Rearrange The World

Sandy Pope For Teamsters President

2011-10-07T22:29:00.014-04:00

While the news media focuses on the daily ups and downs of the Republican candidates vying to run for President of the United States in 2012, a different type of Presidential election kicked off this week.

Ballots were mailed out yesterday (October 6) to the 1.4 million members of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) labor union, and will be counted beginning on November 14. General President James Hoffa, in office for the last 12 years, is running for reelection, but is being challenged by reformer and democracy advocate Sandy Pope, currently serving as President of Local 805 in New York City. A Pope victory would be a victory for bottom-up democratic decision-making over the top-down autocratic rule exemplified by Hoffa, and would also put a woman in charge of the Teamsters for the first time in their history. Both of these symbols could help improve the image of the Teamsters, and of unions in general, in the eyes of the rest of the country.

For many of us, our image of the Teamsters union was formed by their controversial President in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Jimmy Hoffa, father of the current President. The McClellan Committee of the U.S. Senate held public hearings on allegations of corruption and dealings with organized crime by Hoffa and his predecessor, Dave Beck. John F. Kennedy, then a Democratic Senator from Massachusetts, was a member of the committee, and his brother Robert F. Kennedy was its chief counsel. After JFK was elected President in 1960, RFK continued investigating Hoffa and the Teamsters as Attorney General, eventually convicting Hoffa of jury tampering and fraud. Hoffa was released from federal prison in 1971 when Republican President Richard Nixon commuted his sentence; he disappeared in 1975 and is presumed to have been murdered, although his body has never been found.

Around that same time, groups of rank-and-file Teamsters who felt they had no voice in contracts being negotiated for them by top officials formed a reform group called Teamsters for a Democratic Union. TDU organized members across the country around a set of basic reforms aimed at making the officers more accountable to the membership and less prone to corruption. They also worked hard to rid the union of its connections to organized crime. One of TDU's major points was that the President should be directly elected by the members, rather than by delegates to a convention. The fact that Sandy Pope is today campaigning for the votes of those members is a direct result of TDU having won that democratic reform. TDU is an enthusiastic supporter of Pope's candidacy, and her view of unions being democratically run by its members is consistent with TDU's mission.

Sandy's belief in democratic unionism isn't limited to just the Teamsters. She has a long history of reaching out to members of other unions to share her vision and experience. In 2008 I attended a conference in Dearborn, Michigan sponsored by Labor Notes magazine. Sandy led a workshop I attended on contract negotiations, covering elements of the process from how the negotiating committee should act in front of management at formal sessions to how to rally the membership to support your negotiations. After the workshop was over, she took names and addresses of people who were interested in more resources, and then mailed each of us a package of articles and sample contract language. As a member of my engineering union's negotiating team, I had the opportunity to put some of Sandy's lessons into practice the following year as we successfully negotiated several significant improvements in one of our collective bargaining agreements. This willingness on her part to share what she's learned with members of other unions demonstrates her commitment to helping workers everywhere negotiate for better conditions, and having someone with that mindset leading the Teamsters would certainly have a positive impact on the state of organized labor in this country.

We'll have to wait until mid-November to see if Sandy succeeds in her election bid. In the meantime, you can help by sending her a donation. Current Teamster members can contribute to the campaign's General Fund, while nonmembers can contribute to the Legal and Accounting Fund, as I have done. In addition, if you know or come into contact with any Teamsters (e.g., your local UPS driver), encourage them to cast their vote for Sandy. Just as citizens around the country are demonstrating in favor of more participatory democracy - the right to participate in decisions that affect them - so should our brothers and sisters in the Teamsters demonstrate their support for greater internal democracy.

Republican Strategy Explained

2011-09-30T22:25:00.003-04:00

Have you noticed that the only consistent theme in Republican position statements appears to be opposition to whatever it is that President Obama proposes? Time and time again, whether the topic is healthcare, foreign policy, budget deficits, or unemployment, we see Republicans in Congress make their proposals, after which President Obama endorses some elements of those proposals (to the chagrin of many Democrats), only to see the Republicans reverse their positions and back away from their own proposals, for no apparent reason other than to distance themselves from the President.

This scene from the 1932 Marx Brothers movie "Horsefeathers" pretty well sums up this sophisticated Republican strategy, and may well have been its original inspiration:

Troy Davis, Rest In Peace

2011-09-21T23:50:00.008-04:00

Troy Davis (October 9, 1968 - September 21, 2011)

The state of Georgia proceeded with the execution of Troy Davis tonight; official time of death was declared to be 11:08 p.m. Eastern time. Death was by lethal injection.

The execution had been scheduled for 7:00, but was postponed while the U.S. Supreme Court reviewed a request for a stay of execution. At 10:43, according to Richard Kim's live blogging at The Nation, the Supreme Court issued a one-line statement denying the request to stop the execution. It was also reported that there were no dissents - not a single one of our nine Supreme Court justices chose to intervene in this case.

Joining the Supreme Court in its unwillingness to stop the execution of a potentially innocent person was President Barack Obama; his Press Secretary Jay Carney said "it is not appropriate" for the President to "weigh in on specific cases like this one", according to ABC.

I watched online as Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! reported live from outside the prison in Jackson, Georgia, interviewing NAACP President Benjamin Jealous as they both received news of the execution and of Davis' death.

Many people, in this country and around the world, tried to stop this madness. There are many compelling reasons to believe that Troy Davis was innocent of the crime for which he was just executed, which would mean not only that we just killed an innocent person but also that the real killer of off-duty police officer Mark MacPhail is still at large. Beyond the question of guilt or innocence, though, is the barbarity of this state-sponsored killing. Killing a murderer does not bring the murder victim back, and certainly does not demonstrate to the rest of us that killing people is wrong; it only increases the number of people being killed.

Sadly, there appear to be many people in this country who are immune to these arguments against the death penalty. Last year, when Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison ran unsuccessfully against Texas Governor Rick Perry in the Republican primary, her campaign considered making Perry's zeal for executions an issue to use against him. However, as reported by Salon, when her campaign asked a focus group of likely Republican primary voters about the possibility that Perry had ordered the execution of innocent people who were wrongfully convicted, they found that it didn't bother them at all. "It takes balls to execute an innocent man", said one registered Republican.

If that's our new national slogan, forgive me if I don't join people like that in chants of "USA!" tonight.

Ten Years of Living in a "Homeland"

2011-09-10T23:32:00.028-04:00

"Videogames of the tower's fall

Homeland Security could kill us all"

- Green Day, "21st Century Breakdown"

For the last ten years, we've been told by government officials and the media that we're living in a "homeland". We're constantly reminded that the horrific attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon buildings on September 11, 2001 were attacks on our "homeland", and that our Homeland Security officials are working vigilantly to protect us from further attacks.

Before 2001, however, "homeland" was a term that was rarely, if ever, used to describe the US. We spoke of living in a country, nation, or republic, not a homeland. The US Constitution states that our goals are to "form a more perfect Union", "insure domestic Tranquility", and "provide for the common defense"; there's nothing in there about "securing the homeland". In fact, for many of us, the term "homeland" sounds uncomfortably similar to "fatherland" ("Vaterland" in German), a term that stirs up images of violent militaristic nationalism and fascism from the first and second World Wars.

So how did the United States of America become a Homeland?

One of the first official uses of the term, which received little public notice at the time, appeared in a series of reports by a bipartisan governmental commission. The US Commission on National Security/21st Century was created in 1998 under Democratic President Bill Clinton to perform a review of national security policies and strategies as we entered the 21st century. The commission was co-chaired by former Democratic Senator Gary Hart and former Republican Senator Warren Rudman, and included former Republican House Speaker (and 2012 Presidential candidate) Newt Gingrich, former CEO of Lockheed Martin (and its predecessor Martin Marietta) Norm Augustine, and Leslie Gelb, head of the Defense Department study group on the history of US involvement in Vietnam whose report became known as the "Pentagon Papers" after being leaked to newspapers by Daniel Ellsberg. The Hart-Rudman Commission's final report, released in February 2001 (seven months before the 9/11 attacks) was full of references to our "homeland"; the first major section was titled "Securing the National Homeland", there were warnings that attacks upon our homeland were becoming increasingly likely, and its recommendations called for several changes in governmental organization, including creation of an Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Security as well as a National Homeland Security Agency.

The report seemed to languish under the just-inaugurated Republican administration of President George W. Bush, until the 9/11 attacks seemed to make the report more relevant. Within days, President Bush announced the creation of a new Office of Homeland Security, and use of this new term spread rapidly in the media. A little over a year later, in November 2002, Congress created a new Cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security, transferring existing organizations such as the Coast Guard, INS, Secret Service, TSA, and FEMA from other Executive Branch departments.

All of this begs the question: if the creation of a new Department of Homeland Security was necessary for the defense of the United States against attacks, then what is the purpose of the Department of Defense? Shouldn't an organization called "Department of Defense" be responsible for the defense of the homeland?

Unfortunately, that department's activities are probably better described by its former name, the War Department, as it was known from 1789 through 1947. After the end of World War II in 1945, the US public was weary of being at war, and so eliminating our Department of War and replacing it with a benign-sounding Department of Defense probably seemed like a popular move. The new name was also in line with the developing Cold War mindset, in which the Soviet Union was cast in the role of a belligerent warmonger while the United States was portrayed as only using its military for defense. In reality, the history of US military actions since World War II seem to have more to do with a projection of power, and protection of US business interests, beyond our borders than with an actual defense of those borders. Our "Defense" department invaded the Dominican Republic in 1965, Cambodia in 1970, Grenada in 1983, Panama in 1989, Afghanistan in 2001, and Iraq in 2003, in addition to sending ground troops, bombers, or both to Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Lebanon, the former Yugoslavia, Haiti, and Libya, among other places.

Given the Defense Department's preoccupation with military adventurism abroad, perhaps there was a need for a new department to focus on defending the United States, but please, let's use a different name. "Homeland" seems to have been deliberately picked to stoke the public's feelings of nationalism, hatred of foreigners, and willingness to do almost anything in order to defend our "home". Use of the term "Homeland" has probably made it easier for the government to chip away at our civil liberties, increasing the scope of activities such as wiretapping and electronic eavesdropping (signals intelligence, or SIGINT), intrusive body searches and other invasions of privacy, and indefinite detainment without being charged. In short, the more we talk about securing a homeland, the more we move towards living in a national security state rather than a free and open democracy. As Benjamin Franklin wrote, "those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

After ten years of talking about securing a "homeland", let's drop the hyperbolic language and get back to just providing "for the common defense", as it says in the Constitution. While we're at it, why not set up a new Department of Domestic Tranquility?

Capital Goes On Strike

2011-08-06T11:25:00.015-04:00

For the first time in history, the creditworthiness of the United States Treasury was downgraded yesterday. Standard & Poor's dropped its AAA rating of US debt down a notch, to AA+.

During the last few weeks' arguments over negotiating a deal to increase the debt limit, both the Obama administration and members of Congress warned that a bill needed to be passed before hitting the debt ceiling on August 2 in order to avoid a credit downgrade. Well, they got a deal, it was signed into law on August 2, but our credit has been downgraded anyway.

Far from being an unprecedented or unexplainable move by a jittery rating agency, this instead seems to be part of a pattern of actions by finance capital to sabotage the US economy.

Corporations have large amounts of cash reserves - nearly $2 trillion, according to some estimates - but rather than using that cash to hire more employees, they're either using it to buy back their own stock (to pump up the price) or just sitting on it. Similarly, banks have nearly $1 trillion in cash, but they're reluctant to actually lend it to potential home buyers or startup businesses.

Just as workers use the withholding of their labor (a labor strike) to change unfavorable conditions, the financial industry is withholding its capital to change what they perceive as unfavorable conditions. We appear to be in the grip of a capital strike.

U.S. corporations have engaged in this sort of behavior before, sometimes with the cooperation of the U.S. government, to undermine social democratic governments in other countries. During the 1970s, Chile under President Salvador Allende and Jamaica under Prime Minister Michael Manley were both victims of capital strikes by U.S. companies as well as local businesses. Allende was overthrown in 1973 by a U.S.-backed military coup, while Manley's party was merely voted out of office in 1980, but in both cases capital began to flow freely once again under new conservative governments.

Not that President Barack Obama should be mistaken for a social democrat; Obama's policies pale in comparison to the wide-ranging reforms of Allende and Manley. Moreover, Obama did nothing to stop the overthrow of elected President Manuel Zelaya in Honduras, where business interests welcomed the coup. Nevertheless, it appears that even the possibility of an occasional finger-wagging or public shaming from a Democratic President is more than our financial industry is willing to tolerate.

President Obama needs to stop worrying about being accused of "fomenting class warfare" if he targets wealthy individuals or corporations. The class war is already underway, instigated by the wealthy against the rest of us; yesterday's credit downgrade should be seen as a declaration of war. It's time for President Obama to be clear about what's happening, and stop trying to appease the markets, because that's clearly not working.

The United States can either return to the democratic rule of one person, one vote, or we can continue on the current path towards an oligarchy of one dollar, one vote.

Which side are you on?

"Battle In Seattle" Governor Approved As Ambassador To China

2011-07-28T23:25:00.005-04:00

The nightly news has given us the impression that Congress has been unable to accomplish anything for weeks as they argue over whether or not to raise the debt ceiling before August 2. But yesterday, July 27, the Senate confirmed Commerce Secretary Gary Locke to be the next U.S. Ambassador to China.

Gary Locke, a Democrat, was Governor of Washington when Seattle hosted the 1999 World Trade Organization (WTO) conference, which famously drew tens of thousands of protesters opposed to the WTO's corporate agenda. As dramatized in the 2007 film Battle In Seattle, Governor Locke called out the National Guard to help the Seattle police clear protesters off the streets of Seattle so as not to tarnish his pro-business image.

It's bad enough that President Obama picked Locke to be his Secretary of Commerce, but now he's being sent to represent U.S. interests in China. Presumably his responsibilities will include keeping the shelves of our Wal-Mart stores stocked with products made by Chinese sweatshop labor, as well as convincing the Chinese government to continue funding our federal debt - assuming, of course, that Congress agrees to authorize more of that debt.

In honor of Locke's promotion, here's the classic 10cc song "Rubber Bullets" from 1973, set to video of protests at a G20 meeting. Hey, maybe Ambassador Locke can advise the Chinese government on crowd control methods!

Republicans To US: If You Don't Cut Social Security & Medicare, We'll Kill This Dog

2011-07-26T19:52:00.013-04:00

Well, actually, what they're threatening to do is refuse to increase the debt ceiling, essentially forcing the federal government to shut down, which is about as insane as shooting a dog (thanks to National Lampoon for this classic magazine cover).

I'm not really a government economist, and I don't play one on TV, but let me see if I understand the sequence of events that has led us to the brink of this abyss.

By the end of the administration of President Bill Clinton (D), the federal budget actually had a surplus. Then President George W. Bush (R) took over, and federal budgets started running deficits again. First came tax cuts for the rich, which reduced the amount of money coming in. Then came invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, resulting in increased spending. The Medicare prescription drug plan, which obligates the federal government to pay whatever prices are set by pharmaceutical companies for seniors' prescriptions, has also increased spending.

Now, however, that there's a Democratic President, the Republicans in Congress have suddenly declared that deficit spending must be stopped immediately. The logical approach would be to undo the Bush-era policies that contributed to the national debt, right? Raise tax rates on wealthy individuals and corporations to where they were ten years ago, bring the troops home from Afghanistan and Iraq, and allow Medicare to negotiate lower prices on prescription drugs as is done in most other countries. That would be the logical approach.

Logic, however, seems to be in short supply in DC these days. Instead, Republicans in Congress are demanding deep cuts, or even a dismantling, of Social Security and Medicare. Somehow, they want us to pay for ten years of corporate tax breaks, military operations, and subsidies to for-profit drug companies by cutting back on our parents' and grandparents' income and making it more expensive for them to go to the doctor or hospital.

Never mind killing the dog in the above photo; the Republicans are trying to kill Grandma.

Bobby Kennedy's Inspiring Vision

2011-06-04T16:37:00.017-04:00

Last summer, during a vacation drive through New England, I convinced my family to make a stop at the JFK Presidential Library in Boston. While browsing through the museum shop, I came across a pile of paperback copies of a fascinating book by JFK's brother Bobby. These were not newly published versions of the book, but leftover copies printed during his 1968 Presidential campaign (in fact, the library's website still has copies available for sale). I bought a copy, initially as a collector's item, but having now read it several times, I'm impressed by its high-minded vision as well as its continuing relevance today.

"To Seek A Newer World" was not intended to be a campaign book. When it was first published in November 1967, Bobby Kennedy was not a Presidential contender, only a United States Senator from New York, where I lived at the time. The book is essentially a series of essays and excerpts from speeches covering his Senate term, to which he had been elected in 1964. Although some of his positions, particularly on the U.S. war in Vietnam, put him at odds with President Lyndon Johnson, everyone expected Johnson to seek re-election in 1968, and Bobby was at first unwilling to challenge his fellow Democrat in the primaries. It took another Democratic Senator, Gene McCarthy of Minnesota, to mount a campaign and demonstrate Johnson's vulnerability in the early primaries. By March of 1968, Bobby changed his mind and declared his own candidacy for the Presidency. On March 31, President Johnson announced on TV that he was dropping out of the election, suddenly making it a very real possibility that Senator Kennedy might be the Democratic candidate in the November general election. "To Seek A Newer World" was quickly updated with some more recent Kennedy statements on Vietnam, as well as the text of his campaign announcement, and rushed out as a "Special Campaign Edition" discount paperback. Sadly, that campaign was cut short less than three months after it began. On June 4, 1968 (43 years ago today), Kennedy won the California and South Dakota Democratic primaries. Moments after finishing his victory speech in Los Angeles, he was hit by gunfire, fell into a coma, and died on June 6. Vice President Hubert Humphrey became the Democratic candidate at the party's August convention, but his earlier reputation as a champion of civil rights and desegregation had by then been irreparably tarnished by his unquestioning support of Johnson's Vietnam War policies, and he was defeated in November by Republican Richard Nixon.

Reading "To Seek A Newer World" today provides some insight into how the course of history, and of the world, might have been different had Bobby lived to contest the election with Nixon.

The chapter on America's cities contains some frank discussion of past mistakes in the areas of public housing and urban renewal. "We rarely asked", wrote Kennedy, "those whose homes we leveled whether they liked the plan, and we thought too little about what would become of them after their homes were gone." Kennedy pointed to his own efforts in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn, NYC as an alternative approach, where residents of the community held seats on the boards of the organizations making development decisions.

Bobby also devoted a chapter to the Alliance for Progress, the comprehensive program for Latin America that was a high point of his brother John's Presidency. After JFK's 1963 assassination, his successor Johnson did not give the Alliance a high priority, and Johnson's covert support of the Brazilian military's overthrow of the democratically elected Goulart administration in 1964, as well as the overt invasion by the U.S. Marines of the Dominican Republic in 1965, seemed to run counter to the Alliance's aims. RFK, however, displayed admirable insight into the root causes of the region's situation. Kennedy wrote empathetically of Latin Americans' "feeling with regard to foreign owners in the extractive industries - oil, minerals, metals - which are also criticized as depleting resources essential to their future. Few Latin Americans can fail to be sensitive to their history, to the centuries in which their mineral wealth was taken by a small privileged minority, to be sent abroad to the coffers of Spanish kings and then to the banks of Europe." This is precisely the theme of Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano's Open Veins of Latin America, the book which Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez gave to U.S. President Barack Obama in April 2009 in order to help Obama understand the region. Galeano first published his book in 1971, yet here was a U.S. Senator making some of the same points three years earlier.

Kennedy also stressed that the Alliance for Progress had always been underfunded. In a footnote, he pointed out that even if the current annual Alliance spending for all of Latin America were to be doubled, that total amount of money would be equal to the cost of what the U.S. was then spending for only two weeks' worth of the Vietnam war. Think about that - an amount of money that could have been spent for constructive purposes for all of Latin America for a year was instead being squandered in only two weeks for bombing, burning, and strafing a single country in Southeast Asia. Even when writing about Latin America, Bobby couldn't help bringing the subject back to the disastrous war being waged in Vietnam.

At several points in this book, Bobby complained about stubbornness and a lack of leadership: "there is no courage or discipline involved in following failure down the road to disaster"; "the courage to admit a mistake and retreat is not a universal characteristic of national leaders". He probably had then-President Johnson in mind when he wrote these words, but they could equally be applied to many of our Presidents since then.

Kennedy even reached back to a Shakespeare play to point out that governments frequently use wars to distract the people from problems at home. He quotes a line from Henry IV in which the king advises his son to "busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels". Wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya seem to be doing a great job of "busying giddy minds" these days, leaving less time for serious debate about our domestic economy.

The book ends with a more hopeful and upbeat Postscript, containing perhaps one of Bobby's most quoted lines: "Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance."

Bullets may have stopped Senator Kennedy's quest for the Presidency, as well as his too-short life, but they could not stop the "ripples of hope" he set into motion. Go back, as I did, and revisit Robert F. Kennedy's remarkable writings; you'll find yourself inspired by his vision of hope for the future, and moved by his ripples.

The Bin Laden Trial That Wasn't

2011-05-14T20:38:00.022-04:00

I realize this probably puts me in the minority, but I am not rejoicing over the May 1 death of Osama bin Laden. President Obama claimed that "justice has been done" with the execution of bin Laden by special forces, but I'm not so sure. I think that justice would have been better served by capturing bin Laden alive and putting him on trial.

It's not as if apprehending an evil mass murderer and putting him on trial would have been unprecedented, with all sorts of insurmountable logistical problems. It's actually been done before. For example, 50 years ago, the entire world watched as former SS officer Adolf Eichmann was put on trial in Israel for his role in organizing mass deportations of Jews to death camps in German-occupied Eastern Europe during World War II.

After Israeli intelligence found Eichmann living under an assumed identity in Argentina, agents from Mossad and Shin Bet kidnapped him and brought him back to Israel. The trial began in April 1961, with Eichmann in a booth made of bulletproof glass to protect him from possible attacks. The trial was broadcast live, so that people around the world could hear the prosecution's case as well as the former high-ranking Nazi's efforts to defend himself. The three-judge panel found Eichmann guilty on all counts, and sentenced him to death; Eichmann was hanged in 1962.

Wasn't that a better way to bring this murderer to "justice" than if the Mossad agents had just executed Eichmann on the spot in Argentina?

Another effort to bring a mass murderer to trial ultimately failed, to the disappointment of many, when Augusto Pinochet died of natural causes in 2006. Pinochet led a military overthrow of the democratically-elected government of his native Chile in 1973. On September 11 of that year (the same date on which New York and Washington would later be attacked in 2001), the Chilean military bombed and strafed La Moneda, their equivalent of the White House, as part of their coup. Thousands of citizens were rounded up, tortured, and killed, as was vividly portrayed in Costa-Gavras' 1982 film Missing. When Pinochet finally yielded power in 1990, he ensured that an amnesty law was in place to shield him from future prosecution, but the Chilean justice system was in the process of removing that amnesty and bringing Pinochet to trial for his crimes when he died. The families of his victims felt robbed of their chance to see the man who ordered the deaths of their loved ones brought to justice.

Sadly, the families of the victims of the September 11, 2001 attacks have also been robbed of a chance to see Osama bin Laden brought to trial. Instead, we have the United States setting an example that vigilante justice and extrajudicial killings are acceptable.

I'm deeply disappointed that President Obama, a former lecturer in constitutional law, doesn't see this difference.

I Dreamed I Saw Phil Ochs Last Night

2011-05-07T10:14:00.010-04:00

My wife and I went to see a one-night-only showing of a new documentary about the 1960s folk singer Phil Ochs called "There But For Fortune" (www.philochsthemovie.com). The DVD is scheduled for a July 19 release, and I highly recommend purchasing this film.

Phil Ochs wrote topical songs, often using news articles from The New York Times or Newsweek for inspiration. The title of his first album, "All The News That's Fit To Sing", was a pun on the Times' debatable claim to contain "all the news that's fit to print". In some ways, Ochs was a musical version of Mort Sahl, who used newspaper articles as his jumping-off point for standup comedy routines (or, to update the analogy, think of Jon Stewart on "The Daily Show"). He was also an active participant in the movements to educate the public about those events, including the civil rights movement and U.S. military intervention in Vietnam, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic. He performed at the street demonstrations outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and became angered and disillusioned by the violent reaction against those protests by the police, ordered by Democratic Mayor Richard Daley and endorsed by Democratic Presidential nominee Hubert Humphrey. Phil's next album cover featured a tombstone giving his place and date of death as Chicago, 1968.

The movie offers a wealth of Phil's musical performances, taken from TV shows as well as film from rallies, protests, and marches. Also featured are interviews with Joan Baez and other musicians. Tom Hayden, cofounder of Students for a Democratic Society and one of the "Chicago Eight" indicted by the Nixon administration for "conspiracy to riot" at the 1968 Democratic convention, puts Phil's politics in perspective with the times. Billy Bragg, the British singer/songwriter who wrote new lyrics for the tune "Joe Hill" as "I Dreamed I Saw Phil Ochs Last Night", is also interviewed in the film.

The film is an inspiring tribute to an overlooked artist who needs to be remembered, because his lyrics, sense of irony, and commitment to making this country live up to its claimed ideals are sadly needed as much today as they were during the turbulent decade of the 1960s.

Here's the official trailer for the movie:

May Day Greetings 2011

2011-05-01T11:02:00.005-04:00

May 1, or May Day, is recognized by many around the world as Labor Day, in honor of the large demonstrations held by workers in Chicago in May 1886 for the 8-hour day. Many symbols of the labor movement, including the May Day holiday and songs such as "The Internationale", were hijacked by the Soviet Union and other countries whose forms of government were more correctly described as "bureaucratic collectivist" than "worker-controlled".

British musician Billy Bragg updated the lyrics to "The Internationale" in 1990; here's a video with his recording set to images of workers' struggles throughout the years. Happy May Day!

Armistice Day Message from Veterans for Peace

2010-11-10T23:23:00.002-05:00

In honor of Veterans' Day, I am reprinting here the 2010 "Armistice Day Message" from the Veterans for Peace website:

November 11 is a cause for mixed emotions among those former members of the military who wish to permanently halt the horror of war.

A holiday in our name is indeed an honor, as was our service itself, but “Armistice” somehow still sounds more suitable. That word refers to the end of a conflict, the end of the killing, the maiming, the destruction, the inhumanity, the erosion of civilized personal behaviors that have taken centuries to mold. While “Armistice” does not connote lasting peace, at least it does connote a chance for societies to grasp hold of themselves and, if able, to pull back from the abyss.

Veterans For Peace, while grateful for the parades recognizing our duty and the ultimate sacrifice of our fallen comrades, would prefer a time of reexamination of the jaded justifications and obscene outcomes of the military causes we served. All too frequently those justifications have been morally insufficient to vindicate the malevolent international conflicts to which they gave such ignoble birth.

For these reasons Veterans For Peace gratefully acknowledges the heartfelt recognition which our nation solemnly offers us today. But we fervently urge that tomorrow our great nation devote its equally heartfelt and solemn attention and talents to the cessation of existing wars and to the prevention of similar calamities in the decades to come.

Kurt Vonnegut, the internationally acclaimed author from our country and a POW in Dresden during the Allied firebombing of that city in WWII, gives us something to think about on this day of remembrance.

"…November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy all the people of all the nations which fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I've talked to old men who were on the battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.

Armistice Day has become Veteran's Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veteran's Day is not…Armistice Day I will keep. I don't want to throw away any sacred things."

The Wellstone Files

2010-10-31T18:29:00.001-04:00

Senator Paul Wellstone, the progressive Democratic Senator from Minnesota, tragically died in a plane crash eight years ago this month, just before Election Day, as he was running for a third term. Minnesota Public Radio has obtained hundreds of pages from the FBI's file on Wellstone, beginning when he participated in protests against the Vietnam War in the early 1970s. The files go right up to the plane crash and its aftermath, as the FBI investigated tips indicating the crash was a result of sabotage.

Read the full story here: The Wellstone Files | Minnesota Public Radio News

Coal Baron Fuels Toomey's Senate Race

2010-10-17T11:33:00.012-04:00

Pat Toomey, the Republican running for the open Senate seat from Pennsylvania currently held by retiring Republican-turned-Democrat Arlen Specter (?-PA), says on his website that "Washington is threatening new and heavy costs and burdens on businesses", and that government instead should be "cutting taxes and decreasing regulation." This has apparently attracted the interest, and money, of a multimillionaire coal executive who normally confines his political activity to West Virginia.

Don Blankenship is the Chairman and CEO of Massey Energy, a job which paid him $17.8 million in 2009. Massey was in the news this past April when an explosion at their Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia killed 29 mine workers. Although the investigation is still ongoing, it appears that high levels of methane gas inside the mine may have led to the explosion. The federal Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) had repeatedly fined Massey for violating safety regulations, including those requiring proper ventilation to prevent the buildup of methane. Presumably these are among those pesky regulations that Toomey wants to decrease if he's elected to the Senate.

According to the Federal Election Commission website, Blankenship gave a personal contribution of $2,000 to Toomey's campaign in September 2009. He is also a director of the National Mining Association, whose two political action committees COALPAC and MINEPAC have also contributed to Toomey.

Blankenship has a history of involvement in his native West Virginian politics. In 2004 he spent $3 million to help defeat state Supreme Court justice Warren McGraw. He was photographed vacationing on the French Riviera with another state judge, Elliot "Spike" Maynard, who later voted to set aside a $76 million judgement against Massey Energy. Having lost his re-election to the court, Maynard is running this year for Congress against Democratic Rep. Nick Rahall. Blankenship, of course, is listed among Maynard's contributors.

Blankenship's newfound interest in Pennsylvania campaigns may have something to do with Massey Energy's expansion into the state. In May 2010, Massey got permission to buy the Mathies coal mine near Pittsburgh, which is now the first Massey-owned mine in Pennsylvania. Given Massey's record of safety and health violations, many people living near the Mathies mine are concerned about this takeover.

Blankenship claims he cares about the safety of coal miners, as well as creating more mining jobs. If that's so, then you would expect the coal miners to follow his political priorities. However, the United Mine Workers of America labor union, through its PAC, has contributed not to Toomey but to Joe Sestak, the Democratic House representative from the Philadelphia suburbs who defeated Specter in the primary. It seems that the mine workers know that Sestak is more likely to be on their side than Blankenship's friend Toomey.

Hopefully, when Pennsylvania voters go to the polls on November 2, they will remember the song "Which Side Are You On?", written by the wife of a UMW coal miner in Kentucky, and vote against the candidate funded by a coal CEO who profits while his employees are killed on the job.

Coexist

2010-09-10T21:42:00.002-04:00

In memory of those who lost their lives on September 11, 2001, as well as all people who have lost their lives since then in wars, bombings, and other acts of senseless violence.

Keep The Trains A-Rollin'

2010-08-24T14:20:00.007-04:00

This train's got the disappearing railroad blues.

- "City of New Orleans", by Steve Goodman

Power outages along Amtrak's Northeast Corridor this morning caused delays and cancellations, not only for Amtrak trains but also for trains operated by regional agencies NJT (New Jersey Transit), SEPTA (Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority), and MARC (Maryland Area Regional Commuter) which use Amtrak's tracks and power lines.

The reaction of most people in the New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington metropolitan areas to this news was probably, "what, again?". Entering "Amtrak power outage" or "Amtrak signal problems" into your search engine will give you an idea of how often this seems to happen.

Unfortunately, each time an incident like this occurs, it reinforces the idea that train travel is unreliable, and makes people more likely to use their cars. "Better pull your car out of the garage if you need to get to work on time", chirped one local TV newscaster this morning.

With the growing recognition that we, as a country, need to break our oil addiction, we need to find ways to encourage more, not less, train travel. Our overconsumption of oil, fueled in part by daily reliance on the personal automobile for commuting to work, has given us the Deepwater Horizon disaster (killing 11 workers and ruining the Gulf coast ecosystems), global warming, and military operations aimed at ensuring the steady flow of petroleum from the Arabian peninsula and the Persian Gulf. Encouraging more people to ride the train to work is an essential part of changing our energy use, but this can only work if the trains actually run on time. For this reason, funding for mass transit must be part of the equation whenever bills dealing with energy or climate change are debated; the issues are inextricably linked.

Government funding was used to build the interstate highways (beginning under the Republican Eisenhower administration in the 1950s), and continues to subsidize travel by car and plane. Government funding is now needed for capital improvements to our existing rail lines, as well as to build new lines, to give people more reasons to leave their cars in the garage each day and take the train to work.

Hiroshima - The Original Ground Zero

2010-08-05T23:10:00.021-04:00

Sixty-five years ago, on August 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima in Japan. Three days later, on August 9, our military dropped another atomic bomb on the city of Nagasaki. These were the first, and so far the only, uses of nuclear weapons in attacks against people.

The official story promulgated in the U.S. is that these two A-bomb attacks were necessary to force a recalcitrant Japanese government to finally surrender and bring an end to World War II; without them, a high-casualty land invasion would have been necessary. My father, an Army Corporal serving in the Pacific at the time, was one of the soldiers being prepared for this invasion force, and was relieved that this use of atomic weapons had cancelled that invasion and probably saved his life.

Others, however, were horrified by these new weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and called on governments to limit their use and stockpiling. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who had led the Manhattan Project scientists in developing these A-bombs, spoke out publicly against starting a nuclear arms race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, which led to the loss of his security clearance and thus his ability to continue any government employment. U.S. physicist Albert Einstein and British philosopher Bertrand Russell coauthored a manifesto in 1955 which stated, in part: "In view of the fact that in any future world war nuclear weapons will certainly be employed, and that such weapons threaten the continued existence of mankind, we urge the governments of the world to realize, and to acknowledge publicly, that their purpose cannot be furthered by a world war, and we urge them, consequently, to find peaceful means for the settlement of all matters of dispute between them." In 1957, Eleanor Roosevelt, Dr. Benjamin Spock (author of "Baby and Child Care"), Dr. Albert Schweitzer, Norman Cousins and others formed The Committee For A SANE Nuclear Policy.

Governments eventually began to listen. On August 5, 1963 - the day before the 18-year anniversary of the first atomic bomb attack - the governments of the United States, Soviet Union, and United Kingdom signed the Partial Test Ban Treaty, which limited testing of nuclear weapons to underground tests, out of rising public concerns over radioactive fallout from testing on the ground, in the atmosphere, or in the Pacific Ocean. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, signed in 1968, was intended to prevent non-nuclear countries from developing or acquiring these weapons, although the refusal of India, Pakistan, and Israel to sign the treaty and their development of their own nuclear arsenals has weakened the treaty, as has the glacial pace of the promised disarmament by the established nuclear "club". The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), completed in 1996, was signed by President Clinton but failed ratification in the U.S. Senate.

The time may be right, though, for a new round of efforts to abolish nuclear weapons once and for all. For the first time, the U.S. government sent an official representative (John Roos, our Ambassador to Japan) to the annual August 6 memorial service at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park near Ground Zero of the 1945 detonation. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was also there, along with representatives of nuclear powers Britain and France. Peace groups, including the Quakers' Friends Committee on National Legislation, are recommending we contact our Senators to push for ratification of the CTBT as well as the new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) signed in April by U.S. President Obama and Russian President Medvedev.

The fact that this would put peace advocates on the same side of this issue as Henry Kissinger, who has been preaching nuclear abolition since 2007, should not deter us. Military hawks and their armchair cheerleaders initially welcomed atomic/nuclear bombs as the epitome of efficiency; they meant that a city could now be destroyed by a single bomber dropping a single bomb, rather than the multiple bombers dropping hundreds of incendiary bombs it took to destroy Dresden and Tokyo during World War II. However, they soon grew frustrated as political leaders refused to authorize the use of nuclear weapons in Korea and Vietnam; what's the use of having such a great weapon, they grumbled, if we're not allowed to use it? Kissinger is probably just continuing his practice of realpolitik, deciding that if the U.S. and its allies can never actually use the darned things, we might as well just ban them forever.

This may be the first time in my life that I've ever agreed with Henry Kissinger on anything.

Arizona's "He Don't Look Right To Me" Law

2010-07-28T21:51:00.015-04:00

There's one in the spotlight, he don't look right to me,

Get him up against the wall!

- "In The Flesh", Pink Floyd

Arizona's Senate Bill (SB) 1070, the "Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act", was scheduled to go into effect tomorrow, July 29. Although a federal judge issued a last-minute temporary injunction blocking key portions of the bill, including those requiring police to check the U.S. citizenship status of anyone they suspected of being in the country illegally, other portions of the bill will still become law tomorrow, and further judicial action could lift the injunction. Moreover, the judge apparently didn't question the constitutionality, let alone the morality, of asking some people, but not others, for ID based on their appearance; the judicial proceedings appear to be more of a pissing contest between state and federal governments than a real debate about human rights.

SB 1070 is usually referred to as an "immigration law", but that's misleading. It's really an identification law, intended to permit authorities to categorize people based on their nationality or ethnic background. While allegedly passed out of frustration and alarm over "illegal immigration", in practice the law would most certainly have been used more against some immigrants than others. For example, chances are that the au pair from Ireland or the college student from Sweden who overstayed their visas would not have been forced to produce their identification papers. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of neighboring California, whose still-thick accent from his native Austria ought to make passing police officers wonder about his citizenship status, would also probably be spared from producing ID on the spot. The Arizona law was clearly targeted against the brown-skinned Hispanics who are imagined to be pouring over Arizona's southern border from Mexico, Central America, and South America. What's more disturbing than the specific mechanics of the law is the motivation behind it.

Is it merely coincidence that this law was drafted and passed during the term of this country's first non-white President? The news is frequently full of all-white protest groups who clearly hate the fact that Barack Obama is President, question whether he was actually born in the United States ("papers please, Mr. President"), and insist that they want "their" country back, presumably taking it back from those people in Washington who don't look the same as they do.

It's also interesting to note that this law was passed in Arizona, which as a territory during the Civil War requested, and was granted, membership in the Confederate States of America and swore their allegiance to CSA President Jefferson Davis. Back in the good ole days of the Confederacy, you didn't need to rely on papers to determine a person's status, other than to find out which white person legally owned a particular black slave.

Going even further back in history, the Arizona territory was originally formed out of land taken by the U.S. military from Mexico by force, in the Mexican-American War (which, interestingly, Abraham Lincoln opposed as a member of Congress). Arizona is also home to many native Americans, who might have been better off if they had taken the SB 1070 approach to illegal immigration when the first ships arrived from Europe.

When I was in the 12th grade, my high school German class took a trip to Munich, in what was then called West Germany. We took a train to Salzburg, Austria, and as we approached the border between the two countries, the porters walked up and down the train cars saying "Papiere bitte" (papers please). We all froze at the sound of that phrase, which immediately conjured up images from countless movies about World War II in which Jews and other refugees from the Nazi German authorities got caught without proper identification. On that same trip, we also visited the museum on the site of the Dachau concentration camp, where many of those people without the right papers ended up. Is this where we want to end up as a country?

My two daughters were both born in Peru, and adopted by me and my wife when they were infants. They are now naturalized U.S. citizens, but those official certificates from the federal government which prove that status are not among the items carried in their pocketbooks on a daily basis. If our family decided to take a vacation in Arizona, and SB 1070 were allowed to be fully implemented as originally planned, would my daughters be stopped and questioned, and perhaps taken away from us, because their brown skin makes them look like they don't belong?

A judge may have temporarily blocked this specific law, but not the underlying racism behind it. SB 1070 wasn't really the "Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act". It should have more properly been named the "Support Our White Neighborhoods Act."

Peace and Love, from Ringo to the World

2010-07-07T11:08:00.004-04:00

Today is the 70th birthday of Richard Starkey, a.k.a. Ringo Starr. One could say he's had a pretty successful life: fame and fortune as drummer with The Beatles, successful solo recording and acting careers, even marrying a "Bond girl" (Barbara Bach). So whenever he's asked what he wants for his birthday, his answer is simple: "Peace and Love".

As explained on his website, each year on his birthday (July 7, or "the seventh day of the seventh month", as he explains in Muddy Waters fashion), Ringo asks people to flash peace signs at 12:00 noon, local time wherever they are, and say "Peace and love". If enough people do this each year, he figures, maybe we'll actually get it.

Ringo seems to be echoing the sentiments of a former bandmate from Liverpool, who asked us to "Give Peace A Chance" and reminded us that "All You Need Is Love". It certainly seems to be what the world needs now.

So here goes:

PEACE AND LOVE

Happy birthday, Ringo.

The Coffee Spill at BP HQ

2010-06-20T12:01:00.004-04:00

The Upright Citizens Brigade has created this comedy video showing what would happen if BP executives tried to deal with a spilled cup of coffee during a business meeting the same way they've addressed the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico:

Irony, British (Petroleum) Style

2010-06-16T21:09:00.004-04:00

Here's my entry for Rachel Maddow's BP poster contest:
Rachel Maddow, on her nightly MSNBC show, has been asking viewers to take this photo of a BP gas station, where BP sternly warns its customers that they "are responsible for spills", and combine it with some appropriately ironic pseudo-motivational commentary on BP's absence of clarity about cleanup responsibility when they're the ones doing the spillage.

You can find all the necessary links and instructions to create your own BP poster on Rachel's blog here.

Year Of The (Rich) Woman

2010-06-13T14:39:00.014-04:00

This past Tuesday's primary wins by Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina in California, along with other high-profile campaigns by women for federal and state offices, has many pundits declaring the 2010 election to be "The Year Of The Woman". A closer look at some of these candidates, however, indicates that their personal wealth, and their willingness to use that wealth to finance their campaigns, may have more to do with their electoral success than gender.

Meg Whitman, the former CEO of eBay, spent about $71 million of her personal wealth, estimated to be in the billions, to win the Republican primary for Governor of California.

Carly Fiorina, the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, spent $5.5 million from her own pocket to become the Republican candidate for Senate from California. Some of that money may have come from the $21 million severance pay she received when HP fired her in 2005.

Linda McMahon (no relation to me, thank goodness), the former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), spent $14 million of her own money to win the endorsement of the Connecticut state Republican convention last month as that party's candidate for the U.S. Senate. Yes, the person who brought us "professional wrestlers" Hulk Hogan and The Rock on TV shows like "Raw" and "Smackdown" now wants to help run the federal government.

The irony is that all of these free-spending Republican candidates are running on a platform of "fiscal conservatism". Go figure.

Instead of examining how these candidates made their fortunes, or questioning the wide pay disparities between CEOs and average workers at these corporations, the media is instead focusing on Alvin Greene, who won Tuesday's primary in South Carolina to become the Democratic candidate for Senate, and asking how an unemployed vet got the $10,400 filing fee to get on the ballot. Perhaps the fact that media corporations receive millions of dollars from candidates like Whitman, Fiorina, and McMahon for TV and radio ads, while Greene did not buy any media advertising time, has something to do with it?

Class, rather than gender or ethnicity, is still the strongest dividing line in our society. Individuals and corporations with a great deal of money have far more influence in the decisions which affect our lives than the average citizen. Citigroup even acknowledged this situation in their infamous 2005 report by calling the U.S. a "plutonomy". Electing a female millionaire, who made her fortune in the corporate world, will be no more liberating than electing male millionaires has ever been.

In 1973, Pink Floyd's song "Money" has the rich narrator saying "Think I'll buy me a football team" as a fun way to spend some excess cash. Today, the preferred form of recreational spending for the rich seems to be buying a Senate seat or governorship (former Goldman Sachs partner Jon Corzine managed to buy both in New Jersey before the voters finally got sick of him), but sometimes they'll settle for a mayor's office (Michael Bloomberg in New York City).

Money, so they say,

Is the root of all evil today

Memorial Day Layoff By Defense Contractor

2010-06-05T15:40:00.004-04:00

On Tuesday, June 1, upon returning to work following the long Memorial Day weekend, 45 engineers at the L-3 Communications facility in Camden, New Jersey were told by the company they were being laid off.

Meanwhile, TheStockAdvisors.com recommends investing in L-3, "a leader in a fast-growth niche of homeland security and defense: Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance, often abbreviated C4ISR or ISR."

The investment advice article goes on to say that "We see L-3 Communications as one of the best companies in the robust defense sector."

There are at least 45 engineers out there who might disagree with that statement.

The Defense Industry Racket

2010-05-30T21:16:00.030-04:00

You fasten all the triggers for the others to fire

Then you set back and watch when the death count gets higher

You hide in your mansion as young people's blood

Flows out of their bodies and is buried in the mud.

- "Masters of War", Bob Dylan, 1963

War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest,

easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious...It is the only

one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

- "War Is A Racket", General Smedley Butler, 1935

Memorial Day is supposed to be a time for remembering our soldiers who have died fighting in wars. While we pay respect to the memory of these men and women who volunteered to serve their country and sacrificed their lives, let's also remember the segment of our society which actually profits from war - the defense contractors. These corporations have appeared to be largely recession-proof, continuing to post profits and pay out bonuses to their executives, although some are now beginning to lay off their non-executive workers.

Bob Dylan called them "masters of war" in his 1963 song, but Smedley Butler called them racketeers nearly thirty years earlier. Butler spent 33 years in the U.S. Marines, earning the Medal of Honor twice and rising to the rank of Major General before retiring in 1931 as the most decorated Marine at that time. After leaving the Marines, he became extremely critical of companies which profited from selling to the military, as well as those which he believed persuaded our government to use the Marines to stabilize countries for the purposes of business investments. In his 1935 book "War Is A Racket", he detailed how the profits of companies such as DuPont, Bethlehem Steel, and Anaconda Copper increased an average of 200 percent during World War I, and proposed paying "the officers and the directors and the high-powered executives of our armament factories...the same wage as the lads in the trenches get."

In 1961 another retired general, Dwight Eisenhower, gave his farewell address as President and explained how the relationship between the military and corporations had changed: "Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense. We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions." Eisenhower went on to warn us that, "In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."

Today, Eisenhower's "permanent armaments industry" is so well ensconced that it apparently doesn't have to worry about minor things like obeying the law. The nonprofit Project On Government Oversight (POGO) maintains a Federal Contractor Misconduct Database showing companies which continue to win government contracts despite their histories of misconduct, including contract fraud and environmental, ethics, and labor violations. It should come as no surprise that the top 9 companies on the current list, sorted by amount of federal dollars, are defense contractors: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, Raytheon, L-3 Communications, United Technologies, BAE, and SAIC. Lockheed Martin is in first place, receiving over $38 billion in federal dollars during fiscal year 2009 despite 50 reported instances of misconduct since 1995. Their reported profit for that period was $3 billion. Of these 9 defense contractors, the one with the smallest number of violations is L-3, with 6; they made $901 million in profit on $7 billion of FY2009 federal contracts.

One reason, perhaps, that our government is reluctant to punish these corporations is the jobs they're supposed to provide as a form of military Keynesianism. John Maynard Keynes was a British economist who proposed using government spending to stimulate demand during times of high unemployment. The application of his policies in both FDR's New Deal and the military spending of World War II is widely believed to have pulled the U.S. economy out of the Great Depression of the 1930s. Following that war, government spending in the form of contracts to military suppliers (now euphemistically renamed "defense contractors") was seen as a way to continue job creation and prevent the return of a depression. The recent use of stimulus packages to counter our current recession has been called a return to Keynesian economics, but defense contracts have represented a system of permanent stimulus spending since the 1940s.

Unfortunately for the employees of those defense contractors, the continuation of two active wars and large Department of Defense budgets may no longer translate into job stability. A recent article in The Hill reports that some of the same profitable defense contractors in the POGO list are now laying off large numbers of employees. Lockheed Martin's Mission Systems & Sensors (MS2) division recently reduced its workforce by about 972 employees through a combination of voluntary packages and involuntary layoffs; a spokesman said they needed to "size its workforce to meet projected workload and remove redundancies." Raytheon says it needs to lay off 225 workers in Arizona to "achieve the right mix of talent to remain competitive in the marketplace." BAE is laying off 610 workers in Ohio and 373 in Tennessee because the "major spike" in military contracts due to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan "has now passed and we are adjusting our workforce levels." The L-3 Communications division in impoverished Camden, NJ announced a layoff of 65 workers in April "to make our products and services more affordable in today's competitive environment."

However, the Hill article also quotes David Berteau of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, who points to another reason behind these layoffs; "defense companies, responsible to their stockholders, must keep profits high enough to compete for capital as they anticipate reductions in the defense budget." It's not that these corporations are at risk of not turning a profit; it's that the profits must be "high enough" to satisfy investors on Wall Street, even if that means cutting jobs at a time when the federal government, which provides the money for those profits, is trying to create jobs to bring the country out of recession.

These jobs being cut are some of the relatively few remaining for skilled workers such as scientists and engineers that are somewhat immune to overseas outsourcing. Most defense contracts require employees to hold security clearances, which are only available to U.S. citizens.

This Memorial Day, as we honor the patriotic sacrifices of our soldiers during times of war, perhaps we need to begin demanding some patriotic sacrifices by the executives of our defense contractors. Have they started looking in the mirror to see if they can "remove redundancies", or considered reducing their multimillion dollar compensation packages to make their companies' products "more affordable"? If they're not willing to do so, then perhaps taxpayers should begin questioning why their money is used to subsidize for-profit corporations which are no longer willing to hold up their end of the bargain by providing stable jobs for the middle class. The public rage at "government bailouts" of banks and auto makers could pale compared to what should be an even larger rage at the decades-old government subsidy of the defense industry. It's time to look closely at "too big to fail" corporations like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman and consider either breaking them up into smaller, less powerful companies or nationalizing them so that the taxpayers can purchase what the military truly needs at cost, without paying the additional cost of executive bonuses, profits to Wall Street investors, and layoffs aimed at keeping those profits as high as possible.

Happy Birthday, Mr. Zimmerman

2010-05-24T22:14:00.005-04:00

In honor of Bob Dylan's birthday today (born May 24, 1941 as Robert Zimmerman), I listened to a healthy cross-section of his songs in my collection, ranging from his early protest folk songs up through the Traveling Wilburys supergroup, and marveled again at how well his lyrics perfectly captured whatever mood and imagery he was targeting.

His "Blowin' In The Wind" put the question of civil rights before us all:

"How many years can some people exist,

before they're allowed to be free?"

In "Masters of War", he denounced the military-industrial complex only two years after President Eisenhower had coined the term:

"Come you masters of war, you that build all the guns

You that build the death planes, you that build all the bombs

You that hide behind walls, you that hide behind desks,

I just want you to know I can see through your masks."

His "Subterranean Homesick Blues" contained the lyric that inspired the name of the Weathermen faction of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS):

"You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows"

Even when Dylan turned his rage on personal relationships rather than social injustice, his lyrics captured things perfectly. How many of us have found ourselves in situations where these parting words seem all too fitting:

"You just kinda wasted my precious time,

Don't think twice, it's all right."

My personal favorite, though, is from "Positively 4th Street":

"You've got a lot of nerve, to say you are my friend

When I was down, you just stood there grinning...

I wish that for just one time, you could stand inside my shoes

You'd know what a drag it is to see you"

Thank you, Mr. Zimmerman, for giving us so many great lyrics. As you said in "My Back Pages", you were so much older then, you're younger than that now.

Another World Is Possible

2010-05-22T22:02:00.004-04:00

The main theme underlying this blog is that groups of people working together can challenge entrenched interests, not only to block or reverse harmful actions but to imagine new approaches and new ways of doing things that are more positive, healthy, and sustainable.

Many like-minded people are making plans to attend the US Social Forum June 22-26 in Detroit, MI. The theme of this event is "Another World Is Possible - Another US Is Necessary." This will be the second US Social Forum (the first was in 2007), and is one of many regional gatherings which grew out of the World Social Forum, an alternative to the annual gathering of the world's economic elite in Davos, Switzerland. Rather than accept the label of "anti-globalization" assigned to these activities by the media, participants instead stress their vision of a different kind of globalization - one driven by the people of different communities working together on shared goals, rather than the agendas of for-profit corporations.

One group which will be represented at the US Social Forum is Healthcare NOW!, the single-payer advocacy group which held a "house-warming" event at its new Philadelphia office today to raise funds for the trip to Detroit. National Organizer Katie Robbins spoke with the group of 30 supporters, as did Donna and Larry Smith, who were featured in the Michael Moore film "Sicko". Donna now works for National Nurses United, and both she and Katie certainly offer the possibility of a different way of delivering healthcare in the United States; one in which all people have access to the care they need, without regard to their ability to pay, and that access cannot be lost due to job loss or graduation from school. That vision has been hard to communicate in the face of the corporate-driven healthcare "debate" which only permits discussion of minor tinkering within the existing employment-based private health insurance system, but it's a vision we must keep discussing.

These single-payer supporters enjoyed some laughs while watching the film "The Yes Men Fix The World", in which a pair of pranksters who pose as corporate executives or government officials help us imagine a world where Dow Chemical accepts full responsibility for the 1984 pesticide plant accident in Bhopal, India and sets up a fund for the medical needs of its victims, or the New York Times publishes articles on the passage of Maximum Wage legislation.

Challenging corporate power, as well as the paradigms they've encouraged us all to accept as unchangeable, is an essential step towards building a better world. People like Katie Robbins, Donna Smith, and the Yes Men are all helping us to think of creative ways to do this. As Donna said today, the balance of power is currently badly tipped away from the people, but each of us has to do our part to restore the balance, and we can never know which action will be the one that finally does so.

Or as John Lennon sang:
"You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one.
I hope someday you'll join us, and the world will live as one."

Pennsylvania Democrats Reject Specter

2010-05-18T23:25:00.004-04:00

In a historic upset, Rep. Joe Sestak (D-PA) has defeated incumbent Senator Arlen Specter (?-PA) in today's Democratic primary. Sestak will now move on to the general election in November as the Democratic candidate, facing Republican candidate Pat Toomey.

Specter, to his credit, conceded shortly after 10:00 p.m. and has so far not pulled a "Lieberman", i.e., declared a run as an independent after losing a party primary.

Considering the effort expended by national and local party officials, from President Obama and Vice-President Biden to Governor Ed Rendell and Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, on Specter's behalf once this longtime Republican rebranded himself as a Democrat, the choice of Sestak by a majority of the state's Democratic voters should be seen as a strong rebuke to the party establishment.

After all, isn't the point of a primary to let the voters choose their candidates? Wasn't the primary supposed to be a reform to move away from the old "smoke-filled room", where the party's power brokers met in secret to choose their official slate of candidates?

It seems the establishment of the Democratic Party has forgotten about small-d democracy.

As Sestak said tonight, "This is what democracy looks like: a win for the people."

BP: Too Big To Drill?

2010-05-14T22:27:00.007-04:00

Oil company BP has been in the news ever since the April 20 explosion on the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico killed 11 workers and started a massive oil spill that has yet to be stopped.

A new group called Seize BP organized protests around the country on May 12 and is collecting signatures on this online petition:

"The government of the United States must seize BP and freeze its assets, and place those funds in trust to begin providing immediate relief to the working people throughout the Gulf states whose jobs, communities, homes and businesses are being harmed or destroyed by the criminally negligent actions of the CEO, Board of Directors and senior management of BP."

The last time a government attempted to seize BP, that government was overthrown and replaced with an autocrat who was less of a threat to BP's profits. At that time, BP was known by its former name, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.

During the first half of the twentieth century, the British government increasingly relied on its steady supply of oil from Iran, profitably supplied by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC). The Iranian people, however, were increasingly unhappy with the terms of this arrangement. AIOC underpaid its Iranian oil workers and denied them positions in management. The royalties paid to the Iranian government were a lower percentage of revenues than that of many other oil producers, and it was eventually discovered that AIOC used a false second set of books to hide their true revenues, and thus the true amount of royalties owed, from the government of Iran.

The secular, democratically-elected government of Iran, led by Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, nationalized the assets of AIOC and created the National Iranian Oil Company. AIOC and its British patrons were not happy, and began to plan a change in government, along with the U.S. government. In 1953, the CIA organized Operation Ajax which resulted in a coup d'etat against Mossadegh and the return of the Shah of Iran to his throne, where he ruled until the 1979 revolution. The National Iranian Oil Company was converted into a multi-corporation consortium, mainly controlled by AIOC and five U.S. companies. In 1954 AIOC changed its name to British Petroleum, perhaps to distance itself in the public mind from this episode.

British Petroleum was also the primary oil company behind the construction of the Alaska Pipeline in the mid-1970s. Although Exxon (now Exxon Mobil) is largely blamed for the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989, the pipeline's owner and operator, Alyeska Pipeline Service Company, shares the blame by not being properly prepared to respond to and clean up the spill once it happened, making the environmental damage far worse than it should have been. British Petroleum (renamed yet again to "BP" in 2001) is the largest shareholder in Alyeska.

In 2006, a section of BP's pipes in Alaska developed holes due to corrosion and created a large oil spill near Prudhoe Bay. BP pleaded guilty to violations of federal law and was fined $20 million.

If BP were a person (and 5/9 of the Supreme Court would argue that it is, according to their Citizens United v. FEC ruling), this type of sociopathic behavior would lead to jail time. In the case of a corporation like BP, shouldn't we at least take away its right to continue doing business?

Mamas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Warriors

2010-05-08T20:41:00.006-04:00

Tomorrow is Mother's Day, that annual holiday which is celebrated by sending cards and flowers to our mothers, sharing a family meal, or participating in a run or walk to raise money for breast cancer research. One of the earliest proponents of establishing Mother's Day, however, instead saw it as a way to stop nations from waging war against each other.

Although she had written the words to the "Battle Hymn of the Republic", which became a rallying song for the Union Army in the Civil War, Julia Ward Howe later became horrified by the carnage of that war and became a pacifist. She became convinced that if women had more decision-making power in government, wars would become less likely, since women who had worked so hard to raise their sons would never allow them to go off to war and kill some other woman's son. Clearly, Howe would have been disappointed if she had lived long enough to meet the likes of Margaret Thatcher or Golda Meir, whose terms as Prime Minister of England and Israel, respectively, proved that women could lead their nations to war just as easily as men.

Let's start a new Mother's Day tradition this year of reading Howe's original proclamation and seeing if we can all think of ways to make her vision a reality.

Mother's Day Proclamation
Julia Ward Howe, 1870

Arise, then, women of this day!

Arise, all women who have hearts,
Whether our baptism be of water or of tears!

Say firmly:
"We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."

From the bosom of the devastated Earth a voice goes up with our own.
It says: "Disarm! Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice."
Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil at the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel.

Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace,
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God.

In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And at the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.

Forty Years Ago: Four Dead In Ohio

2010-05-02T20:34:00.011-04:00

Forty years ago, on May 4, 1970, soldiers from the Ohio National Guard fired their rifles into a crowd of students at Kent State University who had been protesting President Nixon's expansion of the Vietnam War into what had been neutral Cambodia on April 30.

When the shooting stopped, four students were dead and nine were wounded. Two of the killed students hadn't even been part of the protests, but had been walking between classes when the shooting started.

Neil Young was so shaken by this incident that he quickly wrote the song "Ohio", went into the studio with bandmates David Crosby, Stephen Stills, and Graham Nash to record it, and convinced Atlantic records to rush out the single, even though their hit "Teach Your Children" was still on the charts. Soon the story of this tragedy was blasting through radio speakers everywhere:

"This summer I hear the drummin', Four dead in Ohio...
What if you knew her and found her dead on the ground?
How can you run when you know?"

Ten days later, police opened fire on student protesters at Jackson State College in Mississippi, killing two and injuring twelve. The Steve Miller Band addressed both incidents later that year in their "Jackson-Kent Blues":

"Four were shot down by the National Guard troops...
Shot some more in Jackson just to show the world what they can do...
Nothing any good is gonna come from a war"

The shooting and killing of college students by armed police and soldiers had so shaken up this country that even the normally apolitical Beach Boys found they could not stay silent. Singer Mike Love took the old Coasters song "Riot In Cell Block #9" and rewrote the lyrics to address these and other shootings, calling it "Student Demonstration Time":

America was stunned on May 4, 1970
When rally turned to riot up at Kent State University
They said the students scared the Guard
Though the troops were battle dressed
Four martyrs earned a new degree
The Bachelor of bullets
I know we're all fed up with useless wars and racial strife
But next time there's a riot, well, you best stay out of sight

On this anniversary, we need to remember the "four dead in Ohio" and the two dead in Mississippi, while we also mourn the thousands of deaths in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos that they were trying to prevent, as well as the deaths our government continues to cause today in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. As Pete Seeger sang in "Where Have All The Flowers Gone": "When will they ever learn?"

Kent State casualties, May 4, 1970:
Allison Krause, 19
Jeffrey Miller, 20
Sandra Scheuer, 20
William Schroeder, 19
Jackson State casualties, May 14, 1970:
Phillip Lafayette Gibbs, 21
James Earl Green, 17

A Specter Is Haunting The Senate

2010-04-25T21:18:00.011-04:00

Just about a year ago, on April 28, 2009, Senator Arlen Specter (?-PA) announced his party switch from Republican to Democrat. On May 18 of this year (primary election day), the Democratic voters of Pennsylvania will have their chance to say whether they accept him as a Democrat, or if they prefer current Representative Joe Sestak (D-PA).

Specter's coming-out as a born-again Democrat was hailed at the time by the national party as another stepping-stone to their holy grail of a filibuster-proof 60-vote supermajority in the Senate. The Democrats finally obtained that 60-member caucus in July 2009 with the swearing-in of Al Franken (D-MN), delayed for months by sore loser Norm Coleman's endless court challenges, and it lasted until February 4 of this year, when Scott Brown (R-MA) was installed in the late Ted Kennedy's seat.

So did those 7 months of unstoppable Democratic hegemony usher in a progressive utopia? Hardly. That could only have happened if the Democrats in the Senate were all unabashed New Dealers, which they're not. For every progressive like Barbara Boxer (CA) or Sherrod Brown (OH), there's a corporate shill like Blanche Lincoln (AK) or Ben Nelson (NE). Even the two Independents who caucus with the Democrats, self-described socialist Bernie Sanders (VT) and self-described megalomaniac Joe Lieberman (CT), cancel each other out on most issues. With all those existing internal contradictions, welcoming Arlen Specter into the Democratic fold did not win us the Employee Free Choice Act's union-friendly organizing rules, a public option in the health insurance reform bill, or a rush of agency appointments; the long-standing vacancies on the National Labor Relations Board were finally filled in late March by recess appointment, not by a Senate vote. The only one who benefited from Specter's switch was Specter himself, who avoided a challenge from his right, in the form of Pat Toomey, in the Republican primary.

In other words, Specter's party switch was all about Arlen Specter. It was yet another act of expediency by a person whose entire political career has been notable for its opportunism.

Single Bullet Specter
Specter's first recorded act of political expediency may be his most infamous: his creation of the "single bullet" theory as a staff attorney for the Warren Commission in 1964. You don't have to be a conspiracy buff to marvel at the story behind this portion of the Commission's conclusions.

The FBI had presented the Commission with its conclusion that presumed assassin Lee Harvey Oswald had fired three shots. Three empty shell casings had been found on the floor near the sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository, where Oswald worked. Also, the film of the motorcade taken by spectator Abraham Zapruder with his 8mm movie camera established a timeline of the shootings, and FBI marksmen demonstrated that the bolt-action rifle found in the Book Depository could only have been loaded, aimed, and fired three times during that timespan. Since there appeared to be three sets of wounds - first President Kennedy in the neck, then Governor Connally's torso and wrist, and finally Kennedy's fatal head wound - this seemed consistent with the three shots from Oswald's rifle. Three shots, three wounds, one gunman; case closed.

Except there was a third person wounded that day in Dealey Plaza. James Tague had been watching the motorcade from a sidewalk across the street from Zapruder. After the shooting was over, a police officer came over to Tague to ask if he was all right; his right cheek was bleeding. Together they found a chip missing from the curb, and concluded that a bullet had hit the curb and caused a cement chip to scrape Tague's face. The Warren Commission didn't want to hear about this story, because all bullets had already been accounted for. If Tague had been wounded as a result of a fourth bullet, and Oswald's rifle could only have fired three bullets, that seemed to imply the presence of a second gunman, and thus a conspiracy.

Enter staff member Arlen Specter to the rescue. Specter theorized that, since Connally was sitting in front of Kennedy in the limousine, the first bullet could have gone through Kennedy's neck and then proceeded to travel through Connelly's torso and wrist before finally embedding itself in his thigh. Tying both men's wounds to a single bullet freed up the second bullet to miss the limousine entirely and hit the curb where Tague was standing. The third bullet was still available to be the kill shot for the President. That's four sets of wounds caused by only three shots. Presto - Specter had come up with a way for the Warren Commission to stick to its lone gunman conclusion!

What's incredible about this piece of history is that Specter's theory was not based on forensics, ballistics, or physics; it was only based on Specter's eagerness to come up with a story that fit the conclusion his bosses seemed to want.

First Party Switch
Hot off his Warren Commission gig, Specter went to work in the Philadelphia District Attorney's office, where he soon set his sights on the top job. When the local Democratic Party wouldn't let him run for DA, he decided his ambition was more important than his party membership (sound familiar?) and ran as a Republican.

During his two-term reign as Philly's top prosecutor, Specter hired another young ambitious lawyer from his alma mater (University of Pennsylvania) named Ed Rendell, starting him off on his own successful political career. Rendell, now the Democratic Governor of Pennsylvania, is naturally an enthusiastic supporter of his former boss' re-election campaign.

Anita Hill
A defining moment of Specter's Senate career was his character assassination of Anita Hill during Senate hearings in 1991. Specter had angered many Republicans by voting against President Reagan's nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court in 1987, and he was eager to win back their favor by supporting President Bush's nomination of Clarence Thomas, especially since he was up for re-election in 1992. When Hill came forward with allegations of sexual harassment while Thomas had been her supervisor, Specter mercilessly attacked her through a hostile interrogation that painted her, not Thomas, as the one at fault.

Women all over the country were so outraged by Specter's treatment of Hill that it reportedly led to a record number of female candidates for office in 1992, as well as a heightened awareness of the issue of sexual harassment in the workplace. Specter, meanwhile, had proven that he could be a loyal Republican; Thomas was confirmed to the Supreme Court, from which he still gives us disastrous decisions like the Citizens United v. FEC corporate personhood case, and Specter was rewarded with another six-year term in the Senate.

Not A Loyal Democrat
Shortly after his April 2009 party switch, Specter attempted to paint himself as an independent-minded maverick, pointing out on Meet The Press that "I did not say I would be a loyal Democrat." Given his history, why would we expect him to be? In fact, he reminds me more of Joe Lieberman than anyone else. In 2006, Ned Lamont challenged Lieberman from the left in the Connecticut Democratic primary and won. Rather than graciously accept the will of his party's voters and retire, Lieberman instead ran in the general election as an independent, accepting money and endorsements from Republicans, and kept his job. Specter tried to avoid that scenario by bolting from the Republican Party before Toomey could defeat him in the primary, but Sestak has interfered with his plans for an uncontested Democratic primary.

Sestak is not exactly a progressive alternative; this former Navy vice-admiral would probably be closer in policy positions to Jim Webb than Russ Feingold in the Senate. However, Sestak has already done more for Democrats in his short political career than Specter. In 2006, during his first-ever political campaign, Sestak not only defeated twenty-year Republican incumbent Curt Weldon, he also helped the Democrats win a majority in the House and enthusiastically supported Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) in her bid to become the country's first female Speaker of the House. During the 2008 Presidential primaries, Sestak took time out from his uncertain re-election bid to actively campaign for Hillary Clinton, who would have become the country's first female President had she won. Anita Hill would be proud.

Arlen Specter has proven time and time again that he is willing to do almost anything to advance his own career. Last year's party-label switch was nothing more than his most recent act of expediency to try to keep his job in the Senate, and even Vice-President Biden's recent campaign appearances for him can't convince me otherwise. Let's hope that Pennsylvania's Democratic primary voters can help Arlen Specter do what he seems incapable of doing for himself - put him on the unemployment line.

Healthcare For People, Not For Profit

2010-04-22T23:02:00.003-04:00

Below is the text of a Declaration of Health Independence and Security which was written and adopted during the single-payer healthcare conference in Wayne, PA on April 10. Click here to add your name to the list of signatures and learn how to get more involved.

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for citizens of this nation and its separate but equal states to transform conditions related to the common good within our control and necessary in order to assure the basic human rights of all, recognition of our common humanity and a decent respect to the opinions of humankind compel us to declare those conditions for which we demand such a transformation.

Healthcare is a basic human right. To this end, we the undersigned citizen representatives of these assembled states, declare our dedication to the transformation of the profit-driven healthcare system into one of our shared humanity under a social insurance model–a publicly funded, privately and publicly delivered system, equally available to all. Current expenditures on healthcare can and must fund this systemic transformation.

Working in our individual and several states, we will educate our fellow residents, petition our legislators for our collective redress of grievances under the current system, and pursue passage of citizen-driven healthcare policy legislation.

We hold these truths still to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal and have certain unalienable rights. Among these rights are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and that in order to enjoy these rights, access to healthcare without regard to financial or any other barriers must be secured.

Signed this 10th day of April, 2010, at Central Baptist Church in Wayne, Pennsylvania.

Beating Swords Into Scalpels

2010-04-14T20:55:00.010-04:00

Five days before the April 15 income tax filing deadline, at a time when more people than usual are pondering government spending priorities as they calculate their annual tax bill, I spent the day with a group of activists working to divert the money we currently spend on war into guaranteeing healthcare for all.

The Progressive Democrats of America (PDA) sponsored this one-day conference in Wayne, PA, which drew participants from ten states (Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Massachussetts, California, Ohio, Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware). The photo above, taken by PDA National Field Coordinator Conor Boylan, shows a working group discussing efforts to take the fight for single-payer healthcare, or "Medicare For All", from the national level to individual states. As one participant from Ontario reminded us, the Canadian single-payer system began in the province of Saskatchewan, then moved to other provinces before eventually being implemented at the federal level.

If the woman at the table looks familiar, you probably remember her from the Michael Moore film Sicko, where Donna Smith was shown moving in with her daughter after the medical bills from her cancer treatments and her husband's heart attacks had forced her into bankruptcy. Donna is now Co-Chair of PDA's Healthcare NOT Warfare campaign, and she helped lead most of the day's discussions, together with Chuck Pennacchio, who ran as a progressive alternative to Bob Casey in the 2006 Democratic primary for U.S. Senate and is now Executive Director of Health Care For All Pennsylvania.

Ben Day, Executive Director of Mass-Care (shown to Donna's left in the photo), explained the failures of the Massachussetts healthcare reform and its individual insurance mandate, on which the just-passed federal bill was based. Rather than control costs, premiums have continued their double-digit annual increases since this Romneycare came into being. People are also getting less coverage for these higher premiums, as the commercial health insurance companies move towards high-deductible plans that increase out-of-pocket expenses.

Dan Hodges of Health Care For All California (shown to Ben's left) discussed the single-payer bills which passed the state legislature in 2006 and 2008, only to be vetoed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Dan reminded us that the public campaigns around each of these bills presented a teachable moment which educated more Californians about how health insurance companies operate as a cartel to fix prices, and how existing single-payer systems in Canada and the U.S. (Medicare) operate more efficiently and with lower overhead rates.

Vic Edgerton, Chief of Staff for Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), urged us to continue building visible grassroots support for single-payer outside the halls of Congress and the state legislatures, so that kindred spirits inside the legislatures, like his boss, can have more weight behind their arguments. As President Franklin Roosevelt allegedly told a group of reformers, "you've convinced me; now go out there and make me do it."

For those who might ask how our government would pay to cover everyone, the $33 billion supplemental spending bill to send more U.S. troops to Afghanistan, scheduled to be voted on by Congress this month, was identified as a good healthy start. That's right, this is another supplemental war bill, on top of the money already appropriated in the regular budget for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, despite President Obama's promise that he would end this practice held over from the Bush regime.

It was invigorating to spend the day with these activists who take seriously Dr. Martin Luther King's admonition from his April 4, 1967 speech at New York City's Riverside Church: "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."

April 4: Remembering MLK "In The Name Of Love"

2010-04-04T09:55:00.011-04:00

Today is April 4, a date to remember Martin Luther King, Jr.

On April 4, 1967, King gave his "Beyond Vietnam" speech at Riverside Church in New York City.

In that speech, he stepped outside the boundaries which had been established for him as a civil rights leader and denounced the U.S. government's military involvement in Vietnam and other developing nations. He expressed his concerns that our government was on the wrong side of revolutionary movements, and that the huge sums of money being spent on wars would result in the underfunding of the anti-poverty programs which the civil rights movement had just convinced the federal government to begin:

"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."

As both Tavis Smiley and Bill Moyers reminded us on two excellent PBS shows during this past week, the reaction against King's Riverside speech was swift and harsh. Newspapers which had supported King as a civil rights leader editorialized against his latest words the very next day, saying he had lost credibility. President Johnson saw this speech as a personal attack on him and refused any further meetings with King. Even some of King's supporters thought he would lose his focus by joining the peace and anti-military movements.

On April 4, 1968 - one year to the day after that speech - King was shot and killed in Memphis, Tennessee.

That date is memorialized in the U2 song "Pride (In The Name Of Love)":

Early morning, April 4
Shot rings out in the Memphis sky
Free at last, they took your life
They could not take your pride

Note the use of the word "they", not "he" - "they took your life". For even though the bullet that struck down King was fired by a single gunman - whoever he was, and whoever else was involved - the growing atmosphere of hatred towards King made such an act of fatal violence inevitable.

King was in Memphis in March and April of 1968 to support the black sanitation workers whose efforts to unionize were being resisted by the city government. The city's white establishment mocked the black workers' picket signs declaring "I Am A Man". After a March 28 demonstration in Memphis was brutally broken up by the police, King was denounced on the floor of the U.S. Senate the next day by Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV), who urged that "the Federal Government take steps to prevent King from carrying out his planned harassment of Washington, D.C. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." Byrd was referring to King's planned Poor People's March on Washington; King was assassinated before that march took place. Senator Byrd reminded his fellow Senators that the "first duty" of government "is to preserve law and order."

Arthur Murtagh, an FBI agent in the Atlanta office, claims that when news of King's shooting reached them, there was celebration, with one supervisor yelling, "They got the son of a bitch! I hope he dies!".

The forces of law and order had apparently prevailed - and they chose April 4, the one-year anniversary of King's denunciation of the profitable but deadly military-industrial complex, to make their point.

The Runaways: Five Girls Who Loved Rock'n'Roll

2010-03-30T19:37:00.017-04:00

This past weekend, I dragged my two daughters and my wife with me to see The Runaways, the new film about the groundbreaking all-female rock band of the 1970s. Hopefully they learned that "Girl Power" was not a concept that started with the Spice Girls.

Joan Jett, Cherie Currie, Lita Ford, Sandy West, and Jackie Fox were all teenagers when their eponymous debut album was released in 1976. The leadoff single, "Cherry Bomb", certainly grabbed the attention of those of us fortunate enough to hear it on the radio, although most critics dismissed the band as a novelty act offering more titillation than talent. The critics were wrong; band members wrote most of the songs, making an exception to cover Lou Reed's "Rock and Roll" from his Velvet Underground days, and the girls played their instruments better than most of their garage band peers.

The film is based on a book by Currie, and Jett is an executive producer, which probably explains why it focuses mostly on these two characters, played by Dakota Fanning and Kristen Stewart, respectively. When Stewart, as Jett, is told by a guitar teacher that "girls don't play electric guitar", that patronizing brushoff, combined with Jett's defiance, establishes the film's theme - don't tell girls they can't do something just because they're girls. But Ford's lead guitar playing and West's drumming also proved the point that girls could rock just as hard as boys, and their part of the story deserves more screentime. Fox's name isn't even uttered in the movie, partly for plot simplification (the band went through several bassists in their short lifetime) and partly due to legal disputes.

While Ford's musical style leaned towards heavy metal, Jett was more drawn to glam rock and the emerging punk rock movement, two sounds she combined and parlayed into a successful post-Runaways solo career with songs like "Bad Reputation" and "I Love Rock'n'Roll". Jett's attitude as well as her songwriting talent are still very much in evidence today. Her most recent album, 2006's "Sinner", encourages listeners to "Change The World", and bashes the then-reigning Bush administration in "Riddles" by sneering at the Newspeak names of Bush policies such as "Healthy Forests" and "No Child Left Behind", screaming "wake up, people!", and finally ending with non sequitur soundbites from Bush and Rumsfeld.

Joan Jett was also one of the first women in rock to start her own independent label, Blackheart Records, when she couldn't get a record deal after the Runaways' breakup (folk rocker Holly Near may have been the first with her Redwood Records). In addition to putting out Jett's new releases as well as CD reissues of her back catalog, Blackheart has a stable of new bands like Girl In A Coma and The Dollyrots.

The Runaways played an important part in rock history, paving the way for The Go-Go's, The Bangles, The Donnas, Hole, Veruca Salt, and The Pretenders' Chrissie Hynde. The Runaways film captures the essence of their sound and attitude, and shows the difficulties this all-female band faced in a male-dominated industry. If this movie inspires a new generation of teenage girls to pick up guitars and drumsticks and start a band, or in fact express themselves in whatever way they feel inspired, it will have succeeded in its goal.

Four Strong Winds Of Change

2010-03-27T19:05:00.005-04:00

In honor of Women's History Month, here are four American women who made history by standing up for their beliefs and principles, even in the face of strong opposition.

Jeannette Rankin: The first woman in Congress, she was elected to two separate terms in the House of Representatives (1917-1919, 1941-1943). Her first election, in 1916, was four years before ratification of the 19th Amendment gave all women in the U.S. the right to vote; she had been a leader in the movement which led to women's suffrage in her home state of Montana in 1914. As a pacifist, she voted against U.S. entry into World War I in 1917, and again against entry into World War II in 1941, saying: "As a woman, I can't go to war and I refuse to send anyone else." Both votes were unpopular and led to her failure to win re-election to consecutive terms. In between her two terms, she co-founded the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). True to her principles, she spoke out against the Korean War in the early 1950s and the Vietnam War in the 1960s, leading an all-woman protest march in 1968 at the age of 88.

Helen Keller: Most people know about this deaf and blind girl from the film The Miracle Worker, but she was also active on the political left. Keller was a member of the Socialist Party and supported Eugene Debs in his presidential campaigns on that party's ticket. She wrote frequently on labor struggles, and supported the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, or "wobblies") in contrast to what she saw as the AFL's conservative policies and its emphasis on skilled white male workers. Newspapers and prominent figures who had earlier praised her academic accomplishments, including earning a degree from Radcliffe, attempted to dismiss her socialist pronouncements by reminding people of her disabilities. Keller responded to these critics by observing that, while she was physically blind and deaf, they were "socially blind and deaf" for defending the system that she was working to change. Her activities earned her a thick FBI file, where Director J. Edgar Hoover described her as a "writer on radical subjects" who therefore needed to be monitored by the government.

Angela Davis: This philosopher, academic, and activist was involved with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Black Panther Party, and the Communist Party (CP). When she started teaching at UCLA in 1969, California Governor Ronald Reagan fired her because she was a CP member. She eventually was able to return to teaching, and is still today on the faculty of the University of California in Santa Cruz. In the early 1970s, Davis was arrested and put on trial for her alleged role in a failed attempt to free a convict. She was acquitted by the jury, and many felt she had been targeted because of her radical politics, including John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who wrote and recorded their song "Angela" about her. Davis ran for Vice-President of the U.S. on the CP ticket in 1980, four years before the Democratic Party nominated their first female VP candidate (Geraldine Ferraro) and twenty-eight years before the Republican Party nominated their first female (Sarah Palin). When her 1980 running mate, Gus Hall, sided with the Soviet Union's reactionary old guard in their 1991 attempted coup against Mikhail Gorbachev, Davis and others who had supported Gorbachev's reforms left the CP and founded the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, where she continues to serve on its Advisory Board.

Dolores Huerta: This labor leader was a co-founder of the United Farm Workers (UFW) along with Cesar Chavez. Huerta led the UFW's nationwide grape boycott in the 1960s which pressured the California grape industry into negotiating a collective bargaining agreement. She is credited with coming up with the UFW's slogan "Si, se puede", which roughly translates to "Yes, it can be done" or "Yes we can". Barack Obama used the "Yes, we can" version as the slogan of his successful 2008 Presidential campaign, although Huerta officially nominated Hillary Clinton for President at the Democratic National Convention. She currently serves as President of the Dolores Huerta Foundation, and serves as an Honorary Chair of the Democratic Socialists of America.

Working Class to Banks: We're 'Mad As Hell'!

2010-03-21T14:45:00.002-04:00

On March 19, my wife Susan and I used our lunch breaks to attend a labor rally in Philadelphia. Over a thousand of us cheered as several speakers pointed out the stark contrast between bank executives, who used taxpayers' money to rescue their companies from their high-risk actions and are now rewarding themselves with multimillion-dollar bonuses, and the average American worker, many of whom have lost their jobs and the health insurance that goes with them.

Several speakers paraphrased the slogan delivered by Peter Finch's character in the 1976 film Network ("We're mad as hell, and we're not going to take it anymore!"). A minister called these bankers sinners, and told us it was just as much of a sin for us to vote for their enablers in Washington. Republican-turned-Democratic Senator Arlen Specter (?-PA), who must have thought his mere presence on the stage would help his re-election campaign, looked nervous. Bill George, head of the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO, spoke of revolution.

Following the speeches, I marched with the rallyers as national AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka led us to the nearby Bank of America office building. A small group of us entered the lobby with Trumka as he asked to speak to the management, then we marched through the lobby to another set of doors after his request was denied. As Trumka explained to the crowd outside, "I guess they're too busy counting the money to speak with us."

This was a perfect example of how to channel the palpable populist rage that's out there into a progressive proposal: instead of making rich bankers richer, let's tax the banks and use that revenue to build and repair infrastructure, thus putting people back to work. It's a message that could redirect peoples' anger away from government, where the tea baggers have focused it, to corporations as the real root cause of the economic collapse, and more of our elected Democratic representatives should be leading this charge.

Instead, we get President Obama saying, in a February 10 interview with Bloomberg, that he doesn't "begrudge" JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon his $17 million bonus, nor Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein his $9 million bonus. “I know both those guys; they are very savvy businessmen", he said. Well, President Obama, you should get to know some of the workers who charged through the Bank of America building in Philly, instead of hanging out with CEOs (is this what Sarah Palin was thinking of when she accused Obama of being pals with terrorists?).

Filmmaker Michael Moore was on MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann a few nights ago, and observed that Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) had said, in reference to his proposed financial reform bill, that "we don't want to punish Wall Street". Actually, Moore said, "yes we do."

Moore and Trumka have the right idea about how to react to Wall Street greed. Are any of our elected Democrats in Washington listening?

A Hunting We Will Go

2010-03-20T22:52:00.002-04:00

During a House committee's questioning of Attorney General Eric Holder on March 16, Rep. John Culberson (R-TX) complained about using law enforcement tactics and civilian trials for alleged terrorists, explaining: "Texans understand that when you are at war the goal is to hunt down your enemy and either kill them or capture them."

Be very, very quiet, everyone...we're hunting rabbits...er, I mean, terrorists...

When I heard Rep. Culberson's quote on NPR the following morning, my first thought was of Elmer Fudd singing "Kill The Wabbit" as he hunted down Bugs Bunny in an old cartoon. However, a little bit of research, such as entering the phrases "hunt down your enemy" and "kill them" into a search engine, reveals how popular this tempting base instinct has become, from Clint Eastwood's westerns and "Dirty Harry" movies to dozens of video and computer games in which the instructions to the player are no more complicated than Rep. Culberson's instructions to our soldiers.

The problem is, Rep. Culberson has got it wrong. Hunting down people as if they were animals is not our goal, nor should it be. A civilized nation, which is what we aspire to be, is supposed to be above that sort of thing, and the various attempts by nations to write down some rules of war have reflected that. For instance, the Hague Convention of 1907 included among a list of forbidden actions "to declare that no quarter will be given". But the document that Rep. Culberson and his fellow wabbit-hunters should really brush up on is the U.S. Army Field Manual on Operations, FM 3-0, which states the following:

"The disciplined and informed application of lethal and nonlethal force is a critical contributor to successful Army operations and strategic success. All warfare, but especially irregular warfare, challenges the morals and ethics of Soldiers. An enemy may feel no compulsion to respect international conventions and indeed may commit atrocities with the aim of provoking retaliation in kind. Any loss of discipline on the part of Soldiers is then distorted and exploited in propaganda and magnified through the media. The ethical challenge rests heavily on small-unit leaders who maintain discipline and ensure that the conduct of Soldiers remains within ethical and moral boundaries. There are compelling reasons for this. First, humane treatment of detainees encourages enemy surrender and thereby reduces friendly losses. Conversely, nothing emboldens enemy resistance like the belief that U.S. forces will kill or torture prisoners. Second, humane treatment of noncombatants reduces their antagonism toward U.S. forces and may lead to valuable intelligence. Third, leaders make decisions in action fraught with consequences. If they lack an ethical foundation, those decisions become much, much harder. Finally, Soldiers must live with the consequences of their conduct. Every leader shoulders the responsibility that their subordinates return from a campaign not only as good Soldiers, but also as good citizens with pride in their service to the Nation."

Fortunately, it is these words of guidance which our soldiers are obligated to follow, not the vigilante rantings of John Culberson.

Aside from playing video games, the other source for Culberson's bloodlust may be the following passage from Leviticus 26:7, in which God promises the people of Israel that if they observe his commandments, "You shall chase your enemies, and they shall fall before you by the sword" (the New International Reader's Version puts it even closer to Culberson's language: "You will hunt down your enemies. You will kill them with your swords."). Conservative Christians love to quote from the book of Leviticus, because it seems to set up an easy-to-follow moralistic universe which they no doubt find comforting. However, they seem to forget that most of the teachings of Jesus in the New Testament, which they claim to believe, refutes those older teachings. As Jesus is quoted as saying in Matthew 5:43-45, "You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust."

If Jesus showed up today and tried saying things like that, he'd be accused of being soft on terrorism and run out of town quicker than you could say "kill the wabbit."

Obama's Flawed Consensus Model

2010-03-14T20:34:00.004-04:00

President Obama's procedural approach to most issues so far seems to be a modified form of consensus decision making. This may be a holdover from his days working as a community organizer, and the idea, in theory, has a certain appeal. Unfortunately, several of the prerequisites for a consensus model to work are missing in the way Obama is using it, leading to narrow and dangerously flawed policy decisions.

Having served several years ago as the Clerk of my local Friends Meeting, I'm familiar with the Quakers' use of consensus and the reasoning behind it. When decisions are made by majority vote, those holding minority opinions can feel that their views are not reflected in the group's official position, and are therefore less likely to feel any investment in carrying out that position. The goal of consensus is to involve everyone in formulating a group position, so that each participant feels involved in the eventual outcome. Rather than settling a matter by taking a vote, discussion continues until everyone feels they can support what has emerged to be the sense of the group. The final decision may not meet all of the goals of any one of the individuals, but it should reflect the shared goals of the group.

For such a consensus model to work, however, two key elements are necessary. First, all of the community's views must be represented in the process. If the Friends Meeting decided to discuss a key budget issue, but didn't invite certain members with strong views on that topic, the result would not truly reflect a group consensus, and may fail to really solve the problem. Second, all of the participants must share a commitment to this consensus process. If a subgroup decides to wage a war of attrition by continuing to argue for their views until everyone else tires of the process and drops their opposition, they may prevail in getting their view approved, but they've missed the point of the consensus approach.

On too many issues, the administration is not inviting a broad enough spectrum of views to participate in the process, and they're allowing some voices to drown out others.

Let's look at the health care debate. The Obama administration as well as the congressional committees brought together "policy experts" from the health insurance industry (both individual corporations as well as their lobbying group AHIP), hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies (again, individual corporations as well as PhRMA) to forge a consensus. Locked out of these discussions was anyone advocating a single-payer system, such as Physicians for a National Health Program, California Nurses Association, or House sponsors of the single-payer H.R. 676 such as John Conyers (D-MI) or Dennis Kucinich (D-OH). Also absent from these discussions were any representatives from other industrialized countries with decades of experience in administering various types of national-level healthcare systems, such as Canada, England, or France; think of the valuable lessons learned they could have shared, so that we could have constructed a system that took the best aspects from all these different real-world models. Instead, Obama established ground rules saying that this country's existing practice of employment-based healthcare coverage, using private health insurance companies, would remain unchanged. Imagine if the country's chicken farmers insisted that the foxes be a part of any new improved plan for guarding the henhouse, and refused to look at what farmers in other countries had done about the problem, because we need to find a uniquely American solution. That probably wouldn't work out too well for the chickens.

Another example is our regulation (or lack thereof) of the financial industry. Two of Obama's key economic advisers are Lawrence Summers, Director of the National Economic Council, and Timothy Geithner, Secretary of the Treasury. Yet both of them were high-ranking officials in the Clinton Treasury department, where they worked with the Republican majority in Congress to pass the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999. That law, which repealed key provisions of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, is being held largely responsible for creating the financial collapse that led to a near-repeat of the Great Depression - precisely what Glass-Steagall was intended to prevent. Inviting Summers and Geithner to help create a consensus on financial regulation is a bit like reacting to the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska by asking the builders of that single-hull ship to design the next generation of oil tankers.

To be fair, the primary sponsor of the 1999 financial deregulation, former Republican Senator (and current employee of Swiss bank UBS) Phil Gramm, was the top economic adviser to John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign - another reason these policies seem like a "consensus".

Finally, there's Obama's military surge in Afghanistan, announced last December after soliciting expert views. But how wide did he cast his net in looking for those views? As CENTCOM Commander Petraeus explained his plan to "clear, hold, build" Afghan territory, did anyone point out that this is essentially a rebranding of our "strategic hamlet" program in Vietnam, and ask why we expect it to work any better this time? Was there anyone in the room comparing our plans to identify and assassinate Taliban leaders with the notorious Phoenix Program in Vietnam? Did Obama ask Norodom Sihanouk for his advice on whether our CIA-led "secret war" along the Af-Pak border might destabilize neighboring Pakistan - precisely the same type of actions which destabilized Sihanouk's Cambodia and led to the rise of Pol Pot? Even if Obama wanted to limit the debate to the specific case of Afghanistan, without looking for parallels with Southeast Asia, he would have done well to have consulted historians of the British Empire and the Soviet Union, to ask them why Afghanistan is referred to as the "graveyard of empires". Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, offered some unique insights based on his country's 1979-1989 military occupation of Afghanistan during an interview last fall with The Nation magazine; it's not at all clear that Obama read that issue.

In 1964, writer Abraham Kaplan formulated his "law of the instrument": "Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding." Obama's approach seems to demonstrate what I'll call the Consensus Corollary to Kaplan's law: if you try to find consensus on an issue by only inviting hammers to the meeting, your solution will be to increase the amount of pounding.

What we seem to keep getting, in every policy debate, is a roomful of hammers. And it's the people who wind up getting pounded.

Stupak On Af-Pak

2010-03-11T22:45:00.004-05:00

My fellow progressives have been mercilessly dumping on Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI) lately, due to the way he's been using his opposition to abortion to hold up health care reform bills in the House. His name first came to prominence last fall as co-author of the Stupak-Pitts amendment to the House version of the health care bill, which appeared to go beyond merely prohibiting federal funds from being used for abortions to actually preventing any private health insurance plan which paid for abortion from participating in federally-sponsored health insurance exchanges. He's back in the news now as the badly-watered-down health care bill (aka the "No Health Insurance Company Left Behind" Act) is nearing final passage, warning again that it had better not permit any federal funding for abortions (which, apparently, it already doesn't, a fact that has so far escaped him).

But a little-noticed vote in the House on March 10 reveals another side of Rep. Stupak.

Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) introduced House Concurrent Resolution 248, which would have invoked the War Powers Act to direct President Obama to withdraw all U.S. Armed Forces from Afghanistan. Not surprisingly, the bill was rejected 356-65. The roll call vote shows that the 65 "Yea" votes include the usual suspects of progressive Democrats (e.g., Barbara Lee, Keith Ellison, John Lewis, Lynne Woolsey, Peter Welch, Jesse Jackson, Jr., Chellie Pingree) and libertarian/isolationist Republicans (e.g., Ron Paul, Walter Jones). But there's another name in that honorable list of 65 members of the House who went on the record in favor of ending our country's disastrous military intervention in that "graveyard of empires" - Bart Stupak.

In fact, Rep. Stupak has a fairly consistent voting record in favor of avoiding these quagmires. In addition to yesterday's vote to get our troops out of Afghanistan and its border region with Pakistan ("Af-Pak"), he also voted against our pre-emptive invasion of Iraq.

So while many progressives are getting excited about a possible challenger to Bart in the primary election, hoping to rid the House of this pro-life Democrat who dares to hold up health care reform, I'm thinking the world might actually be better off if we had more representatives like this pro-peace Democrat who dares to try and stop our military adventures around the world so we can keep our troops safe and sound here at home.

In other words, a single issue does not completely define any candidate.

Update: Nothing in the above post should be interpreted as minimizing the importance of protecting a woman's right to choose a safe, legal abortion. While I agree with Rep. Stupak's vote to withdraw our troops from Afghanistan, I deplore his attacks on abortion services. And while I'd like to see more members of Congress vote the way Stupak did on Afghanistan, better yet would be more members of Congress who are progressive on a wide spectrum of issues, not just that one. For example, Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) voted "Yea" on Resolution 248 to withdraw from Afghanistan, but has opposed Stupak's efforts to restrict health insurance policies' coverage of abortion; she's also a co-sponsor of the single-payer H.R. 676. We definitely need more people like her in Congress!

Elections in Iraq: Is This What Democracy Looks Like?

2010-03-07T20:26:00.004-05:00

National elections were held today in Iraq to elect members of the Council of Representatives (Majlis an-Nuwwab). The news is filled with pictures of smiling Iraqis casting their ballots (using an "open-list" form of proportional representation), along with comments from U.S. officials about this "key milestone" in the development of post-war Iraq.

Elections are a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for a democratic society.

After all, while Saddam Hussein held the title of President of Iraq, elections for the National Assembly were held regularly. Of course, the government found various reasons to disqualify potential candidates, and so the winners tended to be members of the ruling Ba'ath Party. These elections were rightly recognized by most other nations as neither free nor fair.

For today's election, however, over 500 potential candidates were disqualified from being listed on the ballot, allegedly due to their past ties to the Ba'ath Party. Is this a legitimate barring of antidemocratic elements, or just a role reversal of who's on the ballot and who's off? One of the key figures behind this move is the infamous former political exile Ahmed Chalabi, the darling of the neocons who pushed the Clinton and Bush administrations to invade Iraq and overthrow the Hussein government. Chalabi, who is still wanted in neighboring Jordan for bank fraud, is one of today's candidates on the Iraqi National Alliance party list, so you could say he had a vested interest in keeping some of these other candidates off the ballot.

Time will tell whether today's election was relatively free and fair, or merely another in a long history of U.S.-sponsored "demonstration elections" meant to show progress and stability in a client state. It was many years before we learned how we manipulated the first elections in Italy after World War II by funding the Christian Democratic Party, paying voters to show up and vote our way (following the tried-and-true practice of "walking around money" in cities like Chicago and Philadelphia), and keeping left-of-center parties off the ballot. Our quick recognition of questionable election results has a long history, including South Vietnam in the 1960s and El Salvador in the 1980s. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is now trying to convince the Organization of American States (OAS) to readmit Honduras because, after all, their new government is in place as a result of an election; the OAS, noting that the election in question was conducted by the leaders of an illegitimate military coup, is so far unconvinced.

So let the U.S. administration chalk up today's Iraqi election as another key milestone that allows us to withdraw our troops from that country, because, let's face it, no country can truly have anything remotely resembling a free and open society so long as it's occupied by foreign troops. However, even after our troops leave, the Iraqi people will be dealing with the aftermath of our invasion and occupation for years to come. Reports surfaced this week of sharply increased rates of birth defects - heart defects, missing or deformed limbs, head abnormalities - in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, possibly as a result of drinking water contamination from the U.S. military's use of depleted uranium (DU) and white phosphorus.

I wonder which achievement future generations of Iraqis will most remember us for - "spreading democracy", as former President Bush liked to say, or spreading birth defects.

Concierge Medicine: The New Club Med

2010-02-28T12:44:00.002-05:00

A few weeks ago, my wife Susan received a letter from her longtime primary care physician. Concerned that her large practice made it difficult for her to give patients the attention and care they deserve, this doctor proudly announced that she was converting to a smaller but more personalized practice, and invited Susan to apply. If Susan acts now, and is among the first 600 patients to scrape together the new $1,500 annual membership fee, she can enjoy continued access to her beloved doctor; otherwise, she'll have to find a new one.

Welcome to the new Club Med.

Susan's doctor has chosen to affiliate with MDVIP, a company in the growing field of "concierge medicine" or "boutique medicine". In the MDVIP business model, each doctor limits the practice to a 600-patient maximum, each of whom pays $1,500 per year. Of that $900,000 annual "dues" coming in to the doctor, MDVIP keeps a third for help with administration, marketing, and research, leaving the doctor with a guaranteed annual income of $600,000 and no cumbersome insurance paperwork. For the patient, that $1,500/year has to come out of pocket - your insurance doesn't pay for it - although MDVIP says you can use your pre-tax Flexible Spending Account, if your employer lets you set one up.

MDVIP is experiencing a growth spurt. In 2006 they had about 100 doctors; the number now is 350. While Susan's doctor is one of only 5 MDVIP franchisees in Pennsylvania, neighboring New Jersey has 9, New York has 13, and California has 51. This growth may accelerate even more now that consumer products company Procter & Gamble has completed its buyout of MDVIP. No word yet on whether this corporate partnership means your MDVIP doctor will be advising you on the health benefits of P&G products such as Prilosec.

There are other concierge medicine "clubs" with even higher annual fees than MDVIP. MD2 charges over $10,000/year for the privilege of being one of only 50 families in your doctor's practice. Concierge Medicine/LA has a sliding scale fee based on age, from $1,750/year to $10,000/year, in return for the type of annual physical they say the U.S. President receives.

This gets to the core of what should be the starting point for any national debate on health care: what do we, as a nation, believe about the type of healthcare people should receive? Is health care a right, where all people deserve the type of comprehensive exams and easy access that the U.S. President or a corporate CEO receives? Or is health care a privilege, where such boutique-level services are rationed according to one's ability to pay?

Susan will be looking for another doctor, since this $1,500/year Club Med fee doesn't fit within our family budget. Meanwhile, our oldest daughter is only able to remain on my employer-provided health insurance as long as she's a full-time student. Once Kate finishes college, she'll have to find her own insurance, provided she doesn't get denied because her asthma is deemed to be a pre-existing condition. Welcome to the world of those priced out of these concierge clubs - the world of steerage medicine.

The Antidemocratic Democratic Majority

2010-02-21T09:34:00.004-05:00

In his 1966 soul hit, Wilson Pickett told his lover that "Ninety-Nine and a Half Won't Do"; he needed all 100% of her love. Today, Senate Majority "Leader" Harry Reid seems to believe that fifty-nine and a half won't do; unless he has 60% of the Senate aligned on an issue, he won't bring a bill to the floor for a vote.

Funny, but I thought that anything over 50% was how democracy worked.

The latest policy issue to hit this anti-democratic brick wall is the healthcare "public option". Polls consistently show that a majority of the U.S. supports such a government-sponsored, non-profit public health insurance plan to provide some much-needed competition to the for-profit health insurance industry. A majority of U.S. Senators have expressed support for it. Yet the public option was stripped out of the Senate health reform bill as part of the Democrats' quixotic quest to win over enough conservative Democrats and/or "moderate Republicans" to reach the 60% supermajority needed to avoid a filibuster. That didn't happen, yet the public option remains out of the bill.

Senator Michael Bennet (D-CO) is circulating a letter to Reid asking that the public option be brought to a vote under the reconciliation process, which only requires a simple majority (51 Senators, or even just 50 if Vice-President Biden can then cast the tie-breaking vote). The Progressive Change Campaign Committee is asking us to call our Democratic Senators and ask them to sign the letter; 20 have signed it so far, including progressives Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Sherrod Brown (D-OH), and Barbara Boxer (D-CA). Even one of my own Senators, the "born-again Democrat" Arlen Specter (?-PA), signed on Friday, no doubt as a result of my call to his office earlier that day.

Isn't it sad that, having elected a Democratic majority to the House and Senate, as well as a Democratic President, we now have to call and beg our members of Congress to actually use that majority to pass a bill?

Barack Obama was elected President in 2008 with 53% of the popular vote. Why should he now be required to muster a 60% supermajority in the U.S. Senate to get any new laws?

Let's see how this rule would have affected a famous vote from our past. On June 4, 1919, after several failed attempts, the Senate finally passed a bill guaranteeing the right of women to vote. After being ratified by the required number of states, this bill became the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920.

That bill passed the Senate with 56 out of 96 votes (we only had 48 states at the time), or 58.3% of the full Senate.

Harry Reid would have waited until he had a 60% supermajority, or 58 votes out of 96. With his brand of leadership, we might still be waiting for women to have the vote.

Some Senators, such as Tom Harkin (D-IA), are trying to change these rules (see his interview with the WaPo's Ezra Klein back in December for some interesting perspective). This 60% rule is anti-democratic in the way it's being used to thwart the will of the majority. It's got to go.

Joan Baez Not Afraid To Change Subject At Civil Rights Celebration

2010-02-13T14:52:00.003-05:00

During the February 11 PBS broadcast of "In Performance at the White House: A Celebration of Music from the Civil Rights Movement", artists including Smokey Robinson, Natalie Cole, and Bob Dylan sang some of the songs that had accompanied activists as they challenged racial prejudice. Joan Baez, as usual pushing the envelope of discussion, attempted to remind the audience of the connections between fighting injustice and violence at home and fighting our government's efforts to wage war in other countries.

After singing two verses of "We Shall Overcome", the anthem she memorably sang at the 1963 March on Washington, Baez recalled Martin Luther King, Jr.'s decision to speak out against the Vietnam War. She said they had sung the words "We are not afraid" to this tune, to help King overcome his fear of taking on such a controversial topic, then led the audience in singing that verse.

If the members of that audience, which included the Obama family along with members of Congress and the Cabinet, are curious about what King ended up saying, they should read the speech he gave on April 4, 1967 at Riverside Church in New York City. Titled "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence", it still has relevance today.

In answer to questions about why he was speaking out against the war, King said that "America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continue to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube." Substitute "Afghanistan" for "Vietnam", and contrast the vast sums of money we continue to spend on that war with the apparent lack of money available for domestic programs, and you'll see how little has changed.

King did not just focus on our government's war in Vietnam, however. He asked us to "look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America", and pointed to the U.S. military presence in Venezuela, Guatemala, Columbia, and Peru. Today our military is still active in Columbia, supporting the business-friendly Uribe government while workers are murdered for organizing unions. The Obama administration's refusal to strongly oppose last June's coup in Honduras seems to once again confirm that, as King said, "we are on the side of the wealthy and the secure while we create hell for the poor." As President Obama continues to push Congress for approval of so-called Free Trade Agreements with Columbia and South Korea, he should instead heed Dr. King's admonition to not let "the need to maintain social stability for our investments" drive our foreign policy.

One can only guess how King would have reacted to the recent Citizens United v. FEC Supreme Court ruling that corporations have the same free speech rights as persons; but he seems to have foreseen such a distorted set of values in 1967 by warning that "when machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered."

During his January 27 State of the Union address, President Obama called for a spending freeze on most government programs, but exempted the Department of Defense budget, for which he's actually proposing a spending increase. Forty-three years earlier, in his Riverside Church speech, Dr. King told us that "a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."

President Obama should take this hint from Joan Baez, read King's 1967 speech, and consider what his administration's policies say about our nation's values. Otherwise, the election of an African-American President who merely perpetuates the policies of his white predecessors, while ignoring the need for what King called a "revolution of values", will be a hollow victory.

The Colorblind Soul of Stax

2010-02-06T10:36:00.010-05:00

Fifty years ago, on February 1, 1960, four black college students walked into the Woolworth's store in Greensboro, North Carolina, and sat at the "whites only" section of the lunch counter to buy something to eat. This sparked a wave of similar sit-ins across the southern U.S. to challenge the long-standing "Jim Crow" laws of separate facilities for "white" and "colored".

Around that same time, though, blacks and whites were working together in the Southern city of Memphis, Tennessee to create incredible soul music that still sounds sweet today. At the Stax Records building on McLemore Avenue, there were no separate sections for "white" and "colored".

Brother and sister Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton, two white businesspeople in Memphis, used the first two letters of their last names (STewart/AXton) to come up with the name of their record label and studio in 1961. Over the next several years they produced crossover hits on both the R&B and pop charts by artists including Sam & Dave ("Soul Man", "Hold On, I'm Coming"), Eddie Floyd ("Knock On Wood"), Carla Thomas ("B-A-B-Y"), Wilson Pickett ("In The Midnight Hour"), and Otis Redding ("Respect", "Try A Little Tenderness", "(Sittin' On) The Dock Of The Bay").

Part of what wove these songs by different artists into a cohesive Stax sound was the label's house band, the core of which also recorded instrumental hits as Booker T. & the MGs ("Green Onions", "Time Is Tight"). This integrated band of two black guys (Booker T. Jones on keyboards, Al Jackson on drums) and two white guys (Steve Cropper on guitar, Lewie Steinberg and later Donald "Duck" Dunn on bass) often surprised audiences at concerts and TV viewers who expected to see an all-black band. The image of blacks and whites working side-by-side, bound together by their love of the music they were co-creating, helped smash the assumptions behind the segregation laws just as surely as the images of blacks and whites trying to drink coffee together.

In a 2005 interview for Philadelphia's WXPN radio station, Cropper reflected on this colorblind atmosphere: "As far as I know the whole time I was at Stax Records there was absolutely zero color. Everybody came in there equal through those doors." Isaac Hayes, who cowrote many Sam & Dave hits with David Porter before starting his solo career, confirmed this in his own WXPN interview in 2003: "We were all mixed there. We were a family. And that's a testament of the power of artistry, because it has no boundaries. Music has no boundaries. It's a human process and that's what brought us together."

Cropper and Dunn helped revive interest in this music in the late 1970s by playing in The Blues Brothers band. Despite their name, a nod to the electric Chicago blues of Chess Records, many of this comedy/musical act's songs came right out of the Stax catalog: frontmen John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd would run out on stage while the band played Redding's "I Can't Turn You Loose"; they had a hit single with a remake of Sam & Dave's "Soul Man"; and their third album featured remakes of The Bar-Kay's "Soul Finger" and the MGs' "Green Onions". Belushi and Aykroyd were the first to admit that their versions were at best pale imitations of the originals, and they urged fans to revisit those original recordings. During a scene in their 1980 movie when Aykroyd pushes an 8-track tape cartridge into his car's player, the camera lingers on the "Best Of Sam & Dave" label as the music plays, as if to say, "buy this album!".

Yes, by all means, buy this incredible music, and celebrate the example of these artists for whom the important question was not whether you were "white" or "colored", but only if you had soul.

Howard Zinn: Don't Mourn - Organize!

2010-01-30T23:41:00.005-05:00

Historian and activist Howard Zinn died on January 27 at the age of 87. Our paths crossed briefly, even before I knew who he was and started reading his works. I was a student at Boston University in 1978-79 while Zinn was a professor there. During a maintenance workers strike in 1979, some professors continued to hold classes, while others (including Zinn) canceled theirs to honor the strike. Each student had to decide whether or not to cross the picket lines in order to attend those classes being held; being forced as a 19-year-old to think about where I stood on a matter of principle like this made a lasting impression on me. I'm sure Zinn would have been pleased by the lengthy discussions that went on in the dorms over this issue, because he wanted people to think about their actions.

Rather than attempt to recount his remarkable life, the impact he had on how history is told, or his contributions to our social movements, I strongly urge you to do the following:

Read (or re-read) his classic work, A People's History Of The United States. This amazing book tells the stories you won't read anywhere else, and also retells the stories you thought you knew, but from another perspective. Beginning with the treatment of the Arawak natives of the Bahama islands by Columbus in 1492, Zinn retells our country's history through the words of people like Eugene Debs, Emma Goldman, and Mary "Mother" Jones. My own well-thumbed copy, purchased a few years after its 1980 publication, is where I first learned about the Haymarket Affair, the Ludlow Massacre, the annexation of Hawaii, and other events they didn't teach about in school.
Watch Howard Zinn: You Can't Be Neutral On A Moving Train, the 2004 documentary narrated by actor Matt Damon. My wife and I watched it yesterday, and we were captivated by the story of his work with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Georgia and by the films of his speeches providing a historical context of U.S. involvement in Vietnam.
Follow the advice of Joe Hill, an organizer and songwriter for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, or "Wobblies"). In 1915, he was falsely accused of killing a grocer during a robbery in Utah, and was sentenced to death. According to Zinn's People's History (p. 327 in my copy), Joe Hill wrote a letter after the verdict saying, "Don't waste any time in mourning. Organize."

In this case, we might allow ourselves a bit of time to mourn the loss of Howard Zinn, but after that he would want us to get right back to the work of making sure the voices of the people are heard - people from our past as well as the people of today.

The "Ups and Downs" of the State Of The Union

2010-01-30T16:45:00.005-05:00

Watching President Obama's State Of The Union address on January 27 reminded me of the Paul Revere and the Raiders' song "Ups and Downs". Over and over, he would get our hopes up by identifying a serious problem or a too-powerful interest, only to let us down by offering half-hearted reforms as solutions.

He railed against those Wall Street banks which "hand out big bonuses", but then backed down, saying only that "they can afford a modest fee to pay back the taxpayers". Modest fee? Ooh, that'll show them. But why tax the banks, modestly or not, when they'll just increase customer fees to cover the new taxes? Why not tax the individuals receiving the obscene bonuses - say, a 100% tax on compensation over a certain amount?

The President pledged $30 billion "to help community banks give small businesses the credit they need", but then added a proposal to "eliminate all capital gains taxes on small business investment". Great, another tax loophole for the investor class that the rest of us can't use.

Mr. Obama used the phrase "clean energy" ten times, reminding me of Paul's grandfather in the Beatles' movie A Hard Day's Night ("he's very clean"). However, just as I was smiling over visions of electric cars, solar cells, and wind turbines, he talks about "building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants". Once again, we're off in search of that mythical creature whose existence, like that of the Yeti, has long been rumored but has never been proven - the safe, clean nuclear power plant. Next he'll be promising that electricity will be too cheap to meter...

I jumped up from the couch when he called out the Supreme Court for their disastrous "Corporations Are People, Too" decision in Citizens United v. FEC, saying "I don't think American elections should be bankrolled by America's most powerful interests." His solution? "Pass a bill that helps to correct some of these problems." I would have hoped this former constitutional law professor might have at least mentioned the possibility of amending the Constitution to destroy once and for all the absurd notion of corporate personhood.

President Obama "embraced the vision" of a world without nuclear weapons, but never called on the Senate to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. President Clinton signed the CTBT in 1996, but it's languished since then in the U.S. Senate while 151 other countries have ratified it.

The President's strong words about "nations that insist on violating international agreements in pursuit of nuclear weapons" were followed up with specific criticism of North Korea and Iran, but no mention was made of Israel, which has nuclear weapons but refuses IAEA inspections and has never signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Saying that "America must always stand on the side of freedom and human dignity", Mr. Obama talked about supporting the rights of girls in Afghanistan, women in Iran, and job-seekers in Guinea. That's all well and good, but what about the rights of voters in Honduras to be governed by the people they elected? Wasn't this right violated in June 2009 when democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya was removed by the military, and "Interim President" Roberto Micheletti suspended civil liberties? The Obama administration never took a strong stand against this coup, ignoring its impact on respect for the rule of law and democratic elections in a region with a history of too many US-supported coups. I'd love to see the U.S. "always stand on the side of freedom and human dignity"; when do we start?

The real lesson, I guess, from this year's State of the Union address is a reminder about the nature of our democracy. Electing an intelligent President with good intentions may open up more space for progressive change, but we can't just wait for it to come from him or her; we the people have to do the work ourselves.

Later this same week, we heard the sad news that historian Howard Zinn, author of A People's History of the United States, had passed away. In an interview on Bill Moyers' Journal last month, Zinn reminded us of this important concept:

"You know, democracy doesn't come from the top. It comes from the bottom. Democracy is not what governments do. It's what people do."

Thank you, Howard, for that important reminder.

"Church of the Poison Mind" in Minnesota's 5th Congressional District

2010-01-26T19:25:00.010-05:00

On January 4, 2007, Rep. Keith Ellison of Minnesota's 5th district became the first Muslim member of the U.S. Congress. This photo of me and my daughters Kate and Julia congratulating him outside his new DC office was taken on that historic day.

Our family had volunteered all year in our home district (PA-7) to help Joe Sestak defeat a 20-year Republican incumbent, and we rode a bus to DC with the other volunteers to see Joe's first day in Congress. But the 2006 elections had been about more than just one seat; many of us saw a chance to change the majority of both the House and Senate from Republican to Democratic, and I donated to progressives around the country trying to help make this happen. I had read about Keith's candidacy because his religious faith would make him a "first" if he won, but I sent him money out of affinity with his progressive positions and his activism in his community. So after making sure my daughters saw the House elect its first female Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, we set out to visit the offices of some of these newly-elected progressives. When Rep. Ellison's staff heard we had donated to his campaign despite living in Pennsylvania, they introduced us and took this photo. I thought it seemed pretty gracious and inclusive of Keith to take time out from that busy first day to pose with a white Christian guy and his two adopted daughters from Peru.

Well, Lynne Torgerson probably wouldn't think so. In fact, she'd probably put me, Kate, and Julia on some terrorist watch list based on this photo. Ms. Torgerson is one of the candidates running against Keith this year, and the "Issues" page on her website includes the following contorted observations:

And, what do I know of Islam? Well, I know of 911. Nineteen (19) men from Saudi Arabia, all Muslim, hi-jacked planes, and flew into the two (2) World Trade Towers murdering thousands of people, and tried to fly into our Pentagon, and some believe they also tried to fly an airplane into our White House. From this, what I perceive is Islam conducting an act of war against my country.
the total "religion" of Islam is not fully protectable by our First Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Keith Ellison simply is not a proper person to have in our federal government.
Stop Iran.

Wait - "Stop Iran"?!? Stop them...from what, exactly? From speeding down a highway? From breathing? Are we to stop all people in Iran, or just the current government? I guess they're just up to something no good, and they need to stop. Period.

Her "Issues" page also gives us this important point:

Me, I am a Christian. If someone criticizes Jesus, I am not going to go kill them. I may not even notice.

You see the logic here, don't you? Those who follow the "religion" of Islam, according to her, are trying to kill the nice, nonchalant Christians who would never dream of killing anyone. Perhaps Ms. Torgerson needs to brush up on her history, such as the Crusades (Christians killing Muslims for living in Jerusalem), the Spanish Inquisition (Christians torturing and killing Jews and Muslims for not being convincing enough in their conversion to Christianity), or the colonization of the Western Hemisphere (Christians enslaving, raping, and killing the natives). If she prefers more recent events, she can revisit the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, in which 168 innocent people were killed by those nice Christian boys Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols. Of course, these reprehensible acts by killers calling themselves Christians in no way indicts the entire religion of Christianity, just as the actions of 19 hijackers calling themselves Muslims indicts Islam.

But don't just take my word for it. Ms. Torgerson's website complains that some of her statements have been taken out of context, so by all means, read for yourself here.

Sadly, one thing you will NOT find on her website is the following passage from Article VI of the United States Constitution:

The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States. [emphasis added]

They always seem to forget about that part...

So please, everyone, let's stop this silly distraction about religious affiliations. It's not Muslims from another country who are foreclosing on homes and driving their owners into bankruptcy; it's American banks doing that. It's not Muslims killing people like Nataline Sarkisyan by denying them healthcare; that would be American insurance companies.

I will once again take out my checkbook and donate to Keith Ellison's Congressional campaign, as I did in 2006 and 2008. Not because he's a Muslim, and not in spite of it. Because of his record of service on issues that matter to working American families like mine.

Supremes to Corporations: My World Is Empty Without You

2010-01-24T12:11:00.000-05:00

In a mindnumbing 5-4 decision announced on January 21, the U.S. Supreme Court decreed that corporations, as "persons" with free speech rights, must be allowed to directly spend money in federal elections. It's as if corporations had been cruelly bound and gagged, like Black Panther leader Bobby Seale during the Chicago Conspiracy Trial, and "Justices" Roberts, Scalia, Alito, Thomas, and Kennedy are the great liberators who have finally set them free.

Commentator Jim Hightower warned us of this likely outcome in the September 2009 issue of his Hightower Lowdown newsletter. The timing couldn't be worse; the crucial midterm elections this year, in which the entire House of Representatives and a third of the Senate is up for election, are now up for sale to the highest corporate bidder.

Some stories on this Citizens United v. FEC decision have pointed out that campaign spending prohibitions were lifted on labor unions as well as corporations, and that this somehow balances things out. Yeah, right. If unions had as much money and power as corporations, wouldn't we all have fully-funded pensions, free healthcare, progressive income tax, and democratized decision-making in the workplace? In this new "one dollar, one vote" system decreed by the Supremes, corporations will easily outspend anyone else, demonstrating that, while all "free speech" may be equal, some speech is more equal than others.

Of course, corporate money in politics is nothing new. Former Senator Henry Jackson (D-WA), patron saint of today's neocons, was known as "The Senator from Boeing" due to their funding of his campaigns and his unwavering support for their corporate well-being. The post-Watergate revelations of suitcases packed with corporate cash being delivered to Richard Nixon's 1972 Commmittee to Re-Elect the President (with the perfectly appropriate acronym of CREEP) are legendary; one of those companies, ITT, got their payback in 1973 when the Nixon administration engineered the military coup in Chile, saving ITT's telecommunications infrastructure in that country from being nationalized by the Allende administration.

However, growing public disgust over these abuses led to a series of restrictions on corporate spending in campaigns. Sure, corporations still have their way with Congress. Capitol Hill swarms with corporate lobbyists on a daily basis, and corporations encourage their executives to make individual contributions to employee PACs, which then give the money to friendly legislators in a process not unlike money laundering. I often refer to Sen. Joe Lieberman as (I-Aetna), although his slavish devotion to the for-profit health insurance companies extends far beyond just those headquartered in his home state of Connecticut. But at least the corporations were prevented from making direct campaign contributions and openly endorsing candidates.

On the other hand, maybe these new rules will make things easier for us to see what's really happening. If corporate "naming rights" can now move from sports arenas to members of Congress, perhaps our legislators will start dressing like NASCAR drivers and wear patches advertising their corporate sponsors. Imagine tuning in to C-SPAN and watching a debate on climate change; when a Senator gets up to claim that science doesn't support calls for limits on carbon emissions, at least the big Exxon-Mobil patch on his or her jacket will explain this. Perhaps Sen. Lieberman can now drop the pretense that he represents the people of Connecticut and openly announce his true corporate constituents.

What to do: Check out the Move To Amend site set up by the Campaign to Legalize Democracy, sign the online motion, and check out any of the fourteen supporting groups listed on the site for further ideas. Public Citizen also has good ideas and actions to take. If all else fails, we can all move to Delaware, the business-friendly state where over half of all publicly-traded corporations in the US are incorporated; if corporations have all the same rights as people, maybe we the people can get in on some of those corporate tax breaks!

Update: For more on the increasing power of corporations, as well as the 1886 Supreme Court ruling that originated the concept of "corporate personhood", check out the excellent 2003 documentary The Corporation.

Haiti: Disaster Without Context

2010-01-24T00:45:00.000-05:00

The earthquake which struck Haiti on January 12, 2010 was a tragic natural disaster. The conditions in that country, however, are the result of centuries of man-made disasters, although you'd never know it from the nonstop news coverage of the earthquake.

Like many, I was instantly struck by the enormity of the earthquake and the numbers of people killed and wounded, and wanted to help. However, I resisted the impulse to give to one of the traditional disaster relief groups, wanting instead to find someone who had already been working in the country to empower and strengthen local communities. I finally settled on Partners In Health, after learning of them through Naomi Klein, Color of Change, and Rachel Maddow, and donated a few days after the earthquake.

I was then pleased to discover that Partners In Health was one of the groups selected to share in the proceeds from the Hope For Haiti Now telethon, aired on TV Friday night (January 22). As the cameras panned to show the celebrities answering phones, I shouted out "Ringo!" as I recognized the 69-year-old former Beatle drummer. Ringo was, of course, at Madison Square Garden in 1971, playing with his friend George Harrison at The Concert For Bangladesh, probably the first time rock musicians put together a performance to raise money for disaster relief. So it was good to see him still coming out for a good cause, alongside Bruce Springsteen showing how "We Shall Overcome" can fit so many situations since Pete Seeger helped make it a civil rights anthem, and Shakira adapting The Pretenders' "I'll Stand By You" to a pledge of solidarity to the people of Haiti.

However, while these performances had the desired effect of raising a record amount of money, we missed an opportunity to raise viewers' consciousness and awareness of Haiti's history. The island of Hispaniola was colonized first by the Spanish, then by the French in the western territory which became Haiti. In the process, the native Taino people were virtually wiped out through a combination of overwork as slaves, killing, starvation, and disease such as smallpox. To replace them, the colonists brought people from Africa to be the new slaves. Haiti finally became independent in 1804 following a protracted revolt against the French colonists. However, the new nation was left with a crippling debt "owed" to France. You would think the US government would have applauded a fellow outbreak of democracy against a European colonial power so close to our shores; however, the fear of slaves taking over and running a country setting a bad example for our own slaves in the southern states made us turn a cold shoulder to this upstart in the Carribean. Instead, the US Marines have occupied Haiti so many times we've both lost count, and we installed and supported the Duvalier dictators (first "Papa Doc", then his son "Baby Doc") for as long as we could.

And what of Haiti's former President, Jean-Bertrand Aristide? Following a genuinely democratic election, he was ousted by a military coup in 1991, probably supported by US President George H.W. Bush. After regaining the Presidency, he was ousted again by George W. Bush (another father-son Presidential pair, like Haiti's Duvaliers). Aristide's flaw was in challenging the power structures, both within Haiti as well as in international organizations such as the IMF and World Bank. This clearly could not be tolerated, regardless of what the Haitian voters said they wanted. And so Aristide was banished from his country, not once but twice, and even now he's banished from the airwaves, as if he never existed.

A few history lessons along these lines would have put the current situation of the Haitian people in context. Instead, in between the altruistic musical performances, we got Anderson Cooper patting a rescued black boy on the head, as if he were a favorite puppy pulled from the rubble.

Please, go out and read this history about Haiti, so you can understand WHY the country is such a mess, and maybe we can find ways to help the Haitian people rebuild their country and run it for themselves.