out here! This game’s fun, OK? Fun goddamnit. And don’t hold the ball so hard, OK? It’s an egg. Hold it like an egg.
Nuke: [to himself again] What’s he know about fun? I’m young. I know about fun. An old man. He don’t know nothin’ about fun.
Crash: [behind the plate again]: All right. Nobody’s goin’ out there. [Crash calls for a curve ball.]
Nuke:[to himself]: Why’s he calling for a curve ball? I want to bring heat. Shake him off. Throw what you want.
[Crash gives Nuke the sign for the pitch, Nuke shakes his head again. Crash walks to the mound.]
Crash: Why are you shaking me off?
Nuke: I want to bring the heater. Announce my presence with authority.
Crash: To announce what?
Nuke: My presence with authority.
Crash: To announce your presence with authority?! This guy’s a first ball fastball hitter, looking for the heat.
Nuke: So what? He ain’t seen my heat.
Crash: All right, Meat. Give him your heat. [He walks back to his place behind the plate.]
Nuke: Why’s he always calling me Meat? I’m the guy driving a Porsche.
Crash: [to the batter at the plate] Fastball.
[Nuke throws it and the batter hits a home run. The batter stands there, watching.]
Crash: What are you doing standing here? I gave you a gift. You stand here showing up my pitcher? Run, dummy.
Crash Davis: I never told him to stay out of your bed.
Annie Savoy: You most certainly did.
Crash Davis: I never told him to stay out of your bed.
Annie Savoy: Yes you did.
Crash Davis: I told him that a player on a streak has to respect the streak.
Annie Savoy: Oh fine.
Crash Davis: You know why? Because they don’t – -they don’t happen very often.
Annie Savoy: Right.
Crash Davis: If you believe you’re playing well because you’re getting laid, or because you’re not getting laid, or because you wear women’s underwear, then you are! And you should know that!
[long pause]
Crash Davis: Come on, Annie, think of something clever to say, huh? Something full of magic, religion, bullshit. Come on, dazzle me.
Annie Savoy: I want you.
[Larry jogs out to the mound to break up a players’ conference]
Larry: Excuse me, but what the hell’s going on out here?
Crash Davis: Well, Nuke’s scared because his eyelids are jammed and his old man’s here. We need a live… is it a live rooster?
[Jose nods]
Crash Davis: . We need a live rooster to take the curse off Jose’s glove and nobody seems to know what to get Millie or Jimmy for their wedding present.
[to the players]
Crash Davis: Is that about right?
[the players nod]
Crash Davis: We’re dealing with a lot of shit.
Larry: Okay, well, uh… candlesticks always make a nice gift, and uh, maybe you could find out where she’s registered and maybe a place-setting or maybe a silverware pattern. Okay, let’s get two! Go get ’em.
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