The Progressive Populist Today Blog

By defending Mitt and Newt income, Santorum defends a corrupt, unfair and unlevel playing field

2012-01-30T07:31:00.000-06:00

By Marc Jampole

Some in the news media have praised Rick Santorum for his “Why can’t we all just get along” moment in the middle of the Jacksonville, Florida performance of the traveling reality show called the 2012 Republican debates. The pundits missed the main point of Santorum’s words: what Rick did was express approval of the corruption and unfairness of our current economic and political system.

Here’s what Rick said that has won some praise: “The bigger issue here is, these two gentlemen, who are out distracting from the most important issues we have been playing petty personal politics, can we set aside that Newt was a member of Congress and used the skills that he developed as a member of Congress to go out and advise companies — and that’s not the worst thing in the world — and that Mitt Romney is a wealthy guy because he worked hard and he’s going out and working hard? And you guys should let that alone and focus on the issues.”

Rick’s overall message is, “let’s talk about the issues,” but in making it, he also subtly asserts that the current system is just fine.

First Rick puts his seal of approval on the revolving door between government and industry that all too often leaves the fox guarding the henhouse when it comes to regulating the private sector to improve safety, reduce pollution or ensure fair and equitable wages. Newt Gingrich may represent the high point of hypocrisy and corruption in the Age of Reagan, but he is far from the only case.

Santorum’s kind words for Mitt Romney are far more insidious because they support the current structure that rewards a very few with outsized amounts of money while the number of Americans in poverty and near poverty continues to climb.

Let’s savor the words, which reek of deception and class self-satisfaction (and make no mistake about it, Rick Santorum may have come from the working class but he’s now one of the moneyed elite): Mitt Romney is a wealthy guy because he worked hard.

But what about the sanitation guy working nights at Wal-Mart? What about the warehouse worker or the stockperson in the supermarket? What about the nurse working a double shift?

Lots of people work hard, and they don’t get to make millions of dollars a year. And they have to pay Social Security taxes on all their income, not a small part of it. And their healthcare insurance is not quite as good as Mitt’s. I’m not saying that Mitt hasn’t worked hard. So the expression that he was born on third and thinks he hit a triple doesn’t exactly apply to Romney. I understand that brain work can use as many calories as muscle work, but the joints don’t ache as much at the end of the day.

It’s inherently unfair that some people make so much more than others, but let’s assume for a moment that it is fair. Here would be the justifications, which we’ve heard before from a plethora of right-wing sources: society values the work of the investment banker more; the investment banker creates more wealth for society; investment banking requires a set of skills and the advanced education that very few people have.

But even if it were fair to pay enormously large sums to investment bankers, corporate executives and high-powered professionals (which it’s not), the system would still be unfair because it is tilted in favor of those who already have money and power in a way that never existed in the United States until the past 30 years. We can prove this assertion without examining the details: the United States has less social mobility than any other industrialized country. In other words, virtually the only way to make a lot of money working hard (instead of just working hard to get by) is to be born into a well-off or wealthy family.

Money protects children from the degradation that the country has inflicted on public schools over the past 30 years with cuts in funding and an all-out war against teachers’ unions. Wealthy children can go to private schools, get tutors, attend summer enrichment camps, take lessons to improve their talents, participate in national youth competitions, take SAT prep course, hire college consultants and make sizeable donations to universities. They can also afford to stay in school and don’t need money for graduate school.

In short, Mitt Romney was positioned to make hundreds of millions of dollars because of the millions with which he started.

Perhaps Santorum’s statement was not an admonishment to his fellow candidates to stop the negativity. Perhaps he was really speaking to President Obama—in code of course, since he’s so used to speaking in code about the President.

Perhaps Rick’s real message was that the Republicans are not interested in the “fair shot” that Obama advocated in his State of the Union address. They like things the way they are. It works just fine, thanks for Newton Leroy Gingrich, as he can use his government connections to help achieve the political goals of the highest bidder. And it sure works for Willard Mitt Romney, who, because he was born on third base, received a big long-term contract for hitting a bloop single with the bases loaded to score the first run of a 15-0 blowout in April.

Selections from the February 15, 2012 issue

2012-01-29T00:00:00.000-06:00

COVER/Michael Lind
Obama turns attention from Iraq to Asia

EDITORIAL
The battle is joined

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Bugs, biotech salesmen pester farmers

DISPATCHES
Saul Alinsky — the ‘radical’ Republicans love to hate;
States lag in health care overhaul;
Big GOP wants to shut down Newt;
Occupy inspires Newt;
Working-class voters souring on Romney;
Union targets ‘job cremator’ Romney;
Gingrich dodges Medicare tax;
Trumka to Justice Dept.: Probe banks ...

BILL JOHNSTON
Many Catholics don’t follow ‘holy’ orders

DON ROLLINS
Hitchens made the zombies think

BOB BURNETT
Tea Partiers just can’t stand Romney

JOEL JOSEPH
Obama touts free trade deals

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Medical debt is the trifecta of misery

SAM URETSKY
Narcotics laws don’t make pharmacies safe

JOHN BUELL
GOP sheds tears for oppressed wealthy

WAYNE O’LEARY
Corporate man

ALLAN BRAWLEY
Stand with unions against workers’ enemies

SETH SANDRONSKY
Charter schools grow amid questions

PUBLIC INTEREST/Ralph Nader
Neocons prepare for war in Iran

POPULIST PICKS
Muslims become common folk in Dearborn

ROB PATTERSON
Songs were only a start for Harry Belafonte

and more ...

Who will make weaker opponent for Obama: Mitt or Newt? Doesn’t matter if progressives don’t vote

2012-01-25T07:38:00.002-06:00

By Marc Jampole

Progressives, liberals and blue-dog Democrats face an interesting mental puzzle: Who do we want to win the Republican presidential nomination: Mitt Romney, who is seen as being able to attract more centrist and independent voters and therefore more likely to defeat Obama? Or Newt Gingrich, who is seen as less likely to defeat Obama but would be a disaster as president?

If we focus on the best possible “worst case” scenario for the country, we favor Mitt, because his track record suggests that he will be a far abler manager and administrator as president than the loosey-goosey Gingrich. But if we focus on the best chance of retaining Obama, who despite his faults is far more progressive, far more interested in the problems of the 99% and far less corrupt than either of the two likely Republican nominees, Newt seems on the surface to be the better choice as the assumption is that centrists will never vote for the corrupt and hypocritical Gingrich.

The flaw in the reasoning is the assumption that Newt would be easier to defeat than Mitt because fewer centrists will like him. Consider that rural-based evangelicals have never seemed to be able to warm up to Mitt, who represents the city-slicker as much as he represents free market values. They have decided to forgive Newt his transgressions, which Gingrich has rewritten into the rebirth narrative so dear to the religious right. This group, comprising from 20-30% of the population, might sit on its hands in the general election for Romney but might vote in droves for Newt.

Meanwhile in his effort to pander to the far right, Romney cut ties with the Hispanic community by coming out against the Dream Act, which would give long-time illegal aliens with deep community roots the opportunity to go legal. While Newt has not stated a position on this pending legislation, he has expressed sympathy with the long-term illegal immigrant, which has not hurt him with the evangelicals and allowed him to build a bridge to centrists and social conservatives among Hispanic voters. That Newt is a converted Catholic and not a Mormon probably helps his standing somewhat with both evangelicals and Hispanics.

On the other hand, we can safely assume that Mitt Romney would be more able to raise money for the general election than Gingrich could, and many pundits, predictors and politicians put a lot of stock in how much money each candidate raises. Money doesn’t vote, people do. But money can influence votes and money can drive voters to polling places. Whoever the GOP candidate is, we can expect that Obama will raise more money, as much as $1.0 billion total according to a few estimates.

A variation on current speculation is whether the extended campaign for the nomination will hurt or help the Republicans. It didn’t seem to hurt the Democrats in 2008, and in fact helped keep the party in the spotlight. But we were dealing with two candidates who were relatively scandal free. The Republican race has come down to the King of Republican Scandals against Mr. One-percent. Of course, it’s possible that by the time of the love fest that will be the Republican convention, the country will have grown tired of hearing about Mitt and Newt’s flaws, and will therefore shut their ears to Democratic negative campaigning in the fall.

At the end of the day, though, all the speculation in which progressives may engage about the current state of the presidential race leads to one action plan, and it’s always the same action plan for winning all elections:

Support the more progressive candidate, which in this case will surely be Obama.

Drive that candidate leftward with letters, emails and support of other candidates.

Vote on Election Day.

Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow shows why propaganda is effective: the mind wants to be fooled

2012-01-24T07:24:00.002-06:00

By Marc Jampole

I’ve been reading Daniel Kahneman’s very accessible and entertaining Thinking, Fast and Slow, which is his highly anecdotal take on more than 40 years of research by him, his students, his friends and his associates about how the mind operates. I recommend it highly to anyone who wants to know why people think as they do, and how to improve one’s own decision-making, be it in selecting new employees or investing.

Now Kahneman is not a biologist who will depict the chemical and physical processes the brain undergoes. His interest is how the conscious part of the brain—I like to call it the mind—thinks, and specifically, how it makes decisions.

Kahneman proposes that we have two thinking systems, #1 and #2. System #1 is fast-thinking and impressionistic, while system #2 is methodical and rational, and yet will take directions at a moment’s notice from the conclusions provided by System #1.

What I found most interesting in Thinking, Fast and Slow is that virtually all the tricks by which journalists, academics and speech-writers twist the truth are made possible by peculiarities of the human mind.

For example, the mind will tend to make decisions based on the principle of “what you see is all there is” (WYSIATI), which means that people will assume that all the information at their disposal is all the information that is relevant to a decision. By their selection of criteria, experts and details, writers create a world of facts that readers tend to take as WYSIATI, which is why propaganda techniques that involve selection and non-selection work. No one bothers to ask why only the rightwing anti-labor expert is being asked about the impact of the strike, or why none of the options being discussed involves adding taxes to the wealthy. We just accept the facts and experts the media selects for us.

People also tend to let the order of seeing facts or events influence their thinking. Pudovkin and Vertov proved this oddity by running film shots in different orders before audiences in the 1920s. Every audience changed its emotional reaction to the narrative depending on how the shots were ordered. Kahneman describes research that proves we do the same thing when we make decisions or evaluate people. Propagandists have used editing to distort the truth from the ancient Greek sophists up to Andrew Breitbart and the maker of the rightwing anti-union Waiting for Superman.

Kahneman’s book describes extensive research that demonstrates that people will believe an anecdote much more readily than they will believe statistics that go against their current ideas. This peculiarity of thought, proven in multiple contexts, demonstrates why the argument by anecdote is such an effective propaganda tool. The argument by anecdote proposes that one story proves a trend even if the statistics show otherwise. Thus the “Willy Horton” case history that haunted the Dukakis presidential campaign. The anecdote doesn’t even have to be true; witness the great success of Reagan’s “welfare queens” remark, which Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum want to resurrect as “food stamp squires.”

Another weird thing about the mind is that, when asked a difficult question, it will substitute an easier question and answer that one instead. Propagandists take advantage of this predilection of the human mind to eschew the really tough question when using such rhetorical devices as conflation, false conclusions, the Matt Drudge Gambit, question rigging and trivialization. For non rhetoricians, here are some quick definitions:

Conflation: Equating two events, objects, trends or facts that have nothing in common; for example, using fictional evidence to prove a historical trend or comparing Bush II’s spotty National Guard stint to the military record of war hero John Kerry.

Criteria Rigging: Selecting the criteria that will prove the point you want to make, for example, the studies that use criteria that exist in the suburbs to show that the top places to live are all in suburbs.

False Conclusions: Putting a false conclusion at the end of a paragraph or article that is factually based and logically reasoned.

Matt Drudge Gambit: Reporting that a disreputable reporter or media outlet, such as Matt Drudge or Glenn Beck, said something that you know probably is false.

Question Rigging: Selecting the questions to get a better answer. For example, instead of asking people if they believed global warming was occurring, research groups asked them if they thought the news media reported too much on global warming. When asked the second way, many more people seem not to believe that global warming is occurring.

Trivialization: Reducing discussions of important decisions to trivialities, for example focusing on the personality differences between opponents while ignoring their substantive differences.

If we can just overcome these propensities to think in an illogical way, or learn to recognize why we are reaching a conclusion, we would all make better decisions and not be so susceptible to the smoke and mirrors of politicians and pundits.

I’m not sure how many people will end up thinking more rationally after reading Thinking, Fast and Slow, but for the rest of us, at least there is the delight in reading about all the neat research involving the measurement and analysis of human decisions and reactions in both real and artificial environments. I highly recommend Thinking, Fast and Slow.

CliffsNotes Shakespeare cartoons work as literary travesty, but not as a teaching aids

2012-01-23T07:54:00.002-06:00

By Marc Jampole

One of the four short subjects on the “Blackboard” page of the New York Times’ quarterly “Education Life” insert is a gee-whiz Cheez-whiz feature on CliffsNotes Films recent release of animated seven-minute versions of six of Shakespeare’s most often-taught plays.

That’s 7 minutes a play.

From the publisher of study guides which all too often are mistaken by lazy students as cheating aids, not teaching aids. The danger of CliffsNotes, and the reason why most literature teachers look down on them, is that so many students use them to replace reading or thinking about original source material.

I saw most of the Macbeth, Hamlet, Julius Caesar and Othello at the Cliffnotes website. All open with a super hero character with a cape named Cliff flying into a public library where he sets the scene for the play. Cliff’s first words are always the same: “Hey, I’m Cliff and these are my notes.” Cliff will provide narrative links between the scenes throughout the play. A comic foil to Cliff in all of the introductions is a prop from the play, the handkerchief for Othello, Yorick’s skull for Hamlet and a bloodied, bodiless head for Macbeth.

The plays present little else than plots. Characters reveal in words what their soliloquies and actions show in the original Shakespeare. The type of animation, the irony in all the voices and the fast-paced editing stitched together by colloquial narration all derive directly from the fractured fairy tales and Mr. Peabody cartoons that Jay Ward created for the “Rocky & Bullwinkle” show. So is the reduction of complex minor characters to Commedia Del Arte caricatures, the worst of which is making the sensitive and thoughtful Laertes into an intellectually slow big guy, a Lenny or an offensive lineman in a Burt Reynolds football movie.

The Times article notes the use of slang in CliffsNotes cartoon Shakespeare. Here are some examples I especially enjoyed. When I say “enjoyed,” I mean I appreciated the cleverness with which the writers reduced beautiful words to the lowest common denominator of idioms:

“Making the beast with two backs…” to describe Othello’s marriage to Desdemona.

“…first it was like, oh no, we’re going to lose…” to describe the beginning of a battle in Othello.

“I like to call it ‘Daddy issues,’” which is how Cliff reduces Hamlet to a phrase popular with television psychologists; and “Weird stuff is happening in Rome” is how he describes the situation the day before Caesar’s assassination.

“Soothsayers, always saying sooths,” is Caesar’s way of sloughing off warnings about the ides of March.

“He’s your brother-in-law! Gross,” Hamlet to his mother about her marriage to Claudius.

“Dad, Hamlet’s gone bananas,” Ophelia’s plaint to Polonius.

I’m presenting my favorite outside of bullets because it may represent the epitome of travesty, which is, to quote Merriam-Webster, a burlesque literary or artistic imitation usually grotesquely incongruous in style, treatment or subject matter.

I’m talking about the reduction to 14 words of Shakespeare’s most well-know and oft-quoted soliloquy, the one Hamlet gives in the middle of the play that bears his name. Here is how Cliffnotes delivers the 36-line poem that Hamlet recites to himself and which hundreds of millions of school children have had to study and often memorize through the centuries:

“To be or not to be, that’s the question…right? When you think about
it…”

I think it would have been nobler in mind, and deed, if this bit of paraphrasing had remained in some undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.

CliffsNotes states with pride that it believes that students introduced to Shakespeare by its films will want to read and see the original plays. Fat chance! Why would they? These seven minute cartoons are self-contained works of entertainment that satisfy viewers the way Road Runner cartoons or episodes of a sitcom do. The strange dress and sometimes archaic ideas are the same kind of easy-to-digest local color they are accustomed to getting at historical rides and exhibits at a Disney amusement park.

One telling detail: Before you can see any of the CliffsNotes Shakespeares online, you must first sit through a 25-second commercial for a movie about some kids making a zombie movie.

Because the CliffsNotes Shakespeares remain true to the plot, they are great for helping kids get “gentleperson” C’s in their English classes, as they enable the student to regurgitate the plot in essays, test answers and classroom response.

For the student or non-student of any age who has some familiarity with Shakespeare, the CliffsNotes versions should be a hoot, and especially, I think, for educated Gen Xers and Gen Yers, who have grown up with the kind of humor central to the CliffsNotes Shakespeares and are more familiar than Baby Boomers with the argot of the moment. I could see my son and his friends (mostly other engineers and engineering graduate students) whiling away an hour laughing at these travesties. Some may have used CliffsNotes in the past and others certainly did not, but part of the humor for all of them would be that these were the CliffsNotes versions. It’s similar to laughing at pot humor in current youth movies.

That CliffsNotes would produce such intellectually bankrupt yet mildly entertaining nonsense makes perfect sense.

But why does the New York Times publicize it?

Without a doubt, CliffsNotes or its public relations agency has launched a national campaign to attract coverage of the CliffsNotes films in the news media and through Facebook, Twitter and other social media.

But why did the Times bite?

The Times reporter, Katherine Schulten, doesn’t express a point of view, but lets the facts prove the obvious—that this film venture is intellectually bankrupt because it undermines every reason to study Shakespeare in the 21st century.

But for CliffsNotes, even bad publicity, and perhaps especially bad publicity, is good publicity.

Consider why anyone would criticize CliffsNotes, either overtly or implicitly as Schulten does? There is only one reason: because CliffsNotes encourages cheating by enabling students to avoid reading the assigned material.

But isn’t that exactly what the marketplace for CliffsNotes educational products wants? So no matter how strong or weak the criticism, it helps CliffsNotes sells books.

There are other offbeat stories the Times could have covered, but the editors decided to help CliffsNotes sell its quasi-ethical substitutes to reading literature. In doing so, the Times may or may not have been expressing anti-intellectual values. It was, however, certainly expressing marketplace values.

Another skirmish won and lost in three-way battle for control of the Internet

2012-01-19T08:17:00.002-06:00

By Marc Jampole

The one-day protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) accomplished its objective: With three major sponsors running from the proposed legislation, SOPA and PIPA backers are scrambling to revise the law to make it more palatable to the Wikipedia’s and Googles of the world.

The Stop SOPA/PIPA campaign follows the series of battles to preserve network neutrality, which means that telecommunications companies don’t offer different rates to consumers based on content or type of service. Over the past few years, there have been five attempts to give companies like Verizon and ATT the right to create tiered plans for content. All have failed, as consumers have clamored to maintain the free flowing access to the Internet and all of its websites that network neutrality creates.

In case you’re cheering what looks like the latest victory for the people, think again. While many consumers and small companies have an interest in maintaining Internet rules that encourage a free marketplace of ideas and products, it wasn’t the actions of the small fry that won the battle. It was one set of enormous, multinational corporations defeating another.

When it comes to controlling the Internet, there are really three groups of very large companies. These companies have the money to hire lobbyists, contribute to political campaigns, support research and launch public awareness programs such as yesterday’s Wikipedia blackout. (Readers, please alert me if someone else has developed the same or similar nomenclature or has a better way of looking at the power structure as it involves the Internet.)

Here are the three Internet power centers and what their interest is in controlling the Internet:

Internet content creators, such as Disney, Warner Brothers and the music companies, which want to control the use of intellectual property so they can make more money.

Internet access providers, meaning telecommunications companies, which want to put a meter on the flow of the electrons that carry Internet information so they can make more money.

Internet organizers such as Google, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Amazon, Netflix, Facebook and Twitter, which have an interest in keeping everything free and free-flowing. Segments of this diverse group have their own side issues, i.e., the portals and social networks want weaker privacy laws and the merchants such as Amazon that are large enough to organize content are interested in continuing the tax free ride on Internet sales.

So far the consumer has won virtually every Internet control battle because there are three large corporate groups engaged in conflict: two can always fight off the other, or sometimes one just doesn’t put a dog into the fight, leaving two smaller groups to battle it out.

Unfortunately, the larger battle has already gone against those who believe in a free marketplace of ideas, in which the truth reigns over false ideas and misplaced beliefs. No matter how free the Internet remains in terms of access to content and bandwidth, the selection of content has already been severely limited by the concentration of content providers resulting directly from the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

That law allowed companies to own more media properties and led directly to the sorry state of the our media free market: seven or eight large multi-national conglomerates, many of which grind rightwing political axes, control an enormous amount of content on the Internet including most “news” and mainstream entertainment, because these companies control the content available in every other media. If you don’t believe me, plug in “Little Mermaid” and compare the results to any recent book of poetry published by an independent little press.

Unfortunately, Google doesn’t really care much where the content originates, as long as it can organize it for users and charge advertisers for the right to appear on results pages. And when Netflix is looking to do a deal to make more content available, it actually likes dealing with a few big guys. Thus, there is no group of big companies ready to take the side of the consumer.

Without a group of big companies on our side, it will be exceedingly hard for consumers to influence Congress to pass a law that limits media ownership and forces large media enterprises to break up into many smaller businesses. But there is precedent for breaking up a company or industry for the public benefit, such as the 1911 dismantling of Standard Oil and the splitting apart of AT&T in 1984.

Dismantling media properties in the United States is not as high on the list of priorities for progressives as other goals, such as increasing income taxes on the highest incomes, removing the cap from taxable income for Social Security, investing more money in public schools, exiting Afghanistan, pumping more money into mass transit and alternative energy and implementing much more rigorous environmental regulations. But as we gradually take the country back from the rightwing fringe, let’s not forget about bringing more voices into the marketplace of ideas by limiting the size of any one voice.

How is the money race going?

2012-01-18T20:23:00.005-06:00

(Click to make the images bigger. Graphics by Kevin Kreneck)

For the best model of how the rich run America, buy Domhoff’s books and visit his website

2012-01-18T07:15:00.001-06:00

By Marc Jampole

My son and I enjoyed the distinct pleasure of having lunch in a Chinese restaurant in Santa Cruz, California with G. William Domhoff the other day. Bill Domhoff has long studied and written about the sociology of power, which means he explores who has power in the United States, how they got it, how they use it and what they do with it.

His Who Rules America is a classic study on power in America and is routinely reprinted with his always cogent updates. The Powers That Be, describes a social policy model by which a small percentage of our citizens end up defining the terms for all political, social and economic discussions and thereby dominate all others despite the fact they have few actual votes. Domhoff’s model, now included in revisions of Who Rules America, roughly depicts wealthy people and corporations forming foundations and financing university research to produce reports advocating policies which filter to the public through the news media and government commissions comprising the very experts whom the wealthy have financed. Over the past 30 years, right-wingers with money have followed the progressive Domhoff’s social policy model to seize and exercise power on such issues as taxation, privatization of government functions, gun control, abortion rights, capital punishment and voting rights.

Domhoff recognizes that one of the most important denominators of power is money. With it, you can buy other types of power, including social and political influence, and even knowledge. Domhoff has therefore studied income and wealth distribution in the United States and among the various industrialized countries for decades. Years ago, Domhoff was one of the first to see that we were becoming a less equitable nation, with the wealthy gathering an ever growing portion of both income and wealth. He was also one of the first to notice the relative lack of mobility between economic classes in the United States compared to other industrialized countries.

His rigorously scientific approach and open-minded progressivism make Domhoff a delight to engage in conversation. Always the pragmatist, Domhoff states on his website that “it is not easy to change power arrangements, even in a country where people have won freedom of speech and the right to vote. To start with, it is necessary to understand the intricacies of a power structure and how it was constructed in order to change.” In a follow-up email to our talk, Domhoff wrote “I think there has to be a combination of social movements and progressive candidates within the Democratic Party to make advances. Social movements in the USA have usually done best when they have used various forms of strategic non-violence, which can encompass sit-downs, sit-ins, and much else.”

In our chat, he freely roamed among a wide range of subjects, including how to rebuild the progressive voting rolls, the large parts that racism and anti-unionism play in political and economic beliefs, the formation of tax policy, some of his approaches to the study of power and the issue of class identity. I appreciated the fact that he used the term “welfare state” enthusiastically and positively, viewing the welfare state as the means of ensuring that a rich nation doesn’t forget its most needy and that our marketplace has as level a playing field as possible.

The highlight of the lunch for me was his passionate replay of the tragedy of the 2000 election, in which many progressives voted for Ralph Nader, thereby throwing the Electoral College vote and the presidency to the loser of the popular vote, George W. Bush. Domhoff made it clear to his progressive colleagues that the differences between Gore and Bush made a vote for Nader dangerous to the future of the country. At the end of the day, about 2.9 million voters didn’t listen to the pleas of the Domhoff and other progressive pragmatists, including 22,000 in New Hampshire and 97,000 in Florida. If those New Hampshire or Florida voters had voted for Al Gore instead of Nader, we might not have pursued the needless and expensive Iraqi War; fewer of our civil liberties would have been curtailed in the aftermath of 9/11 (that is, if 9/11 occurred); our taxation system would not be so skewered in favor of the wealthy; we would almost certainly have a lower deficit; and we would have made much more progress in developing alternative energy and slowing down global warming.

Let’s hope progressives have learned our lesson. Let’s vote for Barack Obama in November, even as we continue to aggressively push him to the left with our support of progressive candidates for other offices and our letters, emails and comments on key issues such as raising taxes on the top one percent.

For anyone interested in any issue related to power in America, there is no better place to start than Domhoff’s website, Who Rules America at www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica.

The Who Rules America home page presents an introduction by Domhoff with links to various topics and a list of articles, some by Domhoff and some by others, all studies of who has and doesn’t have power in the United States.

The menu bar sends you to six broad topic areas, each of which presents a cornucopia of research, all presented in the breezy language and style of journalism:

Power in America: This section includes Domhoff’s theory that the owners and executives of large corporations and banks constitute a class that dominates American public policy. Other articles explore the distribution of wealth and income in the United States, analyze the prevalence of the dominant class as members of federal advisory committees that set long-term governmental policy and dismantle the myth that public employee and union pension funds have acquired power over corporations.

Power at the Local Level: Here Domhoff details his growth coalition theory, which essentially proposes that a specific segment of the dominant class—the owners of land and buildings—has the lion's share of power at the local level because they join together to create a growth coalition that biases the area in favor of unmitigated development. Perhaps the most interesting part of this section of the website is the case studies of New Haven, Atlanta and San Francisco. I have found this section particularly useful in my public relations business, especially in my advice to outsiders wishing to break into regional business markets and social circles.

Social Change: The articles in the Social Change section of the Who Rules American website include analyses of the successes and failures of social change movements in the U.S. and advice for progressive activists on how to move forward.

Theories of Power: In this section, Domhoff considers a number of older theories of power, including the still-relevant ideas expressed by C. Wright Mills in The Power Elite.

Studying Power: This section studies how to study power. It includes a history of power structure research in the United States and a step-by-step guide on how to do research in the power structure in your community.

Santa Cruz: The Leftmost City is a long essay by Domhoff on progressive politics in the beach and university town of Santa Cruz, California, where Domhoff has resided for more than 40 years.

For anyone interested in learning how things really work in the United States, perusing Who Rules America is akin to eating potato chips. It’s hard to read just one article.

Once you’ve pored over the website for a bit, why don’t you go to your nearest bookstore or visit the website of your favorite online book dealer and order/buy one or more of Domhoff’s books. Not only will you support the research of one of our most important sociologists, you will also be alerting the publishing industry and the political elite that carefully monitor media sales that there is a large and growing market for political and social books from a left and progressive perspective.

Forbes publisher says Kodak failed because of Rochester location, but wouldn’t blame poverty for a person’s failure

2012-01-17T07:38:00.001-06:00

By Marc Jampole

Rich Karlgaard’s publication, Forbes, has long glorified the lone captain of industry who shapes the destiny of companies and nations. The flip side of its great man theory is the belief that people are responsible for their own fates and should not depend on government for handouts. Before and during Karlgaard’s rein as Forbes’ publisher, the publication has pursued both the great man and the no entitlements themes with a vengeance.

Yet in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece over the weekend, Karlgaard misapplies a chic theory of early human history to blame the failure of Kodak on its Rochester location. It’s not the great, or in this case, not-so-great, man who brought Kodak down, it was the fact that Rochester didn‘t have enough creative buzz and talented people to help Kodak make the transition from film to digital picture-taking.

Let’s start with the facts of the article. In documenting Kodak’s decline, Karlgaard makes a strong case that Kodak died of its own short-term greed. Despite an early lead in digital technology, it preferred to sell the cash cow of film, which gave its digital competitors time to build an enormous market lead. That’s the story Karlgaard tells, but he then uses the old rhetorical device of not matching the facts to the conclusion.

To demonstrate that it was the backwater qualities of Rochester and not the stupidity of management that sunk Kodak, Karlgaard mentions a few other cases —paltry anecdotal evidence that is also contradictory since it forces him to label Boston as another backwater. In addition, Karlgaard forgets that while Kodak had its headquarters in Rochester, it had research and manufacturing facilities all over the world.

Although Karlgaard details the stupid tricks of the management of Kodak, Digital Equipment, Data General and Wang, he blames the places where these companies were headquartered. Some amorphous quality he calls “innovation and adaptation” resides not in individuals or the corporate cultures of companies, but in the region. Some regions got it and some regions ain’t. This kind of argument borders on racism, because positive and negative qualities are falsely attributed to a population.

Karlgaard presents no evidence, only his assertion that Rochester failed Kodak as a location for a company more than Kodak failed Rochester through the stupidity of its senior management. I’m guessing that Karlgaard or one of his ghost writers recently has stumbled upon a recent theory of early human history that proposes that European civilization and its American extension dominate the world and that the reason for it is the accident of geography. This theory, popularized by Ian Morris in his Why the West Rules—For Now, is still in dispute, as is the idea that the West has mostly dominated the world stage throughout the ages. Moreover, Morris and others are talking about the change geography compels over hundreds of years among populations of millions of individual entities in locations defined as much larger than a single metropolitan area. Applying the idea to one company over a 40-year period distorts whatever validity this theory may have.

With or without this new scientific idea, Karlgaard makes one of the most specious arguments I have read in the news media in a long time. Behind it is the odious idea that business folk operate on a different standard from others. Even if she/he made mistakes, the business master of the universe can’t be at fault, so it must be her/his environment. Unspoken are the many times that Karlgaard and the staff he hires and fires have rejected the environment argument for the failures of the poor or disadvantaged.

The double standard is the unspoken premise behind many rightwing ideas. For example, why is it that conservatives always argue that corporations and industries don’t need regulation and inspections to keep employees and the public safe? Where did business owners and executives obtain such high ethics that there aren’t even a few rotten apples in the barrel? Meanwhile, the same conservatives argue for limiting the length of unemployment benefits because regular working stiffs—not the dedicated and altruistic business owner—can’t be trusted and will not look for a job if the steady check is coming in. The same conservatives want to impose a greater paperwork burden to get food stamps and Medicaid and to register to vote, even as they bemoan paperwork for businesses.

Karlgaard implies the same argument in his Wall Street Journal piece. It couldn’t possibly be the captain of industry, so it must be the rough seas in the home port.

Selections from the February 1, 2012 issue

2012-01-15T11:15:00.000-06:00

COVER/Matt Duss
Neocon hawks learned nothing from Iraq

EDITORIAL
Fear strikes home

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Support your local dairy

DISPATCHES
Romney leads flight south;
Romney twists job creation stats;
Mitt’s mendacity monitored;
Huckabee chides GOP Obamania;
Santorum’s most outrageous statements;
Medicare still more efficient than private insurance;
Boeing reneges on Kansas jobs in tanker deal;
Romney tax plan hits working poor, middle class;
What if Republicans sweep?;
Some rights for detainees in defense bill;
GOP presidential tax plans favor richest 1%;
Heating assistance cut in time for winter;
Wall Street helps Scott Brown raise funds against Warren;
'Progressive' label OK with Americans;
Ariz. city candidate faces English test;
Alternate party status ...

JIM GOODMAN
Occupy should target food system

DON ROLLINS
End of Iraq reminiscent of Vietnam

ROBERT WEISSMAN
‘Citizens United’ downs Newt, and us

MARK ENGLER
Occupy movement rebels on Internet

SAM URETSKY
Repubs court Jewish vote with little success

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Contraception vs. laissez-faire economics

JOHN BUELL
1% market fake American dream

WAYNE O’LEARY
The uses and misuses of history

N. GUNASEKARAN
Women fill lesser roles in Asian businesses

JIM VAN DER POL
Honesty in short supply in Washington

BOB BURNETT
Recounting best and worst of 2011 politics

ROB PATTERSON
Good movies buried by Hollywood machine

POPULIST PICKS
Hipsters try to make it in Manhattan

and more ...

Backers of anti-worker legislation use front organization to shill for another front organization run by PR firm

2012-01-11T09:01:00.003-06:00

By Marc Jampole

A recent full-page ad in many of the national daily newspapers pictures the newly deceased North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il and his youngest son, who replaced him as supreme ruler, Kim Jong-un. Both are deep in concentration, as if they are planning something grotesquely stupid or painful to perpetrate upon their people.

But the ad isn’t about the North Korean evil empire. It’s about the oppression supposedly felt by American workers in labor unions because they don’t have the right to vote to recertify the union every 3 years, something that the ad sponsors hope to rectify with the proposed Employee Rights Act, a piece of rightwing anti-union legislation percolating in Congress. The ad conflates the lack of real change in political leadership in North Korea with a so-called lack of union rights. The theme line of the ad is “It’s a new labor day.”

The ad talks neither about the rights of workers to organize, nor about the right to negotiate on even terms with management that unionization gains for workers. Nothing is mentioned about the right to make more money and better benefits, which exists only theoretically for most non-unionized nonprofessionals. The only right in which the ad is interested is the right to dismantle an existing union.

The ad sends us to a website called employeerightsact.com which details the anti-union provisions of the Employee Rights Act, all of which make it harder to organize and easier to decertify a union. The information is all presented in terms of benefits to the working stiff.

As with the American Petroleum Institute’s Vote4Energy website, employeerightsact.com makes it easy for those to act in favor of its proposed legislative change. The primary call to action in both cases is the same: write an elected official, in this case, your Congressional representative to tell her/him to support the proposed Employee Rights Act. Both websites also have a slew of information, most of it half-baked assertions and carefully-chiseled semi-facts.

But one thing separates these two websites: The American Petroleum Institute tells us what it is and who is supporting it.

By contrast, employeerightsact.com says that it is a project of the “Center for Union Facts” and sends us to its website.

The Center for Union Facts never really gets around to giving us a formal mission statement, but it seems hell-bent on doing anything to hurt unions. Some of its favorite hobby horses are the aforementioned anti-employee Employee Rights Act and an obsession with union corruption and political influence. It claims that it wants to get the word out to union employees about their rights, but the only right mentioned is the right to decertify.

And who runs Center for Union Facts, you might ask? Here’s all the website says: “The Center for Union Facts is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization supported by foundations, businesses, union members, and the general public.”

I tooled around the Internet looking for information about the organization and discovered that it is operated by a Washington, D.C.-based public relations agency called Berman & Company.

Here’s a direct quote about who funds Berman’s efforts from a Sourcewatch article:

United Press International noted that “the group’s spokesman refused to release the names of its donors or say where its funding came from.” Berman told Bloomberg reporter Kim Bowman that he had raised “about $2.5 million from companies, trade organizations and individuals, whom he declined to identify.” Sarah Longwell, a spokeswoman for the Center for Union Facts, echoed Berman’s groups standard claim for secrecy on who funds their front groups. “The reason we don’t disclose supporters is because unions have a long history of targeting anyone who opposes them, whether it be in a threatening way or by lodging campaigns against them,” she told Detroit Free Press. The paper reported that while Wal-Mart Stores denied funding the group it stated that “it has a relationship in which it exchanges union information with Berman, the group’s head.

As it turns out, Berman & Company runs a number of pro-business websites, none of which ever identifies which organizations and individuals are putting up the money. Here is a partial list of other Berman-run organizations, compiled by "Berman Exposed,” a website dedicated to revealing the deceptive tricks of the company and its founder, Rick Berman:

The Center for Consumer Freedom, which attacks anyone who criticizes smoking, fast food or alcohol

The Employment Policies Institute, which opposes increasing the minimum wage

The American Beverage Institute, which fights laws designed to curb drunk driving

First Jobs Institute, which promotes personal finance advice to young people from a pro-business perspective

We’ve gone through a bit of a maze, so let’s review: One or more companies and individuals pay Berman to create a “front” organization to advocate against regulations and laws that constrain business, including laws against drunk driving and smoking. I call the organization a front because it represents companies and individuals who don’t want their names associated with the work of the front. In the case of anti-union activity, Berman’s front creates another front. The front to the front then launches a misleading advertising campaign meant to draw people to the website. And through it all, we never know who it is who is really pulling the strings.

Our vice president is okay, but Obama should ask Hillary Clinton to replace Joe Biden on the Democratic ticket.

2012-01-10T09:18:00.002-06:00

By Marc Jampole

I want to join the small band of people who are advocating that Vice President Joe Biden graciously retire so that Hillary Clinton can join President Barack Obama on the 2012 Democratic presidential ticket.

I have no complaints about Joe Biden term as Vice President (his weasel-like behavior in the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings years ago is another story). But replacing him with our Secretary of State, Hillary Rodham Clinton, would benefit the country in three ways (and please forgive me if I repeat a little of what political consultants Patrick Caddell and Douglas Schoen and New York Times columnist Bill Keller recently have written:

It would virtually ensure the re-election of President Obama and perhaps help to recapture the House of Representatives and keep the Senate. Hillary is regarded by most as a highly successful Secretary of State and has been the most admired woman in the United States 10 years and counting. I have no illusions about President Obama and this current crop of Democrats, including Hillary. They are centrists who lean towards corporate interests, but they are a lot better than the Republican’s virulent right-wingers. We can’t afford to give the Republicans four years to lower taxes on the wealthy even more, gut social programs, take away civil rights and destroy the Environmental Protection Agency, National Labor Relations Board and other important government agencies.

We would have perhaps the most qualified Vice President in our history, with the possible exception of Henry Wallace, who was Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s second VP. Hillary Clinton has served as a corporate attorney, first lady, U.S. Senator and Secretary of State and has distinguished herself in every role. She has shown an uncanny ability to keep growing, as witnessed by the lessons that she obviously learned from her failed attempt to pass healthcare legislation in her husband’s first term. Hillary is also well respected across the globe and has helped to shape President Obama’s mostly successful foreign policy. And like Barack Obama, she is clearly an intelligent person who prefers science-based solutions and analyses to those based primarily on faith.

It would set Hillary up for a successful run for President in 2016, when she will only be 68 years old. With her experience, her popularity in the United States and around the world, her ability to get things done and her essentially compassionate vision, I believe that Hillary would make a lot of headway in rebalancing the distribution of wealth and income and addressing the triple-headed environmental monster of global warming, resource shortages and pollution.

For those who want to create a band wagon for Hillary Clinton, there’s no time to waste. You should write, call or email both President Obama and Secretary Clinton, the sooner the better.
You can find contact information for the President at a website called “Contacting the President.” It’s a little harder to reach Secretary Clinton. I might start by emailing the State Department.

But your activism shouldn’t end there. You should also make sure that you advocate positions to President Obama and every Democratic candidate that drive them further to the left, including:

Raising income tax rates on those who make more than $200,000

Removing the cap on income that is assessed the Social Security tax

Strengthening the NLRB and raising the minimum wage

Reducing defense spending

Investing more in repairing roads and bridges, increasing mass transit, developing alternative energy and creating a new generation of pollution controls.

Santorum, Gingrich, their defenders want us to believe that only African-Americans take government benefits

2012-01-09T07:42:00.002-06:00

By Marc Jampole

Both Santorum and Gingrich played the race card last week, which should serve as a not-so-gentle reminder that much of the appeal of right-wing rhetoric reduces to the seemingly intractable racism that has poisoned the United States since its inception and has been destroying it since the end of World War II.

Their statements are based on false assumptions and manipulated numbers, but they have their effect among racists, the less educated and those who have been kicked around so much these past few decades that they seethe with undirected resentment.

Let’s start with Newt, who said “And so, I’m prepared, if the NAACP invites me, I’ll go to their convention to talk about why the African-American community should demand pay checks and not be satisfied with food stamps.”

The false assumption is that African-Americans are satisfied with food stamps and African-American leaders spend a significant amount of their time and money advocating for higher food stamp allowances. Certainly, African-American leaders see the necessity of food stamps for all poor families, but their agenda is exactly what Newt says it should be: jobs and economic opportunity, which require equal access to education and strict enforcement of civil rights laws.

For example, I perused the NAACP website looking for references to food stamps and found nothing. There could be a mention (the website has no search function), but I found nothing. It was easy, though, to find information on NAACP efforts to foster diversity in the news media, lower the level of obesity among African-Americans, improve our education system, enforce existing civil rights laws and address the fact that pollution and other environmental problems affect areas in which people of color live throughout the world much more than they affect other areas. These are just a few of the projects on which this mainstream organization is working that are featured and easy to find on the website.

Newt was merely channeling the mythic kindly patrician trying to give well-intention advice to the field hands. Rick Santorum’s comments were a bit more odious since he was fomenting racial warfare with his usual “politics of resentment.” Here’s Angry Rick’s quote, in reference to a question about foreign influences on the U.S. economy, which he quickly morphed into a rant against government programs to help the needy, which he, like so many, call “entitlements”: “I don't want to make black people's lives better by giving them somebody else’s money; I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money.”

Singling out blacks implied that African-Americans receive the lion’s share of Medicaid benefits. That’s just not true. Santorum’s defenders immediately cited the misleading statistics that while 12% of the population is African-American, they represent 30% of those receive Medicaid benefits. It’s the wrong comparison, since Medicaid is only available to the poor, about 30% of which are African-American.

Some might make the false statement that it’s their own fault so many African-Americans are poor, but that would ignore the lack of social mobility that exists in the land of the free. Many studies through the years have warned that fewer people move between classes in the United States than in Europe. The latest report—this one by the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD)—finds that there is even less social mobility in the United States than previously thought and that virtually all social mobility involves middle class people gaining wealth or losing it. If you’re poor, it’s statistically extremely difficult, if not impossible, to move up the ladder. Only someone who ignores these statistics can blame the poor for remaining poor, and that goes for both impoverished whites and blacks.

But what makes Santorum’s comments so offensive is that he creates a divide between African-Americans and other Americans. He is saying that it’s wrong for the virtuous “us” to provide free health care to the undeserving “them.” We know that Angry Rick is against Medicaid and other government programs for the needy, but that’s not what he says here. He says that he’s against giving money to blacks.

What does Santorum want exactly: A Medicaid system that only gives benefits to whites? A segregated system in which taxes from white are earmarked for white people and taxes for blacks are earmarked for blacks?

Angry Rick, I think, is going after bigger game: He is employing the old “divide and conquer” tactic. Divide the middle class and poor by creating an underclass that is easily recognizable as different by the color of their skin. He wants whites to believe that blacks are taking money from their pockets, so they never realize that the interests of most blacks and whites coincide and that pro-wealthy tax, anti-union, outsourcing and spending policies have resulted in most Americans losing ground over the past three decades. He seems to want to incite a racial war which divides whites and blacks of the poor and middle class so that we ignore the class war that the wealthy have waged against the rest of us since the ascension of Ronald Reagan.

American Petroleum Institute wants us to be “energy voters,” which means supporting the Keystone XL pipeline.

2012-01-06T07:01:00.001-06:00

By Marc Jampole

The friendly looking and sharply dressed middle-aged African-American man looks out at us from a full-page ad with a confident smile. A headline in a type face that looks like someone wrote it out by hand reads the words this impressive executive-looking man is supposed to be saying to us: “I’m an energy voter.”

The rest of the ad consists of about 70 words which tell us that we need energy from all sources to create new jobs and then makes the unproved assertion that to get the energy we need “means developing our plentiful domestic energy—like oil and natural gas.” The text then urges us to become “energy voters.” Underneath a campaign button that reads “Vote4Energy.org; more growth.” below which it tells us we can learn more at Vote4Energy.org.

I saw this print ad in yesterday’s USA Today. When I went to the website I discovered that it is part of a series of ads which feature a diverse mix of attractive people telling us to vote for energy.

The Vote4Energy website has lots of facts and figures (all without attribution, so we don’t know how to check if they are true), including projections of how many jobs could be created with a greater supply of domestic energy. Vote4Energy gives us 6 energy issues, including access to energy, energy security, jobs, taxes on energy, consumer needs and the environment (which focuses on not “undermining the economy,” an unveiled code phrase for deregulation).

Vote4Energy also uses many web pages to propose actions that energy voters can take, including registering to vote, writing letters, attending Vote4Energy events and holding letter-writing parties. It provides information and calls-to-action related to every one of the 50 states of the union. You can actually download voter registration forms for all 50 states. There’s also a place to join, which costs nothing but requires you to give all your personal contact information to the organizers of the Vote4Energy movement.

The funny thing about the website is that it keeps talking about domestic sources of energy, but it only ever mentions oil and natural gas in the boiler plate description of the “organization,” in which nuclear, renewable and alternative energy sources appear in a list that begins with fossil fuels. For this one mention of non-fossil fuels I found dozens of mentions of oil and natural gas until I stopped counting.

Funnier still: the only specific action related to a real issue, as opposed to the nebulous concept of “developing our plentiful domestic energy,” is to remind President Obama that time is running out to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, which will run from Canada to multiple U.S. destinations. Any frequent follower of the news knows that this pipeline is extremely controversial because of its high cost and the environmental havoc it will wreak along thousands of miles. The Natural Resources Defense Council has stated that the Keystone XL undermines the U.S. commitment to an economy built on clean energy and instead would deliver dirty fuel from oil tar sands at a high cost. And no, I didn’t get that last piece of information from the Vote4Energy website!

It came as no surprise, then, to discover that Vote4Energy is a project of the American Petroleum Institute (API), which represents 490 oil and natural gas companies.

The approach is quite deceptive for two reasons: 1) API keeps saying “energy,” but it clearly means oil and gas; 2) it focuses on actions that are depicted as empowering to voters, but the one specific action it advocates is to put pressure on the Obama Administration to make the decision to build a pipeline opposed by a large and growing number of state and national elected officials, environmentalists and even some oil refineries.

What’s truly fascinating is that API has launched what is in part a voter registration campaign. API member companies and their executives tend to give money and votes to Republicans, who for the past few years have been pursuing an aggressive campaign to make it harder for people to vote.

I’m not proposing a conspiracy theory by any means. I would be extremely shocked to learn that the API and the Republican Party are working together to create a more conservative electorate.

But what is true is that both Republicans and the API are using deceptive means to cook the voting rolls. The Republican Party is sponsoring and passing state laws that restrict voters based on the bogus issue of voting fraud, which is statistically non-existent. The API is encouraging voting among people whom they have deceived with their misleading marketing campaign.

No one should get a free pass for trying to take a gun on an airplane.

2012-01-05T11:57:00.001-06:00

By Marc Jampole

It sure seems as if there has been a lot of news lately about people trying to carry firearms onto airplanes. As it turns out, people have been trying to sneak guns on board for a long time, at the rate of 2 per day 18 months ago. In December, that number more than doubled, to from 4-5 a day. The week of December 19-25, for example, TSA screeners found 31 guns in carry-on bags, many of them loaded, with bullets in their chambers.

What I find disturbing is the news that the TSA does not have these gun-toters all arrested. As a blogger representing the TSA recently stated (I’m giving you the original reference but note that the New York Times was my source), “Just because we find a firearm on an individual does not mean they had bad intentions, that’s for the law enforcement officer to decide.” Evidently, a majority of passengers found with firearms in their carry-ons explain sheepishly that they simply forgot they had them in their bags.

As far as I’m concerned, that’s like saying the dog ate your homework. I believe that every person who attempts to check a gun through security should go to jail for a minimum of a month. If the gun is loaded or if bullets in the gunperson’s possession, it should be for a minimum of a year. To my mind it’s absolutely amazing that someone can spend years in jail for selling marijuana to adults (a victimless crime), but some people who try to sneak a gun on board a plane can get off with a wrist slap.

I would also end the practice of allowing people to carry unloaded guns on board if they register them first. If someone were waving a gun around on airplane, would you assume that it is probably unloaded? Too bad we can’t get the opinion of the people who went down on planes on 9/11 because terrorists brandished box cutters. Let people check their guns in their suitcases.

Like so many other issues, the United States seems divided about the issue of gun control. A survey by the Pew Foundation after the Tucson shooting of Representative Giffords found that 49% of Americans currently say it is more important to protect the right of Americans to own guns, while 46% say it is more important to control gun ownership. Unfortunately, the National Rifle Association has thrown millions of dollars into convincing state and national lawmakers to pass looser gun laws, money that gun control advocates don’t have to spend. The result has been a spate of recent state laws that make it easier to own a gun and expand the places that people can carry them. Currently 32% of all households have guns in them, which seems high, but in fact is the lowest total since they started keeping records of such matters in the 1970’s. Meanwhile, the number of criminal background checks for gun sales set a record in November and broke that record in December.

My own approach to gun control is to protect society: I would outlaw possession of all handguns outside of shooting ranges and only allow private ownership of hunting guns, making gun enthusiasts rent other guns or keep their guns under lock and key at shooting clubs. I would do away with all the gun shows and all mail-order and on-line purchasing of guns, because it’s so hard to police these sellers. I would make the purchase and background check procedures much more rigorous. I respect hunters and range shooting enthusiasts, but I also respect pilots and drivers of automobiles, yet agree with all the restrictions we put on their rights to protect themselves and others.

The old saw that it’s not guns who kill people, but people who kill people, is wrong. It’s people with guns who kill people.

This is my worry too: Little Girl Red, Cover Your Head

2012-01-05T02:00:00.001-06:00

Santorum symbolizes a political party that says it wants to help families but supports anti-family policies

2012-01-04T09:13:00.005-06:00

By Marc Jampole

Yesterday was a glorious, almost celestial day for Rick Santorum. He lost last night’s Iowa caucus to Mitt Romney by a mere eight votes. Earlier in the day, he was highly praised in a deceptive article by conservative columnist David Brooks.

The Iowa caucus represents what’s wrong with our electoral process and the Brooks article is the latest example of the deceptive politics that the Republican Party plays.

First Iowa: I am far from the first to note that our primary system gives more weight to rural and conservative voters. The first three “votes” almost always sort out the declared candidates into contenders and also-rans. By the end of these “votes” there are typically just two, and sometimes only one, candidate left standing in either party. Yet those “votes” include the Iowa caucus and the primaries in New Hampshire and South Carolina, three states that have much higher levels of conservative voters than the nation as a whole and no major metropolitan area. For example, 6 of 10 voters identified themselves as evangelicals in last night’s Iowa caucus, which only decides on delegates to county conventions to take place later in the year. No national survey has ever shown that more than about 30% of voters identify themselves as evangelicals.

Let’s say that the first three “votes” were Massachusetts and New Mexico, two states with relatively progressive voters, and the swing state of North Carolina. After these three states voted or caucused, the candidates left standing in both parties would certainly be more progressive than they are now. More important, those who participated in these early rounds would be more representative of voters throughout the entire country. The electoral process is rigged right from the beginning.

The David Brooks encomium to Santorum is a masterpiece of political propaganda. If you read not only what it says but what it doesn’t say, you get a good idea of the game that Republicans have been running on the white working class since Richard Nixon’s 1968 campaign.

In the article, titled “Workers of the World, Unite!,” Brooks slowly builds his case for Rick Santorum. Here is my paraphrase of his reasoning:

The largest voting bloc in the country is white working class (whites with a high school education or a little college) and these voters now tend to vote Republican, which makes the Republicans the party of working class whites.

Virtually all Republican candidates come from an upper middle class or wealthy background. (His exact words dance around this fact: “former College Republicans who have a more individualistic and even Randian worldview than most members of the working class.”

Santorum comes from a working class and immigrant background and focuses his concerns not on the individual but on the family.

Santorum is therefore the “working class candidate of the right.”

What Brooks expects us to believe is that the proof a candidate supports the working class is that he or she comes from the working class.

Even a cursory perusal of Santorum’s stands on economic and political issues at his website demonstrates that while he may come from modest means, Rick Santorum definitely does not support the best interests of the working class-white or otherwise:

He wants to curtail the National Labor Relations Board, which is an anti-union move. Unions were the main reason that so many working class whites and minorities achieved middle class status after World War II and the decline of unionism has been one of the major reasons the working class has slipped into poverty and near poverty.

He likes Paul Ryan’s plan to gut Medicare.

His proposals to lower taxes tend to help the wealthy and near wealthy much more than they help the working class.

His proposals to cut government spending would leave less money for creating jobs and educating children.

He explicitly states that he would look to the Cato Institute, Heritage Foundation Enterprise Foundation and the Simpson-Bowles Commission’s recommendations for guidance in economic policies. That’s three ultra-right think tanks that routinely propose policies that take money from the poor and middle class and give it to the wealthy, plus the special commission that was supposed to work on reducing the debt, but instead proposed policies that shift even more of the tax burden away from the wealthy and onto the backs of everyone else while cutting spending for jobs, infrastructure improvements and education.

Brooks wants us to judge Santorum on his style and not his substance. In advertising, that’s called selling the sizzle instead of the steak. Santorum’s steak is a tough chew for the 39% of the population that is working class whites, the group for which Brooks proposes Santorum as a “white knight.” (Brooks doesn’t consider the fate or needs of the non-white working class in his article).

The separation of the working class into white (and the unmentioned “others”) is another example of the ruling elite trying to divide and conquer. The interests of working class whites and non-whites are exactly the same. To divide the groups may make sense for analyzing voting patterns, but in a discussion of issues and “best interests” is patently racist.

Santorum, like all the current Republican candidates, says that he supports the working class, but his policies say otherwise. An old saying goes, “Look at what I say and not what I do.” In considering Santorum, let’s change it a bit: Don’t look at what he says he represents, look at what he says he’s going to do. And what he says he’s going to do will further erode the economic well-being of anyone who doesn’t have a lot of money, which means most people and all of the working class.

The old dilemma

2011-12-31T13:58:00.002-06:00

From the Heartland, Margot McMillen writes:

As a writer, you have to follow rules. Sentences have nouns and verbs and end with a dot. Adjectives (“brown”) are used to describe nouns and adverbs (“happily”) describe verbs. For every era, there are certain images shaping our thoughts while other, perhaps better images, are out. So, in our era, we allow a vocabulary of sex, money, fashion, efficiency, and vampires. Our happiness, according to the day’s writers, goes up and down with the Dow, or maybe with the price of gold. It’s impossible to write about love of the land, culture, family, community, joy, and yet these are gracefully tucked into the vocabulary of Korean peasants I met last January.

And now, on New Year’s Eve, I have a glimmer of insight into how I can transmit the importance of the land we farm. I’m sitting in the same place where I’ve written all my blog entries, the corner of a book-strewn room, with my cello in the corner and here’s the answer: The Korean peasants talked about their land the way my musician friends talk about their beloved instruments. Passed from a grandfather or purchased from a best friend or discovered in a pawn shop, musical instruments embody history and, yes, love. The musician has reverence for the instrument maker, the wood, the pegs, the sound board, the design, the forest.
For every beloved instrument, there is wonder in the tale of the discovery. Mine came from a gun shop, abandoned in the corner when the shop owner took it in trade. Mice have gnawed around the edges, but a friend restored it to play-ability, and left his own marks of improvement. He said it was French-made, from about 1880…and how did it get into the corner of an Ozark gun shop?

I can imagine its history, but I’ll never know it. I can tell you where the instrument is weak and how it must be handled so it will last for another generation. I call it “the old lady,” and when I play outside my house, I take its sturdier, louder, German-made cousin. When a beloved instrument breaks, as happens sometimes simply because the weather changes, it is repaired and, taking it apart for repair, the luthier knows more about it than before and builds the new knowledge into the repair.

This is how we must think about our land. A precious instrument that, when broken, we must repair.

When I came home from that NFFC meeting last January, I began to notice how much the Missouri landscape was changing. Where there had been pasture, my neighbors were pulling up trees and filling in ponds to create flat land for row crops because, in 2011, row crops like corn and soybeans were going to make money. The strategy promoted by the chemical and seed companies is to pour Monsanto’s Roundup, or some other kind of glyphosate poison, all over the pastures and then plant Roundup-Ready crops. The crops have been genetically altered to resist Roundup, the most poisonous herbicide on the planet.

But, with pastures and animals gone, and doused with poison and chemicals, the land will not survive. As the summer wore on, hot and dry, the crops on older fields withered before the crops on newly-plowed pasture. There was no organic matter—animal manure and grass roots—to hold the moisture. We are farming on desert.

But, here in the Midwest, our advisors—extension agents, bankers, seed salesmen—don’t talk about connection to the land, or even connection to consumers. Instead, the language is all about ethanol and how high the corn prices are going to go.

Now we’re on the cusp of 2012. KOR-US is stalled in the Korean parliament, the farmers making their case with more confidence than they had here. I imagine them passing through the halls of parliament, talking to lawmakers who wear western suits. One elder wears an elegant linen robe with a sash that covers his slight body almost completely. He is the spokesman, the most articulate and manages to be commanding without losing his civility. Good manners, it seems, transcend the differences in cultures.

Others are dressed in loose-fitting shirts and trousers, practical clothes that move from home to the field. Younger, and more insistent, they are resolute that they want to stay in their traditional villages rather than move to cities, which are already overcrowded. These young men have a clear path ahead of them—resistance and perseverance. In other countries, beginning in Tunisia, similar young men have moved to the cities and found there are no prospects and no comfort.

So, after a year of writing and thinking about these things, I find myself with the old dilemma and the old demons: What will cure rural America? What will rid our neighborhoods of meth labs? What will tempt our kids to stay around? What will make us happy? How can we turn the conversation to culture and joy?

Groping for language

2011-12-30T18:46:00.002-06:00

From the Heartland, Margot McMillen writes:
With the year about to close, everyone is evaluating. Plenty went wrong, but what went right? Well, we’re out of Iraq. Sort of. And the unemployment numbers are down, sort of, and housing sales are up. And protestors—from Madison to Wall Street to Oakland--put some of the problems into words.
For farmers, the grain prices have been good and cattle prices are high. My neighbor Angus the cattle man is happy that he’s kept his cattle and improved his pasture by planting clover. He says the clover, with root structures that actually trap nitrogen in the ground, will supply about 30 to 40 pounds of nitrogen per acre per year. That’s significant improvement without adding chemicals. “I want to hear you say it, Jerry,” I said, “improving that pasture was the right thing to do.” And he did say it.
But, despite Jerry’s model, farmers are tearing out trees on other pastures, to plant even more corn next year. The land they’re claiming for row crops is increasingly steep, meaning more potential for the topsoil to float away on the rain. Erosion. And, this at a time when the future of ethanol from the U.S. is less secure than it was a year ago. Now that ethanol is required at the pump, the multinationals are figuring out ways to import it from sugar-rich lands, where production is cheaper and higher per acre.
On January 1, 2011, as I began a year of writing a blog about policy and farming, with side trips into current events and the farmers’ protest history of the 1980s, my goal was to explain farm policy for the non-farmer and to look for themes that might emerge. Maybe these themes would reveal some solutions that I could put into words. As a writer, I believe in the power of words even though they never seem just right and the right ones are just out of reach.
From the beginning of the year, the selfishness of the export-import trade system revealed itself. At the National Family Farm Coalition meeting, I met Korean farmers that would be put off their land by the passage of the Korean-US free trade agreement, KOR-US. This agreement would make the U.S. a cheap-foods conduit for subsidized foods. All the multinationals were arguing that this would be good for U.S. agriculture, but a look at the list of foods showed that we would soon become a conduit for processed foods from all over the globe. One of the foods on the list is chocolate. Dear reader, we do not raise chocolate in this country and we don’t even process it much.
Exporting our cheap foods to Korea would mean the corporations could sell at a price lower than Korean farmers could produce it. At our meeting, the Korean farmers, members of the Korean Peasants’ League, talked about their roots on the land. Their culture goes back centuries, containing religion, festivals, foods. They didn’t talk about money. They talked with gracious elegance about family and culture. They talked about loving the land, as if it was irreplaceable. And they talked about it without apology, as if this was a normal way to talk about farming.
To these Korean peasants, farms were family homesteads stretching back centuries to the ancient ancestors, filled with memories contained in their lineages. Americans don’t talk about farms that way. In our language, farms are centers to be mined by agribusiness. This is how the media talks about farming, how the University Extension agents talk about it, how the bankers talk about it. And, for many farmers, talk about family has been reduced to talk about how well the kids are doing now that they’ve moved to the cities. Love of the land, culture, family—these things might be whispered over the kitchen table, read from a homily at the women’s club meeting or inferred from the Sunday sermon, but they’re never listed as goals for the life well-lived.
And I have puzzled about this all year long. I haven’t gone back to their words. Although I wrote some of them down the pages are buried under heaps of other papers—how to raise ginger, how to make cheddar cheese, how to apply for a grant, the results of a beard contest. But the puzzle, for a writer, isn’t really about specific words, we have plenty of those, but about spirit. Tone. Heart. That’s the trick…how to put your heart in the right place.
So the year closes and I feel I’m still no closer to the language that I wanted, the language that will give meaning to rural life, to those that choose stewardship rather than greed. I saw it in the shapes of the robes of the Korean peasants and heard it in their voices, and I’ve heard it from my neighbors when we’ve sat around the table and talked about what will happen to the land in the future. But it’s still like a secret code, a secret handshake, a wink.

NY Times tells us the 75 things from 2011 that it wants us to talk about and remember

2011-12-29T12:21:00.003-06:00

By Marc Jampole

The New York Times “Thursday Styles” section today published its list of the 75 things that reporters talked about in 2011, one of the silliest and yet most ideologically tinged of the seemingly infinitude of annual lists published in the news media the last two weeks of the year.

Let’s start with the premise of the article: 75 things New Yorkers talked about. Two questions immediately arise: 1) Which New Yorkers? and 2) How do we know these are the things they talked about? Neither question is adequately answered in the paragraphs leading to the list. The writer, Stuart Emmrich, no doubt expressing the consensus of the Style page staff, makes the assumption that we know who he means and that, of course, what else would they be talking about? It’s the typical attempt by the news media, and especially style, society, celebrity and new product writers, to assume a consensus that really expresses what the writer thinks are the views of a cultural elite, e.g., A-listers, people who hang out at certain bars and restaurants or executives frequenting charity balls and cocktail parties.

The article really lists what the Times Style section wants its readers to talk about—or remember—from the past year.

I broke the list down by topic. The results offer further proof that the Times is neither the intellectual beacon its friends believe it to be, nor the liberal propaganda machine that its foes accuse it of being.

Times 75 Things New Yorkers Talked About in 2011

Topic	Mentions
Celebrity	24
Mass Entertainment	19
Hard News	12
Fashion	5
Politics	5
Sports	4
Cultural Issues	3
High Culture	2
Technology	1

The list looks more like the front page of Yahoo! or the contents of the New York Daily News without the crime stories. The list starts to make sense if we forget that the article is supposed to be about what New Yorkers discussed over the past year and instead focus on the fact that it’s a fashion page article (“style” is a modern, more-encompassing term for “fashion.”) While there are only 5 fashion stories, fashion news often focuses on what celebrities and mass entertainment figures are wearing and doing. These topics (except for when it involves fashion) account for 57% of all topics on the list. But still, the celebrity and mass entertainment topics are not about what TV, movie and pop music entertainers and celebrities are wearing (I filed those topics under fashion), but about other aspects of celebrity. Unlike the myth of the New York Times as serious and high-minded, the actual publication often carries stories about celebrity culture and trivial nonsense stories such as this list.

The topics include the usual suspects: Kate Middleton, Lady Gaga, Chaz Bono, Alexander McQueen, Tim Tebow and Ryan Gosling as featured celebs; the Republican debates, Steve Job’s death and the deaths of Bin laden and Qadaffi as news. But beneath the superficiality, the article quietly advocates a right-leaning politics. Here are some cleverly presented right-wing messages in the details:

Subtle denigration of known progressive newscaster Keith Olbermann, saying that once he left MSNBC he was “never heard of again.”
Trivialization of the Occupy Wall Street movement by stating that all it ever did was make famous a phrase, “the other 99%,” and an obscure park.
Of the five stories on politics, four have to do with the race for the Republican nomination for president; the only Democratic topic about which New Yorkers evidently spoke during the year was the booing of Michelle Obama and Jill Biden by NASCAR fans.

Now for perhaps the most appalling omission on the list: the Japanese tsunami and the resulting serious leak of radiation at the Fukushima nuclear electrical-generating facility. Does anyone really think that the Fukushima nuke-out, which dominated the news for weeks, was so little talked about that it could not crack a list of 75 subjects?

What could be the ideological imperative behind deciding not to include Fukushima on this list, which purportedly reports what New Yorkers discussed, not what fashion and entertainment topics they discussed? Some thoughts, and in giving them, I am not asserting that the writer and editor consciously worked these ideas out, but rather that these ideas are embedded into their thought processes as unquestioned premises.

The style section is really about buying products and services that express the style of the buyers, their social class and their aspirations/fears. Only the most addicted shopaholic would feel like buying anything after talking about the silent poison of radiation. The best thing for a style section article to do, always, is to keep it light and ironic.

The death of Steve Jobs was also tragic, but at least Steve stands for technological consumerism. Technology consumerism was also the topic of the one technology story I found: the two-day wait for a new iPad 2. Perhaps I could have just as easily listed that story under cultural issues, but wherever it goes, it made the list and Fukushima did not. In what alternative universe did news-savvy New Yorkers talk more about a new smart phone than about a major nuclear disaster caused by yet another extreme weather disaster? Only in a universe in which technology always provides us with great new products to buy.

So with “keep it happy” and “technology is always great” screens before their eyes, the Times Style section staff might have never even thought of Fukushima when brainstorming about the chatter at restaurant tables and cocktail parties over the past year. And if they did think of it, I imagine someone quickly squelched the suggestion as not “bright” enough.

Of course, if the Times really wanted to keep it real, the following topics would have topped the list of what New Yorkers discussed over the past 12 months:

Their children
Personal finance issues
Their jobs, careers and co-workers
Other family members
Local weather
Extreme weather around the world
Local crime news
The long jobless recession, which many will recognize under its more familiar name, “the jobless recovery.”

Unless we did a survey, there’s no telling who’s list is closer to reality: mine or The Times.

Emperor of the Drones

2011-12-29T04:54:00.001-06:00

Why do media wait till a Republican candidate is on a roll to bring out the dirt?

2011-12-28T07:33:00.000-06:00

By Marc Jampole

Almost overnight Ron Paul began to rise in the Iowa polls. And it seems as if it were only a day later that we discovered that he lent his name to some odious assertions and cuckoo beliefs.

Do you see a pattern here? Bachmann gets popular; Bachmann’s husband is outed. Cain gets popular. Women whom he probably sexually harassed and his mistress suddenly speak up. Everyone thought they knew all of Newt’s skeletons, but as soon as he got popular yet a new one popped out, his dealings with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Every time a new Romney challenger appears on the horizon, the media find something. Perry is the only one not to have a new scandal revealed. He plummeted the old fashioned way, from a series of self-inflicted wounds.

Why do you suppose the news media wait for the candidates to ascend? My theory is that the reporters don’t know about these scandals until someone comes to them. No one comes to them with dirt on a candidate until he or she gets big. Now if it were a Bush running for President, I would say that the Bush machine was behind it, since spreading dirt about opponents is consistent with the history of Bush campaign’s tactics (see Kitty Kelley’s The Family, for example). I infer nothing from the fact that Romney is the candidate preferred by the Bushes.

There’s a double shock in the scandal surrounding Ron Paul. The first shock is learning that Paul lent his name to ugly rants against African-Americans, Jews, the state of Israel and gays. Articles with his name on them criticized the U.S. holiday bearing Martin Luther King's name as “Hate Whitey Day” and said that AIDS sufferers “enjoy the attention and pity that comes with being sick.” The image that most have of Paul’s views is that he is an economic free market extremist and a libertarian, a rational if sometimes ill-informed thinker. Racism, anti-Semitism and even homophobia are all inimical to Paul’s rationalism. It’s shocking to see him linked to these irrational views.

The second shock is one of style. Ron Paul looks like such a kindly old man, a grandfather who always has a gentle word of advice. The imagination and most casting directors select off-balanced, crazed, intense, obsessive or somewhat out-of-control loonies to espouse these ugly views.

It’s much harder to forgive Paul his former ties to racism, anti-Semitism and homophobia than to forgive the other Republican candidates their flaws. We always knew that Romney and Gingrich were non-ideological power-grabbers, so new revelations can’t possibly shock us anymore. If Bachmann, Santorum, Perry and Cain believe nonsense and advocate false ideas, at least their wrong-headedness is traditional, theologically based and shared by a large part of the population. Don’t get me wrong: I have more forgiveness in my heart for the religiously based candidate but that does not make these candidates any more appealing than Paul, Romney or Gingrich.

And then there’s Jon Huntsman. The only thing for which we need to forgive him is for thinking that there was room in the current Republican Party for reasonable views based on science and pragmatism.

It’s a sorry lot. Many are saying that President Obama will roll to victory against any of these candidates. That’s a dangerous way for anyone to think whose interests lie with the poorest 99% of the population.

Instead, we should be thinking: No matter who wins the Republican nomination, we must keep driving Obama further left, but make sure we are registered to vote and go to the polls on Election Day.

Haitian spring

2011-12-27T20:42:00.001-06:00

From the Heartland, Margot McMillen writes:
Reports of a re-birth in Haitian agriculture are premature, but the midwives are ready. Turns out, the United States “has opened several training centers that aim to instruct hundreds of farmers in rudimentary practices often taken for granted in other countries” and a couple of U.S. churches have built an “experimental farm” and transplanted urban Haitians to the countryside to learn self-sufficiency. They hope to build 4 more, each housing ten families.
These notes, published in the New York Times on Christmas day, are hopeful beginnings for the nation that 25 years ago took care of itself using farming techniques remembered from Africa. Still, there are significant problems to address, like where their water will come from and how the new, urban-born farmers will adapt to rural life.
If the problems sound familiar, it’s because they’re pretty much like the challenges to agriculture here at home. NYT quotes a transplanted Port-au-Prince grocer who lost his store in the earthquake. He “complains of the backbreaking work and misses the energy of the city, the parties, the friends.” “City dwellers have to believe that it is worth the effort to move their families to spend hours in the hot sun, hoeing and planting.”
One thing that’s different, though, is the fact that the Haitian government recognizes the danger of reliance on imported foods. They estimate that 52% of Haiti’s food comes from abroad, compared to 20% a few decades ago. Here in the U.S., it’s impossible to get real numbers on the amount of imported food we’re consuming. U.S.D.A. keeps track of agricultural products, like raw meats, fruits and vegetables, but doesn’t keep track of processed foods—canned meats, fruits and vegetables. Those are supposed to be tracked by F.D.A. but estimates vary widely. Is it 20%, as FDA graphs claim? Or is it 50%, as the right-wing Judicial Watch asserted using “information-sharing and collaboration among governments, the private sector and academia.”
U.S. agriculture has had a huge impact on Haiti. We sold them only about 7,000 metric tons of rice in 1985. Then came the first “free trade” agreement, under Ronald Reagan, requiring Haiti to lower trade restrictions and accept more US rice. In 1986, US imports rose to 24,683 tons and in 1987, to 100,177 tons. 1986 ended with the expulsion of “Baby Doc” Duvalier, and the Haitian government sought loans from the International Monetary Fund.
Their food supply now thoroughly dependent on “Miami rice,” Haitians booted out the president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1991. He was gone for three years. Then, Aristide returned to power with the help of 20,000 US Army troops. Immediately after, Haiti became part of a new agreement with the IMF. Haiti’s tariffs were lowered on rice imports from 35% to 3%. In contrast, most Caribbean countries had a tariff of 25%. Haiti’s new tariff made it the Caribbean’s least trade-restrictive country.
Thus the game is played, but farmers are not the only gamesmen. There is a world of knowledge to lose—grain is handled by cleaners, millers, warehousers, transporters and processors. In Haiti, these jobs were handled in a traditional manner remembered from Africa. The system included hard work, yes, but also included tricks to make the work interesting. Traditions, stories, festivals, special foods, fun, invention, music. Losing the knowledge, along with the farmers, means the loss of the entire culture that made life rich.
For American farmers, the impact of Haiti’s rural renaissance could be significant. Reviving their sugar mills, for example, could impact the U.S. corn growers’ ethanol market because sugar yields more energy than corn. Reviving their rice culture could impact U.S. rice growers accustomed to exporting with nearly no tariff.

Occupied Wall Street 30 BCE (Before Common Era)

2011-12-26T15:36:00.000-06:00

Old Xmas movie shows which ideological imperatives have changed and which remain the same

2011-12-26T14:11:00.001-06:00

By Marc Jampole

Last night I flipped on Turner Classic Movies for a half hour after returning from participating in a revered Christmas Eve and Christmas tradition among American Jews—having Chinese food with family and friends. I caught the last 20 minutes of the original (and thankfully uncolorized) 1947 version of Miracle on 34th Street, in which a trial is held to determine whether a Macy’s Santa Claus is the real thing.

A lot happens in the last 20 minutes of the movie: the case is heard; the judge declares that the jolly and benevolent old man is the real Santa Claus; Santa’s lawyer, played by the forgettable John Payne, gets together with his love interest, the unforgettable Maureen O’Hara; and Maureen’s daughter, played by a 9-year-old Natalie Wood, gets her Christmas wish.

In those 20 minutes the writer and director made a number of decisions on details to move the plot along that also subtly advocate three of the most important ideological principles of the time. What’s so striking is that one of these principles has in subsequent years been turned on its ear, while the other two persist and have become even more central to mass entertainment and the mainstream news media.

Let’s start with the big ideological reversal which resides in the reason that the judge declares the old man to be the real Santa Claus. It’s because the U.S. Post Office decides to send to him all the mail it has been holding for Santa Claus. The lead-up to this denouement consists of a five-minute interchange between Payne, the prosecutor and the judge in which they attempt to top each other in praising the post office—it’s efficient, accurate and virtuous, just like the rest of the government.

It was 1947, and the United States had just won a war and was in an era in which government was expanding its influence in the economy and guiding a redistribution of wealth that led to the golden age of 1950-1980 in which we became a nation of primarily middle class and well-to-do households. People liked government and mass entertainment wanted us to like government. I imagine that if Miracle on 34th Street were remade today, the post office might still perform its role in moving the plot along, but it wouldn’t be praised to the skies. It’s also likely that the producer would put the name of the delivery service up for bid resulting in a private company like Fed Ex delivering the Santa letters in the remake; or that they might come as emails that Google sent along.

Like many holiday-themed movies and books, Miracle on 34th Street has several plot lines that twist together. One of the twists is typically the Christmas gift wish of a child. It’s a bee-bee gun in A Christmas Story. It’s a train set in the film-by-numbers A Holiday Affair star-studded with Robert Mitchum, Janet Leigh and Wendell Corey (as another lawyer). The boy in Glenn Beck’s children’s book product titled A Christmas Sweater wants a bike. The plot device of focusing on a gift that is a selfish present for a child turns the spirit of Christmas into non-spiritual consumerism. For these children, the holiday reduces to getting, and getting means buying, which the movie families typically are too poor to do.

The miracle at the end (or occasionally in the middle) of the movie always involves the child getting the material possession, which means someone bought something. Christmas was the first holiday to become a commemoration of shopping and consumerism. In 1947 in Miracle on 34th Street, we see consumerism as the ideological imperative behind Christmas, and we certainly see it today. Nothing has changed.

The third ideological imperative I identified in the last part of the movies comes inside the gift that the girl wants. It’s not a bike, bee-bee gun or train set. It’s a house in the suburbs where a car is a necessity.

A house…in the suburbs…where a car is a necessity.

It’s the big American dream after World War II, subsidized by the government, recommended by the news media of the time and furnished by the real estate, car, retail and appliance manufacturing companies that dominated ad spending. Flee the diverse city for the safe and homogenized suburbs in which all social interaction revolved around cars and malls filled with national chain stores and restaurants. 1947 was near the beginning of the post-war American dream that has turned into a nightmare, especially for the environment and those dependent on dwindling natural resources, which means all of us.

Yet preferring the suburbs to cities remains one of the most important ideological tenets imbuing today’s more ubiquitous mass media, as I have discussed on numerous occasions in OpEdge .

Love or hate of government may be a matter of political fashion, but central to both the American post-War and 21st century ideologies is consumerism. That the preferred place to live, the suburbs, features consuming as its biggest virtue makes perfect sense. And it certainly makes sense that this ideology will manifest itself in the details of holiday entertainments. The Christmas entertainments more spiritual in nature, like It Happened on Fifth Avenue— also released in 1947and a delightful variation on My Man Godfrey—tend to be less popular and less replayed on television.

Occupy Des Moines Protests as Iowa Caucuses Near

By: REGINA ZILBERMINTS
Published: December 26, 2011

During a kick-off press conference, at once a kick-off for a week of protests and an introduction to the local movement for national media, five Occupy Des Moines members spoke about why they are participating and for many, why they are willing to be arrested in front of a campaign headquarters this week.

What has Obama done well?

2011-12-26T13:55:00.002-06:00

Listen to internet radio with Talking Progressive

on Blog Talk Radio

What Has Obama Done Well 12/25 by Talking Progressive | Blog Talk Radio:
Join Vicki with Jim Cullen, editor, of the Progress Populist to review the year of Obama and what he has done right.The airwaves and print media are so full of demonizing Obama let us give the President a little Christmas cheer and list the good things he has been able to accomplish. Hasn't been easy to accomplish anything with the uber-rich backing the Repubs and some of the Dems in Congress to stop any progress being made.

If you celebrate Christmas - have a Merry one! Same with Hanukkah - spin that dreidel!

And for everyone have a good two weeks winding up the end of year.

If you are thinking about voting against the Democratic candidate as a protest

or not voting at all. . . answer me this -

When did those actions help you get what you wanted?

;-) Vicki

The Progressive Populist Progressive Populist Blog

Eating local--Haiti and Missouri

2011-12-26T11:25:00.003-06:00

From the Heartland, Margot McMillen writes:

Finally. Some good news from Haiti. There’s an effort to re-build their local food system, to move people out of the cities and into the countryside. Maybe we can learn from them and re-build our own.
One of the joys of being a locavore is the fun of shopping for food. Your list has, say, a dozen items on it. And, at each stop, the visit is a little reunion with people you care about. I’m always excited to see my farmers, grocers and bakers, and at Christmas it’s twice as fun.
So, on Christmas Eve, I stopped at Clover’s Natural Foods to pick up a few things. They let me peek at the space where they’re expanding into the old liquor store next door. Wow! I had no idea there was so much room in that old liquor store—enough so that Clover’s can host demonstrations or maybe a little deli. Chair massages, oh yeah! The possibilities are endless, so they’ll be deciding and probably changing things for a long time.
Then I went to Uprise Bakery for bread. Sam gave me a report on two hens that I dropped off a couple of weeks ago. We have so many predators at our place, and her hen house is pretty well protected; fearing for their lives, I donated the hens to her. They are moulting now, but the days will get longer very quickly and the hens will come out of it. One year, at my house, we ran out of eggs at Thanksgiving and didn’t have any until February. Ever since then, I’ve given myself permission to buy eggs and now we have a few neighbors raising them. So I stock up before the days get short.
Then I stopped at The Root Cellar for pies. Jen baked them using my freshly milled flour and since I’m completely an idiot when it comes to making pie crust it was a big help. Maybe I should say it was essential. Hannah was working, so I got to catch up with her also. I borrowed her ballpoint pen to check off things on my list—only two items left, and both from the farm store—a new bit for the donkey and long underwear for the farmer. For some reason, that list made Hannah laugh.
After the farm store, I stopped at the grain elevator just to visit. Joel had added a bit of décor to the lawn. Five little deer with white lights, you know the kind, and Joel had arranged them so it looked like they were drinking out of the old toilet he plants with flowers in the summer. Those guys have way too much fun at that place.
Amazing but true: Due to the mild weather, neighbors still have lettuce, although we don’t, and we still have tomatoes ripening in the shed. So it’s an easy trade. Most of the root crops—potatoes, turnips, sweet potatoes—are still available, and so are the chard and kale, not to mention the onions and garlic. And, of course, we have every kind of meat available. So, see, it’s not hard to eat local in mid-Missouri at Christmas.
I wish the same success for Haiti as they move forward.
And that's my blog from the heart for today.

Have you seen the letter to investigate Clarence Thomas?

2011-12-26T10:10:00.000-06:00

You can join in the demand at People for the American Way.

A group of 20 House Democrats led by Rep. Louise Slaughter are now pushing for a Justice Department investigation into various possible ethics infractions by Justice Thomas.

September 29, 2011

James C. Duff
Secretary to the Judicial Conference of the United States
Administrative Office of the United States Courts, Suite 2-301
One Columbus Circle, N.E.
Washington, DC 20544

Dear Mr. Duff:

Widespread reporting, including a recent report in The New York Times titled “Friendship of Justice and Magnate Puts Focus on Ethics,” raise grave concerns about the failure of Justice Clarence Thomas to meet various disclosure requirements under the Ethics in Government Act of 1978. Based upon the multiple public reports, Justice Thomas’s actions may constitute a willful failure to disclose, which would warrant a referral by the Judicial Conference to the Department of Justice, so that appropriate civil or criminal actions can be taken.

Due to the simplicity of the disclosure requirements, along with Justice Thomas’s high level of legal training and experience, it is reasonable to infer that his failure to disclose his wife’s income for two decades was willful, and the Judicial Conference has a non-discretionary duty to refer this case to the Department of Justice.

Throughout his entire tenure on the Supreme Court, Justice Thomas checked a box titled "none” on his annual financial disclosure forms, indicating that his wife had received no income, despite the fact that his wife had in fact earned nearly $700,000 from the Heritage Foundation from 2003-2007 alone.

Furthermore, an investigation conducted by The New York Times has revealed that Justice Thomas may have, on several occasions, benefited from use of a private yacht and airplane owned by Harlan Crowe, and again failed to disclose this travel as a gift or travel reimbursement on his federal disclosure forms as required by the Ethics in Government Act of 1978.

Justice Thomas's failure to disclose his wife's income for his entire tenure on the federal bench and indications that he may have failed to file additional disclosure regarding his travels require the Judicial Conference to refer this matter to the Department of Justice.

Section 104(b) of the Ethics Act requires the Judicial Conference to refer to the Attorney General of the United States any judge who the Conference "has reasonable cause to believe has willfully failed to file a report or has willfully falsified or willfully failed to file information required to be reported." If the Judicial Conference finds reasonable cause to believe that Justice Thomas has "willfully falsified or willfully failed to file information to be reported," it must, pursuant to §104, refer the case to the Attorney General for further determination of possible criminal or civil legal sanctions.

Particularly as questions surrounding the integrity and fairness of the Supreme Court continue to grow, it is vital that the Judicial Conference actively pursue any suspicious actions by Supreme Court Justices. While we continue to advocate for the creation of binding ethical standards for the Supreme Court, it is important the Judicial Conference exercise its current powers to ensure that Supreme Court Justices are held accountable to the current law.

As a result, we respectfully request that the Judicial Conference follow the law and refer the matter of Justice Thomas's non-compliance with the Ethics in Government Act to the Department of Justice. We eagerly await your reply.

Sincerely,

Rep. Louise Slaughter
Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr.
Rep. Gwen Moore
Rep. Mike Honda
Rep. Earl Blumenauer
Rep. Christopher Murphy
Rep. John Garamendi
Rep. Pete Stark
Rep. Raul Grijalva
Rep. John Olver
Rep. Jan Schakowsky
Rep. Donna Edwards
Rep. Jackie Speier
Rep. Paul Tonko
Rep. Bob Filner
Rep. Peter Welch
Rep. John Conyers
Rep. Keith Ellison
Rep. Anna Eshoo
Rep. Ed Perlmutter

The Nation's Honor Roll recognizes courageous progressives for the year 2011.

2011-12-26T09:58:00.000-06:00

John Nichols, The Nation

John Nichols, a pioneering political blogger, has written the Beat since 1999. "What a difference a year makes! Last year The Nation’s Honor Roll recognized courageous, if often lonely, battlers against an austerity agenda, an ascendant Tea Party and a Republican electoral wave that had put Democrats, working folks and the unions that represent them on the defensive nationwide. This year we celebrate the remarkable movements that have arisen not just to stem the conservative tide but to build a new vision of progressivism for the twenty-first century. How much has changed? As 2011 finished, even Barack Obama was sounding populist themes. And progressives were organizing, fighting and winning critical battles on the streets, in the polling places and in the media. The events of 2011 did not transform America. But they did confirm that millions of Americans are ready to fight for the 99 percent."

MOST VALUABLE SENATOR: Sherrod Brown

MOST VALUABLE REPRESENTATIVE: Raúl Grijalva

MOST VALUABLE STATE SENATOR: Nina Turner

MOST VALUABLE STATE REPRESENTATIVE: Diane Russell

MOST VALUABLE LOCAL OFFICIAL: Sheriff Dave Mahoney

MOST VALUABLE STATE COALITION: Mississippians for Healthy Families

MOST VALUABLE NATIONAL COALITION: The New Bottom Line

MOST VALUABLE AGENDA: The National Nurses’ “Main Street Contract”

MOST VALUABLE CONFRONTATION: Iowa CCI

MOST VALUABLE RAPID RESPONSE: Iraq Veterans Against the War

MOST VALUABLE MUSICIAN: Tom Morello

MOST VALUABLE ECONOMIC NEWS SOURCE: Beat the Press

MOST VALUABLE WEBSITE: Save the Post Office savethepostoffice .com

MOST VALUABLE JURIST: District Judge Jed Rakoff

MOST VALUABLE BOOK: Who’s Afraid of Frances Fox Piven?

MOST VALUABLE UNION: International Association of Fire Fighters

MOST VALUABLE CAMPAIGN: Draft Elizabeth Warren

MOST VALUABLE IDEA: Occupy Together

. . . continue reading at The Nation.

President Obama Speaks on the Importance of Extending the Payroll Tax Cut | The White House

2011-12-26T07:26:00.000-06:00

President Obama Speaks on the Importance of Extending the Payroll Tax Cut | The White House:

Remarks by the President on the Payroll Tax Cut

South Court Auditorium

1:00 P.M. EST

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you, everybody. (Applause.) Please have a seat. Good afternoon to all of you. Merry Christmas. Happy holidays.

We've been doing everything we can over the last few weeks to make sure that 160 million working Americans aren’t hit with a holiday tax increase on January 1st. We’ve also been doing everything we can to make sure that millions of people who are out there looking for work in a very tough environment don’t start losing their unemployment insurance on January 1st.

Now, on Saturday, we reached a bipartisan compromise that would do just that -- make sure that people aren’t seeing a tax cut the first of the year; make sure that they still have unemployment insurance the first of the year. Nearly every Democrat in the Senate voted for that compromise. Nearly every Republican in the Senate voted for that compromise. Democrats and even some Republicans in the House voted for that compromise. I am ready to sign that compromise into law the second it lands on my desk.

So far, the only reason it hasn’t landed on my desk -- the only reason -- is because a faction of House Republicans have refused to support this compromise.

Now, if you’re a family making about $50,000 a year, this is a tax cut that amounts to about $1,000 a year. That’s about 40 bucks out of every paycheck. It may be that there's some folks in the House who refuse to vote for this compromise because they don’t think that 40 bucks is a lot of money. But anyone who knows what it’s like to stretch a budget knows that at the end of the week, or the end of the month, $40 can make all the difference in the world.

And that’s why we thought we’d bring your voices into this debate. So many of these debates in Washington end up being portrayed as which party is winning, which party is losing. But what we have to remind ourselves of is this is about people. This is about the American people and whether they win. It's not about a contest between politicians.

So on Tuesday, we asked folks to tell us what would it be like to lose $40 out of your paycheck every week. And I have to tell you that the response has been overwhelming. We haven't seen anything like this before. Over 30,000 people have written in so far -- as many as 2,000 every hour. We’re still hearing from folks -- and I want to encourage everybody who's been paying attention to this to keep sending your stories to WhiteHouse.gov and share them on Twitter and share them on Facebook.

The responses we’ve gotten so far have come from Americans of all ages and Americans of all backgrounds, from every corner of the country. Some of the folks who responded are on stage with me here today, and they should remind every single member of Congress what’s at stake in this debate. Let me just give you a few samples.

Joseph from New Jersey talked about how he would have to sacrifice the occasional pizza night with his daughters. He said -- and I'm quoting -- “My 16-year-old twins will be out of the house soon. I'll miss this.”

Richard from Rhode Island wrote to tell us that having an extra $40 in his check buys enough heating oil to keep his family warm for three nights. In his words -- I'm quoting -- “If someone doesn't think that 12 gallons of heating oil is important, I invite them to spend three nights in an unheated home. Or you can believe me when I say that it makes a difference.”

Pete from Wisconsin told us about driving more than 200 miles each week to keep his father-in-law company in a nursing home -- $40 out of his paycheck would mean he'd only be able to make three trips instead of four.

We heard from a teacher named Claire from here in D.C. who goes to the thrift store every week and uses her own money to buy pencils and books for her fourth grade class. Once in a while she splurges on science or art supplies. Losing $40, she says, would mean she couldn’t do that anymore.

For others, $40 means dinner out with a child who's home for Christmas, a new pair of shoes, a tank of gas, a charitable donation. These are the things at stake for millions of Americans. They matter to people. A lot.

And keep in mind that those are just the individual stories. That doesn’t account for the overall impact that a failure to extend the payroll tax cut and a failure to extend unemployment insurance would have on the economy as a whole. We've seen the economy do better over the last couple of months, but there's still a lot of sources of uncertainty out there -- what's going on in Europe, what's going on around the world. And so this is insurance to make sure that our recovery continues.

So it's time for the House to listen to the voices who are up here, the voices all across the country, and reconsider. What’s happening right now is exactly why people just get so frustrated with Washington. This is it; this is exactly why people get so frustrated with Washington. This isn’t a typical Democratic-versus-Republican issue. This is an issue where an overwhelming number of people in both parties agree. How can we not get that done? I mean, has this place become so dysfunctional that even when people agree to things we can't do it? (Applause.) It doesn’t make any sense.

So, enough is enough. The people standing with me today can’t afford any more games. They can’t afford to lose $1,000 because of some ridiculous Washington standoff. The House needs to pass a short-term version of this compromise, and then we should negotiate an agreement as quickly as possible to extend the payroll tax cut and unemployment insurance for the rest of 2012. It's the right thing to do for the economy, and it's, most importantly, the right thing to do for American families all across the country.

This is not just my view. Just a few hours ago, this is exactly what the Republican Leader of the Senate said we should do. Democrats agree with the Republican Leader of the Senate. We should go ahead and get this done. This should not be hard. We all agree it should happen. I believe it's going to happen sooner or later. Why not make it sooner, rather than later? Let’s give the American people -- the people who sent us here -- the kind of leadership they deserve.

Thank you, everybody. (Applause.)

END
1:08 P.M. EST

'via Blog this'

Drones could patrol in U.S., FAA says

2011-12-25T09:35:00.000-06:00

BY W.J. HENNIGAN - Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES -- Drone aircraft, best known for their role in hunting and destroying terrorist hide-outs in Afghanistan, may soon be coming to the skies near you.

Police agencies want drones for air support to spot runaway criminals. Utility companies believe they can help monitor oil, gas and water pipelines. Farmers think drones could aid in spraying their crops with pesticides.
"It's going to happen," said Dan Elwell, vice president of civil aviation at the Aerospace Industries Association. "Now it's about figuring out how to safely assimilate the technology into national airspace."

That's the job of the Federal Aviation Administration, which plans to propose new rules for the use of small drones in January, a first step toward integrating robotic aircraft into the nation's skyways.
Police departments in Texas, Florida and Minnesota have expressed interest in the technology's potential to spot runaway criminals on rooftops or to track them at night by using the robotic aircraft's heat-seeking cameras.

"Most Americans still see drone aircraft in the realm of science fiction," said Peter W. Singer, author of "Wired for War," a book about robotic warfare. "But the technology is here. And it isn't going away. It will increasingly play a role in our lives. The real question is: How do we deal with it?"

"This is a tool that many law enforcement agencies never imagined they could have," said Steven Gitlin, a company executive.

US: End CIA Drone Attacks | Human Rights Watch

2011-12-25T09:30:00.000-06:00

US: End CIA Drone Attacks | Human Rights Watch:

Members of the Abida tribe point to a drone aircraft flying over Wadi Abida,

Demonstrate ‘Targeted Killings’ Adhere to International Law

DECEMBER 19, 2011

(Washington, DC) – The US government should transfer Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) command of aerial drone strikes to the armed forces and clarify its legal rationale for targeted killings, Human Rights Watch said today in a letter to President Barack Obama and in a questions and answers document. A dramatic increase in the use of CIA drone strikes underscores the need for the US to demonstrate that the CIA adheres to international legal requirements for accountability, Human Rights Watch said.

“CIA drone strikes have become an almost daily occurrence around the world, but little is known about who is killed and under what circumstances,” said James Ross, legal and policy director at Human Rights Watch. “So long as the US resists public accountability for CIA drone strikes, the agency should not be conducting targeted killings.”

In the decade since the September 11, 2001 attacks, the Bush and Obama administrations have engaged in a campaign of “targeted killings” – deliberate, lethal attacks aimed at specific individuals under the color of law. Estimates of the number of deaths of alleged al Qaeda members, other armed group members, and civilians from US targeted killings range from several hundred to more than two thousand. Most of these attacks are believed to have occurred in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia, and Yemen using unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, armed with missiles and laser-guided bombs.

The lawfulness of a targeted killing hinges in part on the applicable international law, which is determined by the context in which the attack takes place, Human Rights Watch said. The laws of war permit attacks during situations of armed conflict only against valid military targets. Attacks causing disproportionate loss of civilian life or property are prohibited. During law enforcement situations, international human rights law permits the use of lethal force only when absolutely necessary to save human life. Individuals cannot be targeted with lethal force merely because of past unlawful behavior, but only for imminent or other grave threats to life when arrest is not reasonably possible.

The CIA’s increasing role in targeted killings using drones in Pakistan and other countries with no transparency or demonstrated accountability raises grave concerns about the lawfulness of the attacks, Human Rights Watch said. While the laws of war do not prohibit intelligence agencies from participating in combat operations, states are obligated to investigate credible allegations of war crimes and provide redress for victims of unlawful attacks. The US government’s refusal to acknowledge the CIA’s role in targeted killings or to provide information on strikes where there have been credible allegations of laws-of-war violations leaves little basis for determining whether the US is meeting its international legal obligations.

“Unsupported claims by administration officials that all US agencies involved in targeted killings are complying with international law are wholly inadequate,” Ross said. “By failing to adopt policies and practices that demonstrate compliance with international law, the US raises doubts among its allies about the lawfulness of its actions and creates a dangerous model for abusive governments.”

Since the US has not demonstrated a readiness to hold the CIA to international legal requirements, the use of drones for attacks should be exclusively within the command responsibility of the US armed forces, Human Rights Watch said. The military has more transparent procedures for investigating possible wrongdoing, although it too needs to make clear that it is conducting attacks in accordance with international legal requirements.

Ending the CIA’s command of targeted killing operations would be consistent with the recommendations of the independent 9/11 Commission, which in 2004 specifically urged that “[l]ead responsibility for directing and executing paramilitary operations, whether clandestine or covert, should shift to the Defense Department.” In November, former director of national intelligence Dennis Blair called for military control over the armed drone program, noting that the armed forces have an open set of procedures, while CIA operations require secrecy, which is not sustainable over the long term: “If something has been going for a long period of time, somebody else ought to do it, not intelligence agencies."

Human Rights Watch also called upon the US government to clarify fully and publicly its legal rationale for conducting targeted killings and the legal limits on such strikes. The US should explain why it believes that specific attacks are in conformity with international law and make information public, including video footage, on how particular attacks comply with those standards. To ensure compliance with international law, the United States should conduct investigations of all targeted killings where there is credible evidence of wrongdoing, provide compensation to all victims of unlawful strikes, and discipline or prosecute as appropriate those responsible for conducting or ordering illegal attacks.

The Obama administration, through public statements by senior officials, has provided an outline of its legal justification for using force against al Qaeda and associated organizations. However, the administration has yet to clearly explain where it draws the line between lawful and unlawful targeted killings, Human Rights Watch said.

In asserting that targeted attacks on alleged anti-US militants anywhere in the world are lawful, the US undermines the international rules it helped craft over the past half-century. This sets a dangerous precedent for abusive regimes around the globe to conduct drone attacks or other strikes against anyone labeled a terrorist or militant, and undercuts the ability of the US to criticize such attacks.

About 40 other countries currently possess basic drone technology, and the number is expected to expand significantly in coming years. These drones are primarily used for surveillance. China, France, Germany, India, Iran, Israel, Italy, Russia, Turkey, and the United Kingdom either have or are currently seeking drones with attack capability.

http://www.hrw.org/news/2011/12/19/us-end-cia-drone-attacks 'via Blog this'

CIA drone strikes have become an almost daily occurrence around the world, but little is known about who is killed and under what circumstances. So long as the US resists public accountability for CIA drone strikes, the agency should not be conducting targeted killings.

James Ross, legal and policy director

FCC plan to ease media ownership rules will further limit type of news and opinions that Americans get

2011-12-24T09:42:00.002-06:00

By Marc Jampole

The Obama Administration is once again displaying its conservative feathers as proudly as any peacock might. The same group of pseudo-progressives who overruled distribution of Plan B birth control without an I.D. and executed an about-face to gut proposed higher pollution emission standards now plans to make another assault on freedom of speech.

Obama’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) wants to overturn its longstanding rule that limits companies from owning both a newspaper and a television or radio station in the same local market.

This rule will surely lead to greater concentration of media outlets in the hands of fewer companies. The same thing happened after the Telecommunications Act of 1996 enabled companies to own more stations. Larger companies bought smaller ones and suddenly instead of hundreds of owners of TV and radio stations across the country, there were only dozens. We saw the impact on radio as Clear Channel and other companies owned by rightwingers gained control of the editorial policies of more and more stations. Pretty soon the range of opinion on radio narrowed and moved extremely right. While Rush Limbaugh began making a name for himself before 1996, it was the consolidation of media ownership that led to the domination of talk radio by Rush and his clones—Glen Beck, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Michael Medved, ad nauseum.

The FCC is arguing that it’s absurd not to let companies own both broadcast and print properties in one market since every TV and radio station is printing on the Internet and most newspapers run video on their websites. That argument doesn’t answer the objections to consolidation because the issue is not the distribution of news, but the sourcing of it. With fewer collective owners, there are fewer opinions and fewer definitions of what is newsworthy. With consolidation, the owners will tend to resemble each other even more than they do now, so that the articles and opinions will come to be similar across the various media.

Freedom of speech is useless unless there is a pulpit for every opinion. Each owner represents one possible pulpit for a variety of notions regarding our economy, political system, distribution of wealth, cultural ideas and belief systems, but each pulpit will be available to only one of each type—one set of views on the economy and politics, one idea about wealth distribution, one set of social priorities. We need many owners to ensure that we have many pulpits for every facet of economic, political and social interaction. Right now, a handful of companies already control most of the TV and radio stations, newspapers, movie studios and publishing houses in the country and around the world. The Internet does offer free access to the marketplace of ideas, but successful websites that are not affiliated with big companies draw in the hundreds of thousands, a drop in the bucket. The pulpit is there, but the tent is small compared to The Wall Street Journal or ABC-TV news.

The long suffering newspaper, as a recent Pew study showed, is the whole game, since newspapers originate 50% of all news, and a much higher percentage if we discount celebrity and local crime news and focus on political, economic, social trend and breaking news. As newspapers decline, they are covering less news and presenting fewer opinions, so less news and fewer opinions are getting out to people.

It may be that the FCC is thinking that revenues from TV will enable companies to keep the newspaper viable, something that seems less and less possible under current operating assumptions. But isn’t it just as likely that television advertising and programming departments could begin to dictate the terms of coverage in newspapers, leading to a rapid debasement of content.

If the Obama Administration and the FCC really want to help newspapers survive, a better approach might be to put a limit on the number of media properties one company can own. Make the large media conglomerates divest for the good of the country, like federal law and regulation once made oil conglomerates divest for the good of the country. The more companies there are controlling the media, the freer we will be as a people and as a society, and the less possible it will be for one group to steer the country in the wrong direction by controlling the news and opinion. Each of these smaller media companies after divestiture might be more fragile, but the industry itself would be stronger and more diverse.

Greater government support for the news operations of local public broadcasting stations would also help to create a freer marketplace of ideas.

Finally, government could subsidize newspapers that report original news and are making the transition to the Internet model, perhaps with a tax on Internet news aggregators such as Yahoo! and Google News that make so many stories of local and national newspapers available to the public free of charge.

I urge all readers to go to the FCC website and make a comment. Tell the Obama Administration that you do not want it to concentrate media ownership further. Instead, ask the Obama Administration to develop new laws and regulations that will break up the big media companies and diversify ownership.

In class war, House Republicans must think they’re the 300 Spartans dying politically so wealth inequality can survive

2011-12-22T09:19:00.002-06:00

By Marc Jampole

House Republicans persist in stonewalling an agreement to extend and expand the temporary cut in Social Security and Medicare taxes (AKA payroll taxes). After holding the U.S. economy hostage time and again to maintain temporary tax cuts for the wealthy and paying for them by gutting programs for everyone else, the Republicans are now opposing a little more help for the other 99%.

This move should convince any doubters that there is a class war going on in the United States, and it’s being waged by the wealthy against the middle class and poor. The foot soldiers are conservative pundits and politicians, primarily Republicans. The House Republicans, led by the nose by its Tea Party wing, remind me of the small Greek army led by Spartans that held the Persian Army at the ancient Battle of Thermopylae, recently fictionalized as the movie 300.

The analogy to the Spartans, who sacrificed their lives for the greater cause (Sparta was a proto-fascist state), fits like a glove: The Republicans are taking heat for stonewalling the continuation of this tax cut. Virtually all reputable economists agree that consumers have spent almost all of the extra money in their pockets from the payroll tax cut. This temporary tax cut has thus served as a boost to the struggling economy. Take that boost away, and we will slip back into recession and the Republicans will be blamed. The House Republicans know that they’re putting their jobs and political lives on the line, but I imagine they are “just following orders:” like good soldiers always do.

The reluctance of Republicans in general to extend this tax cut unless we pay for it with cuts in benefits to other poor or middle class people demonstrates clearly that class war is the appropriate term to describe not only the current Republican agenda, but the agenda of conservatives for the past 30 years.

One of the most powerful tools of warfare has always been to cut off the enemy’s supply lines. Information and facts are perhaps the most vital supplies in this violent class war (unless you consider it nonviolent to cause deaths from inadequate medical care or children going to bed hungry). Speaker of the House John Boehner tried to cut that valuable resource the other day when he had someone from his office order C-SPAN to stop videotaping the live battle on the House Floor after he and other Republicans walked out of the chamber. At the time, Maryland Democratic Representative Stenny Hoyer was lambasting the House Republicans for walking away from their responsibility to the unemployed, the middle class, the poor and those on Medicare.

This obnoxious censorship demonstrates that the Republicans are willing to do anything to preserve and exacerbate the current inequality of wealth in this country.

The war analogy illuminates many conservative actions over the past three decades, and especially since the ascendancy of Bush II:

Pulling C-SPAN’s plug was a minor skirmish, but Republicans have been trying to reduce supplies of another precious resource—votes—for the past few years by proposing bills in virtually all states to make it harder both to register to vote and to vote.

Warfare often shows a complete disregard for innocent bystanders, and who can be more innocent than the millions of children who have seen funds cut for public schools, early childhood education and children’s healthcare?

Victors in war claim booty, and the booty in the case of the 30-year war against the middle class and poor is increased corporate profits from gutted regulations and government contracts that privatize traditional government services such as data processing, schools, prisons and military support services, replacing good-paying-rich government jobs with low-paying private sector jobs.

What else is the constant denigration of unions and unionized public workers than guerilla warfare? Taking pot shots at unions, impeding their ability to organize and feeding the public a steady stream of anti-union cant can all be compared to the attack-and-run strategies of guerilla warfare. And just as Viet Cong guerilla war divided the U.S. ruling elite and just as American guerilla war divided British ruling elite, so the right wing has managed to divide the middle class against itself with its constant sniping at unions.

We can only hope that the House Republican’s reenactment of the Battle of Thermopylae has the same effect that the original battle did: Although the Greek army held off the Persians for a few days, the Persians overran much of Greece and captured Athens, that ancient democracy for rich white men. Let’s hope the Republicans lose both the battle and the war, although I wouldn’t compare America’s other 99% to the Persians. No, after 30 years of unmitigated class warfare, we’re more like shell-shocked victims of massive bombing.

2011-12-08T11:41:00.080-06:00

(mediaite.com)

Mitt Romney Makes $10,000 Bet in Republican Debate

By: MARC JAMPOLE
Published: December 12, 2011

I’m betting that Mitt Romney gave his campaign for the Republican nomination a deadly wound in last night’s umpteenth debate between the Republican candidates to face President Obama in November 2012.

O'Reilly Hits Organizer and Tries to Get Him Arrested

By: RIGHT WING WATCH
Published: December 8, 2011

Bill O’Reilly, reportedly walking out of a Newt Gingrich fundraiser held last night in DC (see update below), is asked by Wisconsin community organizer Brendan Lane if he attended the fundraiser. O’Reilly ignores him and then, with no prompting, strikes Lane with his umbrella.