Here’s a poem I wrote 6 years ago about the second Selma march

By Marc Jampole

It’s easy to forget that there were three Selma marches. March 7 commemorates the bloody first march in which state troopers and a county posse attacked 600 unarmed marchers when they reached the Edmund Pettis Bridge. The marchers had wanted to walk 50 odd miles to Montgomery, the Alabama state capitol, to raise awareness of the fight for voting rights.

The images on television were unforgettably horrifying, and America rose, almost as one, to support the marchers.  People from all walks of life using every means of transportation descended on Selma for a second march.  Now there were 2,500 marchers, led by Martin Luther King, who had sat out the first march. I haven’t seen the movie “Selma,” but as Taylor Branch tells it in Pillars of Fire, King debated whether to risk injury or assassination by leading the second march. I have always wondered what goes into the decision to put your life at risk for an idea. It must be frightening to contemplate your own death, and yet to still walk into the lions’ den.

Although the second march on March 9 was merely symbolic, it held the potential for more violence. The Southern Christian Leadership Council tried to get a court order that would prohibit the police from interfering with the next attempt to walk from Selma to Montgomery. The judge decided to issue a restraining order prohibiting another march until he could hold hearings on the court order. So America watched as King led the marchers to the bridge, where he declared victory and said they would wait for the court order.

Much happened before the triumphant third march: The KKK beat to death a white minister and he died after the Selma Hospital refused to treat him. President Lyndon Johnson introduced the Voting Rights Act before both houses of Congress. There were several protests for voting rights elsewhere in the south. Johnson federalized the Alabama National Guard to protect the marchers. And of course, the judge granted the court order saying that the marchers could march because they were exercising their constitutional rights.

The third march that started on March 21 was almost anti-climactic, a five-day marathon of media coverage that started with 8,000 in Selma and ended with 30,000 witnessing another timeless speech by King on the steps of the Alabama Capitol Building. It was very much a victory party, since the marchers were well-protected by the troops and it was apparent that Congress was going to pass the Voting Rights Act. Thus, when I wrote a poem about Selma six years ago, I decided to focus on the second march.

Here is my poem, “The Second Selma March.” The poem, by the way, is a serious travesty of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” about five nuns fleeing Prussian anti-Catholic laws who drowned when their steam ship, The Deutschland, sank in the North Sea in 1875. The arrangement of lines, stanza length, tumbling accretion of verbs, nouns and adjectives, hyphenated words, musicality and other aspects of my poem all come from Hopkins’ poem.

THE SECOND SELMA MARCH

“I had long had haunting my ear the echo of a new rhythm…”

            - Gerard Manley Hopkins

                        It was on TV

            for all the world to touch:

the bloodied men and women

            reeling on the bridge,

the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama,

feel with them the billy clubs,

            horn-bean branches, rifle butts

on black-brown arms and legs, black-brown noses, chins,

                        and lash of bull whips

            swinging hard by hate-sieged men

in uniforms and gas masks,

            tear gas melting lungs and eyes,

on TV for all to see, the bleeding broken

borne on arms and stretchers into church.

            As one the viewers rise

from beer or dinner, stand and cry,

                         Is this my land, is this

            the soil of equal hopes, of equal dreams?

and in a common rapture east to west,

            people stop their meetings, drop their jobs,

board buses, railcars, airplanes, autos

bound for bloody Selma for another march,

            another chance to show the world,

to show themselves they live in freedom’s land.

                        Dead, dead, dead

            if I should march to Edmund Pettus Bridge,

closed-door Martin’s dread of next day’s plan

            before a watching world, confronts

protected points, every ledge and rock along the way,

every liquored angry cracker white with smarts:

            lay of the land, way to escape

after drawing, pulling, piercing him with searing shot.

                        My greater fear:

            to die or disappoint?               

to cease to be or cease to matter?

            March he does

leading new recruits from every state

before the pens and cameras, before the snakelike

            seething men, march he does,

a new rhythm haunting him, a fearless rhythm,

                        relentless echo rhythm,

            sun blister cloud water wind shatter rhythm,

rhythm ready to pay the price,

            peaceful ordnance steady step and turn.

And thousands march along, and multi-millions

watch as at the bridge the troopers wave

            their clubs and court orders

and stop them, but only from crossing:

                        Martin prays,

            declares freedom victorious,

turns home to wait

            for briefs in court, the slower march,

inevitable camp and walk, sing and praise,

five days fifty miles to Alabama’s capitol steps,

            thirty thousand strong to witness Martin ask

How long, not long, not long at all. 

Ferguson financing city operations on backs of the poor is just business as usual

By Marc Jampole

The U.S. Department of Justice Report on the Ferguson,Missouri police department (FPD) makes clear that the City of Ferguson made raising revenue the primary objective of the FPD and the Ferguson court system. In budgets, memos, emails, commands to police and meeting minutes, the DOJ found an explicit collective program to fund city operations with traffic and parking tickets and public safety fines for minor offenses such as not keeping a tidy lawn. The DOJ documents that Ferguson’s fines are much higher than other Missouri cities of the same size, as are the percentage of all city revenues that comes from fining citizens.  

Rural counties in Texas, West Virginia and elsewhere have long had a history of stopping those driving cars with out-of-state plates to pump up the local treasury. Ferguson has taken this gambit one step further by going after its own citizens.

But no one should be surprised or shocked to learn that the Ferguson, Missouri city government financed its operations on the backs of the poor and middle class.  It happens all the time, although usually not with the overtly racist element. When municipalities use tax dollars to build new stadiums with more luxury boxes but fewer cheap seats, as happened in New York, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee and elsewhere, it represents a convoluted form of taxing the poor and middle class to fund municipal benefits to the wealthy. When states and local governments decide to fund activities by issuing bonds that constitute safe investments for rich folk and pay off those bonds through taxing everyone, it’s another complicated way to shift financing burdens to the poor and middle class. The report of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform a few years back didn’t suggest much to help balance the budget but did propose giving rich folk big fat tax breaks while increasing taxes on the poor and middle class, thus shifting to the latter the burden of paying for government.  The net effect of the several tax breaks and tax hikes over the past 35 years has been to make the poor and middle class pay a larger share of the cost of government and government services.

These and other mechanisms for making the poor and middle class pay more are far more subtle than the naked wealth grab we have seen in Ferguson. The headlines in the DOJ report depict a contemporary version of highway robbery:

·         FPD Engages in a Pattern of Unconstitutional Stops and Arrests in Violation of the Fourth Amendment

·         FPD Engages in a Pattern of First Amendment Violations

·         FPD Engages in a Pattern of Excessive Force in Violation of the Fourth Amendment

·         Court Practices Impose Substantial and Unnecessary Barriers to the Challenge or Resolution of Municipal Code Violations

·         The Court Imposes Unduly Harsh Penalties for Missed Payments or Appearances

We can assume that city officials knew that Afro-Americans were arrested and fined at a much higher rate than their representation in the population, but it doesn’t matter one way or the other: the result of using the criminal justice system as a source of revenue and overtly discriminating against blacks in arrests and court treatment pretty much defines the kind of institutional racism that transcends whatever laws are in place to protect against discrimination. 

Global warming deniers share many characteristics with those who defended slavery in first half of 19th century

By Marc Jampole

On close inspection, the political and economic dynamics involving man-made global warming over the past 40 years resemble those of slavery in the United States from about 1790 until the Civil War.

In both the case of slavery and man-made global warming, an overwhelming moral imperative begs us to act as individuals and as a community, but action is forestalled to accommodate the economic interests of a handful of wealthy individuals.

Pretty much everyone except for the hard-core defenders of slavery knew that it was morally wrong by the end of the 18th century. Yet many people like Thomas Jefferson pretended (or stupidly believed) that the main impediment to ending the institution of slavery was the fact that the Black slaves were inferior beings who couldn’t cope with the demands of contemporary society. This belief, often based on a false science called “scientific racism,” persisted despite the preponderance of real-world evidence to the contrary. The lies and distortions used to justify slavery concealed the real reason the institution persisted: slavery was in the economic best interests of a handful of ultra-wealthy and politically connected Southern growers and Northern merchants. Even as more people began to oppose the horrors of slavery and Northern business interests developed alternative economic structures, slavery continued to spread West from the southeastern Atlantic coast towards Texas.

It took the savage butchery of the Civil War to end slavery in the Unites States. In the war to fight secession and end slavery more than 600,000 soldiers died, countless others suffered injuries and the slave-owning states that seceded from the Union saw their economies decimated. Before the war, millions of slaves died from overwork and murder or suffered beatings, whippings, rapes and other violence from their owners and a society that conflated their humanity with private property.

We can see the same dynamics that led to the Civil War working in the case of man-made global warming. It’s as morally wrong to avoid addressing a problem that could lead to the deaths and suffering of hundreds of millions of people in the near future as it was to enslave millions of human beings. BTW, some experts have shown that the adverse effects of environmental degradation hit the poor and people of color around the world much worse than they hit the wealthy.

Global warming deniers tell two kinds of lies to conceal that their main concern is their own selfish short-term interests. The first lie is to deny that the Earth is warming or aver that the warming is part of the natural unfolding of Earth’s history and not because of humans. Another variation of this scientific lie is to postulate that the impact of global warming will not be catastrophic. Just as the super-wealthy whose riches depended on slavery found so-called experts to tell the various lies that justified slavery, so have the ultra-wealthy whose riches depend on polluting our environment. A handful of scientists—less than 1% of those qualified to proffer an opinion—have received undue attention in the mass media for their misrepresentations of the science of climatology; we know that some scientists who deny global warming, like the disgraced and disgraceful Wei-Hock Soon, have been in the pay of groups that deny global warming.

The other big global warming lie is that an expeditious transition from fossil fuels to alternative energy sources will destroy our economy. Economic studies demonstrate that the impact of increasing pollution limits on fossil fuels and depending on wind, hydraulic and solar energy will be quite minor. Some people will lose their jobs and find others, but that happens in any dynamic economy that routinely introduces new technologies. New pollution controls, research and development into alternative energies, retrofitting manufacturing systems and delivering the new forms of energy to consumers and business will all create new jobs and economic wealth. The big change will be that those who own the means of producing and delivering fossil fuels and fossil-fuel based electricity and those whose industrial processes depend on fossil fuels will see the basis of their incredible wealth upended—which is what happened to slave owners.

Just as slavery continued for decades in the face of growing opposition, even as more people come to realize that continuing to rely on fossil fuels is immoral and short-sighted, the pollution not only continues, but grows.

There is one difference between the dynamics involving slavery. The death and destruction wrought by slavery was apparent to anyone who cared to read the works of abolitionists or to visit a large plantation. The harm caused by man-made global warming and other environmental degradations is harder to picture. We look at the ocean from a beautiful beach and do not see the increased carbon dioxide in the water that’s slowly killing important ecosystems. It’s hard for most people to connect the dramatic increase in extreme weather events with the increase in both average temperatures and ambient carbon dioxide. Moreover, the conflagration—which may involve environmental disasters, weather calamities and wars for resources—is still in the future.

Slavery was a horrible institution. Millions of slaves lived their lives under the yoke of violence, their freedom and dignity denied. I believe that every American should spend at least one minute every day thinking about our nation’s collective guilt in enslaving and mistreating millions of our fellow human beings.

But make no mistake about it. If we don’t act both quickly and radically to address man-made global warming, the death and destruction from it will end up being much greater than what Africans and African-Americans suffered under slavery.

Editorial: Reaping the Whirlwind

President Obama has been opposed almost entirely down the line by Republicans ever since their leaders met at the high-dollar Caucus Room restaurant the night of Obama’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 2009, to plan their opposition. Over steaks and cocktails, they pledged to use every parliamentary trick to deny the new president any accomplishments.

Congressman Pete Sessions (D-Texas) even said the Taliban could be a model for the Republican insurgency that would obstruct Obama’s agenda.

It’s bad enough that Republicans tried to block Obama’s and the Dems’ efforts to revive the economy after the bottom dropped out during the last year of George W. Bush’s administration. Almost in lockstep, Republicans opposed the economic stimulus and the loans that helped General Motors and Chrysler survive in 2009. Then, in 2010 Republicans almost unanimously opposed the Affordable Care Act, despite it being based on the individual mandate to buy insurance that the Heritage Foundation originally proposed.

Unfortunately, Republican sabotage also extends to Obama’s attempts to bottle up the terrorists who were spawned by George W. Bush’s ill-considered invasion and occupation of Iraq. It used to be that politics ended at the water’s edge, but under Caucus Room rules, anything that makes Obama look bad is good for the GOP.

As this is written, there is an impasse between the House and Senate over the funding of the Department of Homeland Security. Senate Republicans have indicated their willingness to pass a “clean” bill that would keep the lights on at DHS, but House Republicans have refused to consider any bill that funds Homeland Security but doesn’t repudiate President Obama’s executive authority to defer the deportation of undocumented immigrants. Senate Democrats can block the House’s poison-pill bill in the Senate, saving President Obama a veto — but that doesn’t mean the Democrats deserve blame for the shutdown if it occurs at the end of February.

[Post Script: The Senate approved a bipartisan "clean bill" on Friday, Feb. 27, funding the Department of Homeland Security without the provision rejecting Obama's executive actions on immigration. The House took no action on that bill, but it rejected the House Republican leadership's proposal for a three-week extension of the DHS budget 224- 203 Friday afternoon, with 52 Republicans voting with most of the Democrats to reject the stopgap. Friday evening the House voted 357-60, with Democrats joining the Republican leadership, to extend House funding for one week.]

Republicans are playing chicken with national security, and they are placing a hardship on national security professionals. Even if the GOP-imposed shutdown occurs, essential Homeland Security personnel will remain on duty, though they won’t know when they might be paid for their service.
The shutdown might tempt an Al-Qaeda or IS sympathizer to think this is an opportune time to strike an American target. You can be sure Republicans are ready to blame the President if that happens.

If an attack doesn’t happen next week, it probably will happen eventually. We shouldn’t be scared of a gang of extremists who already are stretched thin trying to hold their outposts in Iraq and Syria. But deranged Christians shooting up classrooms, theaters and malls apparently aren’t enough to make us reconsider the sacred “right to bear arms,” so why should we let the threat of an Islamist terrorist with access to Youtube make us suspend the Bill of Rights?

We should keep our guard up in public places in the United States, but in the meantime we should support our Arab and other Islamic allies (including Iran) who are willing to clear IS and Al Qaeda out of the Mideast, with air cover from the US Air Force and other military resources as necessary.

Some of us might not accept the obligation, but the US is responsible for unleashing the murderous gangs in Iraq who have spilled into Syria. Bush and his right-wing friends thought that replacing Saddam Hussein’s secular Ba’athist regime in 2003 would clear the way for a free-market paradise in Iraq. Instead, we found that ousting Hussein was ruinous to Iraqi society as well as our relations with neighboring countries. The Ba’athist army under Hussein had been nominally secular but was dominated by Sunni Muslims. After they were defeated and discharged by the Americans, with no way to make an honest living, many rediscovered their religion and were attracted to Al-Qaeda in Iraq and later to IS.

Egypt’s president at the time, Hosni Mubarak, predicted that the invasion of Iraq would produce “one hundred new bin Ladens,” driving more Muslims to anti-Western militancy. “When it is over, if it is over, this war will have horrible consequences,” Mubarak told Egyptian solders in Suez on March 31, 2003.

Now it is up to President Obama to clean up the mess that Bush left, and is entirely reasonable for Obama to refuse to legitimize Al Qaeda, the “Islamic State” and other extremist groups who claim to be advancing Islam.

Some have criticized the President for refusing to connect extremism to the religion of Islam — particularly after shootings by Islamist militants in Paris and Copenhagen. On Feb. 18, speaking at a three-day White House Summit on Countering Violent Extremism, Obama said, “We are not at war with Islam. We are at war with people who have perverted Islam.” He added, “No religion is responsible for terrorism. People are responsible for violence and terrorism.”

This makes sense when President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry are working to get cooperation from Islamic nations in the fight against Islamist extremism. They have signed up 62 nations, including the European Union and the Arab League, in a coalition to fight IS. Five Arab allies — Bahrain, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar — are participating in air strikes against “Islamic State” targets in Iraq and Syria, while others are offering delivery services and humanitarian aid. Turkey, which initially resisted support for the actions in Syria, has pledged military and logistic support for the operation.”

Even if US military units still are conducting most of the air strikes, it helps to have Arab nations on our side, which would be more difficult if Obama were to adopt the Fox “News” talking point that we are at war with Islam.

The savagery of IS has moved more Muslim nations to side with the US. The videotaped execution of a captured Jordanian pilot by burning him to death (in violation of the Koran) solidified popular support in Jordan for King Abdullah’s campaign against IS. And the beheading of Egyptian Christian workers who had been captured in Libya by an IS-allied group caused Egypt to strike out at IS targets in Libya and called for the US-led coalition to join the fight in that troubled nation.

Egyptian forces already are fighting extremist insurgencies in the Sinai Peninsula in the east and are trying to stamp out dissent after the 2013 coup that overthrew the Muslim Brotherhood, which swept to power in 2012 and attempted to impose Sharia law and cracked down on the Coptic Christian minority after a popular movement drove President Mubarak out of office.

Under new President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi, the former general who led the coup against the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt has detained tens of thousands of Brotherhood members as well as journalists and other protesters. Police and military have killed hundreds under the banner of fighting terrorism. Democracy is hard ...

The perils of Republican attempts to undermine President Obama abroad are illustrated in the experience of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who in 2013 urged Saudi and Qatari governments to arm Syrian rebel groups when Obama was slow to get the job done. After arms did move to Syrian rebel groups, McCain told CNN’s Candy Crowley in January 2014, “Thank God for the Saudis and Prince Bandar.” But the arms didn’t just go to the “moderate” Free Syrian Army that is backed by the US, Turkey and Western allies. Steve Clemons reported at TheAtlantic.com June 23, 2014, that two groups fighting Syrian President Assad who received arms from Qatar and Saudi Arabia turned out to be Jabhat al-Nusra, an al Qaeda affiliate, and ISIS, which was expelled from al Qaeda because they were too extreme for the jihadists. Just two weeks after President Obama met with Saudi King Abdullah on March 28, 2014, Bandar was removed from his position as head of Saudi intelligence. McCain apparently learned nothing from the debacle.

Clemons concluded, “John McCain’s desire to help rebel forces toss off a brutal dictator and fight for a more just and inclusive Syria is admirable. But as has been proven repeatedly in the Middle East, ousting strongmen doesn’t necessarily produce more favorable successor governments.” — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, March 15, 2015

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Selections from the March 15, 2015 issue

COVER/Eric Boehlert
Stewart, Colbert and a diminished liberal voice?

EDITORIAL
Reaping the whirlwind

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR 

LLEWELLYN HINKES-JONES
The decennial market crash

RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Get big, get government subsidies

DISPATCHES
Uninsured rate hits new low in 2014;
O’Care helps 32M get insurance;
Chicago populists help force runoff;
Wyden calls trade hearing ‘premature’;
Repubs slash university spending;
Feingold, Strickland eye Senate races;
Banking could go postal;
Alaska legalizes pot;
Vatican takes on Big Pharma;
Repubs and their stenographers turn 72 days into two full years;
Climate deniers' favorite scientist took money from fossil fuelers;
Sandy Hook was fundraising bonanza for NRA ...

GENE NICHOL
Stepping on necks of farmworkers in N.C.’

BOB BURNETT
Obama grows coattails

DON ROLLINS
Bipartisan sentencing bill a moral victory

ROBERT BOROSAGE
The case for a populist challenger

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Outsource! The pharmaceutical mantra!

SAM URETSKY
In Huckabee’s view, it’s bubbas vs. bubbles

WAYNE O’LEARY
Cautionary tale for our times

JOHN and ELISABETH BUELL
Executions: Theirs and ours

JUAN COLE
Today’s top 7 myths about Daesh/ISIL

BOOK REVIEW/Seth Sandronsky
Making media democracy

ROB PATTERSON
Politics makes strange TV shows

POPULIST PICKS
Hellhound; Exodus; Shadows in the Night

and more ...

Netanyahu uses faulty logic to justify a dangerous & unwise policy

By Marc Jampole

Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu’s reasoning makes as little sense as his overall strategy.

Netanyahu is determined to scuttle the imminent deal between Iran and the P5+1 countries over Iran’s development of nuclear energy and nuclear weapons. (BTW, P5+1 refers to the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council—the United States, Russia, China, United Kingdom and France—plus Germany.) Netanyahu argues that by signing a 10-year deal, the United States and the other countries are giving Iran de facto permission to construct nuclear weapons when the agreement ends. Netanyahu is convinced that once Iran has a nuclear capability, the first thing it will do is use it on Israel.

There are three major holes in Bibi’s logic:

1. From what we can tell, the agreement will likely halt Iran’s development of nuclear weapons for 10 years, postponing for a generation the possibility of an Iranian nuclear attack on Israel.
2. If, after the agreement ends, Iran begins an active program of nuclear weapons development, the United States and other nations can always renew the severe economic sanctions that have been crippling Iran for years.
3. Tehran is less than 1,000 miles from Tel Aviv, close enough that any nuclear bomb exploded in Israel would poison the Iranian air and water for decades. Moreover, Israel would likely respond to a nuclear attack from Iran in a like manner, leading to the immediate deaths of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Iranians. The doctrine of mutually-assured destruction that has kept the United States and the Soviet Union (and now Russia) safe from a nuclear conflagration would likely also prevent Iran from attempting a first strike against Israel.

But as illogical as Netanyahu is thinking, his overall strategy is even more absurd. How will giving a speech in front of the U.S. Congress sink the talks? Most observers note that the speech represents a marriage of convenience between Republicans, who want to embarrass President Obama, and the Israeli Prime Minister, who thinks the speech will win him votes in the upcoming Israeli elections. In the short term, this strategy is risky, and in the long term it is doomed to failure. His planned speech gives the growing number of American Jews uncomfortable with Israel’s actions vis-à-vis the Palestinians another reason to unite, funnel money to Israeli progressives and jawbone their elected officials. It pisses off many in the United States, already uncomfortable with Netanyahu’s support of additional West Bank settlements. And it worsens his relationship with the head of the country that protects Israel and shtups it with $3.1 billion in military aid every year.

President Obama and others have objected to Netanyahu’s speech before Congress because it comes too close to the Israeli elections and therefore goes against the American tradition of not appearing to interfere in foreign elections. In breaking this tradition, with whom has Netanyahu gone to bed? The American right, which before Reagan had a long history of overt anti-Semitism and still has its share of racists and Jew-haters.

Joining with Republicans to embarrass a Democratic president really has to make a lot of Jewish Senators and Representatives who are Democrats pretty unhappy; even the most militaristic of them may now listen a little more carefully to the arguments of those who want to apply more pressure on Israel to stop building more settlements in the West Bank and finally negotiate a two-state solution. Of course Netanyahu’s insult to the president must please all those Jewish Republicans in Congress—oops, there’s only one!

We haven’t come to the big strategic question—how could Israel possibly be against rapprochement with Iran? What could Israel possibly lose by bringing Iran back into the stable of nations dedicated to peace? Who benefits from the current state of affairs in the Middle East? Of course the Israeli and Jewish equivalents of Islamic and Christian extremists get to keep the status quo, which is helpful to their side. And Israeli and American arms manufacturers certainly benefit from continued tensions, as they will be able to sell more guns, bullets, tanks and aircraft. The status quo suits these groups and their political factotum Netanyahu just fine.

Thus the only way to understand Netanyahu’s campaign to upset the negotiations with Iran as reasoned action is to conclude the he is an ardent supporter of the current instability in the Middle East. And that makes him a warmonger. We can only hope that Israeli voters realize Netanyahu’s way leads to more bloodshed and vote him out of office on March 17.

We need to initiate a massive campaign to make LAWS against the law

By Marc Jampole

Does your spell check program ever frustrate you when it changes the grammatically correct “the person who” to the incorrect “the person that” or misses your mistake when you write the incorrect “the company and their employees” instead of the correct “the company and its employees?”

We can blame these mistakes on the humans who programmed the software.

But who will we blame when computerized robots decide to bomb a village of innocent civilians while searching for an escaped soldier? Or when an autonomous weapon decides on its own to start shooting wildly into a shopping mall?

I’m not talking about drones, which humans operate at a distance. Humans maintain full control over drones.

No, I’m referring to the next advance in weapons of mass destruction: automated weapons that make the decision to shoot, to bomb or to torch without human intervention, based upon the weapon’s completely independent analysis of the situation. They’re called Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (LAWS) and military contractors all over the world are working furiously to develop them. The United States, Britain, Israel and South Korea already use technologies seen as precursors to fully autonomous weapons systems, according to a New York Times reportthat’s almost two years old. 

You probably haven’t heard much about LAWS. My Google News search revealed a total of 159 stories about them on the same day that close to eight millions stories appeared about the aftermath of Rudy Giuliani’s absurd accusation that President Barack Obama doesn’t love the United States and almost 4.5 million stories covered the death of a minor actor named Ben Woolf (who?). 

Use of LAWS raises many technical issues. Opponents of LAWS wonder if we can ever program a robot to make the subtle distinctions between an enemy combatant and an innocent civilian, or to understand that the enemy has moved its antiaircraft radar device to the roof of a hospital (an exampleI borrow from the Times Bill Keller)? Then there is the issue of faulty programming that plagues automated systems meant to check spelling and grammar, analyze loan applications, translate from one language to another, evaluate essays or select products for purchase. And what happens if an electrical surge or scratch in a printed circuit makes an autonomous weapon go haywire? Or if some rogue programmer implants malware into the system?

The moral issues raised by having robots make battle field decisions for humans are even more troubling. Virtually all systems of human morality start with the principle, “Thou Shall Not Kill.” Since the beginning of recorded history thousands of philosophers, historians, soldiers, politicians and creative writers have written many millions of words pondering when killing another human being is justifiable.  We honor those who kill in society’s name and punish those whose murderous deeds society considers as unwarranted.  The issue of the “just war” is one of the most important themes in moral philosophy since at least the fourth century before the Common Era.

From the birth of humans until today, every killing in peacetime and war, condoned and unsanctioned, single deaths and mass murders—all of it has been committed by individual human beings to whom we can assign praise or blame, guilt or innocence. Taking the decision to pull the trigger, drop the bomb or throw the grenade out of the hands of human beings and putting into the hands of software is inherently immoral because it makes it impossible to determine who really is responsible for a wartime atrocity. The generals will blame the robot or hide behind the robot for justification, claiming that the software is infallible.

Some proponents of LAWS argue that automation will lead to more humane wars, since robots are not subject to mistakes in analysis, vengefulness, panic, fear or other emotions that color the decisions made by men and women in battle. That’s my definition of a sick joke—something that is both funny and horrifying at the same time. The lack of emotion in a robot may cause it to decide to level the village for strategic reasons, whereas a human being might recognize that the deaths of innocents or destruction of historic structures would make an attack unthinkable. And consider how much easier it will be to go to war if all a government had to do was send out the robots. The history of recent American wars suggest two dynamics: 1) the more our soldiers die in a war, the more likely people are to turn against the war; and 2) the number of deaths on the other side doesn’t sway most of the population from supporting a war. It seems clear that having an army of autonomous robots that hold within their operating systems the final decision to shoot or not will lead to more and more violent wars. Holding computers up as more virtuous than humans because they analyze dispassionately is the same kind of illogical thought process as the standard rightwing argument that businesses can regulate themselves but that society must carefully watch food stamp and Medicaid recipients for fraud.

Building the atom bomb was a bad idea that many of the scientists involved later regretted. Building lethal autonomous weapons systems is another bad idea.

I’m advising all OpEdge readers to write, phone or email their Congressional representatives, Senators and the President of the United States every three to four months asking them to come out in favor of banning all LAWS research and development in the United States and to work for a global treaty to ban LAWS R&D internationally. The United States should impose the same harsh sanctions on nations developing LAWS that we now impose on the Soviet Union, Iran and North Korea. We should refuse to buy any military armament from any private company ding LAWS R&D.

There’s a meeting of the United Nations Convention on Conventional Weapons (CCW) dedicated to the issue of autonomous weapons on April 13-17. I recommend that all readers email CCW at ccw@unog.ch and tell the organization that it should come out against any further development of LAWS and recommend sanctions against nations and businesses that develop LAWS.

In short we have to make LAWS against the law. Let’s not let this genie get further out of the bottle.

What did Scott Walker miss by quitting college before he earned a degree?

By Marc Jampole

I have no problem with the fact that Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker didn’t finish college. Having a college diploma is not an absolute requirement for serving as assemblyperson, county executive, governor or even president.

Of course our only president without a college degree since the 19th century had a pretty shabby record: He helped to start the cold war. He selected nuclear power over solar as the primary energy source for the government to support. He nationalized steel plants to stop a strike. He let demagogue Joe McCarthy walk all over the country and tacitly approved the red scare. His name was Harry Truman and he also approved the two most barbaric single acts in human history: dropping atomic bombs on two Japanese cities after Japan had started negotiating its surrender, thereby killing from 150,000 to 200,000 innocent civilians in two fell swoops.

Just because most elected office holders have college degrees doesn’t mean one has to have one to succeed, just as the fact that the overwhelming number of business executives have diplomas doesn’t mean that we can’t see the occasional Bill Gates, Michael Dell or Mark Zuckerberg. That virtually all of these non-degree-bearing business titans (Steve Jobs was the very rare exception) came from wealthy families probably matters the same as the fact that many if not all of our past presidents without degrees came from wealthy families. Of course, some might say that Walker, even if born to a solidly middle class background, has been recently adopted by the ultra-wealthy Koch family.

Thus, while I would advise a young person who wants to go into politics to get a degree or acquire a wealthy family, I am not opposed to Scott Walker merely because he dropped out of college when he still had between one and two years worth of credits left to earn a degree.

I do, however, wonder what courses Walker missed by leaving Marquette University early?

He obviously missed some economics classes. He buys into the Reagan program of lowering taxes on the wealthy, cutting basic government services, killing unions and reducing regulations—all the policies that have led to the greatest non-violent transfer of wealth in world history over the past 35 years, taking wealth and income from the poor and middle class and giving it to the wealthy. Study after study disputes the economic premises of the rightwing, and yet they persist in proposing lowering taxes, cutting money for public education, ignoring our crumbling infrastructure of mass transit, roads and bridges, passing laws that discourage unionization and opposing regulations that protect our environment and create jobs in new earth-friendly technologies. We could cynically conclude that these right-wingers are supporting a program that helps their major constituency, the ultra-wealthy, but in Walker’s case, might it be that he missed the econ classes that would help him through some of the more arduous number-crunching of mainstream (read: Keynesian) economics?

Walker probably missed some science courses, too. He has signaled many times that he doesn’t believe in human-caused global warming. He promised not to support any legislation that would raise taxes to combat climate change, and has spoken at the climate-denying Heartland Institute. He is also on record as disliking resource recycling.  No one knows Walker’s views on evolution, because he keeps dodging the question. But his comment “Both science and my faith dictate my belief that we are created by God,” seems to suggest that he really doesn’t understand science, since science neither proves nor disproves the existence of a deity. Science investigates how things work, not why they do. Walker’s current attempt to turn the University of Wisconsin, one of the world’s leading research institutions, into a glorified trade school certainly shows a lack of understanding of the importance of new scientific discoveries for the continued well-being and improvement of society.

Another class Walker probably didn’t have a chance to take—or maybe he just didn’t attend the lectures—is Ethics. His reign as Milwaukee County Executive was as full of scandals involving his friends and cronies as has been the political career of Republican Governor Chris Christie, and that’s not a good thing. Walker has been investigated for illegally coordinating contributions from a super PAC. His latest illegal and unethical shenanigan has been to refuse to pay the annual Wisconsin state contribution to state pension programs, another Christie trick. Finally, one has to question the ethics of any candidate who takes millions of dollars from the Koch money machine, since the Kochs are known for injecting false notions into our national discussions about the environment, global warming, taxes and industrial policy.

My question, then, is whether Scott Walker would hold and promote so many false ideas if he had finished college. Judging from the large numbers of diploma-holding Republicans who say they share his beliefs, the answer is probably no. If we want to look for the reason Walker proclaims such ignorant views, we would probably be on firmer ground just following the money—right to the front doors of the Kochs, Adelson, Anschutz, Waltons, Scaifes and other American oligarchs who seek to distort our political discourse by flooding the marketplace of ideas with lies.

Our latest irrelevant distraction: Whose fault if Congress doesn’t fund Homeland Security?

By Marc Jampole

If and when the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) loses its funding, will we, the American people, blame the Republicans as we usually do when the federal government or parts of it shut down because of a funding stand-off?

Or will we blame Senate Democrats for not passing the House-approved DHS bill, which contains measures to roll back President Obama’s executive orders regarding immigration?

Will we blame the GOP for trying to link Homeland Security money to keeping the immigration status quo?

Or will we blame the President for announcing new immigration regulations which committed the cardinal capitalist sin of helping average people and not corporations? Or maybe blame him just because he’s Obama and we like to blame our nation’s first Black president whenever possible?

These questions are roiling around the capital as the clock inexorably ticks down towards another imminent deadline for shuttering—at least temporarily—part of the federal government.

You have to hand it to Speaker of the House John Boehner for his ability to breathe new life into the increasingly tiresome shutdown Passion Play that our elected officials have performed these past four years in repertory with that theatre of the absurd that is the House’s Sisyphisian effort to roll back the Patient Protection & Affordable Care Act. It is sheer brilliance to construct a potential government shutdown that right-wingers are also 100% against.

In fact everyone seems to be against closing DHS. No one is arguing over the contents of the Homeland Security Bill. The tug-of-war between House Republicans and the Senate has been a tight-bristled broom that has swept away any discussion of DHS’s excessive bureaucracy, waste and lack of transparency. There has been no broader discussion of the DHS role in curtailing civil rights, militarizing local police and creating a surveillance state.

Ironically, DHS is probably the federal department that can weather a funding crisis the best. Many of its parts such as the Border Patrol, the Secret Service, the Coast Guard, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Transportation Security Administration will continue to operate because they provide “essential services.” Much of the rest of the department such as the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services will be able to continue operating because they receive at least partial funding through the fees they charge.

In other words, it’s a classic sideshow that our elected politicians and the mainstream news media use to keep our minds off what really matters. Instead of debating issues of civil liberties, security abuses and crony capitalism on the one hand and real immigration reform on the other, we can enjoy a pissing match between two sides that both pretty much like the DHS just fine the way it is. The blame game between political celebrities has once again replaced a rational discussion of the issues.

Editorial: Derail Trans-Pacific Pact

Democratic members of Congress need to stiffen their spines and, when it comes to vote on fast-tracking consideration of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, they must say no to President Obama. Principled conservative Republicans also ought to reject the threats to national sovereignty that the trade pact represents.

The TPP has been negotiated behind closed doors for more than six years, but Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) has said he wants to reintroduce a bill granting Fast Track Authority in February to grease the skids for the trade deal.

Fast Track Trade Authority was created in 1974 by President Richard Nixon to minimize public debate and congressional oversight on trade deals. It has been used 16 times since then, often to enact controversial trade pacts, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement and establishment of the World Trade Organization. Those deals made it easier to move manufacturing jobs out of the United States and they also lowered trade barriers to let foreign manufacturers export their goods into the United States, Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch noted.

Fast Track allows the executive branch to unilaterally select partner countries for “trade” pacts, negotiate their contents and sign the agreements and then submit them to Congress, where both the House and Senate are required to vote the agreement up or down, without amendments, within 90 days.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership dates back to 2002, when Chile, New Zealand and Singapore started talking about trade liberalization. More nations joined the talks, including the US in September 2008, during George W. Bush’s administration. Participant nations hoped to wrap up the pact in 2012, but contentious issues such as agriculture, intellectual property, and services and investments dragged out the negotiations. As of 2014, 12 countries in the Asia-Pacific region participated in negotiations, including Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the US and Vietnam. China and South Korea reportedly are considering joining TPP.

Global Trade Watch noted that the TPP would expand the NAFTA model that has spurred massive US trade deficits and job loss, downward pressure on wages, unprecedented levels of inequality and new floods of agricultural imports. TPP expands NAFTA’s protections for firms that offshore US jobs. And US negotiators used the 2011 Korea trade deal – under which exports have fallen and trade deficits have surged – as a template for the TPP.

Although it is called a “free trade” agreement, the TPP is not just about trade. Of TPP’s 29 draft chapters, only five deal with traditional trade issues. One chapter would provide incentives to offshore jobs to low-wage countries. Many would impose limits on government policies that we rely on to maintain safe food, a clean environment and more. Our domestic federal, state and local policies would be required to conform with TPP rules.

Radio talker Thom Hartmann prefers to call TPP the “Southern Hemisphere Asian Free Trade Agreement” (SHAFTA).

According to leaked documents, TPP would extend patent protections for drugs made by Big Pharma to prevent rival companies from making generic version of those same drugs, Hartmann noted in a recent commentary. “This a huge deal,” he said.

“If the TPP goes through, real live breathing people (Doctors Without Borders estimates about half a billion of them) will effectively lose affordable access to the medicine they need to survive.”
The TPP also would let corporations sue countries in international courts run by corporations, with judges handpicked from corporate law firms, Hartmann noted. “In other words, if a corporation doesn’t like a regulation, or thinks it’ll diminish their profits, they can sue your town, state, or our federal government over it — and that would gut environmental and financial rules without any input from ‘We the People’ or our elected representatives in Congress.”

Considering what’s at stake, Hartmann noted, you’d think it would be widely covered by the news media. But Media Matters for America recently reported that during the 17 month period between August 2013 and February 2015, only one nightly network news show, PBS’ Newshour, mentioned the trade deal — and they only mentioned it eight times. ABC, CBS, and NBC didn’t mention the TPP once.

Cable news stations did little better when it comes to TPP coverage than their network counterparts. According to Media Matters, Fox “News” and CNN each talked about the trade deal once and MSNBC talked about it 71 times. But those 71 mentions were mostly on one show, The Ed Show, and because MSNBC is only available by cable subscription, most Americans never watched Ed Schultz talk about the TPP.

So you can’t depend on finding the truth about TPP or other issues in which the owners of broadcast media have a financial interest, and daily newspaper editorial pages are largely unwilling or unable to buck the corporate line, either.

You should contact your congressional representative and your senators to urge them to vote against giving President Obama Fast Track Trade Authority. If the bill is worth passing, it ought to be able to survive consideration in the regular order of business, starting with committee hearings and amendments if necessary.

If your representative is a Republican, and particularly if he or she aligns with the Tea Party, you can say that their claims of being a conservative intent on preserving American sovereignty will ring hollow if they vote to give President Obama — the supposed socialist tyrant — a clear route to gain approval of the trade deal that his administration negotiated.

You can call members of the House and Senate either at their local offices or by calling the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121.

Good News at the FCC

Considering the neglect of reporting on the TPP and the overall lack of scrutiny by the corporate-owned media on corporate power and the growing oligarchy that is strangling democracy, it is all the more important that President Obama’s Federal Communications Commission appears to be heeding the wishes of millions of grassroots activists to declare that broadband Internet service providers are a public utility.

Obama may have disappointed progressives with his promotion of a trade deal that hands multinational corporations more power, but he encouraged progressives last Nov. 10 when he embraced the principles of “Net Neutrality.” And progressives were elated when Obama’s FCC chairman, Tom Wheeler, a former lobbyist for telecoms, announced on Feb. 4 that he will base new “Net Neutrality” rules on Title II of the Communications Act, which will regulate broadband Internet service providers as a public utility, as telephones are regulated. Those new rules are expected to ban ISPs from throttling, blocking and prioritizing their customers’ messages based on their pay plan.

“If the FCC ignores the industry pressure and approves Wheeler’s rules, activists who have fought for a decade to keep the Internet open will have plenty to celebrate,” Matt Wood and Candace Clement of Free Press wrote in a Feb. 11 column on “Net Neutrality’s Biggest Deal Ever.”

If you are reading this newspaper, God bless you, and we’ll keep it coming, but you probably know that you are among a dwindling population of newsprint readers.

The younger generation — and by that we mean people under 40 — increasingly depend on the Internet for their news and information. (Go ahead and buy a youngster a gift subscription anyway!) It is vital to our democracy that corporations aren’t allowed to serve as a gatekeeper for liberal and progressive websites, podcasts and liberal talkers like Hartmann, Amy Goodman, Jim Hightower and others whose programs are available over the Internet. Obama and the Democratic majority on the FCC are taking a major step forward to preserve free speech on the Internet. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, March 1, 2015

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Selections from the March 1, 2015 issue

COVER/Heather Digby Parton
GOP health plan: ‘People could die, that’s OK’

EDITORIAL
Derail Trans-Pacific Pact; Good news at FCC

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

DON ROLLINS
Constitutional elitism

RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
One person’s weed is another’s salad

DISPATCHES
Resistance to Medicaid expansion claims Baton Rouge ER;
Kochs back attack on Medicaid;
Employed white Southerners most at risk in O’care challenge;
GOP health plan — same old same old;
Who would trust Repubs with economy again?;
Half of America is still broke;
Obama readies veto pen;
Stein mulls another Green prez race;
Pols start lining up for 2016;
Kochs already have raised $249M for political takeover;
Rauner attacks Illinois unions;
Oil workers strike expands:
Tennessee welfare drug tests find 37 users ...

BOB BURNETT
Republicans try to bully US into attacking Iran

GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet
A recovery for some

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
A Valentine’s Day gift of health

SAM URETSKY
Vaccine myths still persist

WAYNE O’LEARY
On the road to corporate health care

JOHN BUELL
Alternatives to market myths

NORMAN SOLOMON
CIA mission: Destroy the whistleblower

MARK ANDERSON
Deluded farm groups aid trade trap

BOOK REVIEW/Seth Sandronsky
Black islanders, mainlanders

ROB PATTERSON
Movie houses need to lure us off the couch

JOHN YOUNG
You will not refuse the tar sands mafia

DONALD KAUL
Telling the truth about religious violence

and more ...

Media covers up transgressions by Williams, Cosby & others, until it doesn’t

By Marc Jampole

Today’s New York Times contains four articles on Brian Williams’ propensity to lie about his personal involvement in ongoing news stories such as the Iraq War and Hurricane Katrina: two in the business section, one in the science pages and an opinion column by David Brooks. The Times covers multiple aspects of the story: the potential financial impact on NBC, the plunge in Williams’ “trustworthiness” rating, the easy corruption of memory by lies and Brooks’ opinion that Williams should not be forced to resign (BTW, Brooks proffered no such defense for Dan Rather after Rather’s producer forgot to fact-check a forged document in 2004).

The Times represents a microcosm of what’s happening in media land: a full-scale feeding frenzy that includes some 53.6 million stories about Williams’ mendacity identified by Google News. Compare that total to the mere 116,000 stories about the attempt by Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner to destroy public sector unions or the just under 6 million stories about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s peevish and counterproductive plans to give a speech about Iran to the U.S. Congress. The Williams lies are attracting more coverage than even Alabama’s almost statewide defiance of a U.S. Supreme Court order to allow people of the same sex to marry in a civil ceremony, which racks up some 43 million stories on Google News. Note dear readers that when you do a Google News search on these topics you may come up with different figures, since the counts are not static.

I note these numbers not to make the point that celebrity news tends to trump real news. Anyone who peruses Internet news portals knows that already. I am merely demonstrating how big the news of Williams’ lies has become—and yet it’s a very old story. Suspicions that the NBC anchor didn’t encounter enemy fire and did not really find a body floating past his 5-star hotel in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina have been around for a long time, but the news media chose not to cover them.

Just like the media determined for years that Bill Cosby’s predilection for drugging and raping women was not of interest to the American public. At the peak of the feeding frenzy a few months back, when it seemed as if every day a different woman was coming forth (heroically, since it stirred up bad memories in each, plus Cosby has a lot of money and clout to discredit the victims), several journalists admitted that they participated in a cover-up of decades-long rumors and accusations against Cosby. The media, perhaps too enamored by this folk hero, collectively refused to follow the story.

Until they did.

The Jerry Sandusky scandal unfolded in a similar way. The only way to describe the media coverage of an aborted investigation of Sandusky for pederasty more than 10 years before the big story broke is “media blackout.”

We know why the news media finally picks up on these scandals. The story becomes too big to ignore or the discussion on social media sites becomes too intense. The big question is why does it take so long for the media to get around to reporting these scandals?

I think we get an inkling of an answer when we contrast the media’s slowness to cover Williams, Cosby and Sandusky with the way it jumped into the fray when it came to accusations against Hillary Clinton—all false—in the Benghazi debacle or accusations—again, false—that John Kerry did not display heroism under fire during the Viet Nam War.

Let’s face it: the mainstream news media operates from a slightly right of center position and looks rightward. It defends those who reflect this point of view, and surely Williams, Cosby and Sandusky all do so in their own right: Williams delivers a right-of-center version of the news. Cosby’s character of Cliff Huxtable represents the American ideal of upper middle class consumerism, and Cosby himself has tended to blame his fellow African-Americans for their lack of social mobility. And what could be more American than Penn State football—except maybe an image of SUVs packed with unneeded purchases tooling home from a mall.

Some will question my examples, since Clinton and Kerry are both political figures, whereas Williams, Cosby and Sandusky are not, but consider these arguments:

The mass media—controlled by the wealthy and ultra-wealthy—tend to look rightward, and are therefore more likely to publish unsubstantiated rumors about left-looking centrists than about conservatives. For example, for years no one published the rumors that Bush I had a love nest; and the media positively buried the incredible amount of evidence that Bush II shirked his National Guard duty. The politician most protected by the mainstream news media today may be New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who is tied to a long series of scandals involving self-dealing and cronyism, and yet is routinely touted as having presidential timber. I predict that a waterfall of reporting of Christie scandals—let’s call it the Christie moment—will begin just as soon as he starts to represent a serious challenge to Jeb Bush, the mainstream media’s choice for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016.

To current practitioners of mainstream journalism, there is absolutely no difference between an elected official, a news anchor or a football coach. They’re all celebrities and are all treated like celebrities. The media pump up the celebrities they like and tear down those they don’t like. And behind the reasons for liking and not liking are always subtle ideological reasons.

If NBC uses the Dan Rather standard, it’ll force Brian Williams to resign

By Marc Jampole

If NBC follows the Dan Rather standard, it will either force Brian Williams to resign or fire him. Williams is the NBC news anchor who for years has said he rode a helicopter that underwent enemy fire during the ill-fated and disastrous Iraqi war. He has made the claim so many times that no apology or explanation can leave his reputation unstained.

Rather, most will remember, was the long-time CBS anchor who lost his job (excuse me—retired early!) because one of his producers failed to confirm a source. At the time Rather was the most well-known and well-respected television anchor in America. He fronted a report prepared by experienced and well-respected TV news producer Mary Mapes in a show called “60 Minutes Wednesday.” The topic: some memos purported to be written by a Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian that proved once and for all that Bush II shirked his National Guard duty during the Vietnam War era.

Too bad the memos were forgeries. After defending Rather and Mapes for about two weeks, CBS admitted that the news team had inadequately investigated the memos. Mapes was fired almost immediately, and Dan Rather, who was set to retire anyway, went more quickly and less elegantly than previously planned.

The contrasts with the Brian Williams case are striking: Rather did not lie, whereas Williams did. Rather’s report was accurate in the whole, which is to say, a lot of evidence points to the conclusion that George Jr. shrugged off his National Guard duties. Williams, by contrast, was trying to pretend that he was a soldier instead of avoiding being one.

Of course, NBC could follow the Fox News standard, which is much looser regarding the factual content of stories and the punishment reporters get for reporting false information, consciously or by accident. Take the Shirley Sherrod scandal, for example.  Now deceased Andrew Breitbart, an RWRBB (right-wing rich-boy blogger), edited a video copy of a speech of Sherrod, an African-American employee of the Federal Department of Agriculture, to make her sound like a “Black racist” and posted it on his website. Fox ran the clip numerous times. We soon learned that the RWRBB doctored the clip. Fox never checked the accuracy; it probably could have easily seen the edits that Breitbart made to twist Sherrod’s words. But no one was fired at Fox. Not the anchor, not the producer, not a research assistant who might be responsible for fact-checking or sourcing video. Now why is that? Is it because journalistic ethics have declined in the decade since the Rather firing or because Fox doesn’t really care about the accuracy of its stories?

We should give NBC time to assimilate and process the Williams admission of a long-time lie and the public’s reaction to it. But at the end, if it keeps Williams, it puts itself in the same league as Fox News.

Mainstream national news stations distort the political scene in many ways: they select the experts and the issues from a narrow political spectrum that is centrist looking rightward; reduce everything to personalities; truncate coverage of real news in favor of following celebrities; accept the Republican’s definition of the issues; argue by anecdote instead of presenting the facts; stud their stories with hidden messages supporting consumerism and belittling intellectual achievement; and give the wrong side of long-settled issues like vaccination and global warming equal opportunity to spread their ignorance.

But the national mainstream news media rarely tell an out-and-out lie that they know is a lie. Fox does, which makes the NBC decision to fire or not to fire Brian Williams so interesting to observe.

“Liberal” cultural psychologist foregoes science to accept the premises of the right wing

By Marc Jampole

Several progressive friends of mine were raving about Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, which is about three years old, so I read it. In it, Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University, extends a very important theory about morality in humans that is emerging among anthropologists and primatologists. But then he uses false reasoning and what looks like shoddy research to twist the theory into a wild assertion that people inherently respond more enthusiastically to rightwing arguments.

In the first part of The Righteous Mind, Haidt explores the idea that morality is hardwired into humans, a theory that has gained much ground over the past few decades. Haidt combines studies by cultural anthropologists and some primatologists to postulate that there exist five distinct foundations to morality and moral thought inherent in humans, all traceable to primates and other mammals. Haidt expresses each of the five as a dichotomy of good and bad behavior:

• Care/harm
• Fairness/cheating
• Loyalty/betrayal
• Authority/subversion
• Sanctity/degradation

Haidt shows how each of these foundations of morality evolved in response to an adaptive challenge, e.g., care/harm evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of caring for the vulnerable young; sanctity evolved as a response to the need to avoid contaminants in food and elsewhere. This first part of the book extends research conducted by Frans de Waal, Jane Goodall and others that pretty much establishes that primates have morality, which means that morality is hardwired into humans, part of our essential nature.

Unfortunately Haidt uses the second half of The Righteous Mind to explicate a bloated theory that liberals concern themselves with only two of these moral foundations, care and fairness, whereas conservatives are concerned with all five. Haidt sees this so-called difference in moral emphasis as the reason conservative arguments resonate so emotionally with the electorate.

Haidt’s premise is that Republicans speak to all five moral foundations, whereas Democrats since 1960 offer a narrow moral vision, based only on the care and fairness moral foundations. We don’t even have to question his assumption that Democrats serve as stand-ins for liberals to see how Haidt jury-rigs his argument. The premise is false, because it posits that only Republicans talk about loyalty, authority and sanctity. What Haidt is really doing is accepting the Republican’s definition of these terms. Haidt contrasts how the Democrats and Republicans talk about fairness—the Dems focus on equal opportunity while the GOP focuses on the unfairness of taking money from taxpayers and giving it to the poor.

But to construct his argument, Haidt must ignore their differences in the areas of loyalty, authority and sanctity and instead state unequivocally that Democratic candidates don’t care about these moral foundations. It’s really utter nonsense. For example, Democrats often speak of the sanctity of life as the reason to have strong social welfare programs; they evoke “law and order” themes as much as Republicans do (see Radley Balko’s Rise of the Warrior Cop for the sorry details). Haidt gives no example of Republicans’ so-called appeal to the loyalty foundation. Thus, Haidt uses rightwing definitions of two of the three moral centers Democrats supposedly lack and gives no example of the third.

Haidt never considers the other factors that have led to Republican election success in recent decades: He ignores the greater preponderance of cash that Republicans tend to have at their disposal. He ignores the fact that the mainstream news media—owned as they are by the wealthy—tend to pay more attention to Republican races and define political and economic issues using Republican terms. He displays every sign of not having read the works of C. Wright Mills, William Domhoff or Frances Fox Piven/Richard Cloward on how the ruling elite exercises control over elections and the electorate. He never considers the impact of racism, which makes people consider certain groups less than human and therefore not subject to the moral considerations reserved for those considered legitimately humans. Instead, Haidt reduces all the complexity of politics to the Democrats not appealing to three of five moral foundations, as defined by the semantics that Haidt borrows from the rightwing.

Ostensibly substantiating Haidt’s political theory are surveys he and associates have administered. These surveys supposedly show that those who call themselves liberal care much more about the care and fairness foundations than about the other moral foundations, whereas conservatives care equally about all five. But the surveys are full of ambiguous questions that can derive the same answer from both liberals and conservatives.

For example, the basic moral foundations test asks the question, “When you decide whether something is right or wrong, to what extent are the following considerations relevant to your thinking?” What follows are a number of factors, each of which the respondent must rate as very important to not very important as a consideration. Here are some of the factors, with brief comments on why these answers could misguide researchers:

• Whether or not someone violated standards of purity and decency: Liberals will think it pure and decent for marriage to sanctify gay relationships, whereas conservatives will understand “purity and decency” as standards that regulate the behavior of individuals.
• Whether or not someone did something to betray his or her group. Whether or not someone showed a lack of loyalty: What’s true betrayal or true loyalty?—to blow the whistle on unethical behavior by group leaders or to protect the group by concealing evidence it did something that transgressed its ideology or ethics.
• Whether or not someone was denied his or her rights: Which right? The right to be served or the right not to engage in business transactions with someone whose race or way of life you disapprove of?
• Whether or not someone’s action showed love for his or her country: Some believe Dick Cheney loves his country most; others would say it’s Edward Snowden.

I could spend another 20 pages analyzing the flaws and logical inconsistencies in Haidt’s absurd claim that liberals care about only two of the five moral foundations he and others have identified in primates. Before his flight of fancy into political theory, however, Haidt does establish that the five major strands of moral thinking are innate to humans, which argues against revealed religion as necessary for morality to exist. Anyone who reads The Righteous Mind should stop after the first eight chapters or be prepared to wade through some of the most manipulative and misleading nonsense written in recent years.

New Yorker & Times writers use verbal selfies to communicate myth that science & math are hard & not fun

By Marc Jampole

The epidemic of verbal selfies used to begin feature articles continues unabated. It seems as if every other feature article begins with something about the writer—personal struggles with the problem under discussion, an anecdote from childhood, a favorite professor’s lecture on the topic years ago, how the topic reminds the writer of another subject, the writer’s enthusiasm in broaching the topic, the means by which the writer travelled to meet someone in the article.

These verbal selfies are often laughable, but none more so than Alex Wilkinson’s first few sentences in “The Pursuit of Beauty” in the New Yorker. In sharing his attitude towards and experience with the subject matter, Wilkinson disqualifies himself from writing the article at the same time revealing he is a dishonorable person not to be trusted. 

The article is about a math professor who solved a math problem open for more than 150 years. To entice us to continue reading, which is the function of the first paragraph of a prose piece, Wilkinson writes:

“I don’t see what difference it can make now to reveal that I passed high-school math only because I cheated. I could add and subtract and multiply and divide, but I entered the wilderness when words became equations and x’s and y’s. On test days, I sat next to Bob Isner or Bruce Gelfand or Ted Chapman or Donny Chamberlain—smart boys whose handwriting I could read—and divided my attention between his desk and the teacher’s eyes. Having skipped me, the talent for math concentrated extravagantly in one of my nieces…”

The article is about advanced math. To write it will require the writer to understand some fairly complicated ideas, at least conceptually, and to understand them well enough to be able to translate them into journalistic English for the reader. Wilkinson disqualifies himself because he admits that he couldn’t even do simple algebra. What’s more, he admits he cheated to pass his math classes. How do we know he hasn’t fudged some of the facts in the article? How do we know his explanation of the problem the mathematician solved doesn’t smooth over with rhetorical lies those concepts Wilkinson failed to understand?

In short, Wilkinson embarrasses and disqualifies himself within the first three sentences. And an editor approved his copy!

Charles Blow tries but fails to pull the same anti-science crap in his article, “A Future Segregated by Science,” in the New York Times. He starts the article, “Let me say up front: I’m not a science guy.” But then Blow quickly admits he loves science (he just likes the arts more!) and even won a high school science fair with a research project. Blow continues his disquisition about his personal relationship with “science” with a shaggy dog story about an airline losing the winning project, preventing him from competing in an international science fair. All this personal stuff comes before a very good article on the racial and gender gap that currently exists in science and technology (STEM) careers.

At least Blow doesn’t disqualify himself from writing the article, since 1) he admits he’s actually pretty good at science and 2) the article is about analyzing statistics—his area of expertise as a writer—and not about science itself.

It’s rare for Blow to start an article with a personal anecdote, except for when the piece concerned Yale campus police stopping his son, a Yalie, without cause. He’s one of the most legitimately creative and interesting journalists with a regular column in a daily newspaper, one who rarely resorts to cheap, overused rhetorical devices.

Why then did Blow feel compelled to start the article by assuring us he’s “Not a science guy”? The article bemoans the fact that science work has become segregated and that few minorities have science and technology careers. He blames both schools for not producing enough STEM graduates and corporations for not hiring recent Hispanic and Black science graduates at the rate at which they do graduate. Blow ends his article with a call for more gender and racial equality in STEM careers.

Blow doesn’t realize that his beginning—“Let me say up front: I’m not a science guy”—is a small part of the problem. Week after week journalists interject snide asides about science and math: Science and math are hard subjects. They’re not fun. Those who like them are socially maladroit and unathletic. Science careers aren’t glamorous. Add to these articles the extensive coverage given to the truly small number of global warming deniers, those who would deny their children vaccines and opponents to evolution. No wonder so many kids don’t want to pursue science careers!

One weapon in this decades-long media war against science and math is for writers to distance themselves from the subject by saying they find it hard or they don’t like it. Some might say that the writers who express dislike or fear of STEM subjects are trying to establish rapport with their readers, who might not be adept at science or might be intimidated by it. But this hypothetical rapport is firmly based in the ideological premise that science and math are difficult and not enjoyable and thereby merely contributes to the anti-science mythology, which is part of the mass media’s larger anti-intellectualism.

Both the cheating poor student Wilkinson and the honorable good student Blow use this rhetorical device and put it at the very beginning of the article. In Wilkinson’s case, it disqualifies him from even writing the article. In Blow’s case, it merely postpones what turns out to be a fine discussion of a crisis.

The two writers are unified by their employment of the most overused rhetorical device in contemporary non-fiction to make a statement that contributes to the anti-science attitudes pervasive in the mass media. How American: narcissism in pursuit of anti-intellectualism.