Americans Against The Tea Party

Why Progressives Can't Ignore Religion

2012-02-28T23:26:00.000-05:00

Alternet/by Mike Lux

Wall or no wall, politics and religion have always been inextricably intertwined, and we won't win until we recognize and deal with that fact.

February 28, 2012 |

Photo Credit: David ShankboneIn this fine country of ours, there is "a wall of separation between Church and State," as Thomas Jefferson once put it. And thank God for that (at least, if you’re inclined to believe in it). Our country has been so much stronger and more free as a result of having that wall.

Here's the thing, though: having that wall doesn't mean that the cord linking politics and religion can ever be severed, at least not in this country where religion lives so fervently. The fact is that the USA remains, by a considerable margin, more religious and more Christian than any other Western nation, with close to 80 percent of us still calling ourselves Christians (in spite of somewhat falling percentages on that number in recent years).

Even beyond that, though, religion permeates our culture, our language, our traditions, our public rituals, our history, and yes, our political debate. More than anything else -- more than political party, more than political history, more than any cultural icon whether it be Shakespeare, Star Wars or John Wayne — Christian religion is at the core of what America believes in and relates to. Progressives ignore or dismiss religion at our peril: we will never get to a majority political coalition in this country without understanding religion and the people who believe in it.

The fact is that religion has driven most of our country's great conflicts and has been the inspiration for most of our progress. The abolitionists and the pro-slavery Southerners, the suffragists and the appalled conservative ministers who railed against them, the Populists of the late 1800s and the High Church business elite who were locked in combat, the Protestant Prohibitionists and the heavily Catholic "wets" who opposed them, the Civil Rights movement of the 1950-'60s and the racist but Bible-beating Southerners who fought them: they have all fought over an impossibly tangled blend of religion and politics.

The good news is that the religious fault-lines are pretty much the same kind of fault-lines as the political ones political activists are more used to. In religion as in politics, conservatives tend to be rather individualistic, as the ultimate goal is to win the reward of heaven for yourself. Conservatives tend to value tradition and traditional hierarchy above change and openness, believing that too much change is scary and that only traditional authority figures can protect us. Conservatives tend to believe that an excess of democracy and "rights,” whether in government or a church setting, is a bad thing. God's role for conservatives is to punish us if we stray from the one true path.

Religious progressives, on the other hand, are drawn less by hope of heaven and fear of hell than by the appeal of the sacred community, and the teachings of religion to love their neighbors as themselves. They tend to be more open to new ideas, new kinds of leaders, and new ways of thinking about faith; and much less inclined toward thinking there is one true path.

The happy thing about the American experiment with freedom of religion — which actually echoes ancient Greece and Rome before Christianity became the official state religion — is that while people are inevitably shaped, motivated and drawn to politics by their religion and philosophy, our constitution's wall of separation between church and state has generally (with some notable exceptions) kept our politics far more free of zealotry and violence than you find in countries without that wall. For most of world history, politics and religion were so intertwined they corrupted each other and caused a great many bad things. The fact that this has not happened as much in America is a tribute to founders like Jefferson.

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The Republican Brain: Why Even Educated Conservatives Deny Science -- and Reality

2012-02-28T23:23:00.000-05:00

Alternet/By Chris Mooney

New research shows that conservatives who consider themselves well-informed and educated are also deeper in denial about issues like global warming.

February 22, 2012 |

Photo Credit: C-SPAN

This essay is adapted from Chris Mooney’s forthcoming book, The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science—and Reality, due out in April from Wiley.

I can still remember when I first realized how naïve I was in thinking—hoping—that laying out the “facts” would suffice to change politicized minds, and especially Republican ones. It was a typically wonkish, liberal revelation: One based on statistics and data. Only this time, the data were showing, rather awkwardly, that people ignore data and evidence—and often, knowledge and education only make the problem worse.

Someone had sent me a 2008 Pew report documenting the intense partisan divide in the U.S. over the reality of global warming.^.It’s a divide that, maddeningly for scientists, has shown a paradoxical tendency to widen even as the basic facts about global warming have become more firmly established.

Those facts are these: Humans, since the industrial revolution, have been burning more and more fossil fuels to power their societies, and this has led to a steady accumulation of greenhouse gases, and especially carbon dioxide, in the atmosphere. At this point, very simple physics takes over, and you are pretty much doomed, by what scientists refer to as the “radiative” properties of carbon dioxide molecules (which trap infrared heat radiation that would otherwise escape to space), to have a warming planet. Since about 1995, scientists have not only confirmed that this warming is taking place, but have also grown confident that it has, like the gun in a murder mystery, our fingerprint on it. Natural fluctuations, although they exist, can’t explain what we’re seeing. The only reasonable verdict is that humans did it, in the atmosphere, with their cars and their smokestacks.

SNIP

But it’s not just global warming where the “smart idiot” effect occurs. It also emerges on nonscientific but factually contested issues, like the claim that President Obama is a Muslim. Belief in this falsehood actually increased more among better-educated Republicans from 2009 to 2010 than it did among less-educated Republicans, according to research by George Washington University political scientist John Sides.

The same effect has also been captured in relation to the myth that the healthcare reform bill empowered government “death panels.” According to research by Dartmouth political scientist Brendan Nyhan, Republicans who thought they knew more about the Obama healthcare plan were “paradoxically more likely to endorse the misperception than those who did not.” Well-informed Democrats were the opposite—quite certain there were no “death panels” in the bill.

The Democrats also happened to be right, by the way.

The idealistic, liberal, Enlightenment notion that knowledge will save us, or unite us, was even put to a scientific test last year—and it failed badly.

Yale researcher Dan Kahan and his colleagues set out to study the relationship between political views, scientific knowledge or reasoning abilities, and opinions on contested scientific issues like global warming. In their study, more than 1,500 randomly selected Americans were asked about their political worldviews and their opinions about how dangerous global warming and nuclear power are. But that’s not all: They were also asked standard questions to determine their degree of scientific literacy (e.g, “Antibiotics kill viruses as well as bacteria—true or false?”) as well as their numeracy or capacity for mathematical reasoning (e.g., “If Person A’s chance of getting a disease is 1 in 100 in 10 years, and person B’s risk is double that of A, what is B’s risk?”).

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Millions Join Strikes Across India Demanding Reforms

2012-02-28T23:14:00.002-05:00

Published on Tuesday, February 28, 2012 by Common Dreams

Indians demanding improved rights for employees, trade unions and political activists

- Common Dreams staff

Millions of people, including members of the nation's eleven largest trade unions, took to the streets across India today in a nationwide strike that seeks a remedy to rampant inflation, an end to the privatization of public entities, and increased labor protections -- including calls for a social security system and a minimum wage. The strikes were mostly aimed at the financial institutions, the postal service, and the transportation sector.
Eleven trade unions backed the strike call, posing a challenge to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his administration (AFP, Diptendu Dutta) Agence France-Presse reports:

A nationwide strike called by trade unions including those affiliated with the government hit Indian cities Tuesday, as millions joined the call for tighter labour laws and a minimum wage.
Eleven central trade unions backed the strike call, posing a fresh challenge to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his leftist administration, which had called on the unions to call off the show of force.
"We are fighting for our rights against a government that is anti-people." --Gurudas Dasgupta
"This is a historic occasion. For the first time all the big trade unions have come together to protest the anti-labour polices of the government," All India Trade Union Congress general secretary Gurudas Dasgupta told AFP.
Among the unions' demands are a national minimum wage, permanent jobs for 50 million contract labourers, more government efforts to rein in the rising cost of living, and an end to the sale of stakes in profitable public companies.
"We gave the government ample opportunity to discuss these issues. Now striking is the only option before us," Dasgupta said.
"We are fighting for our rights against a government that is anti-people," he added.

The Indian Express adds:Members of Trade unions and left-wing political parties participate in a protest rally during a one day general strike in Hyderabad on February 28, 2012. A one-day general strike, called by India's major trade unions, struck the country to protest high inflation and other issues. (NOAH SEELAM, AFP/Getty Images)

Life in major cities, including capital Delhi, Mumbai and Chennai, was normal though it was affected in states like Kerala, Odisha and Tripura while the strike had a mixed response in West Bengal where the Trinamool Congress government pulled all stops to neutralise the strike.
In West Bengal, shops, markets and business establishments were mostly closed in some areas, while state-run buses and trams plied with fewer passengers. [...]
Central trade unions have sponsored the strike demanding guarantee of labour rights, end to the contract labour system, bringing workers in the unorganised sector under the social security net and pension benefit for all workers.

And The Hindustan Times reports:

The strike, which includes workers from state-run phone companies, bus drivers and postal workers, is a new headache for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's government as it grapples with weakening economic growth and faces elections in several states.

Workers linked to the ruling Congress party have also joined the protest and have promised further action if their demands are not met. [...]

"We will have to think about our future course of action if the government does not come forward with proposals on how it will react to our demands," G. Sanjeeva Reddy, president of the Indian National Trade Union Congress, the ruling party's trade union, said.

Hit by high interest rates, stubborn inflation and a stuttering reform agenda, India's economy is expected to grow by about 7% in the fiscal year ending March, compared with earlier expectations of about 9% growth.
Singh's government has faced a slew of protests since winning a second term in 2009, denting the Congress party's image as a defender of the poor.
The party is currently fighting five state elections, including one in Uttar Pradesh, the country's most populous state.

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WikiLeaks' Stratfor Dump Lifts Lid on Intelligence-Industrial Complex

2012-02-28T23:13:00.002-05:00

Published on Tuesday, February 28, 2012 by The Guardian/UK

WikiLeaks' latest release, of hacked emails from Stratfor, shines light on the murky world of private intelligence-gathering

by Pratap Chatterjee

What price bad intelligence? Some 5m internal emails from Stratfor, an Austin, Texas-based company that brands itself as a "global intelligence" provider, were recently obtained by Anonymous, the hacker collective, and are being released in batches by WikiLeaks, the whistleblowing website, starting Monday.WikiLeaks website featuring documents obtained by hackers from private intelligence firm Stratfor. Photograph: guardiannews.com
The most striking revelation from the latest disclosure is not simply the military-industrial complex that conspires to spy on citizens, activists and trouble-causers, but the extremely low quality of the information available to the highest bidder. Clients of the company include Dow Chemical, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon, as well as US government agencies like the Department of Homeland Security, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Marines.
Analysts working on the Middle East for the company appeared to be very poorly informed, with no more experience than a semester of studying abroad, according to journalists who have studied the documents. "They used Google translate to read al-Akbar news articles," says an incredulous Jamal Ghosn, associate editor of that newspaper in Beirut, Lebanon. "This is a guaranteed way for good intelligence to be lost in translation."
Mike Bonnano of the Yes Men, a group of international pranksters who impersonate corporate executives and government leaders to highlight environmental and social abuses, was astonished to discover that his group was being tracked by Stratfor, which was apparently making money selling a list of his public-speaking engagements.
"They [are] making it sound better to clients simply so that they can make money," says Bonnano, after reviewing the material provided to him by WikiLeaks. "We're not talking about good intelligence, we're talking about a lot of information because more information means more money. That does not mean that it's smart."
Bonnano gave another example: Stratfor allegedly sent a memo to Dow Chemical summarising a public blogpost on the use of an environmentally-friendly washing machine used by activists campaigning against the 1984 lethal gas leak from Union Carbide's plant in Bhopal, India, which killed over 2,259 people instantly and an estimated 25,000 over the next few years.
Stratfor is not the first company to be caught selling low-quality "intelligence" to government agencies and multinational corporations. Aaron Barr, then CEO of HB Gary Federal, a Sacramento, California-based company that sells similar services, boasted in 2010 that he could extract information about hackers like Anonymous from social media. In early February 2011, the company website was hacked to reveal the company was selling very inaccurate information about WikiLeaks.
What is more disturbing is that the information revealed about HBGary Federal and Stratfor suggests both companies were also seeking to profit by disrupting journalists and activist groups. HBGary Federal documents suggest that they were marketing a campaign for Bank of America to attack Glenn Greenwald of Salon and for the US Chamber of Commerce to attack the Washington, DC-based thinktank, the Center for American Progress (full disclosure: I do consulting work for the CAP). (There is no evidence Bank of America or the US Chamber of Commerce responded to the alleged offer of these services.)
Likewise, Stratfor has been actively following anti-Union Carbide activist groups like the Bhopal Medical Appeal, a tiny, Brighton, England-based non-profit, which worked with the Yes Men in July 2009 to stage a protest outside the Dow office in Staines in the UK. The newly-released emails suggest that the Dow shut down its offices on that occasion to avoid the protesters, after receiving a Stratfor report.
"Why is a company like Stratfor sniffing around us?" said Colin Toogood, of Bhopal Medical Appeal. "It makes you question how smart they are. How much is this costing? Wouldn't it be better PR to just get out and clean Bhopal up?"
Julian Assange of WikiLeaks says that the emails also reveal that Stratfor has recruited a "global network of informants who are paid via Swiss banks accounts and pre-paid credit cards – which includes government employees, embassy staff and journalists around the world." This, he says, "is corrupt or corrupting because Stratfor is a private intelligence organisation that services governments and private clients."
Assange notes that Stratfor is also seeking to profit directly from this information by partnering in an apparent hedge-fund venture with Shea Morenz, a former Goldman Sachs managing director. He points to an August 2011 document, marked "DO NOT SHARE OR DISCUSS", from Stratfor CEO George Friedman, which says:

"What StratCap will do is use our Stratfor's intelligence and analysis to trade in a range of geopolitical instruments, particularly government bonds, currencies and the like."

The claim that Stratfor buys information from insiders, while seeking to profit from their analysis, could attract the attention of regulators like the Securities and Exchange Commission, which polices Wall Street. This is something that Stratfor is already worried about. In an August 2011 memo released by WikiLeaks, Friedman wrote to his employees:

"We are retaining a law firm to create a policy for Stratfor on the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. I don't plan to do the perp walk and I don't want anyone here doing it either."

The company has refused to answer any questions about the emails. Instead, it released a short statement (http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/stratfor-statement-on-wikileaks-...) that says:

"Some of the emails may be forged or altered to include inaccuracies; some may be authentic. We will not validate either. Nor will we explain the thinking that went into them. Having had our property stolen, we will not be victimized twice by submitting to questioning about them."

Assange slyly points out that this is in keeping with a lunchroom memo from Fred Barton, Stratfor's vice-president of intelligence, in which he states that he has an unofficial rule:

"Admit nothing, deny everything and make counter-accusations."

Statfor belongs to an extensive industry. In Top Secret America, a new book by Dana Priest and William Arkin of the Washington Post, the authors reveal that there are literally thousands of so-called intelligence analysts hawking equally dubious information to the federal government.
By its very nature, of course, such information is secret and often protected by government order. Nothing short of a major congressional investigation will be able to drill down into this intelligence-industrial cartel to assess not just the quality of the information and the way it was obtained, but whether or not any of it serves the public interest – or the very opposite. That is, unless Anonymous or WikiLeaks gets there and does the work first.

Pratap Chatterjee is the author of two books about the war on terror: Halliburton's Army: How a Well-Connected Texas Oil Company Revolutionized the Way America Makes War and Iraq, Inc. (Seven Stories Press, 2004). He is the former executive director of CorpWatch and a shareholder of both Halliburton and KBR.

As Santorum and Romney Battle for the Loony Right, the Rest of Us Should Not Gloat

2012-02-28T23:12:00.001-05:00

Published on Tuesday, February 28, 2012 by Robert Reich

by Robert Reich

My father was a Republican for the first 78 years of his life. For the last twenty, he’s been a Democrat (he just celebrated his 98th.) What happened? “They lost me,” he says.
They’re losing even more Americans now, as the four remaining GOP candidates seek to out-do one another in their race for the votes of the loony right that’s taken over the Grand Old Party.(Photo: REUTERS/Joshua Lott)
But the rest of us have reason to worry.
A party of birthers, creationists, theocrats, climate-change deniers, nativists, gay-bashers, anti-abortionists, media paranoids, anti-intellectuals, and out-of-touch country clubbers cannot govern America.
Yet even if they lose the presidency on Election Day they’re still likely to be in charge of at least one house of Congress as well as several state legislators and governorships. That’s a problem for the nation.
The GOP’s drift toward loopyness started in 1993 when Bill Clinton became the first Democrat in the White House in a dozen years – and promptly allowed gays in the military, pushed through the Brady handgun act, had the audacity to staff his administration with strong women and African-Americans, and gave Hillary the task of crafting a national health bill. Bill and Hillary were secular boomers with Ivy League credentials who thought government had a positive role to play in peoples’ lives.
This was enough to stir right-wing evangelicals in the South, social conservatives in the Midwest and on the Great Plains, and stop-at-nothing extremists in Washington and the media who hounded Bill Clinton for eight years, then stole the 2000 election from Al Gore, and Swift-boated John Kerry in 2004.
They were not pleased to have a Democrat back in the White House in 2008, let alone a black one. They rose up in the 2010 election cycle as “tea partiers” and have by now pushed the GOP further right than it has been in more than eighty years. Even formerly sensible senators like Olympia Snowe, Orrin Hatch, and Dick Lugar are moving to the extreme right in order to keep their seats.
At this rate the GOP will end up on the dust heap of history. Young Americans are more tolerant, cosmopolitan, better educated, and more socially liberal than their parents. And relative to the typical middle-aged America, they are also more Hispanic and more shades of brown. Today’s Republican Party is as relevant to what America is becoming as an ice pick in New Orleans.
In the meantime, though, we are in trouble. America is a winner-take-all election system in which a party needs only 51 percent (or, in a three-way race, a plurality) in order to gain control.
In parliamentary systems of government, small groups representing loony fringes can be absorbed relatively harmlessly into adult governing coalitions.
But here, as we’re seeing, a loony fringe can take over an entire party — and that party will inevitably take over some part of our federal, state, and local governments.
As such, the loony right is a clear and present danger.

Robert Reich is Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. He has written twelve books, including The Work of Nations, Locked in the Cabinet, and his most recent book, Supercapitalism. His "Marketplace" commentaries can be found on publicradio.com and iTunes.

No Public Education, No Democracy!

2012-02-28T16:12:00.002-05:00

Brave New World

by SIMONE HARRIS

I teach English at Montgomery High School in Santa Rosa, California. I love my school, my amazing colleagues, and the kids who enter my classroom each year. But I hate what is happening to public education.
From the national to the local level, our public schools are under attack, and that means our students are under attack. This attack takes more than one form. The cuts to vital education services are horrifying enough, but they’re only half the picture. The other half is the violation of our public trust by private interests.
It’s not a pretty sight, but we must look squarely at the vultures of privatization that prey on the damage to our schools, from New York to New Orleans to Wisconsin to California. Diane Ravitch, former Assistant Secretary of Education in the first Bush administration, refers to the three big education funders, Bill Gates, Eli Broad and the Walton Family, as the Billionaire Boys Club in her excellent book The Death and Life of the Great American School System. Ravitch has come a long way since her days of working under Bush Sr. I’ve even heard people refer to her as the Noam Chomsky of education, a sure sign of how far to the right our political culture has drifted.
But we were talking about vultures. These corporations are poised to supply the artificial heart of learning to a wounded public school system they fully intend to finish off. But they won’t succeed. No they won’t because our communities are going to fight for our beloved schools, we teachers are going to fight for our students, and our students are going to demand the education they deserve!
There are so many intelligent, talented, compassionate educators who were called to this profession. Teaching was a calling for me. I’m in this for the long haul, and by this I mean public education. I’m going to stand up for the right that all young people have to a quality education.
Education is a right. Education is a human right; it’s not a humiliating race for basic funding, something the Obama administration and Education Secretary Arne Duncan would do well to remember. Education is indeed a right, and yet did you know there is more segregation in our schools today than at any time since 1968, the year of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination? The corporate obsession with charter schools and high stakes tests has contributed mightily to this segregation while shamefully distracting us from the poverty and income inequality that go hand in hand with it.
I’m not going to lie down while corporations prey on our students. I don’t want to see our nation’s young people at the mercy of a Rupert Murdoch or a Michael Milken. Do you remember Michael Milken, the former felon and Junk Bond King of the eighties? Michael Milkin is co-founder of K-12 Inc., America’s largest provider of online education for kindergarten through 12th grade.
Do you know what an online school is? That’s the one that exists inside of a computer. These days, kids can conduct their entire social lives on a computer and get all their schooling done there too. They never even have to leave the house. It’s very compact, very efficient, but there is one missing link: the human link, the spacious beauty of the human bond.
Online or virtual schools typically have high withdrawal rates, and that’s not surprising. It makes sense, doesn’t it? It must be very tempting to drop out of a “school” when there are no human beings there in person to make you feel connected to a real community, no gym, no playground, no student art on the walls, and no teacher to get to know you, to care, to see who you are and who you might one day become.
The bitter irony is that these online schools are marketed to English learners who need the exact opposite of isolation, who benefit most from cooperative strategies in natural, not virtual, settings.

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Hershey's Not as Sweet as We Thought The Chocolate Sweatshop

2012-02-28T16:11:00.001-05:00

by DAVID MACARAY

What happened recently at the Hershey candy factory, in Palmyra, Pennsylvania, has to be considered one of the weirdest and most outrageous labor stories of the new year.
First the outrageous part. According to a story in the New York Times (February 21), Exel, the logistics company hired by Hershey to oversee its Palmyra operation, was found guilty by OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) of intentionally failing to report 42 serious injuries in the plant over a period of four years. Those 42 accidents constituted 43-percent of all such injuries that occurred during that period.
The majority of those injuries were related to the lifting and rehandling of large crates (some weighing 60 pounds) of Reese’s cups, Kit-Kat bars, and Hershey’s Kisses. The Labor Department issued fines in the amount of $280,000, and David Michaels, the Assistant Secretary of Labor in charge of OSHA, was quoted as saying, “Exel understood exactly what the law was on reporting. They were aware of these other injuries, and they just did not record them.” So that $283,000 penalty (inordinately high for OSHA violations) wasn’t levied for the usual reasons—improper record-keeping or unsafe working conditions—but for the much more serious crime of willful deceit.
Of course, Hershey wiped its hands clean of the whole affair, claiming they had no knowledge of how Exel ran the operation. This “veil of ignorance” nonsense is reminiscent of American sportswear and sports equipment companies claiming not to know that their products—the ones being sold for top dollar on American shelves—are
being manufactured in Central American sweatshops where near slave-labor conditions exist, and where union activists are regularly threatened, beaten and, on occasion, murdered.
Unfortunately, this “know nothing” posture is prevalent across-the-board. By their own admission, the U.S. Government in Iraq had no knowledge of what Halliburton and Blackwater were doing, and Halliburton and Blackwater had no knowledge of what their subcontractors were doing, which meant, conveniently, that no one could be held accountable. Contractors and subcontractors now litter the commercial landscape. Say what you will about the “enemy,” but the only guys in Iraq who seemed to know who answered to whom were the insurgents.

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Resurrecting Ayn Rand: Hedge Fund Money Teams Up With Koch & BB&T

2012-02-28T16:08:00.001-05:00

by PAM MARTENS and RUSS MARTENS (Counterpunch.org)

Gary Weiss, the Wall Street writer who was ahead of his time with his comprehensive chronicle of Wall Street corruption in 2006 (Wall Street Versus America) charts a bold new course this week with the release of Ayn Rand Nation: The Hidden Struggle for America’s Soul.
Thanks to Weiss, the nation might just escape the next wave of Ayn Rand’s radical capitalism and student brainwashing by corporate money vultures fanning out across U.S. campuses.
Thanks to the trail paved in Weiss’ book, we did some further digging into the money cartel financing this “spontaneous” outpouring of campus and Tea Party interest in Rand, whose work is regularly considered by top academics to be mediocre and simpleminded.
This cartel has a striking similarity to the network of university economists set up by Big Tobacco in a money for hire scheme from 1983 to the mid 90s to blanket Congress and the media with bogus OpEds and research papers.
While it has been well known that the oil billionaire, Charles Koch, has been funneling tens of millions of dollars through his foundation into economic programs at public universities and mandating approval of faculty and curriculum in some instances, it has not heretofore been reported that a sweeping partnership in these programs has sprung up between Koch and the southern banking giant, BB&T, the latter corporation mandating that Ayn Rand’s book Atlas Shrugged is taught and distributed to students.
Koch is based in Wichita, Kansas; BB&T in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. An email request to the Charles G. Koch Foundation for information on how this partnership evolved went unanswered, despite Koch’s copious web site claiming to want to set the record straight on his past funding schemes.
Raising more eyebrows is the discovery that the so-called populous craze for Ayn Rand’s seminal work, Atlas Shrugged, is also being financed by a decidedly non-populist pact of deep-pocketed hedge fund operators.
As we reported yesterday in this space, the Ayn Rand Institute (ARI) has already conceded the following on its web site:

“ARI seeks to spearhead a cultural renaissance that will reverse the anti-reason, anti-individualism, anti-freedom, anti-capitalist trends in today’s culture. The major battleground in this fight for reason and capitalism is the educational institutions—high schools and, above all, the universities, where students learn the ideas that shape their lives…To date, more than 1.4 million copies of these Ayn Rand novels have been donated to 30,000 teachers in 40,000 classrooms across the United States and Canada.
“Based on a projected shelf life of five years per book, we estimate that more than 3 million young people have been introduced to Ayn Rand’s books and ideas as a result of our programs to date…partnerships have been established between ARI and the...
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Rick Santorum and the Sexual Counter-Revolution

2012-02-26T19:38:00.001-05:00

By Laurie Penny

Source: New Statesman

Almost a century ago this month, women's rights activist Emma Goldman was arrested in New York for distributing "obscene, lewd, or lascivious articles". What she was doing was handing out pamphlets about birth control, with the aim of freeing women sexually and socially from the burden of unwanted pregnancy, and she got a spell in a prison workhouse for her trouble.

Walk around Lower Manhattan today, as I did this morning, and you'd think that history had vindicated Goldman's long campaign for sexual freedom.

Pop songs promising a catalogue of horizontal delights pump out of the doorways of shops selling dildos and cheap knickers in the early mornings. Men hold hands with their husbands in SoHo. Wall Street workers in skirt suits jostle on the subway with excited teenagers in tiny shorts defying their parents and the winter chill.

Everywhere, on billboards and bus-stops and hoardings a hundred feet high, images of female sexual availability bulge and shine and flutter their perfect airbrushed eyelashes. Thighs glisten, legs spread and giant red lips open wetly for the latest low-calorie yoghurt. Surely, you'd think, this is a sweaty shangri-la of erotic liberty. Surely this is one place where the sexual revolution of the 1960s was allowed to reach its logical conclusion.

Step into any coffee shop or diner that carries the rolling news, however, and you'll find that in the land of the free not everything is as free as it seems. Over the past few weeks, right-wing politicians have launched an all-out assault on women's sexual and reproductive freedom and LGBT rights, attacking not just gay marriage and abortion but contraception, too.

In 2012, the morality of hormonal birth control is now a serious hot-button issue in the Republican presidential race. Last week, not a single woman was allowed to testify before a Washington hearing on reproductive rights and "religious freedom" -- which includes allowing bosses to deny their female employees contraceptive health coverage on moral grounds.

Meanwhile, the state of Virginia debated whether or not to force every women seeking an abortion to submit to vaginal probing with an ultrasound device, a policy that campaigners called "state-sponsored rape" -- one state representative commented that he couldn't see what the problem was, as these women had already consented to being penetrated when they got pregnant.

As panels of terrifying old men gather on national television to debate whether and how far women should be punished for having sex outside marriage one could be forgiven for thinking that American politics had temporarily been scripted by Margaret Atwood. As the recession crunches down, the country is awash with anti-erotic, anti-queer, anti-woman rhetoric that goes beyond 'culture war' into the territory of sexual counter- revolution.

The Republicans know that contraception in particular is a losing issue for them - a New York Times poll found that two thirds of voters, including 67 per cent of Catholics, support requiring employee health care plans to cover the cost of birth control, and Obama is up ten points with women from August - but they can't help themselves. One whiff of an uncontrolled pudenda and they start scrapping like housedogs who have been sprayed with pheromones, which makes for such classic TV moments as candidate Newt Gingrich, currently America's most famous serial adulterer, seriously participating in a debate about sexual continence.

To call this backlash a culture war would be to imply that more than one side is fighting.

This is far from the case. Compared to the pageant of homophobic and misogynist pants-wetting going on on the American right, all the Democrats need to do to make themselves look like a sane and useful political outfit is to sit back and watch the Republicans engage in auto-erotic asphyxiation.

Americans have short memories, particularly in election years, and most seem to have forgotten that it is barely two months since President Obama stepped in to restrict the sale of the morning-after-pill -- to girls under 17 -- a move seemingly designed to reassure the increasingly suspicious, sexist American centre-right that he hates sexual freedom a little bit, too. Just not as much as those crazy Republicans.

Curiously enough, precisely the same arguments seem to be at play when British conservatives attack abortion rights and sexual health - they might be gradually reintroducing fear of female sexuality into mainstream public life, but at least they're not as bad as those crazy Americans. Meanwhile, the public conversation about women's rights and sexual freedom is creeping back, inch by inch, towards conservative censoriousness.

This new sexual counter-revolution is bigger than America. The rhetoric of god, marriage, morality and little girls learning to keep their legs closed has crossed the pond with all the tooth-aching tenacity of a Katy Perry song. Last week, we had Baroness Warsi going to the Vatican to announce that Europe needs to be more 'confident in its Christianity'.

This week, it's a campaign by the Telegraph to remind women, their doctors and the government that abortions are not available 'on demand', a move that follows two years of attacks on sex education and the legal right to choose in parliament. Just like in the United States, the effect of this mission creep of legislative misogyny is to chip away at public support for women's right to control our bodies and our destinies.

It's worth reminding ourselves what birth control and abortion actually mean in political terms. The hormonal birth control pill was the first step in a technological revolution that, within living memory, liberated one half of the human race from functional dependency on the other. With legal abortion as the other side of the equation should birth control fail, women can finally be the mistresses of our own reproductive systems, rather than the slaves of it.

We can choose when, if and how many children we want, we can be sexually active without fear of pregnancy, and we can participate, at least in theory, in every area of public and professional life - we can have, in short, all the advantages that men have always enjoyed through accident of biology.

Pro-choice campaigners speak of a woman's right to "control her own body", rather than have it controlled for her by her husband, the church or the state, as if that right were a social given rather than something that our mothers and grandmothers fought and went to prison to win.

When conservative head-bangers like Rick Santorum complain that birth control encourages women and girls to have sex outside marriage, the appropriate response should be "yes, and?". Of course we want to have sex outside marriage without fear of social or economic punishment. Of course we want to control our fertility and, with it, our future.

These are precisely the technological advances that make real equality a possibility, and they are precisely the advances that players in the big boys' throwback club of modern politics wish to curtail when they complain of "moral decline" in public life.

The sexual counter-revolution is all about control. It's about control of women, control of desire, and control of political space at a time when elected representatives have nothing to offer voters beyond sops to our most fearful prejudices. As for those dirty billboards, they are part of the equation. A culture of objectification is part of managing and monetising the social fact of desire.

Anglo-American culture has never had a problem with sex as long as it is carefully managed -- as long as it is enjoyed only by straight men and endured by women, guiltily, in the dark.

Link

When Big Business and Human Rights Collide

2012-02-26T19:35:00.002-05:00

Published on Sunday, February 26, 2012 by the Los Angeles Times

When Big Business and Human Rights Collide

A case before the U.S. Supreme Court may deny victims abroad recourse against corporate-sanctioned abuse.

by Ka Hsaw Wa

Among the thousands of interviews I've conducted as a human rights investigator over the last 24 years, one of the most difficult was in 1996, outside a refugee camp along the Thai-Burma border. I was no stranger to suffering in my country. I had fled from Burma (also known as Myanmar) just a few years before, escaping the brutal military regime after being arrested and tortured. I had gone to the camp to investigate reports that villages were being uprooted and brutalized to make way for a natural gas pipeline built by U.S. oil giant Unocal and other multinational corporations. There, I met a young mother from my Karen ethnic group whose baby had recently been killed by Burmese troops providing security for the pipeline.
A protestor during a demonstration at the Unocal Terminal Motor Transport facility in Los Angeles is seen on Dec. 12, 1996 holding aloft a photo of a resident of Burma reportedly injured by a landmine explosion. Other protestors chained themselves to a Unocal tanker truck. The demonstration's intent was to protest Unocal's involvement in a Burmese pipeline project, which activists claimed led to human rights abuses and destruction of the Burmese rainforest. (Leane Johnstone/Earth Action Team/AP Photo) That was Jane Doe, as she would later be known. She would go on to help establish the legal principle that U.S. corporations can be held liable for complicity in severe human rights abuses abroad. Now, a case being argued before theU.S. Supreme Courton Tuesday may mean that future Jane Does will have no such recourse against corporations.
Jane Doe 1 was a poor farmer whose great misfortune was that she was living in the path of the project when Unocal — now owned by Chevron — and its French and Thai corporate partners began building the pipeline. Their other partner was the Burmese military regime, and the corporations contracted with its army, despite its abhorrent human rights record, to provide security for the project.
The soldiers forced thousands of villagers to provide slave labor for the project. One of those villagers was Jane Doe's husband. As Jane Doe told me in the camp, the military forced her husband at gunpoint to clear the jungle and carry heavy loads. When he escaped, the soldiers came looking for him. They found Jane Doe instead, nursing her baby near a cooking fire. She told them she didn't know where her husband was. The soldiers beat her into unconsciousness and kicked her and her baby into the fire. Jane Doe recovered from her injuries; her baby died.
I remember trying to comfort her and thinking: How is it possible that foreign companies can come into Burma, hire a rogue army, make billions of dollars and have no responsibility for what their business partners do? There have been positive changes in Burma recently, but at that time, justice was impossible; the courts served the military. But Unocal was a U.S. company, and I had met American lawyers who believed that U.S. corporations were not above human rights laws.
And so, in 1996, Jane Doe 1 became a lead plaintiff in Doe vs. Unocal, a lawsuit filed in Los Angeles, where Unocal had its headquarters. The case was based on the U.S. Alien Tort Statute of 1789, which allows non-U.S. citizens to file lawsuits in the U.S. for violations of international law. Jane Doe's case was the first to apply that law to corporations accused of liability in human rights violations. In 2005, Unocal agreed to a settlement. The case has provided an underpinning for similar claims against corporations headquartered in the U.S. or doing business in the U.S., and thus it has helped victims of crimes against humanity gain some justice.
For example, in 2007 Yahoo agreed to compensate the families of two Chinese dissidents imprisoned after the Internet company provided their identifying information to the Chinese government, and in 2010 the military contractor Blackwater compensated the families of several Iraqi men allegedly killed by Blackwater guards.

Continue Reading.........

Remotely Piloted War

2012-02-26T19:34:00.002-05:00

How Drone War Became The American Way of Life

By Tom Engelhardt

In the American mind, if Apple made weapons, they would undoubtedly be drones, those remotely piloted planes getting such great press here. They have generally been greeted as if they were the sleekest of iPhones armed with missiles.

When the first American drone assassins burst onto the global stage early in the last decade, they caught most of us by surprise, especially because they seemed to come out of nowhere or from some wild sci-fi novel. Ever since, they've been touted in the media as the shiniest presents under the American Christmas tree of war, the perfect weapons to solve our problems when it comes to evildoers lurking in the global badlands.

And can you blame Americans for their love affair with the drone? Who wouldn’t be wowed by the most technologically advanced, futuristic, no-pain-all-gain weapon around?

Here’s the thing, though: put drones in a more familiar context, skip the awestruck commentary, and they should have been eerily familiar. If, for instance, they were car factories, they would seem so much less exotic to us.

Think about it: What does a drone do? Like a modern car factory, it replaces a pilot, a skilled job that takes significant training, with robotics and a degraded version of the same job outsourced elsewhere. In this case, the “offshore” location that job headed for wasn’t China or Mexico, but a military base in the U.S., where a guy with a joystick, trained in a hurry and sitting at a computer monitor, is “piloting” that plane. And given our experience with the hemorrhaging of good jobs from the U.S., who will be surprised to discover that, in 2011, the U.S. Air Force was already training more drone “pilots” than actual fighter and bomber pilots combined?

That’s one way drones are something other than the futuristic sci-fi wonders we imagine them to be. But there’s another way that drones have been heading for the American “homeland” for four decades, and it has next to nothing to do with technology, advanced or otherwise.

In a sense, drone war might be thought of as the most natural form of war for the All Volunteer Military. To understand why that’s so, we need to head back to a crucial decision implemented just as the Vietnam war was ending.

Disarming the Amateurs, Demobilizing the Citizenry

It’s true that, in the wake of grinding wars that have also been debacles -- the Afghan version of which has entered its 11th year -- the U.S. military is in ratty shape. Its equipment needs refurbishing and its troops are worn down. The stress of endlessly repeated tours of duty in war zones, brain injuries and other wounds caused by the roadside bombs that have often replaced a visible enemy on the “battlefield,” suicide rates that can’t be staunched, rising sexual violence within the military, increasing crime rates around military bases, and all the other strains and pains of unending war have taken their toll.

The Causes of the Protests in Afghanistan

2012-02-26T19:33:00.002-05:00

Published on Sunday, February 26, 2012 by Salon

The Causes of the Protests in Afghanistan

by Glenn Greenwald

Most American media accounts and commentary about the ongoing violent anti-American protests in Afghanistan depict their principal cause as anger over the burning of Korans (it’s just a book: why would people get violent over it?) — except that Afghans themselves keep saying things like this:

Afghan protesters shout anti-U.S. slogans during a demonstration in Kunduz province February 25, 2012.Protesters in Kabul interviewed on the road and in front of Parliament said that this was not the first time that Americans had violated Afghan cultural and religious traditions and that an apology was not enough.
“This is not just about dishonoring the Koran, it is about disrespecting our dead and killing our children,” said Maruf Hotak, 60, a man who joined the crowd on the outskirts of Kabul, referring to an episode in Helmand Province when American Marines urinated on the dead bodies of men they described as insurgents and to a recent erroneous airstrike on civilians in Kapisa Province that killed eight young Afghans.
“They always admit their mistakes,” he said. “They burn our Koran and then they apologize. You can’t just disrespect our holy book and kill our innocent children and make a small apology.”

And:

Members of Parliament called on Afghans to take up arms against the American military, and Western officials said they feared that conservative mullahs might incite more violence at the weekly Friday Prayer, when a large number of people worship at mosques.
“Americans are invaders, and jihad against Americans is an obligation,” said Abdul Sattar Khawasi, a member of Parliament from the Ghorband district in Parwan Province, where at least four demonstrators were killed in confrontations with the police on Wednesday.

The U.S. has violently occupied their country for more than a decade. It has, as Gen. Stanley McChrystal himself explained, killed what he called an “amazing number” of innocent Afghans in checkpoint shootings. It has repeatedly — as in, over and over — killed young Afghan children in air strikes. It continues to imprison their citizens for years at Bagram and other American bases without charges of any kind and with credible reports of torture and other serious abuses. Soldiers deliberately shot Afghan civilians for fun and urinated on their corpses and displayed them as trophies.
Read the full article at Salon...

Glenn Greenwald was previously a constitutional law and civil rights litigator in New York. He is the author of the New York Times Bestselling book "How Would a Patriot Act?," a critique of the Bush administration's use of executive power, released in May 2006. His second book, "A Tragic Legacy", examines the Bush legacy. His just-released book is titled "With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful." He is the recipient of the first annual I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism.

Two Bubbles That Went Pop: Reflections on the Manipulation of Populism

2012-02-26T19:32:00.001-05:00

By Paul Street

Saturday, February 25, 2012

A slightly shorter version of this essay was originally published on Counterpunch. Long after its leading encampments have been torn down – often with brute force and (educationally enough) predominantly by Democratic mayors and with the approval and involvement of a Democratic White House – the populist Occupy Movement deserves major credit for changing the United States’ political discourse. It helped bring the nation’s savage economic inequalities and the unmatched democracy-, society-, and ecology-destroying power of the wealthy Few (the instantly famous “1%”) into the national political discussion in ways that will give it a deserved place in future American history textbooks. It performed the remarkable service of calling out the name and address of the nation’s true unelected masters: corporate-financial capital and Wall Street.

Why did it emerge in the late summer and early fall of 2011? There were precursors and inspirations from recent history that helped spark and explain the timing of the Occupy moment, of course: occupations of public space (Cairo’s Tarhir Square) to protest the rule of a dictator in Egypt and to protest neoliberal austerity measures in Spain and Greece; the December 2008 occupation of the Republic Door and Window plant on Chicago’s North Side; and the mass popular upheaval in Madison, Wisconsin in February and March of 2011 – a remarkable rebellion that included a 16 day people’s occupation of the Wisconsin State Capitol. Within New York City, not far from where OWS broke out, activists earlier the same year launched an outdoor encampment (“Bloombergville”) to protest Mayor Bloomberg’s plans to cut social services and jobs – an action that provided an interesting link between the Madison upheaval and Occupy, that utilized many of the same organizational methods that would be employed by Occupy movements across the nation, and that provided some of OWS’ early activists.

Only the 1 Percent Took Your House Away

Beneath and beyond these immediate sparks, however, there lay deeper developments that provided the fuel for Occupy’s sparks to catch fire. Occupy and the broader popular and populist spirit of sympathetic opposition to the rich and corporate few it helped capture arose when it did, I think, because of the bursting of two bubbles: the hyper-collateralized real estate, credit, and finance bubble of 2001-2007; and the electoral-politics Obama hope and change bubble of 2007-2011. The popping of the first bubble – sparked by a wave of foreclosures in poor black and Latino communities that Wall Street had pumped with a wave of super-exploitive sub-prime home loans - laid bare the true elite and its culpability for the decline and indeed the breaking of American life and society. As Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich argued in a December 2011 Mother Jones essay titled “The 1% Revealed,” the transparent crashing of the national and global economy by the financial shenanigans of the super-rich undermined the ability of the right-wing to credibly continue its longstanding fake-populist game of blaming the professional and managerial “liberal elite” for everything wrong in America. It exposed the real masters, “the 1 percent who are, for the most part, sealed off in their own bubble of private planes, gated communities, and walled estates.” Compared to the corporate and Wall Street elite, “professionals and managers, no matter how annoying, were [shown to be] pikers. The doctor or school principal might be overbearing, the professor and the social worker might be condescending, but only the 1 percent took your house away.”

The Class One Serves

The bursting of the second bubble reflected the realization that American democracy (or what’s left of it) is no less crippled by the dark cloud of big money and the many-sided machinations of capital when Democrats hold nominal power than when Republicans do. Elected in the name of progressive change and a promise to clean up a corrupt Washington, the Obama administration has been a tutorial on who rules America and the underlying conflict between capitalism and democracy. With its monumental bailout of hyper-opulent financial overlords, its refusal to nationalize and cut down the parasitic financial institutions that had paralyzed the economy, its passage of a health reform bill that only the big insurance and drug companies could love, its cutting of an auto bailout deal that rewarded capital flight and raided union pension funds, its undermining of desperately needed global carbon emission reduction efforts at Copenhagen (2009) and Durban (2011), its refusal to advance serious public works programs (green or otherwise), its green-lighting of offshore drilling and numerous other environmentally disastrous practices, its roll-over of Bush’s regressive tax cuts for the rich, its freezing of federal wages and salaries, its cutting of a debt ceiling deal (in the summer of 2011) that was all about cutting social programs instead of tax increases on the rich, its disregarding of promises to labor and other popular constituencies, and other betrayals of its “progressive base” (the other side of the coin of promises kept to its Wall Street and corporate sponsors, who set new campaign finance records in backing Obama in 2008), the “change” and “hope” presidency of Barack Obama brilliantly demonstrated the reach of what Edward S. Herman and David Peterson call “the unelected dictatorship of money,” which vetoes any official who might seek “to change the foreign or domestic priorities of the imperial U.S. regime.” It richly validated radical analysts’ jaded take on the plutocratic reality behind the heavily personalized, candidate-centered “electoral extravaganzas” (Nom Chomsky) that big money and big media stage for the citizenry every four years, telling us that “that’s politics” – the only politics that matters. In its presidential, as in its other elections, U.S. “democracy” is “at best a guided one; at its worst it is a corrupt farce, amounting to manipulation…It is an illusion,” the left historian Laurence Shoup observed in early 2008, “that real change can ever come from electing a different ruling class-sponsored candidate.”

Demands of Living Wage at UVA

2012-02-26T19:30:00.003-05:00

By Living Wage at UVA

Source: Living Wage at UVA

Saturday, February 25, 2012

The Living Wage Campaign calls for all University of Virginia employees, direct or contract, to be paid a living wage of $13.00 per hour plus benefits. Our full demands are:

1. Every UVA employee must be guaranteed a LIVING WAGE under university policy.
This wage can be no less than $13.00 and must be adjusted on an annual basis to comply with the Economic Policy Institute’s regionally-sourced cost-of-living and inflation calculations. The implementation of a living wage must not come at the reduction of any other benefits, including health care. This base wage must be extended not only to direct university employees but also to contract and subcontract employees; the campaign holds that outsourcing core functions does not relieve the University of its obligation to treat employees fairly. UVA must therefore consolidate and make publicly available all data from contractors regarding labor conditions, a right it already reserves in a number of contracts. Contractors who do not meet these requirements will not be eligible.

2. All working members of the UVA community have the right to job security.
In implementing the living wage policy, no jobs or wages will be eliminated or diminished. The University must commit to providing full-time jobs when possible, and part-time or temporary work only when necessary. What the University calls an entry-level wage should be just that: a wage for entry-level employees only. Entry-level wages must not be permanent wages and there must be clear and feasible channels for advancement. A strong community is built by those who share sustained personal investment in it, a goal which can only be achieved by ensuring workers have access to full time and appropriately compensated employment.

3. All UVA workers must be guaranteed safe, just, and humane working conditions.
This includes clearly publicized avenues for reporting wage violations and/or unsafe working conditions. UVA must protect workers’ rights to organize, to speak out about poor working conditions or low wages, and to file grievances without fear of retaliation. The University must also acknowledge the disproportionate number of women and people of color at the bottom of the wage scale. UVA must take concrete steps to address these disparities through the equitable promotion of people of color and women.

4. The University must allow and facilitate the creation of a Living Wage Oversight Board,
an employee organization with oversight responsibilities for ensuring the University’s ongoing commitment to providing a living wage for all employees. This task force will also serve as a resource for workers to report grievances and labor violations without fear of reprisal or retaliation.

Debunking Poverty Myths and Racial Stereotypes

2012-02-26T19:29:00.004-05:00

Published on Saturday, February 25, 2012 by Center for American Progress

A Better Understanding of Social Benefit Programs

by Sophia Kerby

Race baiting has been a focus of debates in various media outlets about programs aiding those whose income is at the pit of that debate. Below are some of the most startling facts that debunk some of the poverty myths and racial stereotypes that surround social benefit programs.
1. President Barack Obama is not a “food stamp president.” According to recent figures, more food stamp recipients were actually added under President George W. Bush than under President Obama. Under President Bush the number of recipients rose by nearly 14.7 million.
2. Blacks are not the primary recipients of assistance through federal benefit programs. 35.7 percent of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, recipients and 43 percent of those on Medicaid—two of the largest public benefit programs—are white.
3. The main reasons why people living in poverty are not employed are illness and inability to find work. Approximately 56 percent of those who did not work in 2010 did not work due to illness, disability, retirement, or an inability to find work.
4. Social Security benefits have saved many senior citizens from poverty. If Social Security were excluded from income, 14 million seniors over the age of 65 would fall into poverty.
5. Many Americans receiving public benefits paid for them. Thirty-nine percent of Americans receive benefits they paid for through payroll taxes taken out of their own paychecks.
6. More white Americans live in poverty than any other group. In 2010 31.6 million white Americans lived in poverty, more than any other racial or ethnic group.
7. Many people of color who receive Social Security benefits do so for survival. Forty-five percent of all black beneficiaries and 58 percent of “other” beneficiaries (those who are neither black nor white) use the program for its survivor and disability benefits, not for its retirement benefits.
8. Social benefit programs like Medicaid really do serve those most vulnerable. Two-thirds of Americans living in poverty are not enrolled in Medicaid because single individuals and childless couples are largely excluded from Medicaid coverage.
9. Many beneficiaries of low-income public benefit programs are elderly, children, or disabled. Among American households receiving food assistance under SNAP, 75 percent have an elderly or disabled person or a child.
10. The federal government does not hand out checks. Only about 10 percent of all federal dollars committed to public benefit programs for low-income Americans are paid in cash, and the majority of cash assistance programs are focused on those who cannot work.

Sophia Kerby is the Special Assistant for Progress 2050 at American Progress working with the Communications team. She studied in India and South Africa before graduating from the University of Maryland-College Park in 2011 with a B.A. in government and politics. Sophia previously completed internships at the Women’s Campaign Forum, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the U.N. Development Programme. Prior to joining American Progress, Sophia worked on health policy issues domestically and internationally as an intern with Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

US Spies See No Evidence of Iranian Nuclear Weapons Program

2012-02-26T19:29:00.000-05:00

Published on Saturday, February 25, 2012 by Common Dreams

- Common Dreams staff

US intelligence agencies believe there is no hard evidence that Iran has decided to build a nuclear bomb, The New York Times reports in today's edition.
The Times said there was no dispute among American, Israeli and European intelligence officials that Iran had been enriching nuclear fuel and developing infrastructure to become a nuclear power.
But the Central Intelligence Agency and other intelligence agencies believe that Iran has yet to decide whether to resume a parallel program to design a nuclear warhead -- a program they believe was essentially halted in 2003, the paper noted.

* * *

From the New York Times report Saturday:

Recent assessments by American spy agencies are broadly consistent with a 2007 intelligence finding that concluded that Iran had abandoned its nuclear weapons program years earlier, according to current and former American officials. The officials said that assessment was largely reaffirmed in a 2010 National Intelligence Estimate, and that it remains the consensus view of America’s 16 intelligence agencies. [...]

Yet some intelligence officials and outside analysts believe there is another possible explanation for Iran’s enrichment activity, besides a headlong race to build a bomb as quickly as possible. They say that Iran could be seeking to enhance its influence in the region by creating what some analysts call “strategic ambiguity.” Rather than building a bomb now, Iran may want to increase its power by sowing doubt among other nations about its nuclear ambitions. Some point to the examples of Pakistan and India, both of which had clandestine nuclear weapons programs for decades before they actually decided to build bombs and test their weapons in 1998.

“I think the Iranians want the capability, but not a stockpile,” said Kenneth C. Brill, a former United States ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency who also served as director of the intelligence community’s National Counterproliferation Center from 2005 until 2009. Added a former intelligence official: “The Indians were a screwdriver turn away from having a bomb for many years. The Iranians are not that close.”

Amid the ugly aftermath of the botched Iraq intelligence assessments, American spy agencies in 2006 put new analytical procedures in place to avoid repeating the failures. Analysts now have access to raw information about the sources behind intelligence reports, to help better determine the credibility of the sources and prevent another episode like the one in which the C.I.A. based much of its conclusions about Iraq’s purported biological weapons on an Iraqi exile who turned out to be lying.

Analysts are also required to include in their reports more information about the chain of logic that has led them to their conclusions, and differing judgments are featured prominently in classified reports, rather than buried in footnotes.

When an unclassified summary of the 2007 intelligence estimate on Iran’s nuclear program was made public, stating that it had abandoned work on a bomb, it stunned the Bush administration and the world. It represented a sharp reversal from the intelligence community’s 2005 estimate, and drew criticism of the C.I.A. from European and Israeli officials, as well as conservative pundits. They argued that it was part of a larger effort by the C.I.A. to prevent American military action against Iran.

# # #

“Trickled On” Economics

2012-02-26T19:27:00.002-05:00

Published on Sunday, February 26, 2012 by Common Dreams

“Trickled On” Economics

by Doug Harvey

One thing about an election year, particularly this one, is that it reveals the fallacy that humanity has somehow emerged from “mere animal conditions.” We may have comfortable homes, climate-control, exo-skeletons (known as automobiles) to allow us to move about rapidly and move objects many times our own weight, etc. But beavers, ants, and foxes have these things. One thing that humans have the capacity for, if they strive to use it, is being able to see life from another’s viewpoint – we have the capacity for compassion. If anything would allow us to rise from a “mere animal condition,” it is this compassion. But under the capitalist model, currently the dominant paradigm in the world, the priority is put on expropriating land and labor in order for a small group to accumulate wealth they did not produce. In our deluded national narrative, these people are said to be “job creators.” In fact, their access to wealth and power has allowed them to create a sort of neo-feudal system that can be aptly called, “Trickled-On Economics.”
In this dominant paradigm headed by Big Capital, compassion is highly discouraged. There is a tendency among the politicians, managers, and overseers of capitalist institutions to live like there is no tomorrow and pretend like there was no yesterday. After all, the working class – those who actually produce wealth – can be depended upon for a source of insurance in the event the gaming schemes of Big Capital fail. This attitude of borrow now (“leverage” if you are rich), worry later, unlike the wealth itself, has trickled down, or should I say “trickled on” the general public.
The so-called “debt crisis” currently providing rationale for cutting social programs was created by capitalists manipulating the housing and financial markets for short-term profit, a scheme that crashed the global economy. While they were doing that, working class people struggled with a steady decline in income resulting from off-shoring American manufacturing, union sell-outs, and outright union-busting. To make up for this decline, they were handed credit cards, deregulated during the Reagan years, and usurious lending became the order of the day. In addition, instead of providing education for its citizens as some social welfare states of western and northern Europe have done, the student loan industry was created, with student loan giant Sallie Mae becoming a for-profit corporation by 1995. As if this was not enough (it never is), for-profit health care, starring Big Pharma, has become ensconced in Congress, K-Street, and Wall Street. Also, moving in from the desert is a dust devil known as the for-profit prison system. Examples of profiteering from others’ misfortune, or indeed manufacturing misfortune for profit, (note: I do not even broach the war profiteering game in this essay), has no limit in the capitalist paradigm.

Continue Reading...........

Harvest America or Invest in America

2012-02-26T19:26:00.001-05:00

Published on Sunday, February 26, 2012 by Common Dreams

Harvest America or Invest in America

by Stan Sorscher

Many American voters seem ready to run our country as if it were a business.
Some businesses take a long-range growth perspective, and honor all their stakeholders. A country run that way would be OK.
However, other businesses believe their markets are "unattractive," to use the business school expression. If your business is in an unattractive market, your smart business move is to defer investment in new plant and equipment, cut back on worker training, freeze or terminate pensions, reduce R&D, extract as much value from the business as possible, return the cash to shareholders, and dump whatever remains. I wouldn't run a country that way.
For decades, industrialists have looked at America and concluded that our domestic economy was unattractive compared to low-wage alternatives. We don't invest in industrial capacity, we treat our schools as a cost to be minimized rather than a social investment in our children, we terminate pensions, we reduce our investment in infrastructure to a fraction of other countries', and what R&D we fund seems to create jobs in "more attractive" places, outside the United States.
In business school, this is called a harvest strategy. Economists explain that harvest strategies can be good, pruning away the old to make way for the new.
Something like this occurs in biology, when old dead organisms are scavenged by vultures, dung beetles, funguses, larvae, and bacteria. In biology, scavengers are not "good or bad." Scavenging is just something that scavengers do for a living. They don't get paid 400 times the average wage, nor do other biological organisms treat them with great respect.
Over the last few decades, one American industry after another has been harvested -- home electronics, steel, shoes, clothing, household appliances, wood products, textiles, furniture, power tools, televisions, and domestic manufacture of those delightful Apple products, among others.
Companies harvest to please their investors. Harvest automatically "works," since the purpose of a company is to please shareholders. We have mastered the harvest part, where we prune away the old.
We do a poor job of making way for the new. Creating new industrial capacity doesn't just happen, as if by an invisible hand. It happens when we have well-designed public policies.
The purpose of public policy is to invest in the future and raise our standard of living, not harvest the legacy of past generations.
That's one difference between a company and a country. Markets are notoriously short-sighted. Markets under-invest in future growth.
A dynamic, healthy political system would never permit a harvest business strategy into our political life. In America, we have a strong free press, and established institutions of civil society like good public schools, strong unions, respect for science, a strong social safety net, a strong middle class, citizens who are secure in their futures and willing to defend their interests, and effective institutions for the environment, civil rights, women's rights, human rights, and public health. We have strong historical and constitutional values about one-person one-vote and a government responsive to local communities.
Right?
Well, no. That's not right. Quite the opposite.

Continue Reading...........

Don’t Tell Us It’s Not a Class War

2012-02-26T19:24:00.003-05:00

Published on Saturday, February 25, 2012 by the Globe and Mail (Canada)

Don’t Tell Us It’s Not a Class War

by Gerald Caplan

The entire world seems to be one huge advertisement for The Shock Doctrine. Naomi Klein showed in her revelatory book how the corporate-political-military-media complex exploits crises to further impose their harsh right-wing agenda – even when they themselves created the crisis. In a sane world, the economic meltdown and deep recession of the past four years would have led at minimum to stringent regulation of financiers and speculators plus programs to assist their victims. But in this world, you have to be nuts to believe in a sane world.
In reality, everything that’s happened in the past several years has gone to further empower and enrich the 1 per cent (or maybe the 5 per cent) at the expense of the rest of us. Look anywhere you want. What else does the universal demand for austerity programs mean? What else does the sudden concerted attack on public sector workers mean? What else does the intransigent line taken by multinational corporations against their unions mean? What else does the demand for “right-to-work” laws mean? What else does the widespread attack on seniors’ pensions mean?
Police in riot gear descend on an anti-austerity protest outside the Greek parliament in Athens on Feb. 19, 2012. REUTERSLook at poor Greece. Ms. Klein could have invented it as a pure case study for her thesis. Big economic problems, it’s true. So how do you fix them? As a Greek journalist wrote matter-of-factly in The New York Times, the latest bailout program imposed by the IMF, the European Union and the European Central Bank “almost guarantees recession.” And this will be on top of the punishment that had already been inflicted on the 99 per cent, including deep cuts to private-sector wages, layoffs in the civil service and significant reductions in health and social security.
Throughout, economists like Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, whose forecasts have repeatedly been borne out, assured the few who would listen this was a guaranteed recipe for exacerbating Greece’s economic woes. It meant, after all, instead of growth, a guaranteed contraction of the economy. Which is exactly what happened. But apparently these critics, while correct about the consequences of enforced austerity, were wrong about the proper solution. The punishment, it seems, had not been crushing enough. Now a new and improved package of pain will be inflicted, a condition for the country receiving bailout funds at sky-high borrowing costs. For the vast majority of them, it’s a Greek tragedy.
At least 21 per cent of Greeks are unemployed. Yet the thumbscrews are to be tightened once again: more austerity, more spending cuts, eliminating another 20 per cent of all government jobs and slashing the minimum wage by another 22 per cent. All this, in a country in its fifth year of recession.

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Corporations Don’t Need a Tax Cut, So Why Is Obama Proposing One?

2012-02-24T08:20:00.005-05:00

Published on Thursday, February 23, 2012 by Robert Reich

by Robert Reich

The Obama administration is proposing to lower corporate taxes from the current 35 percent to 28 percent for most companies and to 25 percent for manufacturers.
The move is supposed to be “revenue neutral” – meaning the Administration is also proposing to close assorted corporate tax loopholes to offset the lost revenues. One such loophole allows corporations to park their earnings overseas where taxes are lower.Photo: (REUTERS/Jason Reed)
Why isn’t the White House just proposing to close the loopholes without reducing overall corporate tax rates? That would generate more tax revenue that could be used for, say, public schools.
It’s not as if corporations are hurting. Quite the contrary. American companies are booking higher profits than ever. They’re sitting on $2 trillion of cash they don’t know what to do with.
And it’s not as if corporate taxes are high. In fact, corporate tax receipts as a share of profits is now at its lowest level in at least 40 years. According to the Congressional Budget Office, corporate federal taxes paid last year dropped to 12.1 percent of profits earned from activities within the United States. That’s a gigantic drop from the 25.6 percent, on average, that corporations paid from 1987 to 2008.
And it’s not that corporations are paying an inordinate share of federal tax revenues. Here again, the reality is just the opposite. Corporate taxes have plummeted as a share of total federal revenues. In 1953, under President Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican, corporate taxes accounted for 32 percent of total federal tax revenues. Now they’re only 10 percent.
But now the federal budget deficit is ballooning, and in less than a year major cuts are scheduled to slice everything from prenatal care to Medicare. So this would seem to be the ideal time to raise corporate taxes – or at the very least close corporate tax loopholes without lowering corporate rates.
The average American is not exactly enamored with American corporations. Polls show most of the public doesn’t trust them. (A recent national poll by the University of Massachusetts at Lowell found 71 percent with an unfavorable impression of big business – about the same as those expressing an unfavorable view of Washington.)
The Administration’s initiative doesn’t even make sense as a bargaining maneuver.
Republicans will just accept the Administration’s lower corporate tax rate without closing any tax loopholes. House Republicans have already made it clear that, to them, closing a tax loophole is tantamount to raising taxes. And corporate lobbyists in Washington know better than anyone how to hold tight to loopholes they’ve already got.
Big business will fight to keep their foreign tax shelters. After all, it’s almost impossible to distinguish between their foreign and domestic earnings, which is why the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other business lobbies have spent the past three years trying to make it even easier for companies to defer U.S. taxes on income they supposedly earn outside the country.
Representative David Camp, a Michigan Republican who heads the House Ways and Means Committee, has already proposed a 25 percent corporate top rate and changes that would let companies avoid paying U.S. taxes on even more of the income they say they earn outside America.
Nothing is going to be enacted this year, anyway, so it would have made more sense for the Administration to support a hike in corporate taxes – and use it to highlight the difference between the President and his likely Republican challenger.
Mitt Romney wants to reduce the corporate tax rate to 25 percent before eliminating any tax loopholes. Rick Santorum wants to cut the rate to 17.5 percent and eliminate corporate taxes for manufacturers. Newt Gingrich wants to cut the rate to 12.5 percent and let companies write off all capital investments immediately.
It’s discouraging. The President gives a rousing speech, as he did on December 6 in Kansas. Then he misses an opportunity to put his campaign where his mouth is.

Report: Half a Million Afghans Flee Fighting but Head to Starvation and Death

2012-02-24T08:20:00.001-05:00

Published on Thursday, February 23, 2012 by Common Dreams

'Fleeing war, finding misery' documents harsh effects continued fighting brings to Afghan families

- Common Dreams staff

Fighting in Afghanistan has left half a million Afghans displaced and on the brink of starvation or death, according to a new report from Amnesty International.
Refugees in Kabul, Afghanistan, on February 11, 2012. Amnesty International's report states that "nearly two dozen displaced children under the age of five froze to death in January 2012." (U.S. Army Photo by SPC. Anthony Murray Jr) The report, 'Fleeing war, finding misery: The plight of the internally displaced in Afghanistan,' (pdf) states that 400 people a day are displaced, with displacement on the rise.
Thousands of the displaced individuals are seeking shelter in slum areas around Kabul and other cities, making makeshift shelters that offer little in protection to the elements. The report states that "nearly two dozen displaced children under the age of five froze to death in January 2012."

"Thousands of people are finding themselves living in freezing, cramped conditions and on the brink of starvation, while the Afghan government is not only looking the other way but even preventing help from reaching them," said Horia Mosadiq, Amnesty International's Afghanistan researcher.
"Women and girls disproportionately bear the consequences of displacement," said Cristina Finch, Amnesty International USA's women's policy director. "They face an increased risk of sexual violence which is often compounded by the insecure conditions of slums and armed conflict. We call upon the U.S. government to work with the Afghan government to help ensure that needed assistance is delivered."
Throughout Afghanistan, United Nations agencies and humanitarian organizations cannot deliver effective aid to slums, as they are prohibited from assisting in ways that implies the permanence of settlements. So, instead of digging permanent water wells, they are forced to deliver water to displaced communities in tankers.
"Local officials restrict aid efforts because they want to pretend that these people are going to go away," said Mosadiq. "This is a largely hidden but horrific humanitarian and human rights crisis."
"Afghans have real grounds to feel less secure now than at any point in the last ten years," said Mosadiq. "International and Afghan forces should address the impact of conflict on civilians, including displacement. The Taleban must also look to protect civilians, by ensuring humanitarian access to the areas they control."

* * *

Ashfaq Yusufzai reports for Inter Press Service that externally displaced Afghans are suffering as well, as Pakistan cracks down on refugees.

According to the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), Pakistan is home to 1.7 million documented Afghan refugees. Meanwhile, data compiled by Pakistan’s home and tribal affairs department found that the country was simultaneously playing host to 400,000 undocumented Afghans, many of who live in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), one of the Pakistan’s four major provinces.
For the refugees and immigrants, Pakistan is the only escape from a life of poverty and persecution.
Haji Dost Muhammad, an elder of the Afghan Refugees Jirga (tribal assembly), told IPS that many of his people could not return due to a lack of electricity, water and education in their home country.
"Our children have been born and brought up here and now they don’t want to go back as they are getting an education here. When the situation improves in Afghanistan, we will all go back," he said.

But many in Pakistan want an immediate deportation of all illegal residents.

'Perpetual Growth Myth' Leading World to Meltdown: Experts

2012-02-24T08:19:00.001-05:00

UN-Sponsored Papers Predict Sustained Ecological and Social Meltdown

- Common Dreams staff

"The current system is broken," says Bob Watson, the UK’s chief scientific advisor on environmental issues and a winner of the prestigious Blue Planet prize in 2010. "It is driving humanity to a future that is 3-5°C warmer than our species has ever known, and is eliminating the ecology that we depend on for our health, wealth and senses of self."
Smoke billows from burned trees. A collective of scientists and development thinkers have warned that civilisation faces an 'unprecedented emergency'. (Photograph: CRISTINA QUICKLER/AFP/Getty Images) "We cannot assume that technological fixes will come fast enough. Instead we need human solutions. The good news is that they exist but decision makers must be bold and forward thinking to seize them."
Watson's comments accompanied a new paper released today by 20 past winners of the Blue Planet Prize - often called the Nobel Prize for the environment, and comes ahead of the 20th anniversary of the Rio+20 conference – which takes place in June this year – where world leaders will (it is hoped) seize the opportunity to set human development on a new, more sustainable path.
Civilization Faces 'Perfect Storm of Ecological and Social Problems'
The Guardian's John Vidal reports:

In the face of an "absolutely unprecedented emergency", say the [...] past winners of the Blue Planet prize – the unofficial Nobel for the environment – society has "no choice but to take dramatic action to avert a collapse of civilization. Either we will change our ways and build an entirely new kind of global society, or they will be changed for us".
The stark assessment of the current global outlook by the group, who include [Watson]... US climate scientist James Hansen, Prof José Goldemberg, Brazil's secretary of environment during the Rio Earth summit in 1992, and Stanford University Prof Paul Ehrlich. [...]
"The perpetual growth myth ... promotes the impossible idea that indiscriminate economic growth is the cure for all the world's problems, while it is actually the disease that is at the root cause of our unsustainable global practices"
Apart from dire warnings about biodiversity loss and climate change, the group challenges governments to think differently about economic "progress".
"The rapidly deteriorating biophysical situation is more than bad enough, but it is barely recognized by a global society infected by the irrational belief that physical economies can grow forever and disregarding the facts that the rich in developed and developing countries get richer and the poor are left behind.
"The perpetual growth myth ... promotes the impossible idea that indiscriminate economic growth is the cure for all the world's problems, while it is actually the disease that is at the root cause of our unsustainable global practices", they say.
The group warns against over-reliance on markets but instead urges politicians to listen and learn from how poor communities all over the world see the problems of energy, water, food and livelihoods as interdependent and integrated as part of a living ecosystem.

The paper urges governments to:

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Anthony Shadid: 'Most Gifted Foreign Correspondent in a Generation'

2012-02-24T08:15:00.005-05:00

Published on Thursday, February 23, 2012 by Common Dreams

by Ralph Nader

Anthony Shadid, called the "most gifted foreign correspondent in a generation" by his then Washington Post colleague, Rajiv Chandrasekaran (author of the widely heralded book "Imperial Life in the Emerald City"), didn't really need a byline. For anyone who knew of his peerless, unique reports from the Middle East would read them and just know they were a Shadid special.
Alas, there will be no more Shadid reports and features from the streets, alleys, souks, homes, hospitals, workplaces and cultures of the Arab countries. For on an assignment from The New York Times in a dangerous, mountainous area of Syria last week, this humble, brilliant, nuanced, generous, honest, brave double-Pulitzer-Prize winner (with another one likely on the way) died from an apparent asthma attack together with severe allergic reactions and exhaustion.
Mr. Shadid, only 43, with by a wife and two children, never wanted to be a war correspondent embedded in the U.S. military invasions and attacks of these countries. Fluent in Arabic, he wanted to be free to find out what was going on in the Arab communities throughout the Middle East and communicate the truth to the American people and the world.
This son of Oklahoma by way of the University of Wisconsin Journalism School did just that, for more than 15 years in the tumultuous Arab world from North Africa to West Asia. As Rajiv Chandrasekaran wrote, "His coverage of the Middle East - from Iraq, Lebanon, Libya and beyond - was, simply, the best. He set the standard. If you cared about the region, if you really wanted to understand what was going on, you read Anthony. If you were in his presence, as I was - we were fellow correspondents and housemates in Baghdad - you watched his performances with the awe usually reserved for basketball stars and violin virtuosos."
The Pulitzer Board's encomium in 2004 cited Mr. Shadid for "his extraordinary ability to capture, at personal peril, the voices and emotions of Iraqis as their country was invaded, their leader toppled and their way of life upended."
He not only went into areas fraught with danger, he also paid the price. In 2002 while covering the Israeli assaults in the West Bank for the Boston Globe, he narrowly escaped death. His photographer and colleague, Michael Robinson Chavez described the scene, "We were in Ramallah. A shot rang out and a piercing scream echoed through the deserted streets. I saw a Palestinian helping a wounded man. It was Anthony. Israeli Defense Forces had shot him in the neck."

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How Far Can Russ Feingold Push Campaign Finance Reform?

2012-02-24T08:14:00.001-05:00

Published on Thursday, February 23, 2012 by The Guardian/UK

Let's hope the former Democratic senator's new job as Obama campaign co-chair means Super Pacs' days are numbered

by Amy Goodman

"The president is wrong." So says one of the newly appointed co-chairs of President Barack Obama's re-election campaign.Russ Feingold in 2010: an outspoken critic of the Citizens United ruling, the former senator has said the president is 'dancing with the devil' by accepting Super Pac support. (Photo: Morry Gash/AP)
Those four words recently headlined the website of the organization Progressives United, founded by former US Senator – and now Obama campaign adviser – Russ Feingold. He is referring to Obama's recent announcement that he will accept Super Pac funds for his re-election campaign. Feingold's statement goes:

"The president is wrong to embrace the corrupt corporate politics of Citizens United through the use of Super Pacs – organizations that raise unlimited amounts of money from corporations and the richest individuals, sometimes in total secrecy. It's not just bad policy; it's also dumb strategy."

And, he says, it's "dancing with the devil".
In 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt said to Congress:

"All contributions by corporations to any political committee or for any political purpose should be forbidden by law."

He signed a bill into law banning such contributions in 1907. In 2012, this 100-year history of campaign-finance controls died, thanks to five US supreme court justices who decided, in the 2010 Citizens United case, that corporations can use their money to express free speech, most notably in their efforts to influence federal elections.
After 18 years representing Wisconsin in the US Senate, Feingold lost his re-election to self-funded Republican multimillionaire and Tea Party favorite Ron Johnson. Since then, Feingold has been teaching law, started Progressives United and, while supporting the effort to recall Wisconsin's embattled Republican governor, Scott Walker, has steadfastly refused to run against him or for the US Senate seat being vacated by retiring Democratic Senator Herb Kohl.
Feingold was the sole member of the US Senate to vote against the USA Patriot Act. He was a fierce critic of the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program. Although Obama, as a senator, originally threatened to filibuster any legislation that would grant retroactive immunity to the telecom corporations involved with the wiretapping, he reversed himself on the eve of the Democratic Convention in 2008 and voted for the bill. Feingold remained adamantly opposed.
On the war in Afghanistan, Feingold told me:

"I was the first member of the Senate to call for a timeline to get us out of Afghanistan. Even before Obama was elected, when it was between (John) McCain and Obama, I said, 'Why are we talking about a surge?' … Sending our troops over there, spending billions and billions of dollars in Afghanistan makes no sense. And I think it was a mistake for the president to do the surge, and I think he's beginning to realize we need to get out of there."

Americans Abandon International Law

2012-02-24T08:12:00.002-05:00

After a decade of “war on terror” rhetoric – and President Obama’s failure to reverse many of George W. Bush’s extrajudicial policies – the U.S. public has come to accept that American “exceptionalism” puts the nation beyond the reach of international law, as Nat Parry explains.

By Nat Parry
Whether they realize it or not, Americans are increasingly embracing policies that undermine the international rule of law, with self-identified liberals, in particular, seemingly reversing their positions on matters such as the Guantanamo prison camp, extrajudicial assassinations and arbitrary detention.
While just six years agothe U.S. public ranked among the world’s most enthusiastic supporters of international law (falling just behind the Germans and the Chinese in global surveys), it now appears that vast majorities of Americans reject the applicability of international law when it comes to the actions of the U.S. government in the “global war on terror.”

President Barack Obama and his national security team monitor the Special Operations raid into Pakistan that killed Osama bin Laden. (White House photo by Pete Souza)

A recent Washington Post-ABC News poll, for example, found that 70 percent of the American public approves of the U.S. government’s decision to indefinitely keep the Guantanamo prison open, despite widespread international condemnation of this policy.
This figure includes 53 percent of self-identified liberal Democrats and 67 percent of moderate or conservative Democrats, “even though it emerged as a symbol of the post-Sept. 11 national security policies of President George W. Bush, which many liberals bitterly opposed,” noted the Washington Post.
In fact, the Post-ABC findings indicate an almost complete reversal of American attitudes on this subject across the political spectrum since the years of the Bush administration. The most pronounced difference has become noticeable in just the past couple years.
In a 2006 poll, for example, 63 percent of respondents said the United States should follow international conventions regarding Guantanamo Bay, while just 30 percent said the U.S. should not be bound by these obligations. The survey also found that Americans generally support giving international courts broad authority to judge U.S. compliance with treaties, with 70 percent rejecting the idea that the United States should receive exceptional treatment under such treaties.
A 2009 survey reconfirmed the strong public support in the U.S. for these principles, finding that 69 percent of Americans agreed with the statement: “Our nation should consistently follow international laws. It is wrong to violate international laws, just as it is wrong to violate laws within a country.” Only 29 percent chose the converse position, “If our government thinks it is not in our nation’s interest, it should not feel obliged to abide by international laws.”

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Onward-Marching Christian Soldiers

2012-02-24T08:10:00.003-05:00

February 23, 2012

From the Archive: In 2008, Rick Santorum declared, “Satan has his sights on the United States of America.” Though sounding odd to many, Santorum’s Satan talk is common among right-wing Christians who have intervened in U.S. politics before, like President Clinton’s impeachment, as Frederick Clarkson noted in this 1998 article.

By Frederick Clarkson (Originally published in 1998)
Most attorneys who ascend into the rarefied atmosphere of media celebrity-hood are either dashing courtroom warriors, like O.J. Simpson’s Johnnie Cochran, or inside-the-Beltway power types, like Bill Clinton’s Robert Bennett. The Monica Lewinsky case broke that mold with the unlikely emergence of the family’s Los Angeles-based lawyer, the garrulous William Ginsburg, as a five-talk-shows-per-Sunday phenomenon.
But perhaps even more unusual — and less examined — is the entrance of Paula Jones’s lawyer, John Whitehead, into the exclusive “Burden of Proof” club of TV-courtroom stardom. As the Paula Jones case merged with the Monica Lewinsky case in 1998, the rumpled Whitehead became a fixture as a talking head on Nightline, CNN and other network news shows.

Two priests during the Inquisition use torture to get a "heretic" to repent.

Yet, there has been only superficial attention to who Whitehead is and what he stands for — despite a lengthy public record of controversial remarks. During his legal-religious career, for instance, Whitehead has asserted that democracy is “heresy”; that the defining aspect of history is the “race war” between Christians and non-Christians; and that the harsh Calvinism of the “Puritan Fathers” is the standard to which temporal law should strive.
But, even as the TV networks ran up millions of dollars in expenses covering Monica and Paula, there was next to no attention to Whitehead’s religious-political goals. Those motives might normally have been expected to draw some interest, especially as the possibility grew that the Jones-Lewinsky controversy could lead to some form of impeachment proceedings against President Clinton (which it did later in 1998).
Still, more often than not, the Washington news media served only as a conveyor belt for P.R. boiler-plate. In a typical description, The New York Times called Whitehead’s Rutherford Institute “a kind of evangelical Christian civil liberties union” — which is how Rutherford describes itself in its publicity material. The P.R. handouts just leave out “kind of.”
Are Whitehead’s beliefs too white-hot to handle? Or are reporters of a kinder and gentler generation merely being considerate of people whose religious beliefs are deeply held? Or is that sensitivity a cover for reporters and editors too timid to investigate and fully report potentially controversial beliefs for fear of being labeled religious bigots?
But as Whitehead and his organization sponsored a legal action aimed at crippling a president, it would seem reasonable to trace the trajectory of Whitehead’s ideas and his career. In this case, there is a fairly straight-forward story about his theocratic ideological roots. The story can be found in Whitehead’s books and speeches, those of his close colleagues and founding documents of the Rutherford Institute.
The Mentor
The man who launched Whitehead’s career is Rousas John Rushdoony, perhaps the leading theocratic Christian thinker of the 20th Century. Rushdoony (who died in 2001 at the age of 84) headed the secretive Chalcedon Foundation in Vallecito, California, and was the founder of what is called the Christian Reconstructionist movement. “Reconstructionism” asserts that in order to pave the way for the “Kingdom of God,” the world must develop theocratic republics ruled by “Biblical law.”

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Need to Talk Sense to Netanyahu

2012-02-24T08:09:00.003-05:00

February 22, 2012

Recalling President George Washington’s farewell advice against tying the United States too closely to any foreign nation, Veterans for Peace urges President Obama to publicly warn Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu against attacking Iran with the expectation of U.S. military support.

MEMORANDUM FOR: The President
FROM: Veterans for Peace
SUBJECT: You Need to Talk Sense to Netanyahu
We members of Veterans for Peace have served in every war since WW II. We know war. And we know when it smells like war. It smells that way now, with drums beating loudly for attacking Iran.
Information offered by the media to “prove” Iran a threat bears an eerie resemblance to the “evidence” ginned up to “justify” war on Iraq — evidence later described by the Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, after a five-year committee investigation, as “unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent.”

George Washington, the first president of the United States whose Farewell Address in 1796 warned against entangling foreign alliances.

The good news this time around is that sane policy toward Israel and Iran can find support in a principled U.S. intelligence community, which has rebuffed attempts to force it to serve up doctored “evidence” to justify war. U.S. intelligence continues to adhere to the unanimous, “high-confidence” judgment, set forth in the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of November 2007 that Iran stopped working on a nuclear weapon in 2003.
(It may be of more than incidental interest to you that both President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have openly admitted that the 2007 NIE put the kibosh on U.S.-Israeli plans to strike Iran in 2008.)
We hope you have been adequately briefed on the findings of the November 2011 report on Iran by the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Those findings are consistent with the key judgments of the U.S. intelligence community expressed four years earlier. The IAEA report contained no evidence that Iran has yet decided to build nuclear weapons, despite widespread media hype to the contrary.
Needed: Presidential Action
We believe that you have the power to nip the current warmongering in the bud by taking essentially two key steps:
1-Announce publicly that you will not allow the United States to be drawn into war if Israel attacks Iran or provokes hostilities in some other way.
In threatening and planning such attacks, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his supporters are assuming you would have no option other than to commit U.S. forces in support of Israel. To assume automatic support from the world’s sole remaining superpower is a heady thing and an invitation to adventurism.
We are aware that you have dispatched emissary after emissary to ask the Israelis please not to start a war. We mean no offense to those messengers, but there is very little reason to believe that they are taken seriously.
We are convinced that only a strong public demurral from you personally would have much chance of disabusing Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders of the notion that they can expect full American support, no matter how hostilities with Iran begin.
The Risks of Silence
A public statement now could pre-empt a catastrophic war. Conversely, the Israeli leaders are likely to interpret unwillingness on your part to speak out clearly as a sign that you will find it politically impossible to deny Israel military support once it is engaged in hostilities with Iran.
What we find surprising (and the Israelis presumably find reassuring) is the nonchalance with which Official Washington and the media discuss the possible outbreak of war. From officials and pundits alike, the notion has gained currency that an attack on Iran is an acceptable option, and that the only remaining questions are if and when the Israelis will choose to attack.
Little heed is paid to the fact that, absent an immediate threat to Israel, such an attack would be a war of aggression as defined and condemned at the Nuremberg Tribunal.
Joint Chiefs Chairman Martin Dempsey’s anemic remark on Sunday that an Israeli attack on Iran would be “not prudent” is precisely the kind of understatement to give Netanyahu the impression that he essentially has carte blanche to start hostilities with Iran, anticipating a mere tap on the knuckles — if that — from Washington.
2-Announce to the people of the United States and the world that Iran presents no immediate threat to Israel, much less the U.S.

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We Need To Know Who Funds These Thinktank Lobbyists

2012-02-24T08:08:00.001-05:00

By George Monbiot

Source: The Guardian

Friday, February 24, 2012

Shocking, fascinating, entirely unsurprising: the leaked documents, if authentic, confirm what we suspected but could not prove. The Heartland Institute, which has helped lead the war against climate science in the United States, is funded among others by tobacco firms, fossil fuel companies and one of the billionaire Koch brothers.

It appears to have followed the script written by a consultant to the Republican party, Frank Luntz, in 2002. "Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate."

Luntz's technique was pioneered by the tobacco companies and the creationists: teach the controversy. In other words, insist that the question of whether cigarettes cause lung cancer, natural selection drives evolution, or burning fossil fuels causes climate change, is still wide open, and that both sides of the "controversy" should be taught in schools and thrashed out in the media.

The leaked documents appear to show that, courtesy of its multimillionaire donors, the institute has commissioned a global warming curriculum for schools which teaches that "whether humans are changing the climate is a major scientific controversy" and "whether CO₂ is a pollutant is controversial".

The institute has claimed it is "a genuinely independent source of research and commentary" and that "we do not take positions in order to appease or avoid losing support from individual donors". But the documents, if authentic, reveal that its attacks on climate science have been largely funded by a single anonymous donor and that "we are extinguishing primarily global warming projects in pace with declines in his giving".

The climate change deniers it funds have made similar claims to independence. For example, last year Fred Singer told a French website: "Of course I am not funded by the fossil fuel lobbies. It's a completely absurd invention." The documents suggest that the institute, funded among others by the coal company Murray Energy, the the oil company Marathon and the former Exxon lobbyist Randy Randol has been paying him $5,000 a month.

Robert Carter has claimed he "receives no research funding from special interest organisations". But the documents suggest that Heartland pays him $1,667 a month. Among the speakers at its conferences were two writers for the Telegraph (Christopher Booker and James Delingpole). The Telegraph group should now reveal whether and how much they were paid by the Heartland Institute.

It seems to be as clear an illustration as we have yet seen of the gulf between what such groups call themselves and what they really are. Invariably, organisations arguing for regulations to be removed, top taxes to be reduced and other such billionaire-friendly policies, call themselves free-market or conservative thinktanks. But according to David Frum, formerly a fellow at one such group – the American Enterprise Institute – they "increasingly function as public relations agencies". The message they send to their employees, he says, is "we don't pay you to think, we pay you to repeat".

The profits of polluting or reckless companies and banks and the vast personal fortunes of their beneficiaries are largely dependent on the regulations set by governments. This is why the "thinktanks" campaign for small government. If regulations robustly defend the public interest, the profits decline. If they are weak, the profits rise. Billionaires and big business buy influence to insulate themselves from democratic control. It seems to me that the so-called thinktanks are an important component of this public relations work.

Their funding, in most cases, is opaque. When I challenged some of the most prominent of such groups in the UK, only one would reveal its donors' identity. The others refused. Disgracefully, their lack of accountability does not prevent some of them from registering as charities and claiming tax exemption.

The Charity Commission in England and Wales – negligent, asleep at the wheel – is becoming a threat to democracy. These organisations are not trying to restore historic buildings or rescue distressed donkeys. They are seeking to effect political change in highly contentious areas. The minimum requirement for all such groups – whether they are on the left or on the right – is that they should disclose their major sources of income so that we know on whose behalf they speak. The commission is providing cover for multimillionaires and corporations who are funding undisclosed campaigns to enhance their own wealth under the guise of charity, and obliging the rest of us to pay for it through tax exemptions. If that's charity, a police siren is music.

The use of so-called thinktanks on both sides of the Atlantic seems to me to mirror the use of super-political action committees (superPACs) in the US. Since the supreme court removed the limits on how much one person could give to a political campaign, the billionaires have achieved almost total control over politics. An article last week on TomDispatch revealed that in 2011, just 196 donors provided nearly 80% of the money raised by superPACs.

The leading Republican candidates have all but abandoned the idea of mobilising popular support. Instead they use the huge funds they raise from billionaires to attack the credibility of their opponents through television ads. Yet more money is channelled through 501c4 groups – tax-exempt bodies supposedly promoting social welfare – which (unlike the superPACs) don't have to reveal the identity of their donors. TomDispatch notes that "serving as a secret slush fund for billionaires evidently now qualifies as social welfare."

The money wins. This is why Republicans swept up so many seats in the mid-term elections, and why the surviving Democrats were scarcely distinguishable from their rivals. It is why Obama, for all his promise, appears incapable of governing in the public interest. What can he tell the banks: "Do what I say or I won't take your money any more"? How can he tax the billionaires when they have their hands around his throat? Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

This is plutocracy, pure and simple. The battle for democracy is now a straight fight against the billionaires and corporations reshaping politics to suit their interests. The first task of all democrats must be to demand that any group, of any complexion, seeking to effect political change should reveal its funders.

Link

CHOMSKY: "Crisis and Hope: Theirs and Ours": (Must See Economic Analysis by the Most Important Intellectual of our Time

2012-02-23T18:23:00.001-05:00

Thursday, February 23, 2012

By Noam Chomsky

Source: The Real News Network

"Crisis and Hope: Theirs and Ours"

Speech at the University of Maryland, January 2012, approx. 67 Minutes

Q&A, approx. 38 Minutes

What Americans Don't Get About the Ravages of Addiction (plus two related articles).

2012-02-23T18:11:00.000-05:00

The Fix / By Maer Roshan

For all the daily hand wringing about celebrity overdoses and DUIs, there is little real reporting on the science of addiction, or how to make progress fighting it.

February 22, 2012 |

Photo Credit: Neno843 at Flickr.Want to get the latest on America's drug & rehab culture? Sign up for The Fix's newsletter here.

Just minutes after Whitney Houston was found dead in a bathtub at the Beverly Hilton last Saturday at the age of 48, a caravan of network trucks began slowly encircling the plush hotel, morbidly eager to document her untimely demise. Since then, it's been nearly impossible to turn on the TV or log on to the Web without witnessing a tribute to the singer, often including depressing video footage of her long, painful decline. Her memorial on Saturday had the pomp and pageantry of a state event—complete with dignitaries, crying onlookers and flags at half-mast.

But while speakers talked movingly about her battles, mention of the word 'addiction' was curiously scrubbed from the event.

It’s no surprise that the singer's death has struck such a chord in the country. Incredibly talented, beautiful and ambitious, Whitney Houston was a rare kind of legend who changed the face of American pop music. In her later life she also became an addict whose cruel struggle with the disease unfolded in full public view. That she lay dying for hours in a luxe bathroom suite while her bodyguards cooled their heels outside is a sad commentary on the state of modern celebrity. That it took less than 10 minutes for the press to begin broadcasting her death is an even more searing indictment of contemporary media culture.

Houston, of course, is not the only celebrity whose problems have received rapt press attention. Last month it was Demi Moore. The week before that it was Disney's Demi Lavato. Meanwhile, the weekly travails of Charlie Sheen and Lindsay Lohan have been breathless fodder for fleets of paparazzi. And for over a year before her death last year, fans of Amy Winehouse received daily updates of her ups and downs. One British tabloid even went so far as to embed a pack of paparazzi at her favorite pubs.

As a longtime editor at several magazines over the past two decades, I've admittedly been an active participant in this game—keenly aware that for ordinary readers grappling with the mundanities of daily life, stars offer a few rare moments of transcendence. But their intoxicating effect on the American public also gives them outsized power to shape public perception. In the 1980s, Rock Hudson and Magic Johnson forced the media to finally pay attention to AIDS only after it had already killed an army of Americans. Michael J. Fox's battle with Parkinson's helped bring invaluable attention and funding to the disease, while prompting a debate on stem cell research that promises to have profound effects on the treatment of other illnesses.

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Virgin Group Mogul Richard Branson Joins the Movement to End the War on Drugs

Some people might think that drug policy reform is a fringe issue. But reformers have won plenty of mainstream support, and achieved international victories.

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Why is the Obama Administration Suddenly Fixated on Stomping out Medical Pot?