In These Times

The Gray Lady’s Decline

Kenneth Rapoza — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 10:00:50 +0000

The nation's most powerful newspaper, The New York Times, faces a sixth straight year of profit loss. The unions are forced to save editorial jobs by taking salary cuts. How does one make a living in print journalism anymore?

As Mike Elk reported in this website on January 3, in an effort to trim its overhead costs, in December the company froze the pensions of its foreign citizen employees and threatened to cut their health insurance benefits. A frozen pension means the company will no longer be contributing to that employee's retirement account. The company is trying to cut pensions across the board, for both union and foreign nonunion employees, from The International Herald Tribune in Paris to foreign citizen Times staffers posted worldwide. (Contract talks with the Newspaper Guild union continue.)

For those who care about good reporting, high-quality journalism at the Times--the kind that lets Apple CEO Tim Cook know someone is watching how his company treats suicidal Taiwanese factory workers--is not disappearing. There will just be less of it. And the people who report it will earn less. In some places, like The Huffington Post, curious news junkie freelancers might even do it for free. At this point in the history of American journalism, it's all just a matter of numbers and time.

The Times is the Bank of America of American journalism. She's too big to fail, but she's listing with a cracked hull in a cold sea. The 589 people who signed a Newspaper Guild letter to Times CEO Arthur Sulzberger Jr. on December 23 know this well. Sulzberger is "right-sizing" the paper, which means downsizing in market speak. Wages and benefits account for the bulk of the Times' production costs, and they are falling. In the first nine months of 2011 ending September 25, the paper spent $373.1 million on wages and benefits, down from $376.2 million in the same period in 2010. Total revenues in 2011 are projected to be $233 billion, a 2.7 percent decline from 2010, when total revenue was $2.4 billion, even though the economy improved last year.

What's happening? It's not the economy. It's us. We are no longer reading newspapers. In September 1998, the Times had around 1.06 million papers in distribution daily on a six-month average, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. By September 2010, it had about 876,000 papers in circulation. At The Boston Globe, also owned by the Times, circulation went from 470,000 in 1998 to 220,000 in 2010. The newspaper union accepted a 6-percent wage cut (original proposed cut was 23 percent) in 2009 to keep jobs. Despite this, the Globe remains a money-losing enterprise.

Management doesn't know what to do. Reporters are faced with job insecurity and lackluster pay growth, if any growth at all. Shareholders aren't happy either. The company has clearly become a bad investment; its share price is down more than 85 percent since 2004. The company itself is moving away from newspapers; in December it sold off its 16 regional newspapers (save the Globe) for just $143 million in cash.

The Times is the last bastion of investigative national journalism. Good articles take months and require a team effort of at least two people, a reporter and an editor with a stake in the article's accuracy and impact. The paper produces (and hires) some of the best minds in the business. But it has a major problem, one that goes far beyond divides between ownership and unions.

What does it all mean? My hunch is that the company will get healthcare benefits concessions out of its overseas employees. The union cannot save them. Advertisers have more outlets to choose from and falling circulation forces them to look elsewhere, too. Already, the result is less money for journalism, and less pay for journalists and editors. Some will argue that the advertising model needs to be changed. Or maybe the old newspapers out there need state sponsorship. But a BBC-type public service model is unlikely in a country whose politicians make defunding National Public Radio a major budget-slashing goal.

Slowly but surely, there will be less coverage, more errors and less oversight at the Times. It's already happened to once-mighty newspapers in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and Miami. The Times is the last hold out, unless the numbers improve.

In the mean time, there will be room for younger hires who can live on $39,000 a year in Boston, or $65,000 in New York. Senior level reporters will have to move to management in their 40s, or hope their book deal makes them rich before they're 50. By then, most will be forced to abandon ship anyway, unless a miracle happens.

A Puritan’s Dilemma

Theo Anderson — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 10:00:03 +0000

Before his suicide in September 2008, David Foster Wallace published three short story collections, two novels, two essay collections, a book about rap music and another about infinity. His final, unfinished novel, The Pale King, was published early last year. His essay subjects ranged from Dostoevsky to the porn industry to tennis. But for all his output and range, Wallace rarely wrote about politics. The most notable exception was a long article about the 2000 primary campaign of John McCain. A prominent thread in that narrative is Wallace's exaggerated innocence about all things political, set against the polished professionals of the mainstream press corps.

Wallace had even less to say about religion. His masterpiece, the 1,000-page novel Infinite Jest, is shot through with the quasi-religious elements of Alcoholics Anonymous. It examines recovering addicts' commitment to a higher power, but traditional religious organizations and formal theology are almost entirely absent. The same is true of his famous 2005 Kenyon College commencement speech, published as This Is Water, which posthumously brought him to the attention of a wider audience.

If rarely his explicit subjects, though, religion and politics were nearly always Wallace's subtexts. He mostly ignored the hideous spectacle of electoral politics in the United States, and he had no time for the nonsense that pervades much of American religious life. But his work is obsessed with the roots of our religious and political poverty. It's a sustained jeremiad aimed at America's spiritual childishness, and it's a plea for preserving what is most valuable in religious thought and practice. Wallace was a Puritan, not in theology, but in his sensitivity to a set of insoluble questions and tensions that are deeply rooted in the Calvinist tradition -- most notably the tension between freedom and determinism.

Though freedom is the foundation stone of America's national identity, it was a foreign idea in the "city upon a hill" that the Puritans left England to build. Calvinist theology taught that God had predestined some people to salvation and others to damnation. Only God knew one's fate. As Edmund Morgan wrote in The Puritan Dilemma, a classic account of early colonial life, Calvinist theology created tensions that were "at best painful and at worst unbearable. Puritanism required that a man devote his life to seeking salvation but told him that he was helpless to do anything but evil." By the First Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s, the hard determinism of the early Puritans had been fading for decades. The burning question within Puritanism became the issue of free will: What role does the individual play in her own salvation? By the early 1800s, strict Calvinism was only a minor thread within American religion, as evangelical denominations resolved the Puritan dilemma by denying the determinism that created it. God didn't choose you. You chose God.

The political equivalent of free will's religious triumph was America's messianic sense of its mission in the world. If the Puritan experiment was about creating a sacred space set apart from the world, America aimed for world-historical transformation. The new nation would be "a new order of the ages," liberated from the corruptions and determinisms that defined Europe. "We have it in our power," as Tom Paine wrote, "to begin the world over again."

Freedom and/or slavery

Wallace's body of work is a report, two centuries on, about the results of that bold project. He takes for granted the nation's success in beginning the world over. But the victory has been primarily cultural, in the proliferation of consumer goods and in our ever-more sophisticated and engrossing forms of entertainment. Despite the presumed progress, something vital is missing. "How is there freedom to choose," asks a character in Infinite Jest, "if one does not learn how to choose?"

The perils of consumer culture and the vacuity of mass media are familiar themes, and though Wallace approached them with astonishing creativity, what gives his work its power is less the originality of his critique than the way he methodically erodes the opposition between freedom and slavery. Virtually all of the characters in Infinite Jest are technically free, yet at the same time enslaved to drugs, entertainment or sport.

In a series of conversations with the writer David Lipsky after Infinite Jest's publication, Wallace said, "I wanted to do something that was very, very much about America. And the things that ended up for me being the most distinctively American right now, around the millennium, had to do with both entertainment and a weird ... wanting to give yourself away to something."

For all the trillions of dollars spent in the name of freedom in Iraq and Afghanistan, the only freedom we really seem to want is the freedom to choose our own form of slavery.

Is this really freedom? The range of options available to Wallace's characters is so narrow, and the coercive forces pressing down on them so powerful, that freedom seems little more than an illusion. In Infinite Jest, a video is so magnificently seductive that anyone who begins watching it is sapped of the will to do anything else. Other kinds of determinism run through all of Wallace's fiction. It's a softer, sadder determinism that defines many of his characters' lives: They're slaves to consumerism and corporate culture, locked into routines of meaninglessness. The short story "Mister Squishy," collected in Oblivion, is in part about a focus group facilitator whose job is to gather consumer opinions about a new snack cake. The facilitator's personal life is a procession of identical days: sitting at home "with his satellite TV's channel-changer in his left hand switching rapidly from channel to channel to channel out of fear that something better was going to come on suddenly on another of the cable provider’s 220 regular and premium channels.”

His professional life is even more meaningless, because the snack cake will go forward regardless of the research findings. "All that ever changed were the jargon and mechanisms and gilt rococo with which everyone in the whole huge blind grinding mechanism conspired to convince each other that they could figure out how to give the paying customer what they could prove he could be persuaded to believe he wanted, without anybody ... ever even saying aloud ... what the simple truth was. That it made no difference. None of it."

The search for redemption

It isn't just the determinism that gives Wallace's work a Calvinist flavor. It's also the pervasive depravity. No Puritan was ever more conscious of humanity's capacity for evil and self-delusion -- even among the "redeemed" -- than Wallace. Some of Infinite Jest's most memorable passages are the stories of participants in recovery groups: how their lives spiraled into dysfunction so ghastly and complex that the details are equally chilling and hilarious. In his nonfiction, Wallace constantly questions his own motives and the foundations of his sense of morality. A recurring question in Wallace's nonfiction is whether his desire to be a good person is really just a way of soothing his conscience. Like a good Puritan, Wallace was a master of intense self-scrutiny that edged frequently into self-abhorrence.

Wallace's work is "very very much about America," as he said, because his deepest quarrel goes back two centuries and more, to the religious transformations and political imperatives of the Revolutionary era, when Americans cut the Gordian knot of their colonial ancestors by embracing easy grace and claiming the power to begin the world over. Lost in our naïve ideas about freedom and our facile assertions of free will are a respect for limits and a sense of tragedy. It is the productive tension between fatalism and striving, despair and hope, that Wallace aims for. He deplores the notion that grace comes without cost -- and that it's guaranteed.

In fact, the only guarantee is the struggle itself. As he wrote in an essay about the difficulty of helping college students understand Kafka's black humor, "It's not that students don't 'get' Kafka's humor but that we've taught them to see humor as something you get -- the same way we've taught them that a self is something you just have. No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home."

Uncertainty about whether there is any transcendent point to "the journey toward home" is what separates Wallace from his religious ancestors. The classic Puritan novel, The Pilgrim's Progress, tells the story of a man named Christian and his journey toward the Celestial City. In Infinite Jest, the two protagonists are recovering addicts whose journeys lead toward dead ends. One ends up immobilized and seemingly insane. The other is hospitalized with a serious injury and is struggling to reject the morphine drip that would alleviate his enormous pain. We never learn what finally happens to either character, and Wallace's refusal to give a satisfying conclusion to his stories is a well-known source of frustration for some of his readers. But there is a certain rationale in his resistance to tying up loose ends.

The deep irony of modern life is that, looking around us, cynicism and despair are rational responses to the world's problems. But, at the same time, they only serve to reinforce and deepen the status quo. As Wallace pointed out in his essay about the McCain 2000 primary campaign, cynicism was George W. Bush's most potent weapon, because it kept voter turnout low. He pointed out, as well, the good reasons to be cynical about McCain's own supposedly selfless motives.

Yet his essay concludes with this observation: "Whether he's truly 'for real' now depends less on what is in his heart than on what might be in yours. Try to stay awake." The Celestial City may be nowhere in sight, and the odds of redemption may be long indeed. The end hasn't been written, though, and there is still hope. The path of hope doesn't necessarily lead toward paradise, but it beats the certainties of the alternative. The choice is ours.

Wallace's choice to end his own life at the age of 46 raises heartbreaking questions, particularly in the context of his preoccupations as a writer. Was it fate? He had suffered from depression since adolescence, and his downward spiral came during a period when he attempted to go off his medication. Was his suicide a final comment on the tension between hope and despair, freedom and determinism? All we can know with certainty is that his voice is gone, and terribly missed.

In a conversation with Lipsky, Wallace said that "it's very hard to talk about people's relationship with any kind of God, in any book later than like Dostoevsky. I mean the culture, it's all wrong for it now." In a culture in which so many gods are so cheaply and easily available, how do we learn to choose wisely among them? If we are determined to give ourselves away, who or what is worthy of our devotion?

Wallace desperately wanted to have that conversation and did everything in his power to encourage it. For all the experimental and avant-garde elements in his work, he constantly wrestled with the most enduring philosophical and religious problems. He brought to the struggle an awe-inspiring intelligence and humor -- and an acute awareness of how fragile, yet vital, is the case for hope. It was his great dilemma, and remains our own.

Why Mitt Romney Doesn’t Have a Prayer

Theo Anderson — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 10:00:29 +0000

There's something a bit off in the way that pundits talk about religion, usually. Take the case of Mitt Romney. They want us to believe that the nub of his "Mormon problem" is that his faith will turn off a key voting bloc in the GOP's base: evangelical Christians.

Sorry, but Romney's problem with evangelicals is hardly the fact that he's a Mormon. His problem is that he isn't Mormon enough.

Think about Romney and his faith for a moment. Does anything come to mind? Anything at all? If you didn't know his religious affiliation by the media's references to it, would you even know that he's a Mormon, rather than a garden-variety Protestant or Catholic? Does he talk publicly about why he's a Mormon? Do we know how the tradition has informed his values? Or what Joseph Smith and The Book of Mormon mean to him?

Contrast Romney with George W. Bush. There was never any doubt about where The Decider stood, even if he almost always chose his spot badly. Among the politically interested, who doesn't know the story of Bush's life-changing walk along a Maine beach with Billy Graham, and his conversion to Christianity at the age of 40? And who can forget his masterful response when a reporter asked him to name his favorite philosopher. "Jesus Christ," he said, without missing a beat, "because he changed my life."

Sure, that answer cost him the vote of all the philosophy majors. But it played brilliantly to average Americans. The smug premise of the question--who doesn't have a favorite philosopher?--gave people another reason to hate the media for its pretense and condescension. And it gave Bush another chance to connect with his base by emphasizing what's most important to them about religious experience.

For evangelical Christians, faith is about change and transformation. Its essence is conversion. They love nothing more than a story about the lost sheep finding his way back to the fold--the more lost, the better. The details are both entertaining and a way of dramatizing the power of accepting Jesus. This is why Bush's alcoholism and his rumored drug use actually helped him with the base. Evangelicals aren't judgmental about the depths of the sin you've fall into. They're glad to hear your story about it, in detail. But there has to be a payoff. They have to know that you've changed; or that, with God's miraculous help, you've overcome some kind of great hardship.

What is Mitt Romney's story? It must be more complex than it seems. But for the casually interested voter, it's a tale of one success after another. Privileged childhood. Private schooling. Harvard M.B.A. Beautiful wife. Fantastically successful business career. Governor of Massachusetts. Big, shiny, happy family. Multiplying homes and grandchildren. Multi-million dollar income, almost all of it from investments.

Romney's life story is so cheery that it almost manages, perversely, to inspire a bit of affection for Bush, whose own path was a long record of failures and struggles well into middle age. At least in that biography you can find a recognizable human being. One of the well-known stories about Bush, for example, captures both the fraught nature of the father/son relationship and the terrible ordeal of establishing one's own identity. Driving home from a night of drinking while visiting his parents in D.C., Bush lost control of his car and hit a trash can, which remained wedged under the car. He was 26 at the time. When his father confronted him about it, Bush upped the ante, making the incident about much more than a car crash. "I hear you're looking for me," he said. "You wanna go mano-a-mano right here?"

The story is ludicrous and poignant all at once--emotional porn for evangelicals, and a perfect setup to the payoff of Bush's conversion many years down the road. It's also a story that you can't imagine coming from Romney, whose own youth is pretty well summed up by that now-infamous picture taken with his Bain colleagues in the 1980s, in which they've stuffed cash into their collars, pockets and mouths. It isn't just the display of raw greed that's so devastating about that photo, politically. It's the fact that Romney seems so successful and polished--and, allowing for some aging, not a bit different than he appears today. It's all well and good that he made a fortune and has apparently been a faithful husband for decades. But to really reach evangelicals' hearts, he'd have to talk about some big failures along the way, and the role that his faith played in changing his life.

If he could, it wouldn't matter that he's a Mormon, just as it hasn't mattered to evangelicals that Newt Gingrich is twice divorced and a Catholic. Gingrich's late-in-life conversion and his owning up to past sins absolve all that. The key for evangelicals is the transforming power of faith, not the denomination or tradition that one belongs to.

The lack of a conversion story handicaps Romney in another critical way. Evangelicals' identity is tightly bound up with their estrangement from the mainstream institutions of American society. The estrangement is mostly self-imposed, and it's more rhetoric than reality. It's a method for evangelical leaders to rally their people, divide the world into believers and unbelievers, and cast true believers as persecuted victims.

Having a conversion story is the clearest way of taking sides in this imaginary struggle. It allows evangelicals to hold the most powerful positions within government and the corporate world while remaining spiritually separate from the institutions that they run. Think about the way George W. cast himself as an anti-establishment man of the people while coming from maybe the most influential political establishment in all of American history--the Bush family. It wasn't just the ranch in Texas and the frantic brush clearing. It was the conversion story. His base understood what it meant: that he had cast his lot with the persecuted, righteous remnant.

Romney's record of flip-flopping is often held against him, but his real weakness is that he hasn't made the most important flip-flop of all. He doesn't connect with evangelicals because nothing in his life cancels out his establishment bona fides. There's no cowboy swagger. No dropped g's. No brush clearing. No conversion story. Nothing about what his faith actually means to him. Romney wears his Mormonism so lightly that, from the perspective of evangelicals, he might as well be an Episcopalian.

He seems to believe that his record of success as a businessman and governor should qualify him to be president. But that record is mostly a liability, because the base within the GOP is angry, and the object of its anger is precisely the corporate and governmental establishment that Romney is so obviously comfortable within. Romney doesn't give off a whiff of victimhood. He doesn't act as if he's under siege by elites, or angry at them. He believes, rightly, that he belongs among them, and is proud of it. Among evangelicals, that kind of coziness with power is politically toxic.

What they want, desperately, is a leader who is itching to go medieval on the establishment's ass. Someone who's willing to risk sounding crazy for the sake of the cause. These are people, after all, who know by heart the biblical stories in which people are wiped out by all manner of violence: hailstorms, swarming clouds of flies and locusts, earthquakes, drought, drowning, famine, stoning, burning, hanging and spearing, just for starters. Whole tribes and cities are destroyed in one stroke in the Old Testament. And many evangelicals believe that human history will end in their lifetimes--that Jesus will return for believers and cast the rest of humanity into hell. People with such a keen sense of God's imminent judgment aren't looking for a leader who's happy to play by the rules of business as usual. They're looking for a leader who views established authority as the enemy--the kind of man, say, who once challenged his own father to a fistfight.

So it's hard not to feel the evangelicals' pain when they look at Romney. After three solid decades of loyalty to the GOP, this is the joke of a candidate the party offers up? A man who isn't even comfortable using his real first name, Willard? A man who looks as if he should be in sunglasses and sandals, sipping strawberry daiquiris on a yacht? A man who embodies every single thing that they despise about Washington? They have good reasons to be skeptical about Romney. His Mormonism is the least of their worries.

To the business wing of the GOP, of course, Romney's establishment credentials are a plus, and he comes off as an eminently reasonable man. Because of that, and because the field of candidates is so weak, he is on his way to winning the nomination.

But that prospect should keep the GOP's grand poobahs awake at night, because Romney won't excite the evangelical base in the general election. He doesn't have a story that speaks to them. He doesn't speak their language. He doesn't get them at the gut level, the way George W. Bush did, and they certainly don't get him. And the inconvenient truth is that without a strong turnout by the evangelicals this fall, Mitt Romney doesn't have a prayer.

Fighting for Gender Equality in Iraq

Rebecca Burns — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 10:00:07 +0000

As President Obama hailed the "extraordinary achievement" of U.S. troops withdrawing from Iraq in December, continuing protests against government repression and abysmal basic services undermined the narrative of a successful democratic transition. Yanar Mohammed, president of the Organization of Women's Freedom in Iraq (OWFI), has for months helped many Iraqis express their anger. Since February 2011's "Day of Iraqi Anger" -- on which tens of thousands of Iraqis nationwide called for jobs, fair distribution of Iraq's oil wealth and an end to occupation -- Mohammed has helped organize weekly demonstrations in Baghdad's Tahrir Square. She's been a vocal critic of both the U.S.-led occupation and the fundamentalist groups that she says it has empowered.

On June 10, 2011, Mohammed and other OWFI activists were attacked and sexually assaulted while demonstrating. Despite continued threats and intimidation, she continues her work to defend Iraqi women from domestic abuse and sexual trafficking, and to promote women's voices and demands in the struggle for a truly democratic Iraq. She spoke to In These Times in December from Toronto, where she was visiting family.

U.S. troops have withdrawn, yet as many as 5,000 private contractors remain. What is the importance of this moment for Iraqis?

We are unable to focus on the withdrawal because our insecurity has escalated. There are more bombings. And we are unable, after eight years, to figure out: What did we gain out of this occupation? We know what we have lost. We know the United States was unable to put together a functioning government. We know that we have lost the elegance of our cities. Baghdad is totally ruined. We know that at this point the standard of life is so low and so expensive that a middle-class family cannot get by, cannot put healthy meals on the table.

Is the occupation continuing by other means?

Although U.S. troops withdrew, they have left us with a heavily militarized society. Almost 1 million Iraqi personnel have been recruited into the army and the security agencies. We are still living in a big military camp -- the only difference is that they are wearing Iraqi military uniforms. We have almost 10 different kinds of security agencies -- some of them are anti-riot, some of them are intelligence and some of them are private security groups. None of them feel like they need to be accountable.

How have things changed for Iraqi women since Saddam was overthrown?

Women's status in the society is much worse. When Saddam was around, we had many objections, but the laws did grant some basic women's rights. But after the so-called liberation, a girl can be married at 11 years. This is legal because the Iraqi Constitution has an article that says that Iraqis are free to choose what kind of law under which they lead their civil lives. Many American officials have called the Constitution the most democratic constitution in the Arab world, but how does an 11-year-old girl choose what kind of law protects her?

How did the OWFI Iraq get its start?

During the beginning of the occupation, I was living in Canada. In May 2003, I traveled to Iraq and met with some women, and we founded the OWFI. Our mission was to build a society of full equality for everybody under a secular, non-ethnic constitution. We started with a few volunteers. One of the volunteers was a young woman who was eloping, but under the threat of an honor killing. We gave her a room on the upper floor in the building, while we took the main floor for the organization. And so we started the first shelter for women in Iraq!

Our main shelter is in Baghdad now, but we have many families who have opened their houses for women who are under threat of honor killing, or who are escaping other kinds of abuse. OWFI defends women without compromising with anyone -- not the tribal groups in Iraq who see women as property, not the religious groups who claim the political scene for themselves and not the nationalist groups, under whom we have lived our whole lives, who see men as the heroes of a society.

Do you consider yourself a feminist?

For sure. The kind of feminism I look at encourages equality -- including when it comes to gender. Inequalities cannot thrive in the third millennium, and that's why everybody is on the streets. Feminists, especially in the Arab world, have had a big say in these public squares of political struggle, because women are the face of political change.

Your organization recently issued a message of solidarity with Occupy Wall Street. The media talks about violence in Iraq a great deal, but rarely inequality and rising unemployment. Is there a new 1% in Iraq?

Although the U.S. troops are leaving, they have left us with a 1% of Iraqis who are ruling ruthlessly. A member of Parliament in Iraq receives annual compensation that is equivalent to $102,000, while a worker in the Iraqi public sector earns $200 or $300 as a beginning monthly salary. This is a society of inequality.

Unlike the revolutions in Egypt or Tunisia that were demanding the removal of a dictator, February's mass demonstrations were targeting a government that was elected. What does this say about Iraqi democracy?

We are asked, "Why demonstrate against an elected government?" During the occupation, all the political and financial support went to the most right-wing groups in Iraq. The elections are the final result of the eight-year U.S. occupation.

The government announced before the demonstrations that there would be a curfew -- they were terrified. Yet people came and demonstrated. Nobody was fighting against each other -- there was no sectarian struggle in this square. But, the end of the day was different. The armies, security groups and anti-riot troops surrounded us, and they began shooting. It did not feel that it was a democratic country at all. On Fridays, people still go. But if you go to demonstrate in Tahrir Square [in central Baghdad], Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has his militias around the square ready to pick you up.

OWFI members have been beaten and sexually assaulted while demonstrating, just like female protesters in Egypt. Why are women targeted in this way?

They wanted us to feel ashamed. Our organization made sure that these demonstrations had a female face. We had our slogans, our banners, which we carried every single Friday. This was not approved by al-Maliki's government. And in an Arab society, if a woman is shamed, she is pushed out of the public arena. They expected that we would go hide in our homes and not show our faces to anybody. The same way in which women are forced to immolate themselves or made the victim of an honor killing, they wanted to force a political dishonoring on us in order to end us politically.

How are the women who have been attacked in Tahrir Square faring today?

All of them are back in the square. But we are very careful as to our whereabouts. Once we see security forces, we leave the square. We are not willing to be tortured again and again.

Are you working to get women elected directly to Parliament?

In Iraq, 25 percent of members of Parliament are required to be women, which is good. But more than half the women in Parliament are from the Religious Right. When we were beaten in Tahrir Square -- 25 of us -- not a single female Parliamentarian spoke out. In other words, those women are puppets.

You have been threatened with assassination. Why do you continue doing this work?

The government is threatening not to renew our registration as an organization. But I always remember the eyes of the young women in our shelter who are given a second chance in life because they just escaped an honor killing that was forced upon them because they were raped, or because they were harassed. This second chance to life for women is important. I will never let go of this mandate, whether I am beaten or declared illegal by some corrupt prime minister. The American occupation put all the resources of Iraq in the hands of the misogynists. Feminists can bring a better future in Iraq. And we are waiting to hear from the feminists of the United States, from progressives, from everybody. We want you to help us gain the upper hand in Iraq

Anniversaries From ‘Unhistory’

Noam Chomsky — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 14:26:42 +0000

George Orwell coined the useful term "unperson" for creatures denied personhood because they don't abide by state doctrine. We may add the term "unhistory" to refer to the fate of unpersons, expunged from history on similar grounds.

The unhistory of unpersons is illuminated by the fate of anniversaries. Important ones are usually commemorated, with due solemnity when appropriate: Pearl Harbor, for example. Some are not, and we can learn a lot about ourselves by extricating them from unhistory.

Right now we are failing to commemorate an event of great human significance: the 50th anniversary of President Kennedy's decision to launch the direct invasion of South Vietnam, soon to become the most extreme crime of aggression since World War II.

Kennedy ordered the U.S. Air Force to bomb South Vietnam (by February 1962, hundreds of missions had flown); authorized chemical warfare to destroy food crops so as to starve the rebellious population into submission; and set in motion the programs that ultimately drove millions of villagers into urban slums and virtual concentration camps, or "Strategic Hamlets." There the villagers would be "protected" from the indigenous guerrillas whom, as the administration knew, they were willingly supporting.

Official efforts at justifying the attacks were slim, and mostly fantasy.

Typical was the president's impassioned address to the American Newspaper Publishers Association on April 27, 1961, where he warned that "we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence." At the United Nations on Sept. 25, 1961, Kennedy said that if this conspiracy achieved its ends in Laos and Vietnam, "the gates will be opened wide."

The short-term effects were reported by the highly respected Indochina specialist and military historian Bernard Fall -- no dove, but one of those who cared about the people of the tormented countries.

In early 1965 he estimated that about 66,000 South Vietnamese had been killed between 1957 and 1961; and another 89,000 between 1961 and April 1965, mostly victims of the U.S. client regime or "the crushing weight of American armor, napalm, jet bombers and finally vomiting gases."

The decisions were kept in the shadows, as are the shocking consequences that persist. To mention just one illustration: "Scorched Earth," by Fred Wilcox, the first serious study of the horrifying and continuing impact of chemical warfare on the Vietnamese, appeared a few months ago--and is likely to join other works of unhistory. The core of history is what happened. The core of unhistory is to "disappear" what happened.

By 1967, opposition to the crimes in South Vietnam had reached a substantial scale. Hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops were rampaging through South Vietnam, and heavily populated areas were subjected to intense bombing. The invasion had spread to the rest of Indochina.

The consequences had become so horrendous that Bernard Fall forecast that "Vietnam as a cultural and historic entity ... is threatened with extinction ... (as) ... the countryside literally dies under the blows of the largest military machine ever unleashed on an area of this size."

When the war ended eight devastating years later, mainstream opinion was divided between those who called it a "noble cause" that could have been won with more dedication; and at the opposite extreme, the critics, to whom it was "a mistake" that proved too costly.

Still to come was the bombing of the remote peasant society of northern Laos, with such magnitude that victims lived in caves for years to try to survive; and shortly afterward the bombing of rural Cambodia, surpassing the level of all Allied bombing in the Pacific theater during World War II.

In 1970 U.S. National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger had ordered "a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. Anything that flies on anything that moves" -- a call for genocide of a kind rarely found in the archival record.

Laos and Cambodia were "secret wars," in that reporting was scanty and the facts are still little-known to the general public or even educated elites, who nonetheless can recite by heart every real or alleged crime of official enemies.

Another chapter in the overflowing annals of unhistory.

In three years we may--or may not--commemorate another event of great contemporary relevance: the 900th anniversary of the Magna Carta.

This document is the foundation for what historian Margaret E. McGuiness, referring to the Nuremberg Trials, hailed as a "particularly American brand of legalism: punishment only for those who could be proved to be guilty through a fair trial with a panoply of procedural protections."

The Great Charter declares that "no free man" shall be deprived of rights "except by the lawful judgment of his peers and by the law of the land." The principles were later broadened to apply to men generally. They crossed the Atlantic and entered into the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, which declared that no "person" can be deprived of rights without due process and a speedy trial.

The founders of course did not intend the term "person" to apply to all persons. Native Americans were not persons. Neither were slaves. Women were scarcely persons. However, let us keep to the core notion of presumption of innocence, which has been cast into the oblivion of unhistory.

A further step in undermining the principles of the Magna Carta was taken when President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act, which codifies Bush-Obama practice of indefinite detention without trial under military custody.

Such treatment is now mandatory in the case of those accused of aiding enemy forces during the "war on terror," or optional if those accused are American citizens.

The scope is illustrated by the first Guantanamo case to come to trial under President Obama: that of Omar Khadr, a former child soldier accused of the heinous crime of trying to defend his Afghan village when it was attacked by U.S. forces. Captured at age 15, Khadr was imprisoned for eight years in Bagram and Guantanamo, then brought to a military court in October 2010, where he was given the choice of pleading not guilty and staying in Guantanamo forever, or pleading guilty and serving only 8 more years. Khadr chose the latter.

Many other examples illuminate the concept of "terrorist." One is Nelson Mandela, only removed from the terrorist list in 2008. Another was Saddam Hussein. In 1982 Iraq was removed from the list of terrorist-supporting states so that the Reagan administration could provide Hussein with aid after he invaded Iran.

Accusation is capricious, without review or recourse, and commonly reflecting policy goals--in Mandela's case, to justify President Reagan's support for the apartheid state's crimes in defending itself against one of the world's "more notorious terrorist groups": Mandela's African National Congress.

All better consigned to unhistory.

When it Comes to Education Technology, Trust but Verify

David Sirota — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 10:00:36 +0000

The release of Apple's computer-based textbooks last month had the usual technology triumphalists buzzing. "Apple And The Coming Education Revolution," blared the headline at Fast Company magazine. "Apple puts iPad at head of the class," screamed MacWorld. And Time declared the announcement the "debut (of) the holy grail of textbooks." It sounds exciting--a rise of the machines that promises educational utopia rather than Terminator-style cataclysm.

Or does it?

Though it may be too soon to definitively answer that question, it's not too soon to ask it, because despite the celebratory hype, there's no guarantee that a hyper-technologized education system is synonymous with genuine progress.

Ponder, for starters, the much-discussed issue of financial efficiency. As the tech website Gizmodo noted in a post titled "You Can't Afford Apple's Education Revolution," the new iPad-based books might "only cost $15 a pop," but "instead of selling an updated textbook every 5-10 years for $100, (publishers will) update and sell every year for $15," and "it's not like you can hand down an iBook from year to year ... you expressly can't." It's the same story with so many other vaunted education-branded technologies: They seem to promise resource-strapped school districts a way to constructively reduce expenditures, but the dazzle of flashy gadgets and interactivity often means budget-busting costs over the long haul.

Those costs might be justifiable when a new device is a sure bet to improve education. But a school's wager on computer technology as a pedagogic panacea is often just that: a blind gamble, and one that evidence shows is hardly safe.

Here in Colorado, for instance, the nonprofit I-News Network recently reported that students attending the state's "full-time online education programs have typically lagged their peers on virtually every academic indicator, from state test scores to student growth measures to high school graduation rates." Stanford University researchers found similar results in their separate study of online schools in Pennsylvania. And after its exhaustive national investigation of the trend, The New York Times concluded that "schools are spending billions on technology, even as they cut budgets and lay off teachers, with little proof that this approach is improving basic learning."

In lieu of empirical data, why are schools rushing into this brave new world of technology?

For one thing, there's the allure of a quick fix, as gadgets seem to hold out the possibility that school districts can sustain huge budget cuts without sacrificing quality tutelage. The idea is that teachers can be replaced by cheaper computers, at once saving schools money, preventing tax increases for school resources, and preserving educational services. Even if data prove that's a pipe dream, the desire for a cure-all has convinced many desperate schools to chase the fantasy.

There's also political pressure from high-tech companies that, according to Education Week, "are thriving in the K-12 market." As the Investigative Fund's Lee Fang recently documented, these firms use some of the loot they are generating to finance state-based political front groups, hire lobbyists and employ has-beens like Gov. Jeb Bush as their public representatives. The result is a powerful political infrastructure that pushes state legislatures and local school boards to divert money away from proven education tools (teaching staff, textbooks, etc.) and into risky technology procurement.

There's little doubt, of course, that some technologies may end up bringing about genuine advancements in education. But that possibility is no reason to suddenly ignore Ronald Reagan's notion of "trust, but verify." After all, before it was the Gipper's, that motto was the mantra of the most devoted science and technology geeks--just as it should be schools' mantra now.

Farewell to Our Feminist-in-Chief

Sady Doyle — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 19:43:45 +0000

The woman on the platform seems happy. She's an ordinary woman, well-dressed but not ostentatiously so, pretty but not playing it up, heading gracefully into late middle age. Her voice is low and calm; her tone is gracious. She smiles frequently as she speaks, compliments the reporters surrounding her and tells them how good it's been to work with them, with what reads as genuine affection.

"I think after twenty years--and it will be twenty years--of being on the high wire of American politics, and all of the challenges that come with that," she says, "It would probably be a good idea to just find out how tired I am."

That gets a laugh, and she laughs with it. If you take Hillary Clinton moment by moment--if you take her, for example, at this moment on January 26, as she announces that she step down from her position as the Secretary of State when the president's terms ends--it's hard to imagine that she's spent the last two decades of her life as one of the most hated women in America. And if you take her on the whole, the void left by her promised departure from American politics is nearly impossible to comprehend.

"Women look for themselves in any woman who stands out among a sea of men," says blogger Melissa McEwan, of Shakesville. "Women who find themselves in Hillary Clinton have a passionate attachment to her, because they see reflected back at them qualities they have or hope to acquire--strength, independence, fortitude, a commitment to other women--but also because to see a woman with those qualities in her position is some sign, even despite her Shawshankian swim through a river of shit to get there, that this nation will embrace a woman like that, like them."

For decades, Hillary Clinton has served as a litmus test for just how much the American public will accept from a smart, ambitious, assertive, feminist woman: How much she can reasonably hope to attain, and what opposition she will face. Her basic competence has never truly been in question; her "likability," the ability of society to accept her, always has been. And women have projected their deepest hopes and fears onto her throughout.

The "challenges" alluded to by Clinton have been huge. Her attempts at healthcare reform led to a "Billary" label and caricatures of the president and his wife as conjoined twins. She refused to bake; America panicked. When her husband cheated, people called her too aggressive to keep him happy; when they stayed married, people called her too submissive to stand up for herself. She ran for the Senate, prompting hand-wringing over her power-hungry nature--she was a wife, her husband already had a job in politics, why did she need a job, too? And she won. So she ran for president, which was where the trouble really started.

Fucking whore. Castrating, overbearing, and scary. Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction. She devil. Iron my shirt. C.U.N.T. Beat the bitch.

The amount of overt misogyny aimed at Hillary Clinton during the 2008 campaign, from conservatives and progressives alike, was enough to shock many young women -- even Obama supporters like myself -- into a new awareness of just how powerful and widespread sexism still was in this culture. In this magazine, Susan J. Douglas accused Clinton of being too much "like a man." (And, hilariously, pointed to notable dying-wife-betrayer and sex-tape-maker John Edwards as an example of a more truly feminine and caring politician.)

Feminist veteran Robin Morgan penned a scorching and controversial response, entitled "Goodbye to All That, Part II." Though I didn't agree with every statement therein, I admit I winced with uncomfortable recognition when I hit the line about young, female Obama supporters "who fear their boyfriends might look at them funny if they say something good about [Clinton]."

Morgan describes the feminist movement's relationship with Clinton as longstanding, rooted as much in an understanding of her historical importance as anything else.

"When I was growing up, [a First Lady] arranged flowers. I mean, that was the job," Morgan told me in a phone call. "The only thing that was known that they consistently did was become alcoholics."

But, Morgan says, Clinton has persistently exceeded the culture's expectations and fulfilled those of her feminist supporters.

To be the first First Lady who openly sought equality with her husband, and the first First Lady with her own political career (and post-graduate degree)--to go from designated flower-arranger to Secretary of State -- and to inadvertently spark the feminist conscience of an entire generation along the way is no small accomplishment. Those I spoke to predicted further accomplishments. Morgan thinks she could be Secretary General of the U.N.; McEwan suggests that she'll be "a global ambassador for women" with the Clinton Global Initiative.

But, without Hillary, where do women stand? Which other figure can reflect women's ambitions, and their fears about the price of ambition, in such a profound and iconic way? There are many women in the political arena, but few as powerful and as historically resonant as Clinton. One clue may be in the passionate outpouring of support for Elizabeth Warren--another law-degree-possessed woman in her early sixties with decisively progressive politics, a gift for fiery summation of the progressive worldview, and a big, committed following, which is already pushing for her 2016 presidential candidacy.

When I put out two queries on Twitter--to speak about Warren, and to speak about Clinton, respectively--the responses I received were almost all women who wanted to speak about Warren. We appear to have found our new girl.

McEwan acknowledges that, in some ways, Warren may well be Clinton's "most natural heir."

"I don't know if there will ever be another Hillary Clinton, though," says McEwan. "And in a way, I hope there isn't, since she is an icon not just because she is extraordinary, but because she is alone."

In the end, what may be the finest sign of what Clinton has accomplished, and which barriers she broke down, is this: People do not, generally, compare Elizabeth Warren to Hillary Clinton. The person they compare Warren to is President Barack Obama.

When Less is More Political Engagement

Jane Miller — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 10:00:46 +0000

No more boom and bust," said Gordon Brown, Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1997, New Labour's first year in government. Fifteen years later, we are reminded daily that we are very much in a bust, and that things will get worse. We must all (or perhaps not quite all) tighten our belts in this era of austerity.

This may be less of a shock for those of us who remember Britain during the 1930s and World War II. We tell ourselves that we managed then without cars or washing machines or refrigerators. We grew quite fond of our ration books and gave a lot of thought to what could be bought with our clothing coupons. We didn't get scurvy or get fat on a diet without oranges and bananas. Indeed, it is generally thought that the British people benefited from a more balanced and nutritious diet during the war than they'd had before it.

There was something leveling about those war years, despite films and novels that revel in the antics of the servanted classes, freezing in their unheated castles. A return to some of those lacks and scarcities would be hard for my generation, but harder still for the next one, let alone the one after that. By the middle of the 1950s we were pretty certain, after all, that life was getting better and that it would go on doing so. And it did. Our parents expected their children to have an easier time of it than they had had. Now most parents worry that their children will have far more to contend with than they did.

So far, it is undoubtedly the young who come off worst -- and that really is a change. Youth unemployment is rising to new heights. Of the more than 1 million unemployed young NEETs (which stands for 'not in education, employment or training') between the ages of 16 and 24 in the U.K., almost 900,000 have been looking for work for a year or more. And since the announcement of a tripling of university fees, there has been a 15 percent reduction in the number of young people applying to higher education institutions for next year.

On the face of it, the government is warier of cutting services for the old than for the young. Even so, there have been disturbing revelations. There are tales of cruelty and neglect of old people in care homes and hospitals, and the possibility that the old constantly find themselves at the back of the queue waiting for medical attention. The moderately serious suggestion that old people should be required to downsize their homes in order to release spare bedrooms for the homeless has been another unwelcome suggestion. Public-sector workers are having to pay more for pensions that will be smaller than ours and delivered at a later date. Many people will be happy to go on working, although no thought has been given to what happens when the young are blocked from work which is still being performed by people in their 70s.

It's possible to feel that the worst effects of recession are a new callousness, a new set of rationales for inequality. Apparently a majority of us blames the poor for their situation and despises them for wanting all the material things that the richer and the rich take for granted. Ruthlessness and competitiveness prevail and are admired. Dishonesty surprises and shocks us hardly at all. The government blames Europe, the last Labour government and the reckless, improvident poor for all our ills, and a majority of those who are asked for their opinion seem to agree with them.

Yet I have Irish friends who are scathing about reports in the English press that they are suffering appalling hardship. My friends believe we're far too sorry for ourselves and too patronizing about them. It's all nonsense, they say. The Irish are used to austerity, and as their boom time only lasted for about 10 years, they feel up to the austerity they're required to go back to.

I am torn between pessimism about the effects of new levels of poverty on our unequal society, and optimism about the vitality of Occupy and other political engagement that take austerity as a given -- and even a kind of inspiration.

U.S. Military Toxins: The Gift That Keeps on Killing

Terry J. Allen — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 10:00:52 +0000

Hey, Iraq, don't say we never gave you anything. In addition to hundreds of thousands dead and untold injured, the United States is leaving behind enough toxic waste sites to kill your rats.

"Open-air burn pits have operated widely at military sites in Iraq and Afghanistan," the Department of Veterans Affairs notes on its website. On hundreds of camps and bases across the two countries, the U.S. military and its contractors incinerated toxic waste, including unexploded ordnance, plastics and Styrofoam, asbestos, formaldehyde, arsenic, pesticides and neurotoxins, medical waste (even amputated limbs), heavy metals and what the military refers to as "radioactive commodities." The burns have released mutagens and carcinogens, including uranium and other isotopes, volatile organic compounds, hexachlorobenzene, and, that old favorite, dioxin (aka Agent Orange).

The military pooh-poohs the problem, despite a 2009 Pentagon document noting "an estimated 11 million pounds [5,000 tonnes] of hazardous waste" produced by American troops, the Times of London reported. In any case, it says, the waste isn't all that toxic, and there is no hard evidence troops were harmed. Of course, one reason for that lack of evidence, reports the Institute of Medicine (which found 53 toxins in the air above the Balad air base alone), is that the Pentagon won't or can't document what it burned and buried, or where it did so.

The little media attention that has been paid to this massive pollution has dimly illuminated its potential impact on U.S. troops. Left in mephitic darkness are the contractors, often impoverished South Asians, who did the dirty work at the bases, as well as Iraqi civilians who live and farm nearby. The Times of London reported that "open acid canisters sit within easy reach of children, and discarded batteries lie close to irrigated farmland," causing people to sicken and rats to die "next to soiled containers."

The toxic air echoes with the Vietnam War's Agent Orange fiasco. Victims of that war's dioxin suffered for years before the United States took limited responsibility -- but only for its troops, and not for the countries it poisoned.

The military's history of pollution is long and largely unmitigated by legislation, treaties or lawsuits. It stretches around the world, from bases in the Philippines to Okinawa, Kuwait to Canada, and to numerous U.S. sites as well.

Once upon a time--before 9/11 turned conspiracy theories into a self-righteous boom industry--Area 51 was an amusing Mecca for a dedicated band of tinfoil-hat nutters who fantasized about alien anal probes and insisted that the government was hiding space aliens on a secret Air Force Base in the Nevada desert.

But a real and more nefarious plot was the military's exploitation of lax regulation and worker confidentiality agreements to use Area 51 as a secret dumping/burning ground for the toxic waste shipped in from other bases.

As deaths mounted at Area 51, workers--and their widows--sued, producing evidence that the military had regularly filled football-field-sized trenches with 55-gallon drums of hazardous waste, doused them with jet fuel and set them ablaze. The lawsuit foundered on the shoals of "national security" secrecy. The military got away with murder.

Fast forward to U.S. military bases around the world that are similarly immune from effective regulation and reporting. GAO investigators charge that the military in Iraq burned prohibited substances and ignored "guidance" to monitor emissions and to analyze its waste stream.

Again, sick and dying vets, this time from Iraq and Afghanistan, are trying to trace their cancers and respiratory problems to the toxins of war. Again, the military refuses to release complete data, and claims the data show no harmful effects. Again, the assumption of culpability, and the clean-up efforts will come too little, too late.

A July article in the New England Journal of Medicine studied 80 soldiers disabled with constrictive bronchiolitis, "a very rare finding" in otherwise healthy, young non-smokers. Almost all the cases were traced to "inhalational exposures during service in Iraq and Afghanistan." The journal lamented : "This group causes particular concern, since their potential toxic exposures are shared by most personnel who were deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan."

And, oh, yes, by those left to endure the predictable consequences of expedient poisoning. You're welcome, Iraq.

Illinois’ Injustice System

Joel Handley — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 10:00:46 +0000

CHICAGO--From where he stands today, Kerry Owens is optimistic. He was released from an Illinois prison in November, after serving a year for retail theft. Owens, 41, has been in and out of the criminal justice system before, but his most recent sentence, for his first felony conviction, has changed his life forever.

He resolved to live differently by volunteering, kicking the addiction that led him to steal $300 worth of merchandise, and enrolling at a local community college. But as a convicted felon, it is now harder than ever to get a job, find an apartment and receive social services.

Owens previously worked as a custodian, and while in prison he earned a certificate for commercial custodian services. But persistent high unemployment and his felony record have left him looking for work. "There's nothing out there," he says. "They're certifying us for jobs that don't exist."

As one of more than 16,000 black male ex-offenders estimated to have been released to Chicago in 2011, Owens is not alone in his struggle. Experts estimate that the unemployment rate for ex-offenders in the city is well over 50 percent, compared to an overall unemployment rate of 10.1 percent. (Nationally, rates for ex-convicts are similar, while the U.S. unemployment rate has fallen to 8.6 percent.)

If history is any guide, rates for black males, who account for two-thirds of Illinois' prison population, are likely even higher. In 2005, in a comparatively favorable job environment, an Urban Institute report found that a year after being released, only 28 percent of black males surveyed were employed, while 60 percent had been employed before their arrests. Recent reports on ex-offenders show higher employment rates, but those reports also count "at least one week of work" during the previous year as "employment."

Determined not to fall back into his old habits, Owens volunteers at the Westside Health Authority, a community center in Austin, one of the six Chicago neighborhoods -- along with Humboldt Park, Englewood, West Englewood, North Lawndale and East Garfield Park -- that receive a disproportionate majority of the city's returning ex-offenders, and account for higher unemployment and arrest rates than the city as a whole. "I'm not bitter, I'm better, [and] productive in the same place I did my crimes in," he says. "I'm no longer part of the problem. I'm part of the solution."

But Owens is part of an increasingly small group of prisoners and ex-prisoners in Chicago who received at least a minimal level of support from social services -- services that have become a major target of state and local governments looking to cut costs. In attempts to close budget deficits, since 2007 Illinois and Chicago have cut extensively from programs that benefit inmates and ex-offenders, including education, job training, healthcare, drug treatment programs and housing.

Conviction, prison, release--and then repeat

According to a 2010 report by the John Howard Association (JHA), which has been monitoring Illinois prisons and working for reform since 1901, 14 percent of Illinois' prison population was enrolled in college education programs in 2002. By 2009, after Illinois cut funding for the programs, only 10 percent of prisoners were enrolled.

Similarly, there were 136 vocational education programs in Illinois state prisons in 2002, but only 96 by 2009. Even those that offer job training, like Vandalia Correctional Center where Owens was locked up, limit the programs to low-level offenders and prisoners close to their release dates. Owens was one of only 45 inmates (out of a total of 1,748 at the prison) who were enrolled in job training at the time of a June 2011 JHA prison tour report. JHA executive director John Maki says, "We're seeing prohibitively long waiting lists at nearly all facilities."

Illinois' financial delinquency has caused further problems in drug treatment centers and housing. According to Geri Cooper, manager of Hardin House Women's Recovery House on the South Side, the program only has 14 participants, even though the waiting list for acceptance is more than a year long, because it can't rely on funding. The Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) used to pay for five months of housing at the center, but now pays only for two. And even though many of Hardin House program's clients are required by courts or parole boards to attend psychological therapy, the state no longer covers it. Participants now must pay $15 per session, not easy for the recently-released and sometimes homeless women to whom the organization caters.

Perhaps most damaging are cuts to mental health services, which leave the penal system as de facto psychiatric wards. In May 2011, Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart threatened to sue Illinois for its negligence and told Chicago's WLS-TV that the Cook County Jail was "the largest mental health provider in the state," where one fifth of the jail's population has been diagnosed with a mental illness. After facing cuts of $114 million between 2009 and 2011, mental health services in Chicago received a devastating blow in November, when the City Council unanimously passed a 2012 budget that closes five of the city's 12 mental health clinics.

As preventive and rehabilitative services have been reduced, incarceration rates have increased and recidivism has persisted. "There's an increased demand for prison space as social services are cut," says Maki. From 2005 to 2009, Illinois' incarcerated population remained fairly constant, at just over 45,000 prisoners. By September 2011, it had increased to well over 48,000, according to IDOC. While recidivism rates, or the percentage of ex-prisoners who have re-offended within three years of their release, have dropped slightly during the same time, from 53.4 percent in 2007 to 51.1 percent in 2010, they remain higher now than a decade ago (44.1 percent in 1998).

Reverend Tommie Johnson, a recovery support services coordinator for Treatment Alternatives for Safe Communities (TASC) and the founder and director of Outside the Walls Ministries in North Lawndale, equates the task at hand for social services to the harrowing plight of the Israelites under the pharaoh's command: "They're telling us we have to make brick without straw." Like other social service workers, Johnson understands the desperate acts of those facing dire circumstances, and that the cycles of convictions and recidivism start early in the lives of many of Chicago's poor black youth.

The new masons

When conflicts arise between Englewood youth, Chris Bufford intervenes. As the lead organizer for juvenile justice with the Southwest Youth Collaborative, which offers mentoring, leadership training and many other programs to youth in the city's Southwest neighborhoods, Bufford uses his own experience as an ex-offender to help them understand the economic and social forces behind their behavior. "We expand from their individual problems to the whole dynamic around the community," he says, "to teach them how to restore the damage they've caused victims and their neighborhood."

Today, Bufford says, "Things are worse. The suffering is more apparent. Young people don't have a way to make a dollar." But resorting to the street economy has long been one of few opportunities for economic advancement immediately available. "Ask any adult criminal when they needed help, and they'll tell you, 'You should have hollered at me when I was 12, probably younger.' "

From Bufford's perspective, the recession has not made the lives of poor black males worse. "It's sad to say, but the recession is taking [the government] in the right direction," as Democratic politicians like Gov. Pat Quinn and Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle explore alternative treatments and ways to reduce inmate populations. Some have called for easing sentences of nonviolent offenders, which comprise 70 percent of Illinois' prison population.

"But," Bufford adds, "[Politicians'] main thing is to save money, not help young people."

This story continues "The Other Chicago," an In These Times series supported by the Local Reporting Initiative of Community News Matters, underwritten by The Chicago Community Trust and administered by The Community Media Workshop and The Chicago Reporter.

The Sunshine State’s Shadowy Legacy

Theo Anderson — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 04:53:53 +0000

There are a few iconic moments and events that represent profound shifts in American history. Think of the civil rights marches in 1965, the riots at Altamont and Stonewall in 1969, or Jimmy Carter's "crisis of confidence" speech in 1979.

This week's GOP primary election in Florida will not rank among them. But with the state in the spotlight again, it's worth pausing to remember what happened in Florida a dozen years ago, and to wonder why it isn't better remembered as an iconic moment in our history, and to consider how the 2000 election has shaped our politics in ways that defy all expectations.

Recall that George W. Bush was declared the winner in Florida by about 500 votes, giving him the presidency. Recall also that Bush's victory was sealed by a 5-4 Supreme Court decision that abruptly halted a statewide vote recount.

In the election's aftermath, the press was concerned more with "healing" than digging into the facts of what happened. And then, after 9/11, it was considered unseemly to question the fundamental health of our democracy. The upshot is that we've never honestly grappled with the extent of the fraud that occurred in Florida in 2000. But the truth is that the state's GOP-controlled election was corrupt almost beyond belief.

According to an investigation by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, more than 50 percent of Florida's 180,000 "spoiled" ballots were cast by African Americans, though blacks constituted only 11 percent of the population. Put another way, ballots cast by African Americans were about nine times more likely to be rejected than ballots cast by the rest of the population. And "the disparity in the spoilage rates," according to the report, "is not the result of education or literary differences."

That conclusion was confirmed by a task force assembled by the state's Republican governor, Jeb Bush.

So tens of thousands of Florida voters were systematically disenfranchised in an election that turned on a few hundred votes. There is bipartisan agreement that this happened. And that was just one of many irregularities favoring Bush. As the journalist Jeffrey Toobin wrote in a judicious account of the election, it's clear that more Florida voters intended to vote for Gore than Bush, and "in any real, moral, and democratic sense, Al Gore should have been declared the victor. . . . If the simple preference of the voters behind their curtains was the rule -- and it is supposed to be the rule in a democracy -- then Gore probably won the state by several thousand votes."

The terrible implications of that fact are difficult to absorb, and both parties have reasons to move on and just get over it. For Democrats, it's too painful to think about the long-term damage inflicted by policies that Bush should never have had the power to pursue. And for Republicans, it's all just whining.

So our response has been repression. We don't talk about it much. The problems it exposed in our electoral processes were written up in reports -- and then ignored. There were reforms to Florida's election laws, but nothing on the scale one would have expected, and the inevitable calls for abolishing the Electoral College faded after a few months. All the drama of the 2000 election changed very little, apparently.

Except that it did.

It didn't initiate the wave of soul searching and reform that one might have expected. But it did teach the GOP that it could turn weakness into strength by attacking without shame. The sullying of John Kerry's war service in 2004 was the most jaw-dropping confirmation of this lesson. But that was just one instance in a broader strategy of shamelessness.

You might think, for example, that Republicans would be shy about making accusations of election fraud after their shenanigans in 2000. Not so. Over the past decade, that accusation has become a powerful galvanizing issue among conservatives. What angers them isn't the very real possibility that states like Florida are disenfranchising minority voters. It's the possibility that ineligible voters are casting votes, or that voters are casting multiple votes, though investigations into voter fraud have concluded that it is rare in the extreme. By any normal standard, it shouldn't be an issue at all.

But the truth of the matter isn't really the question. Zeal trumps reality. Weakness becomes strength.

Here's another legacy of the 2000 election that now defines our politics: Winning a majority means nothing. When a 51-majority vote is sufficient to pass legislation, the Senate is heavily but not outrageously tilted toward the smaller and less populous states. When a 60-vote "supermajority" becomes the standard -- as it now is for any legislation of consequence -- our system is at the mercy of 40 Republican senators who represent between a one-fourth and one-third of the population.

The single most important legacy of the 2000 election, though, was an increasingly conservative and activist Supreme Court. Some pundits speculated that the Court would try to repair its reputation after the election by retreating from the political sphere. Fat chance. Bush's victory and his subsequent appointees had the opposite effect, giving conservatives a 5-4 majority, energizing them politically, and ultimately giving us the Citizens United decision, which has unleashed unlimited corporate spending on our elections.

It's too painful to dwell on, perhaps, but we now live in a political culture created in large part by electoral fraud in Florida in 2000, and by a Democratic Party that has never come to grips with what the GOP has pulled off since then, or how it has done so. It just doesn't seem plausible that a political party could advocate tax cuts for the wealthy during a deep recession and remain viable. But then, it didn't seem plausible that Bush could lose the 2000 election and still be named president; or that John Kerry's war service would become a liability.

The same is true on issue after issue. From climate change to healthcare to gay rights to torture, the GOP is on the wrong side of history and morality. It wouldn't survive long in a healthy democracy. But to borrow from the parlance of Donald Rumsfeld: You engage in political battles with the democracy you have, not the one you might wish to have. In our corrupt and out-of-whack system, shamelessness is a proven and potent weapon.

If Democrats hope to prevail this year and beyond, they'll have to develop an intensity and zeal for telling the truth that is equal to the GOP's chutzpah. That's easy to say and hard to do. "The best lack all conviction," William Butler Yeats wrote, "while the worst are full of passionate intensity." The one certainty about the coming election season is that the worst will be full of intensity. Whether the best in our system will find their voice -- and use it on behalf of truth -- is the critical question.

The Austerians Attack!

James Crotty — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 10:00:02 +0000

When the economic and financial crisis erupted in 2008, progressives hoped that it would trigger a popular revulsion against the right-wing economic policies that caused the crisis. It is now clear that these expectations are not being met. Moderate progressive policy moves have been overwhelmed

by public-sector layoffs and budget cuts as Republicans, too many Democrats and even President Barack Obama himself, have chosen austerity or "belt-tightening" as a main policy objective.

But how did the dogma of these "Austerians" -- inspired by the Austrian School of economics -- come to dominate public policy?

Progressives were not the only ones hoping to seize the opportunity of the economic crisis. A right-wing coalition of ideologues and industrialists saw it as a chance to achieve final victory in the war they have waged since the 1930s to destroy the New Deal institutions built under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and extended through the late 1970s.

Those of us who believe in an economy designed to meet the needs of the majority can still win the war that the Austerians are waging against us. Our commitment to those who are suffering the most during the Great Recession does not need to be sacrificed on the altar of a balanced budget achieved not by taxing corporations and the very rich but by savagely cutting the social safety net. The Left's vision of a government that serves human needs is entirely compatible with moderate sustainable deficits and a shrinking public debt burden.

How is it that a right-wing coalition is closer to destroying social democracy in America than at any time since its emergence in the 1930s? Because the Right succeeded in creating a dominant media narrative that blames deficits on an American public that demands more government social spending than it's willing to pay for. In fact, deficit problems were actually created by the Right's neoliberal economic model imposed on the country after 1980, which involved the radical deregulation of the financial market, regressive tax cuts, rising inequality and unfunded war spending.

To fully understand how we got to this point, we have to go back to the 1920s. This historical context makes the solutions to today's deficit "crisis," offered below, even more obvious and compelling.

Capitalism in crisis

The boom of the second half of the 1920s was marked by little regulation of business, very low taxes on corporations and rich households, a crippled union movement, a powerful financial sector that rained money on the wealthy, and a political system dominated by economic elites. From 1923 to 1929, 70 percent of the growth in income went to the richest 1 percent and only 15 percent went to the bottom 90 percent of the income distribution. This was the Right's dream world.

The out-of-control capitalism of the period led to a financial crisis in late 1929. The ensuing financial collapse was accompanied by a severe depression.

The terrible economic costs of the Great Depression led to powerful political movements in the United States and Europe that demanded both an end to uncontrolled capitalism and its replacement with a new system designed to meet the needs of the people. The Western economic models that evolved from these movements are variants of social democracy, democratic capitalism, regulated capitalism or the mixed economy.

In 1933, Roosevelt and the Democratic Party took control of the government and began to implement a series of social-democratic programs that became known as the New Deal.

They included strict regulation of financial markets, creation of the Social Security program, support for the growing union movement, large public employment programs, implementation of various kinds of deficit-financed stimulus spending and the beginning of unemployment insurance.

U.S. elites were split on whether to accommodate some aspects of the New Deal in the early 1930s, but the strength of the Right's resistance increased in the late 1930s as the danger of mass rebellion against capitalism ebbed. The right-wing coalition tried to undermine all aspects of the New Deal, including:

• the regulation of industry

• the "confiscation" of private wealth through income taxes (which did not exist prior to 1913)

• the reduction of economic inequality

• support for unions

• Social Security

• unemployment insurance

• regulation of business

• the commitment to full employment, which weakened business control over labor

• the diminution of elite control over the government.

In other words the Right wanted to restore the 1920s regime.

Much of the opposition to the New Deal was based on economic self-interest, but ideological forces were at play as well. Kim Phillips-Fein in Invisible Hands: The Businessmen's Crusade Against the New Deal writes that, motivated by a deep-seated "antipathy toward social democracy," the Right:

[B]elieved that at the heart of the New Deal and the labor movement was an excess of democracy -- that the organization of working-class people into labor unions led to the rise of the welfare state and the perversion of the market economy. ... For them, the turning back of the New Deal was a question not only of the bottom line but of the deepest social principles.

The problem for the right-wing coalition was that the ever-expanding role of government in the economy was extremely popular because it created widespread prosperity from WWII through the mid-1970s -- the so-called "Golden Age" of modern capitalism. The rate of economic growth was high, unemployment was low, real wages and family incomes rose rapidly, and inequality plummeted. Much of the business sector distanced itself from coalition efforts to overthrow the New Deal in the 1950s and 1960s because profits were so high.

The mid- to late-1970s marked a turning point. In the wake of the first oil price hike in 1973, the U.S. government was faced with two choices: It could stimulate spending to sustain growth at the expense of higher inflation, or it could restrict spending to stop inflation at the expense of higher unemployment and slower growth. It chose the latter course, which caused the unemployment rate to rise from 4.9 percent in 1973 to 8.5 percent in 1975. Slower growth, higher inflation and unemployment, and falling profits and stock prices created growing discontent with the economic status quo. Meanwhile, social unrest was stirred by conflict over racial integration, the anti-war movement, the women's movement, pro-choice struggles, the so-called culture wars, student radicalism and a youth rebellion.

These developments led to a political alliance between resurgent right-wing economic forces and the rapidly increasing ranks of cultural conservatives. As a result, business and other conservative forces saw a dramatic increase in their ability to raise money to elect friendly politicians, organize grassroots pressure on all politicians, and spend money on an expanding right-wing ideological infrastructure of think tanks and university influence. They also used their control of the media to interpret economic and political events for the public through a conservative prism.

By 1980, the country had come to a crossroads. The existing set of government institutions and policies, in combination with changes in economic conditions -- including the increasing globalization of production and investment that led to rising foreign competition -- were no longer generating the widespread prosperity the public had come to expect. Either we had to reconstruct and reinvigorate our social democratic model or replace it. Right-wing forces, which had vastly increased their political clout, had a clear vision of the alternative model they wanted -- a modern version of the 1920s economy situated in a globalized economic system.

For their part, supporters of the basic New Deal philosophy were confused about how to restructure the government-economy nexus in the face of economic adversity. In addition, a large and growing percentage of Democrats had lost their commitment to the New Deal.

Progressive economists did offer various policy proposals that, in the spirit of the New Deal, were designed to support egalitarian growth. For example, a combination of stronger unions, a rising minimum wage, tougher regulation of financial markets and a more progressive tax policy could have sustained the relatively low economic inequality of the Golden Age.

But right-wing forces were now dominant.

So under President Ronald Reagan, the Right delivered a rapid rise in inequality through financial market deregulation, high unemployment, regressive tax cuts and attacks on unions. Increased capital mobility in a globalized economy also facilitated a "race to the bottom," in which transnational firms threatened to invest only in those countries with the lower wages and corporate taxes, and with the least effective regulatory regimes. Since Reagan not only enacted large regressive tax cuts but also increased defense spending by about 1.5 percent of GDP, he created by far the largest federal budget deficits since the end of World War II. Both the tax cuts and slow economic growth under the new right-wing economic policies helped create the rise in deficits and debt that took place after 1980.

The economy grew much faster than government debt during the early post-war decades -- so the debt-to-GDP ratio became smaller over time. The ratio was at a post-war low of 26 percent in the year before Reagan became president. In other words, there was no deficit or debt problem before the Reagan presidency.

When Reagan left office in 1989, the debt-to-GDP ratio had risen to 41 percent. During the presidency of George Bush senior it rose to 48.1 -- almost double that in 1981. Under Bill Clinton, who increased taxes on the wealthy by a modest amount, the debt-to-GDP ratio declined. In 2001, when George W. Bush took office, the debt-to-GDP ratio had fallen to 32.5 percent. When he left office in 2009, the ratio was 40.3 percent and the deficit was about to explode.

The oft-heard claim that Republicans are fiscal conservatives is nonsense that is utterly inconsistent with the historical record.

The failed right-wing economic model combined with large regressive tax cuts and unfunded wars under George W. Bush, and the Obama administration's efforts to prevent a depression through increased government spending and tax cuts, created the largest federal budget deficits in peacetime history just after Obama took office.

In the first year of President Obama's term, the debt-to-GDP ratio hit 53.5 percent. In 2010 it was just over 62 percent. The deficit was projected to hit 75.1 percent in 2012, in part due to the two-year extension of the Bush tax cuts agreed to by President Obama and congressional Republicans in 2010 at an estimated two-year revenue loss of $850 billion.

A one-sided class war

Rapidly rising deficits at the federal, state and local levels, along with prospective long-term financing problems in the Social Security and Medicare programs, intensified the ongoing one-sided class war waged by the right-wing coalition against the rest of us. As billionaire Warren Buffet famously remarked in 2006, "There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning."

Because of these deficits the right-wing coalition of rich households, large corporations, smaller businesses, ideological conservatives (such as the Religious Right and, more recently, the Tea Party) and conservative politicians is demanding severe cuts in spending that supports the poor and the middle class, or that funds public investment in education, healthcare, infrastructure and technology.

At the same time, this coalition has demanded tax cuts (for the wealthy and corporations) that are larger than the proposed spending cuts, which would increase government deficits and thereby sustain political and economic pressure to further decimate government spending -- what the Right publicly refers to as its "starve the beast" strategy.

The Republican Party, with the assistance of a significant number of Democratic politicians, supports core post-Reagan policies of unrelenting regressive tax cuts, major reductions in nondefense government spending and serious cutbacks to -- or privatization of -- Social Security and Medicare.

The adoption of new austerity programs across the globe, particularly in Europe, threatens to sink economies deeper into recession, perhaps triggering another global financial crisis. Deep cuts in government spending will reduce the income of public-sector workers and private-sector employees who work under government contract, as well as the income of families who receive payments from Social Security and other social programs. This means reduced purchasing power, less production and more unemployment. Here in the United States we need a serious jobs-creation program over the next several years, but it cannot be built on the deep cuts in public spending and regressive tax cuts demanded by the right-wing coalition.

The Economic Normalcy Bias

David Sirota — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 10:00:11 +0000

In 1977, two Boeing 747s collided on an airstrip in the Canary Islands. According to accident investigators, those who survived the initial blast in one plane had time to escape before a fire consumed the wreckage. But eyewitnesses reported that many remained in their seat looking perfectly content--as if nothing was wrong.

Not surprisingly, dozens of these dazed victims were burned to death, and the episode became a reminder of the so-called normalcy bias--a cognitive phenomenon whereby many who are faced with imminent disaster instantly convince themselves that everything is normal and that they don't have to modify their behavior.

Unpleasant as this anecdote is to recount, it exemplifies the psychology at the root of one of America's most destructive traits: our obsession with materialism and consumerism. To extrapolate the metaphor, if our damaged economy, record-low savings rate and sky-high personal debt levels are that smoldering plane about to explode, then America's "shop till you drop" normalcy bias may be engineering yet another avoidable tragedy.

The most recent holiday binge exemplified the impending crisis. Despite persistent unemployment, flat wages and higher prices for necessities (food, health care, etc.), America nonetheless went on its usual post-Thanksgiving buying spree.

A glance at new data from the holiday season tells this story. After Black Friday's now-annual melee of hyper-aggressive shoppers, the Washington Post reported that Christmas saw credit card purchases jump 7 percent over last year. Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve bank reported that consumer borrowing surged to pre-recession levels; Forbes reported that online holiday spending hit a record; and the Los Angeles Times reported that "consumer spending "grew faster than people's take-home incomes" as households "cut their savings rate (to) support their purchases of cars and other goods and services."

In the face of such self-destructive behavior, it's worth asking: Why is overconsumption still the preferred "normal" in America? The flippant answer is that it's simply hard for shopaholics to break old habits. But while that's certainly true, it's not the whole story when enablers are everywhere.

Turn on the television, and you'll inevitably face a bevy of ads telling you to buy something -- a cellphone, a television, a car, anything!--even if you don't actually need the product. Look around at the economy and you'll see growing industries that are based not on fulfilling customers' basic needs, but on satiating consumers' materialist impulses. Tune into politics and you'll hear policies touted for how they will prompt even more consumer spending.

Of course, that latter enabler--politics--is the most powerful of all, as our national leaders regularly tout consumption for its own sake.

Recall that in the face of the planet's climate change and resource crises, then-Vice President Dick Cheney denigrated the notion of frugality, saying, "Conservation may be a sign of personal virtue, but it is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy." Likewise, Rudy "America's Mayor" Giuliani told everyone not to sacrifice after 9/11 but instead to "go shopping." And last month, Bloomberg News headlined a dispatch "Bernanke Prods Savers to Become Consumers," highlighting how the "easy money" lending policies of the nation's chief banker was reinvigorating the culture of gluttony.

Just five years ago, this same Fed chairman was rightly imploring Americans to "forgo consumption or leisure" in order to start reshaping our economy around sustainability and thrift. But after the financial crisis, he, like so many politicians, became just another passenger on that burning plane.

Paralyzed by the normalcy bias, Bernanke and other leaders keep calmly imploring us to go about our business ... move along ... and that's what we keep doing, even though the fuselage may soon go up in flames.

The World According to Newt

Sady Doyle — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 19:35:27 +0000

Political sex scandals occur so often in American life that it's surprising to see how shocked we can get about each new scandal as it arises. Bill Clinton got frisky with an intern. John Edwards had a wife with cancer, a mistress and a sex tape. (So that's why he needed those fancy haircuts.) Herman Cain had not so much a "sex" scandal, but a "harassment and assault" scandal; that got put into the mill, too. Larry Craig had bathroom stalls; Mark Sanford had Argentina. And Newt Gingrich has a well-known habit of trading in his older, sicker wives for new ones.

So when ex-wife Marianne Gingrich told Nightline that in 1999 he had actually asked her to accept his long-running affair with current wife Callista while Marianne was dealing with a fresh diagnosis of multiple sclerosis, and that (here's the charming part) Newt broke that news on the phone, while she was at her mother's house, well: It was hardly surprising. (He denies her allegations.) The odd nature of the request, the bizarre incapacity to see that his choices or timing might be particularly appalling, the childish misogyny of casting aside a sick wife like a broken toy--what's the point of having a woman if it doesn't even work right? There are newer, shinier ones to play with, after all--were all so characteristically Newt.

The most damning information we have about Newt Gingrich is not that he is a cruel man, or even a dishonest man: It is that he is a distinctly weird man. Everything about him -- from his hobby of writing alternate-history novels to his strangely pathetic Twitter-turfing--resonates with the sense of a guy who just never figured out how other people work.

But this news was put into the mill, too, next to the tantalizing term "open marriage." And so, once again, we are invited to consider how the proclivities of the political American penis stand in for American values.

In fact, there are a few things wrong with the popular conception of the story. First, that what Newt asked for was indeed an "open marriage;" although she used the phrase "open marriage," what Marianne says he asked for was permission to continue an affair, not for a marriage in which both he and his wife could sleep with other people. And, second, that this substantially new information: As Raw Story's Executive Editor Megan Carpentier points out, Marianne disclosed much of the story in an interview with Esquire in August 2010. That profile includes the line "[Newt] had also told the press that he and Marianne had an understanding."

But the phrase "open marriage" resonates because it strikes deep at the heart of what we expect of our politicians, despite every bit of evidence we have that it's not realistic, and despite the fact that we often don't expect it of ourselves.

Politicians, Carpentier says, need "to be seen as Christian in most cases, to be seen as hewing to social mores, and to be seen as reflecting a certain kind of social value system that continues to be part of our political process." Even though, she says, "increasingly few people abide by that ideal." Although even infidelity researchers--yes, Virginia, there are infidelity researchers--point out that data on the success or failure of monogamy is hard to come by, one fairly conservative statistic states that about 15 percent to 18 percent of people who have been married have cheated on their spouses.

Nona Willis Aronowitz has written about the scandal for GOOD magazine, pointing out that actively trying to negotiate non-monogamy would, if true, be one of Gingrich's more honorable moves.

"We're at a point where we know many people fail at monogamy, but we still think it's wrong," she told me. "We want our political candidates to at least try to be right, to attempt to live a life we deem acceptable. Most Americans haven't gotten used to the idea of non-monogamy as a viable alternative. We think of it only as a betrayal, which it usually is, given that public non-monogamy is so taboo. So we're not kidding ourselves--we know it happens--we just want our politicians to be sorry about it."

Willis Aronowitz points to Gingrich's redemption narrative--his conversion to Catholicism, his statements about having gotten right with the Lord and himself -- as a means by which he has escaped consequences. Then again, there is also the fact that Gingrich has responded to this latest re-surfacing of Marianne's story by denying any "understanding," and with thundering condemnation that is nearly Biblical in and of itself.

"To take an ex-wife," he told John King at the South Carolina debates, "and make it, two days before the primary, a significant question, is as close to despicable as anything I can imagine."

Given that the man has imagined the Nazis successfully conquering Europe, that's no small thing.

And his campaign has willingly pushed a narrative that is even more popular amongst sexist Americans than redemption: The idea that having told this story once or twice renders Marianne a crazed, vindictive harpy on an eternal quest for revenge. Within Newt's stentorian disapproval, one could also hear the rallying cry of terrible husbands across the nation: Why can't you just let it go?!?

On Saturday, two days after Marianne's new old news broke, Gingrich easily won the South Carolina primary. Whatever Newt's flaws are--and it would indeed be fun to see him run a family-values platform against a president with a marriage that is by all accounts loving and functional--they have not prevented Americans from voting in his favor.

"People actually misunderstand what's going on," Gingrich said, in his South Carolina victory speech. "It's not that I am a good debater. It is that I know how to articulate the deepest-felt values of the American people."

On the one hand, Newt Gingrich has always generously supplied the liberal columnists of the world with their best punch lines. On the other hand, in some senses, the man might actually be right.

The Silence of the Technocrats

Thomas Frank — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 10:00:55 +0000

In 2008, the country's financial system suffered an epic breakdown, largely the result -- as nearly every credible observer agrees -- of the decades-long effort to roll back bank supervision and encourage financial experimentation. The banks' stumble quickly plunged the nation and the world into the worst recession since the 1930s. This was no ordinary business-cycle downturn. Millions of Americans, and a large number of their banks, became insolvent in a matter of weeks.

Sixteen trillion dollars in household wealth was incinerated on the pyre Wall Street had kindled. And yet, to date -- the Occupy movement notwithstanding -- the most effective political response to these events has been a campaign to roll back regulation, to strip government employees of the right to collectively bargain and to clamp down on federal spending.

This return of the Right is even more remarkable when we remember the prevailing opinion climate of 2008. After the disasters of the George W. Bush presidency culminated in the catastrophe on Wall Street, the leading lights of the Beltway consensus deemed that the nation was traveling in a new direction. They had seen this movie before, and they knew how it was supposed to go. The plates were shifting. Conservatism's decades-long reign was at an end. An era of liberal ascendancy was at hand. This was the unambiguous mandate of history, as unmistakable as the gigantic crowds that gathered to hear Barack Obama speak as he traveled the campaign trail.

But while the Washington wise men sat back and waited for the mystic tides of history to sort things out, conservatives acted.

The Republican Right had a coherent theory. Everywhere you look, they declared, you see a colossal struggle between average people and the "elites" who would strip away the people's freedoms. The huge bailouts that followed the financial crisis, they said, are evidence of a design on our savings by both government and Wall Street. Regulation, too, is merely a conspiracy of the big guys against the little.

Now, for the first time in decades, the Right has declared that it wants to have the grand economic debate out in the open. The fog of the culture wars has receded -- temporarily, of course. The conservative movement's manifesto for 2010, the "Contract from America," mentioned not a single one of the preceding decades' culture-war issues. In 2010, a radicalized GOP scored its greatest victory in congressional elections in many decades.

In defending "capitalism," however, the leaders of the latest conservative uprising don't really bother with the actually existing capitalism of the last few years. Instead, the battle is joined at the level of pure abstraction. The issue, the Republican Right tells us, is freedom itself, not the doings of the subprime lenders or the ways the bond rating agencies were compromised over the course of the last decade. Details like that may have crashed the economy, but to the renascent Right they are almost completely irrelevant. What matters is a given politician's disposition toward free markets and, by extension, toward the common people of the land, whose faithful vicar the market is.

Now, there is nothing really novel about the idea that free markets are the very essence of freedom. What is new is the glorification of this idea at the precise moment when free market theory has proven itself to be a philosophy of ruination and fraud.

Falling for the hard-times swindle

The resurgent Right has capitalized on the nation's anguish to create a protest movement that virtually promises to make the anguish worse. This swindle will have terrible consequences down the road. Yet the Right met its goals not by deception alone -- although there has been a great deal of this -- but by offering an idealism so powerful that it clouds its partisans' perceptions of reality.

Now, constructing an alternative reality would normally put a worldly political movement at a profound disadvantage. But this case is different. The reborn Right has succeeded because of its idealism, not in spite of it; because idealism in the grand sense is precisely what our fallen economic world calls for.

The culprits of the cataclysms of recent years -- the ones who wrecked the economy -- were not punished for what they did; they were laden with bailout billions and our blessings. All of which happened courtesy of our government, the officials of which have conducted themselves ever since as though nothing really untoward happened at all.

You could not contrive a scenario better calculated to destroy public faith in American institutions.

The bailouts, combined with the recession, created a perfect situation for populism in the Jacksonian tradition, for old-fashioned calamity howlers, for Jeremiahs raging against the corrupt and the powerful. Populist mobilizing was the task of the moment, and conservatives took to it immediately and with relish. They tossed inconvenient leaders overboard. They declared war on the ruling class. They assembled with megaphones in the park and gave voice to the people's outrage.

But the other faction -- the actual political descendants of Jackson and Bryan and Roosevelt -- took years to rise to the occasion. They didn't seem to understand that circumstances called for a profound change. They couldn't embrace the requirements of the moment even though they were the ones pledged to the traditional hard-times measures (regulation, reform, social insurance) and even though responding to hard times was once their party's very raison d'etre.

They were offered the chance, of course. In 2008 Barack Obama seemed to be a figure of destiny like Roosevelt himself. He took the oath of office under similarly disastrous circumstances and was for a while buoyed up by exactly the sort of popular adulation that followed FDR.

The Anti-Lady Laws of 2012

Sady Doyle — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 10:00:49 +0000

WHEREAS, any given person might, through no fault of her own, find herself in possession of a uterus, and

WHEREAS, this uterus, being located within one's body, fits the commonly used definition of an "internal organ," and also the definition of "personal property," and

WHEREAS, no person has the right to take, use, lend or borrow the internal organs of another person without permission or against her will, nor does anyone have the right to take, lend, borrow or use the personal property of another without permission or against her will,

IT SEEMS CLEAR that every rational adult in America should regard anti-abortion advocates with the same level of respect they have for people who think it's not technically stealing if they only borrow your car, without permission, for the next nine months, or people whose ethics mandate knocking you out in a hotel bathtub and stealing one of your kidneys.

HOWEVER, this is not the case. Which is why this reporter has had the chance to peruse several pieces of "model legislation" drafted by Americans United for Life (AUL), all of which are aimed at making abortion impossible or near-impossible at the state level, and many of which are written in a format that looks

LIKE THIS, which is annoying, because although they attempt to look very official and reasonable by so doing, they are actually written by people who would like to potentially

USE THIS REPORTER'S UTERUS without her permission.

The plan to ban abortion in 2012

All right. Let's drop the conceit, shall we? The model legislation in hand consists of six pieces: the "Abortion Patients' Enhanced Safety Act," the "Abortion-Inducing Drugs Safety Act," the "Planned Parenthood Joint Resolution," the "Abortion Subsidy Prohibition Act," the "Personhood Preamble," and, the most repugnant of all in practice, the "Parental Involvement Enhancement Act." In December, AUL shared its legislation with lawmakers at the American Legislative Exchange Council's three-day policy retreat. When taken as a whole, they present a surprisingly comprehensive plan for banning abortion at the state level in 2012.

Drafting model legislation is not an uncommon practice for the AUL: The organization has had substantial success in getting lawmakers to introduce its model legislation. As Nick Baumann of Mother Jones reported last year, AUL's "Pregnant Woman's Protection Act," which apparently extended the definitions of "justifiable homicide" so that a pregnant woman could claim self-defense for killing anyone who presented a threat to her fetus, was responsible for Nebraska's LB 232, which did the same.

Most of its new model legislation is not surprising; the "Planned Parenthood Joint Resolution" aims to defund Planned Parenthood, which six states did in 2011. "Fetal personhood" measures, such as the one proposed in Mississippi, have already drawn a great deal of coverage this year for their remarkably radical implications -- aside from effectively banning abortion in the state, they also stand to ban hormonal contraception and emergency contraception, and could open miscarriages to criminal investigation. Although they have been unsuccessful, opponents of the right to choose have not surprisingly kept this option on the table.

Several of the other bills are aimed at shutting down abortion providers by requiring them to take on unnecessary costs or meet unreasonable standards: The "Abortion Patients' Enhanced Safety Act" would require any facility that provides five or more first-trimester abortions per month, or any second- or third-trimester abortions, to be licensed as "ambulatory surgical clinics." This would require them to invest in getting such a license annually, and potentially sink money into providing unnecessary services and clinic features. This is not new, either, which is why we know about the unnecessary features: In Kansas, where a similar law was passed, the state regulations for ambulatory surgical centers included investing in rooms far larger than those required for the procedures being offered, installing separate dressing rooms, and putting in extra toilets, presumably so that the abortion providers would be better able to flush money down them. Meanwhile, the "Abortion Inducing Drugs Safety Act" expresses shock that all doctors are not mandating extensive physical exams and multiple supervised appointments for patients when prescribing abortifacients.

The most alarming of these acts is the "Abortion Subsidy Prohibition Act," which would (among other things) ban public entities from leasing a building to an abortion provider, ban public schools from providing abortion information or emergency contraception, and ensure that "monies paid by students as a form of tuition or fees to a state university or a community college shall [not] be used in any way for, to assist in, or to provide facilities for an abortion, or for training to perform an abortion," potentially meaning that state medical schools would not be allowed to teach the procedure, thus restricting access to abortion by attempting to ensure that there simply are no qualified doctors to provide it.

If this all seems a bit totalitarian, bad news: No agency that receives state funding to provide legal services may provide those services "with respect to any proceeding or litigation which seeks to procure any abortion, or to procure public funding for any abortion." Nor may they "advocate for a 'right' to abortion." Yes, you read that right: The word "right" is put in scare quotes.

'... the death of her unborn child.'

However, nothing matches the sheer gall of the "Parental Involvement Enhancement Act," which starts off feigning concern for sexually abused children, insisting without any apparent evidence that "minors who obtain 'secret' abortions often do so at the behest of the older men who impregnated them, and then return to abusive situations." It not only requires that the minor in question notify her parents and get consent for the abortion -- which is not at all uncommon currently -- it also requires that both the parent and the minor sign a form indicating that they "understand" that the procedure will, and I quote, "result in the death of her unborn child." And then they must pay to have the form notarized. It applies these same restrictions to disabled people with legal guardians.

Those seeking a judicial bypass must either prove in court that they have been physically or sexually abused by their parent or guardian, or undergo an evaluation in which the court may consider "what steps the pregnant woman took to assess her options and the extent to which she considered and weighed the potential consequences of each option," and "the pregnant woman's conduct since learning of her pregnancy." Put simply: The court can deny you a judicial bypass because it doesn't like you.

However, there are some judgments it's not allowed to make: "a court may not consider the potential financial impact on the pregnant woman or the pregnant woman's family if the pregnant woman does not have an abortion." The court may also put the person seeking a judicial bypass through a mandatory mental health evaluation. (Because if you want to decide whether to have an abortion for yourself, you might be crazy.)

Again: Much of this is not new. But taken together, these measures provide a comprehensive game plan: First, penalize doctors and facilities for providing abortion and other reproductive health services, in the hopes of shutting them down. Next, restrict the education of future doctors so that the medical procedure itself will not be available. Whenever possible, strip personal autonomy from pregnant people and assault their ability to choose. To eliminate any resistance to this assault, defund advocates for reproductive health or justice, and penalize the act of "advocating for a 'right' to abortion." And, at the end of the road, ban abortion and contraception at the state level.

Therefore it is resolved

WHEREAS, any given person might, through no fault of her own, find herself in possession of a uterus, and

THIS PROPOSED LEGISLATION aims to penalize the act of having a uterus, and to deprive necessary healthcare and personhood to those who possess them,

THIS PLAN cannot, under any circumstances, be tolerated.

In Palestine, to Exist Is to Resist

Melinda Tuhus — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 10:00:51 +0000

WEST BANK, PALESTINE -- On November 15, Mazin Qumsiyeh and other Palestinian activists boarded public bus number 148, an Israelis-only bus that normally takes Jews from the Israeli West Bank settlement of Ariel to Jerusalem. The bus took the group to the Hizma checkpoint, just outside the northern entrance of Jerusalem, where activists resisted authorities' efforts to remove them. Eventually, as a camera broadcast the action online, eight people were pulled from the bus and arrested. They were charged with "illegal entry to Jerusalem" and "obstructing police business."

Qumsiyeh hopes this recent "freedom ride" -- possible because a bus driver let them ride by mistake, he said -- will spark the same kind of response that its namesake did across the United States in the early 1960s, when interstate bus trips helped end racial segregation in the South. Qumsiyeh, author of Popular Resistance in Palestine: A History of Hope and Empowerment, says other examples of nonviolent resistance include protests of the separation barrier (which many Palestinians call an "apartheid wall") that has effectively turned 10 percent of Palestinian land into Israeli land since its construction began in 2002; school girls holding class in the street when they can't get to their schools because of Israeli interference; and farmers braving Israeli intimidation to harvest olives. "For us to exist on this land is to resist," says Qumsiyeh, who teaches at Bethlehem and Birzeit universities.

Most readers of mainstream media in the United States think of the First Intifada (1987-92) as the stone-throwing uprising and the Second Intifada (2000-2004) as the attack of the suicide bombers. They may have heard of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, started in 2005 by more than 170 Palestinian civil society groups. (The movement aims to curtail benefits accruing to businesses that benefit from the occupation.)But few are aware of Palestinians' longstanding creative efforts to use nonviolent direct action in their struggle for self-determination. Those efforts, from the tax revolt in Beit Sahour during the First Intifada to creative actions led by Palestinians like Qumsiyeh, are often supported by both international and Israeli activists. And they are proliferating.

Ghassan Andoni, cofounder of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) and a leader of the Palestinian Center for Rapprochement between People, says nonviolent direct action by Palestinians opposed to the Israeli occupation started before the First Intifada. "Activities included throwing military identity cards issued by the occupation as a way to tell the occupier that we don't recognize your authority and there is no contract between us," Andoni said in an interview in Bethlehem in mid-November. "Then we stopped paying taxes and submitting monthly reports saying, 'No taxation without representation.'"

The First Intifada also saw the creation of autonomous communities all over the West Bank. "We established our own economy to detach from the occupation," Andoni explained. Large protest marches and solidarity campaigns were also organized with international activists and Israelis. ISM has staged "die-ins" in front of Israeli tanks, and its members have chained themselves to homes the Israeli government wants to demolish, and obstructed the Israeli army from imposing a curfew. As popular resistance among Palestinians has spread, Andoni increasingly sees ISM's role as supporting local nonviolent initiatives.

Bil'in, a village near Ramallah, is one such initiative. Residents of Bil'in have mobilized against Israel's West Bank security barrier. Since construction of the fence began there in 2005, villagers have staged various events. After the release of the film Avatar, with its story line of the occupation of Pandora and the rape of its resources, Palestinians painted themselves blue to look like Pandorans. On another occasion, they lugged a television to the fence and cheered their favorite teams during a World Cup tournament to show that normal life would go on.

Bil'in activists photograph and videotape every protest. "The camera is our gun," says Iyad Burnat, who heads the resistance committee in the village. In 2011 the barrier was moved a short distance away from its initial location in Bil'in, on orders from the Israeli High Court. But much of the village remains on the Israeli side of the fence, and protests continue.

What is the ultimate goal of nonviolent action, beyond stopping the security wall and ending the occupation? "One state or two states?" is not the right question to start with, Qumsiyeh says. "The right question to ask is, 'What is the right thing to do that will guarantee the safety and security and peace and humanity of everybody in the long run?' Once we can agree, we'll work toward that."

Required Viewing: 2011’s Top Political Films

Michael Atkinson — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 10:00:50 +0000

Boxing the past year's best political films is an irritating activity. What is the "best," anyway? That said, here are the films you shouldn't miss.

•The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975

The year's most ferocious political documentary, Göran Olsson's found-footage amalgamation is comprised of film shot by Swedish television crews covering activities of black radicals like Angela Davis, Stokely Carmichael and the Black Panthers. This cataract is an awakening to the savage extent to which state power responded to black activism with brute force.

•J. Edgar

This moderately insightful Hollywood biopic should be seen for how small of a deal it makes out of Hoover's rights-obliterating COINTELPRO juggernaut, in contrast to the hard-bitten reality of Olsson's film, which makes no bones about who's to blame.

•Children of Hiroshima

This 1952 film by Kaneto Shindô (screened in the United States for the first time last year) was released in Japan seven years to the day after the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

After depicting the bombing itself, we leap ahead four years as a young teacher and her acquaintances patiently struggle in the ruins to maintain their lives. Using real radiation-burn victims, Shindô's movie is as close to a native history of that trauma as will ever be made.

•City of Life and Death

Nobody saw this withering blitzkrieg coming -- Lu Chuan's big-budget, all-Chinese portrait of the rape of Nanking re-envisions the city's famous holocaust in graphic detail. With its ashen vistas, deep-focus compositions and stone-cold outrage, the film is as purposefully made as, and substantially nervier than, Schindler's List.

•The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu

Talk about found footage -- Andrei Ujica's three-hour epic is made up of propaganda footage from the erstwhile Communist dictator's reign, forming a kind of prevaricating daydream-delusion version of Romanian life in the 20th century. Long and appalling and sort of hell to sit through, it's still vital -- every runaway autocracy ought to be given the same archival treatment.

•Essential Killing

Lean and provocative, Jerzy Skolimowski's newest film takes on the Afghanistan war while doggedly, even perversely, resisting overt politics. It's an on-location survival saga shot with a recognizable American-indie star (Vincent Gallo, completely sans dialogue) as an Afghan fighter escaping from custody into the Carpathian wilderness, meticulously staged and framed on the razor's edge between pulp excitement and arty poeticism, but never quite tumbling into either camp.

•Nostalgia for the Light

Chilean documentarian Patricio Guzmán's new film seems at first blush to detour in an odd new direction -- toward astronomy and philosophy, landing in the Atacama Desert, the elevation and absolute dryness of which make it one of the globe's optimal observatory locations. The nature of time and memory are examined, but soon the desert is also plumbed for its "disappeared" corpses and calcifying human bones.

•Bellflower/Putty Hill

Two of the most startling and resonant American independent films of the year, these seething mini-masterpieces together show the dire state of white 20-something American life as poverty rises and opportunity contracts.

•Into the Abyss

Werner Herzog talks with convicted Texan murderer Michael Perry just days before he is executed in 2010, and explores, in a classic Herzogian way, the lives of the victims' surviving families and the tendrils of inherited sociopathy running through the generations. Herzog is expressly anti-capital punishment, but his film asks questions that are too big for answers.

•Garbo: The Spy

A ceaselessly inventive and seductive historical doc, Edmon Roch's espionage ode traces the World War II career of uber-deceiver Juan Pujol Garcia, a Catalan scoundrel who worked for both the Nazis and British intelligence, lying to the Germans so convincingly that he was largely responsible for their ill-preparedness on D-Day. Bustling with film clips, it's a far more tantalizing vision of Brit spycraft than this year's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

It’s the Stupid Republicans, Stupid

Susan J. Douglas — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 10:22:46 +0000

I have a love/hate relationship with Rolling Stone, which isn't surprising given that I never was, and certainly am not now, part of the magazine's desired demographic. On the one hand, nearly every woman who appears on the cover must be dressed like a stripper in the final stages of her act. By contrast, Jon Stewart, Steven Tyler and other men on the cover actually wear clothes. On the other hand, how could we have gotten through the final years of the Bush administration, not to mention the financial crisis, without the indispensible Matt Taibbi, or the political reporting of Tim Dickinson? In its in-depth articles about the environment, the war in Afghanistan, the Fox News echo chamber, and, of course, electoral politics, Rolling Stone publishes some of the liveliest and most outraged exposés in America.

Dickinson's article "The GOP's Crackpot Agenda" should be required reading for everyone. Unlike some of the overly circumspect -- one might say timorous -- coverage of the House Republicans and presidential aspirants, whose completely outrageous positions are reported with a straight face, Dickinson tells it like it is. What is their agenda? "Promote Dirty Jobs; Trash the Environment; Unleash Wall Street; Destroy the Safety Net; Wreck the Economy; Wage Endless War; Cut Taxes on the Rich; Attack Abortion Rights; and Bash Immigrants." He left out one crucial item: "Wage War on Gays and Lesbians."

Let's focus first on the word "crackpot." Various commentators have resorted to the word "sideshow" to characterize the truly bizarre parade of serial Republican front-runners who brandish their ignorance like Olympic medals and promote the most extremist, numbskull policies to be heard in years. But it was Elayne Rapping who really nailed it: In the age of reality TV, when the Jersey Shore cast unabashedly goes looking for the Vatican in Florence, the Kardashians stage a highly profitable charade of a wedding and stupidity, meanness and dissimulation are a centerpiece of entertainment; it's how you get and sustain attention these days. If it works for the "Real Housewives" of wherever, why not for presidential aspirants? As Rapping noted, "Mistakes of fact, and ignorance of even the boldest headline news issues, have been displayed throughout, in many cases even creating short term bumps in their poll numbers."

Yes, it was entertaining to watch Herman Cain wonder what or where Libya is and Rick Perry give a speech in which he appeared to have mainlined a cocktail of roofies and Robitussin. But the carnivalesque nature of the Republican debates and campaign can numb us to how dangerous these candidates are.

So the Dickinson piece, with its bold-faced laying out of issue after issue, got me thinking. In the past, Republicans have successfully used single-issue passions -- homophobia, opposition to abortion, creationism -- to mobilize particular voters in crucial districts. Maybe it's time for progressives to do the same. Take any single issue you care about the most -- the environment, gay rights, income inequality, reproductive freedom, judicial appointments, healthcare. Things will get worse under a Republican president and Congress. Of course, most of us care about all these issues. But to avoid the so-called "enthusiasm gap" of 2010 that brought us this crowd of obstructionist Neanderthals, activists and progressive PACs need to target people's hot-button issues much more aggressively, especially given the titanic amount of money that will get poured into Republican coffers courtesy of the Citizens United decision.

There are plenty of voters disappointed by or indifferent to President Obama. But these same people may have strong feelings about the dangers of global warming (which Mitt Romney no longer knows the cause of), have a desperate need to preserve Social Security, have gay friends or relatives whose rights they are sick of seeing trampled, and so on. And they will vote on these issues if galvanized.

Even President Obama seems to be getting it. Despite the staggering number of people still out of work, this election year's mantra should not be, "It's the economy, stupid," but, "It's the Republican Congress, stupid." Reports suggest that's how Obama will campaign, which would be an overdue change. In the meantime, let's tack Dickinson's article up on our walls and strategize how to use single issues to keep fanatical bums out of office.

A Case of Strategic Debasement

Gregory D. Foster — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 17:20:14 +0000

What message should we take, what lessons should we draw from the video posted last week on YouTube of U.S. Marine snipers urinating, with unconcealed glee, on the bodies of presumed enemy dead in Afghanistan?

Should we--whether Americans or non-Americans, civilian or military, veterans or nonveterans, liberal or conservative, pro-war or anti-war--be concerned, alarmed, even outraged? Yes.

Should we accept the inevitable argument of institutional defenders and assorted sanctimonious true believers (who presume to understand war and the military) that this incident, however serious (or not), is merely an aberration, a momentary lapse perpetrated by a few bad apples in an otherwise healthy institutional barrel? Ask most people in uniform what they think; or listen to the likes of erstwhile presidential hopeful Rick Perry: "Eighteen to 19-year-old kids make mistakes, and that's what happened here."

The significance of this particular episode should be seen as part of a larger pattern of abuses and incidents by U.S. military personnel that number in the hundreds each year and have for at least the past two decades (since the start of the Clinton administration, when civil-military relations in this country started to receive renewed scrutiny). Remember Chinese-American Army Private Danny Chen, who committed suicide last October in the face of hazing by his "brothers in arms"? Remember Staff Sergeant Calvin Gibbs – yes, a uniformed noncommissioned officer – and eleven other soldiers charged with 76 counts of civilian murder, mutilation, and other forms of assault in Afghanistan? Remember Haditha, and Abu Ghraib, and Guantanamo, and Bagram?

Let us start, but not stop, with the recognition that these are U.S. Marines--"The Few, The Proud," "First to Fight"--whose motto, Semper Fidelis, commands those who wear the Eagle, Globe and Anchor to be always faithful to comrades, to The Corps, to country; whose self-generated and espoused core values are honor, courage, and commitment; whose conception of honor involves "never lying, cheating or stealing; abiding by an uncompromising code of integrity; respecting human dignity; respecting others."

But this is also war--thankless, dangerous, monotonous, frustrating, fog-blanketed, hellish war, where, as with its antithesis love, all's fair. When you're miserable, frustrated, hunting to avoid being hunted and waging dirty war in the shadows against insensate adversaries, anything goes. Right? Wrong.

This episode is, first and foremost, about indiscipline. Not the discipline (and associated good order) those in uniform profess to value and practice, but the conscious or subconscious rejection of restraint and self-control, obliviousness to the need to separate action from thought, denial that, especially in the postmodern age, all the world may be looking all the time.

It is about ignorance. Willing or unwilling ignorance of cultural norms, values and sensitivities; ignorance of the institutional and strategic consequences of one's actions, however ostensibly remote, obscure and isolated.

It is about intolerance, and the associated aggression that together constitute the dark side of all militaries. Intolerance of, hatred of, dehumanization of the generalized Other: the enemy, "Jihadis," "ragheads," "camel jockeys," "gooks," "faggots." They're all the same, aren't they?

It is about inhumanity. Man's inhumanity to man writ large, which war excuses, rationalizes and glorifies.

It is about immaturity. Childish, infantile, sophomoric behavior, the largely unrecognized feature of military culture that prompts manly men to strive for manliness in the face of other manly men. Why else would you urinate on a body? Why else would you treat another human being like an animal?

It is about inexperience. Not the experience of repetitive combat tours conducting repetitive, standardized operations, but inexperience in understanding and dealing with the human behavior and motives that are so central to the wars of today.

It is about incompetence. Not a lack of operational, technocratic skills for waging war American-style, the focus of most military training; but ethical incompetence born of a pronounced lack of attention to developing the intellectual capacity of those in uniform necessary for distinguishing right from wrong in the face of ambiguous operational circumstances.

It is about incomprehension. Incomprehension of the self-corruption that is endemic in war; that makes its practitioners less than they ought to be, even as they seek to be more than they are; that nurtures and sanctifies the most uncivil, inhumane, degrading behavior among war's participants.

It is about insularity. The alienative distance that has developed between an all-volunteer military and the larger society it should represent, but doesn't; the belief that one's actions in combat can be justifiably hidden from an uncaring, clueless, ethically challenged society that doesn't share the pain, responsibility, or integrity of those in uniform.

Even if it is a safe bet that this latest, execrable act will not diminish the standing of the military in the eyes of the American public, it is a safer bet that antipathy, resentment and the attendant further diminution of U.S. credibility and legitimacy abroad will be fueled. No matter who is held accountable--and experience has shown it's not likely to be anyone of "weight"--irreparable strategic damage will have been done, and neither the U.S. military nor its civilian overseers will have anybody to blame but themselves.

Our Selective Definition of Bigotry

David Sirota — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 16:45:00 +0000

If they have any value at all anymore, presidential election campaigns at least remain larger-than-life mirrors reflecting back painful truths about our society. As evidence, ponder the two-sided debate over Republican candidate Ron Paul and bigotry.

One camp cites Paul's hate-filled newsletters and his libertarian opposition to civil rights regulations as evidence that he aligns with racists. As the esteemed scholar Tim Wise puts it: this part of Paul's record proves that he represents "the reactionary, white supremacist, Social Darwinists of this culture, who believe ... the police who dragged sit-in protesters off soda fountain stools for trespassing on a white man's property were justified in doing so, and that the freedom of department store owners to refuse to let black people try on clothes in their dressing rooms was more sacrosanct than the right of black people to be treated like human beings."

The other camp tends to acknowledge those ugly truths about Paul, but then points out that the Texas congressman has been one of the only politicians 1) fighting surveillance, indefinite detention and due-process-free assassination policies almost exclusively aimed at minorities; 2) opposing wars that often seem motivated by rank Islamophobia; and 3) railing against the bigotry of a drug war that disproportionately targets people of color. Summarizing this part of Paul's record, the Atlantic Monthly's Conor Friedersdorf has written: "When it comes to America's most racist or racially fraught policies" affecting the world today, "Paul is arguably on the right side of all of them (while) his opponents are often on the wrong side."

So which side is right? Both of them--and thanks to that powerful oxymoron, Paul has become a mirror reflecting back our own problematic biases. Specifically, his candidacy is showing that the conventional definition of intolerable bigotry is disturbingly narrow--and embarrassingly selective.

This reality is best demonstrated by those voters who say they detest Paul not because of his extreme economic ideas but because they feel his record represents an unacceptable form of racism. These folks will likely tell you that their alleged commitment to policies promoting racial equality has moved them to support Mitt Romney or Barack Obama--politicians who, of course, support bigoted civil liberties atrocities, Islamophobic foreign invasions and a racist drug war.

In making such a choice, then, these voters are tacitly embracing the definition of unacceptable bigotry as only hate speech (Paul's newsletters) and opposition to civil rights laws (Paul's odious position), but not also various forms of institutional bigotry that their favored candidates support and that Paul has fought to end. Incredibly, this selective definition asks us to ignore many of the most destructive tenets of what legal scholar Michelle Alexander's celebrated book calls "the new Jim Crow." And yet, as the reaction to Paul proves, it is precisely this definition that pervades so much of American society.

To be clear: Noting this hypocrisy is not meant to urge a vote for Paul (I'm not a Paul supporter), nor does it absolve those Paul fans who wholly ignore the objectionable parts of their candidate's record on race. Instead, it is simply meant to argue that if we're going to have a long overdue discussion about bigotry, then let's have an honest conversation about all forms of bigotry--not our current talking-points-driven screamfest that rightly criticizes one kind of prejudice but wrongly tolerates other forms of prejudice that are often just as destructive.

Perpetuating that kind of naked bait-and-switchery may help one set of candidates and hurt another in a given presidential campaign, but it does nothing to advance the cause of equality in America.

Curing the First Lady Syndrome

Sady Doyle — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 19:45:16 +0000

Jodi Kantor's new book, The Obamas, is nothing if not ambitious. It aims to be an intimate, complex portrait of a very public marriage, showing the relationship dynamics between two successful, brilliant people, one of whom happens to be president. Kantor was granted access to the president and First Lady's advisors and friends, though not the first couple themselves, and given permission to create an account of how they have lived and worked together since moving into the White House.

The resulting book is, indeed, complex. It refuses to make a plaster saint out of either Barack or Michelle Obama, portraying the president as brilliant and principled, yet overly confident in the power of principle and brilliance alone to triumph over obstacles, and the First Lady as skeptical of the political process and displeased with many of the compromises it required, yet ultimately better at people-pleasing and defending the administration's choices than her husband.

While the Kantor's account is indeed complex, its claims to intimacy are problematic. Kantor often crosses the line between saying what Michelle Obama was perceived to think and claiming to know her thoughts, some of which are unflattering: "Michelle felt her husband was self-absorbed and unrealistic," one passage asserts. And in one unintentionally funny sentence: "The first lady was sensitive about the use of her image and prone to feeling exploited"--wait for it--"especially with bookstores and magazine racks filling with attempts to cash in on her popularity." The overall effect is that the book's takeaway, for many, is essentially: Look! They're fighting! And Michelle is mean! And Michelle herself has responded.

"I guess it's more interesting to imagine this conflicted situation here, and a strong woman," she told Gayle King in a January 11 interview, putting a mocking emphasis on strong woman. "But that's been an image that people have tried to paint of me since the day Barack announced. That I'm some angry black woman."

Her slight pause between "angry" and "black woman" came across; the impression was of someone hesitating to spell the situation out, before just going ahead and spelling. "Michelle Obama finally went there," read the lede of an article in The Hill a few days later.

Rebecca Traister, author of Big Girls Don't Cry: The Election that Changed Everything for American Women, said she was "absolutely surprised and happy to hear her address this kind of stereotyping." And yet, she said, "I was dismayed ... to hear the First Lady address all this stuff with regard to the Kantor book, which I actually think is an effort to treat her with the respect that she deserves, and which I don't think she's gotten from the rest of the media."

Traister pointed to several instances in which Obama had been portrayed cruelly as an angry, emasculating, controlling woman--a Sapphire stereotype right out of the ugliest parts of the white American imagination. There was, for instance, the choice of the National Review to depict her on its cover as "Mrs. Grievance," in a bilious yellow light and threatening pose. Traister also mentioned Christopher Hitchens' attempt to link her senior thesis to the ideologies of Louis Farrakhan on the strength of a footnote, and to suggest that her proximity to Obama might be a reason not to elect him: "I have the distinct feeling that the Obama campaign can't go on much longer without an answer to the question: 'Are we getting two for one?'"

Washington Post columnist and former Jezebel.com editor Anna Holmes mentioned a Buzzfeed list of reactions to the First Lady's joining Twitter, which gave some sense of the bile floating around the Internet: "Why are you so angry? You must have a sad life," one user opined. "I would say the next most hateful woman in America is Michelle Obama. She just about hates everyone and everything," said another. Another person was more succinct: "[The] angry cow is on Twitter."

If Michelle Obama does not get angry from time to time, we should worry. But the surprise around the First Lady's decision to publicly defend herself has as much to do with her earlier approach to these charges as it does with anything else.

"She has removed herself from that aspect of the conversation, or she's just changed the conversation completely, to things that are much more banal," Holmes said. Although Holmes doesn't deny the legitimacy of Obama's chosen projects--fitness, proper nutrition, etc.--she also said that "it's been frustrating that Michelle Obama has kind of removed herself from doing her thing, or doing anything that could get her pushback."

Traister has called this "the momification of Michelle Obama." In order to avoid being flattened into a racist caricature and used as a weapon against her husband, the First Lady has seemingly had to play down the very qualities that make her admirable: her intellect, her drive and her ability to speak directly and compellingly on crucial subjects such as war. This has led, Traister says, to her being spoken of "as a sister, a mother, a daughter, a wife, and absolutely never as her own person." Even her legitimate influence with her husband--they first met when she was assigned to be his mentor at a law firm in 1989--has been given soft focus.

But by addressing the problem so directly, a large part of her silence may be breaking. As Holmes reminded me, many people like Michelle Obama immensely, even if they don't always like her husband's decisions.

"Maybe her commentary on this book is just the beginning of a higher profile for her, at least for this year," Holmes noted. "It is interesting that she's joined Twitter the same week the book came out."

Christopher Hitchens: A D.C. Requiem

Chris Lehmann — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 09:59:34 +0000

The impulse to memorialize says as much about the survivors as the departed—and so the confessional frenzy of establishment journalists to mark the passing of Christopher Hitchens, who died of cancer in December, bears some discomfiting scrutiny. Within hours of the news of Hitchens' death, the online world lit up with fond, nostalgic appreciations—all bearing testimony to the largeness of the man's intellect and alcoholic stamina, his fiercely iconoclastic spirit and his comradely conviviality.

All of which was true. Like many Washington journalists, I was friendly with Hitchens. Despite our disagreements, he was a charming and unfailingly gracious soul. The graceless world of Washington journalism is diminished enormously with his passing.

This doesn't explain, however, the obsessive onrush of Hitchens remembrances that D.C. media hands produced in the wake of his death—nor the curious uniformity of their panegyrics. The typical Hitchens homage described a boozy, marathon social gathering and a rueful evocation of the now-vanished golden time that had produced such an outsized, contrarian character.

Among other things, the cottage industry in Hitchens-iana pointed up a wish fulfillment fantasy for Washington's retinue of pundits for hire and political gossips: Here, it said in essence, was a colorful, impassioned giant in our midst—a latter-day Samuel Johnson. Let our city and our profession bask in his reflected glory.

The trouble is that such beguiling fancies omit a universe or two of causation. It was not that Hitchens' life was a joyous, Falstaff-style incarnation of the vocation awaiting a brilliant Washington writer. Regretfully, I'd suggest instead that the tragedy of Hitchens' later career was not that he defined the Washington spirit, but rather he had grown captive to it. Hitchens' dead-end support for the dishonest and deadly U.S. invasion of Iraq is the most obvious case in point. His ever-shifting rationale for the war—from the imminence of Saddam Hussein's WMD arsenal to the shameful neglect of the Kurds to the desperately urgent confrontation with "Islamofascism"—was a textbook study in the situational evasion of unpleasant truths that is the protective coloration of the practiced D.C. pundit.

One encounter with Hitchens during the early aughts seemed to signal that this shift was under way. During the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, Hitchens published his own defining appreciation of the outsized contrarian who bore the deepest imprint on his own career: Why Orwell Matters. I was invited to a gathering of the city's journalists to discuss the book—hosted by BMW in a luxe downtown conference room.

As Hitchens wound down his book talk and the floor opened for questions, I asked what he thought Orwell, the arch critic of the political abuse of language, would make of the locution "preventive war"—then, of course, the mantra of the neocon crowd urging on the toppling of the Saddam Hussein regime. "I think 'preventive war' is telling it like it is," he announced. "And I think Orwell would recognize that."

I should have offered some kind of counter-parry, but I just couldn't. Something about the whole scene—the sad corporate conference space, the arid mood of self-congratulation—plunged me into despair. There were certainly other, far more shameless moral and intellectual lapses that came hard upon the Bush administration's experiment in preventive warfare, but this moment stayed with me. And while I continued to remain cordial with Hitchens, and to admire a good deal of his genuinely brilliant published work, I couldn't help but think that his "contrarianism"—that vastly overrated, putative Washington virtue—was harming his writing. The book he regarded as his proudest achievement—the atheist polemic God Is Not Great—too often read to me like debate-club score-settling.

I write this in sorrow, not anger; I have fond memories of Hitchens that speak volumes about his devotion to his friends, his fraternal spirit, his restless intellect and his love of family. But I can't shake the idea that the journalistic establishment that has wept so conspicuously over Hitchens' loss contributed in no small way to the dying of his light.

Who Wants to Vote Them Off the Island?

David Moberg — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 17:12:58 +0000

In their tempestuous primary, Republican presidential aspirants have campaigned as if they were competing in an extreme reality TV show called "How Far Right Can You Go?" While presidential primary candidates traditionally play to the party's hardcore believers before the winner moves to the center for the general election, candidates this year have crawled much farther into the swamps of right-wing beliefs, fears, hatreds and vindictive solutions than at any time in recent history.

In their fight to be deemed truly conservative, almost all have called for deeper tax cuts for corporations and the rich (disregarding their jeremiads about deficits), for boosting military spending while drastically shrinking federal government (if only they could remember which parts), and for wiping out new regulations of financial markets or for any environmental protection. They would repeal the new Affordable Care health insurance and begin privatization of both Social Security and Medicare. And they would deport all -- or most -- undocumented workers.

But in their efforts to out-flank all competition from the Right, the candidates embraced even kookier positions as well: ending child labor laws (Gingrich), arresting judges and abolishing federal court districts that violate right-wing principles (Gingrich, again), erecting electric fences on the Mexican border (Cain), and occasionally denying separation of church and state (Bachmann). And beyond Ron Paul's not-so-old racist newsletters, he opposes key civil rights legislation, he supports a gold standard and has been closely tied to white supremacists, John Birchers and much of the worst of the old Right.

Romney, still the favorite to win the nomination after his eight-vote margin of victory in the Iowa caucuses, may once have been a moderate Republican, but he has since repudiated those positions. On major issues of class power and benefits, as well as most social issues, all the Republican hopefuls are united and far to the right.

This primary spectacle raises questions about how and why the Republicans have devolved so dramatically over nearly four decades into a party of extreme reactionary politics. Why have they been so successful when polling shows substantial majorities of the public oppose their stands on many key issues? According to the Pew Research Center, despite widespread skepticism about government and taxation, most Americans favor increased taxes -- especially on the rich -- plus spending cuts to reduce deficits, protection of Medicare and Social Security, strong environmental protection and alternatives to carbon fuels, and a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. Put simply, how did the GOP win as much as it has while becoming so much more conservative than the country?

Tea Party charades

The emergence of the Tea Party, followed by record Republican midterm victories, makes the move right seem a response to popular pressure. It's true that Tea Party agitation has often effectively shaped news media political narratives and pushed Republicans (and some Democrats) rightward. But wealthy individuals and business elites -- not right-wing, middle-class, anti-government faux-populists -- have primarily orchestrated the long-term shift.

In the 1970s, reacting against growing economic equality, a profit squeeze during the stagflation, and new regulation on behalf of workers, consumers and the public interest, both the corporate elite and rich right-wing families began investing in building an infrastructure of a new "winner-take-all politics," which is the title of a book by political scientists Jacob Hacker of Yale and Paul Pierson of the University of California, Berkeley.

These monied interests underwrote a vast expansion of corporate lobbying for the insider political combat over legislation and regulations. And powerful outside groups like Americans for Tax Reform and the Club for Growth added the threat of election challenges to enforce discipline, especially on cutting taxes.

The Republican Party also developed an effective, if often vicious and demagogic, electioneering style -- associated with infamous campaign consultant Lee Atwater. Especially after Gingrich emerged as a leader in 1994, the scorched earth campaigning morphed into an obstructionist, uncompromising approach to legislating and governing. The new corporate Right used deceitful economic arguments and loads of campaign contributions--also to Democrats, when needed--to win these policy goals:

• lower taxes.

• higher corporate subsidies.

• deregulation that created "market outcomes" favorable for the few.

Very little was conservative -- in the popular sense of acting slowly and cautiously to conserve something of value in traditions -- about most of the new corporate agenda, such as deregulation of financial derivatives -- "economic weapons of mass destruction," according to billionaire Warren Buffet.

Fox populi

To win a majority on behalf of their agenda for the business elite, the new corporate Right enveloped itself in a phony populism directed against liberal, intellectual elites. It encouraged a broad range of resentments against the "undeserving," minorities and undocumented immigrants. Indeed, the televised rant that launched the Tea Party excoriated foreclosed-on homeowners as losers asking for bailouts from more sober homeowners -- though all homeowners would have benefited if victims of the burst housing bubble had received help.

While shifting almost all newly generated income to the pockets of the very rich, winner-take-all politics stoked social resentments and undercut social solidarity among those whose pockets were being picked. Promoting the idea, in economist Jared Bernstein's words, that "you're on your own" rather than, as Obama said, "we're in this together," the new corporate Right obscured how much the rich benefited from rigging the rules of the game. As Hacker and Pierson note, government drift or inaction more often helps the rich and powerful. The Right wins when governments adopt its policies and also when there's stalemate and obstruction. But the left needs to change the status quo to make any progress.

This fact is well understood by Tea Partiers, who, as Harvard social scientists Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson write in The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism, are mainly older, white, relatively well-educated and financially well-off Republicans. They have pre-existing right-wing organizational experience. Ideologically they split between social conservatism and libertarianism.

Tea Partiers have shifted the Republican Party toward a more ambitious right-wing agenda -- and a more intransigent, uncompromising political style. They have organized most effectively at the local level but also have support from better-funded, "astroturf" national groups like former Rep. Dick Armey's Freedom Works. Yet the Tea Party's popularity is on the wane, even where its candidates won, according to a November Pew poll. In a year, public agreement with the Tea Party dropped from 27 to 20 percent while disagreement rose from 22 to 27 percent (half had no opinion). This fall paralleled a decline in public approval of the Republican Party (from 42 percent in March to 36 percent) that exceeded the slippage in Democratic approval (from 48 to 46 percent over the same period). That suggests a growing rejection of the Right, even as candidates take more hardline positions.

Democrats have been too often complicit in waging this war on behalf of the corporate class, as they too have drifted right, becoming dependent on corporate political contributions and declaring "the era of big government is over," as President Clinton did in January 1996. Democrats have done a sorry job of exposing how the Republican Right is serving the 1%, partly because they have been doing the same thing. They have neither designed policies to make the state visible in people's lives nor promoted government's positive role and highly effective performance.

Today's Republican Party increasingly embraces a strain of right-wing thought that Columbia University professor Mark Lilla, writing in the New York Review of Books, describes as "redemptive reaction" and "apocalyptic." Such reactionaries, he writes, "think the only way forward is to destroy what history has given us and wait for a new order to emerge from the chaos." The first step in blocking the ongoing rightward march of the Republicans is creating a stronger movement and better infrastructure to provide a persuasive alternative from the left, including a Democratic Party that is truly committed to the 99 percent.

It’s More Than a War of Words

Joel Bleifuss — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 16:28:48 +0000

You may recall, during the Bush reign, pollster and focus-group maven Frank Luntz invented "climate change," the linguistically neutered--and for the oil industry the politically preferable--term for "global warming."

Luntz is a smoke vendor. In Marxist jargon he is in the business of generating "false consciousness." His mission: Obscure the fault lines in American society, and distract attention from the structures of wealth and power.

Conservatives rely on focus-group-tested talking points because they know that only a deceived and distracted populace--an infantilized 99%--will ever tolerate their regressive agenda.

The Right fears that if facts begin to matter, the obfuscations of focus-group-driven pollsters will be exposed for what they are: lies--or "misstatements of fact," as President Ronald Reagan's handlers called his prevarications during the Iran-Contra Scandal.

Addressing the Republican Governors Association meeting in Florida in November, Luntz said, "I'm so scared of this anti-Wall Street effort. I'm frightened to death. They're having an impact on what the American people think of capitalism."

So what do you do when you meet a supporter of the Occupy movement? You co-opt them. "First off," says Luntz, "here are three words for you all: 'I get it.' " Second, "You talk about how 'we're all in this together. We either succeed together or we fail together.' "

Luntz is "right," says Berkeley linguist George Lakoff, writing on the Huffington Post: "We're all in this together. But that is the opposite of conservative morality. It is the progressive view of a moral democracy that all of Luntz's conservative framings contradict. It is an attempt at co-opting the progressive moral system, because the Occupy movement is showing that it has an idea of democracy that makes sense to most Americans." According to Lakoff, Luntz's goal is "to take Obama's strongest moral appeal away from him."

But these days, when it comes to "moral appeal" the Democratic Party is already in trouble.

Democracy Corps, a Democratic polling outfit in D.C., coined the term "Rising American Electorate" to describe a group that comprises 53 percent of the nation's eligible voting population -- Hispanics, African-Americans, unmarried women and young people age 18 to 29. These growing voting blocs supported Democrats by large margins in 2008, but they stayed home in 2010, which helps explain how the GOP captured the House that year.

Democracy Corps reports that its polling has found "these progressive voters are very frustrated with the lack of change. ... [T]hey need to hear that the ... programs and protections they need and value ... are not just politicians' bargaining chips. ...[T]hey need progressive leaders to get passionate again. This is what brought non-voters to the polls in November 2008."

The 2010 midterms did represent a failure of progressive political organization and engagement, a failure we must not repeat. That unfortunate election cycle ceded important ground to the Tea Party and the Right.

But anxious Democratic politicians can't simply scold progressives into turning out on Election Day. If Democrats fail to inspire voters -- if they fail to stake out positions that energize and mobilize their skeptical base -- Obama will be a one-term president, the Democratic Party will ride his coattails into political exile and the Austerians will win.

Thunderstruck in Honduras

Jeremy Kryt — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 10:00:50 +0000

TEGUCIGALPA, HONDURAS--People living in Honduras are more likely to be killed by violence than residents of any other country on earth. This small, Central American coffee and textile exporter is plagued by a murder rate of 82 per 100,000--more than double that of Europe during the worst years of the Dark Ages. Drug-money-fueled gang wars, targeted political assassinations, and bloody land conflicts have so destabilized the nation that the Honduran Congress voted on November 29 to grant sweeping policing powers to the historically repressive Honduran military.

The new measures--dubbed "Operacion Relámpago," or Operation Lightning--allow the military to stop, search and detain anyone, and enter private residences without a warrant. Checkpoints manned by troops armed with U.S.-produced machine guns and led by U.S.-trained officers are once again a common sight in the streets.

"The [Honduran] Constitution had to be gutted and emasculated to accomplish this tragic act," says Congressman Sergio Castellanos of the Democratic Unification Party, who was one of only 18 representatives (out of 128 total legislators) who voted against Operation Lightning. "People are so desperate now that they will do anything--tolerate anything--in the name of ending the slaughter," he says. "Our country has become the butcher shop of Latin America."

Alex Main, senior associate for international policy with the Washington D.C.-based Center for Economic and Policy Research, says Honduras is experiencing a complete breakdown of democracy and the rule of law. "It's difficult to say who is in control--or if anyone is in control. ... People have less faith in democracy when they're living through institutional breakdown," Main says, citing a late October poll by The Economist indicating that a majority of Hondurans no longer see democracy as the best form of government. Twenty-seven percent of Honduras' 8 million people are now in favor of an authoritarian system of government, if that's required to quell the violence. "What we're talking about here," says Main, "is a failed state."

Violence in Honduras has not leveled off since the nation's soldiers began playing sheriff. Within days of Operation Lightning's launch, a prominent security advisor to the government and a well-known journalist were gunned down in separate incidents, and ensuing protest marches were met by soldiers wielding batons and shooting tear gas. A week later, the country's police director declared that his own officers were conspiring to kill him.

"Corruption in the police force is terrible," says Maria Luisa Borjas, a retired Honduran Police Commissioner. "Sadly, the military's track record is just as bad. People forget that a generation ago this country was ruled by a military dictatorship, and that many of the men who supported it are still in uniform." However, she says, police ineptitude has made the public desperate. Although there are no official statistics to indicate the success rate of the Honduran police force, Borjas estimates that about 98 percent of violent crimes in Honduras go unsolved; many aren't even investigated. According to Borjas, political instability also exacerbates the problem. The murder rate in Honduras has gone up 30 percent since the country was rocked by a military coup in 2009.

Castellanos agrees. "It becomes very hard for democracy to function in a militarized climate like the one we're creating. But that is not an accident--all of this goes back to the coup," he says, referring to the military putsch that ousted democratically elected president Manuel Zelaya. "The Honduran military has gradually been occupying more and more space in the political sphere since 2009," Castellanos says. "It scares me to think where this trend is taking us."

Elections since the coup have been tainted with charges of illegitimacy. Current President Porfirio Lobo's regime continues to suffer allegations of human rights violations and suppressing political opposition. And the political uncertainty has made Honduras a haven for drug cartels.

Main says U.S. foreign policy plays an "enormous" role in Honduras' ongoing meltdown. He likens Operation Lightning to similar militarization efforts in Colombia and Mexico in recent years, which were also funded by Washington. "What we're seeing is a cycle where these countries require U.S. [military] assistance, both to fight the War on Drugs, and then to control the terrible gang violence" that comes with prohibition, Main says.

In 2011, the U.S. State Department asked Congress to send $68 million in taxpayer dollars to Honduras, much of which went to arms and training for the Honduran military, despite widespread reports of civil rights abuses.

Castellanos worries about a pattern of hyper-militarization in Latin America, noting that countries with the strongest economic ties to the United States are deploying their armed forces as peacekeepers. "In Mexico and Colombia, the respective militaries have become incredibly potent political instruments, and that has gone hand in hand with the breakdown of civil society," he says. "This kind of power shift is always fatal for democracy."

Egypt’s Revolution Is Not Over

James North — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 10:00:35 +0000

CAIRO--If you demonstrate in Tahrir Square in the heart of this giant metropolis, you continue to risk your life. You might only be tear-gassed, or clubbed, or shot with rubber bullets that usually do not kill. But scattered among the police and military are snipers, with live ammunition.

The snipers figure into cold calculations by the military, which recognizes that if it opens fire indiscriminately, it will lose even more support across the nation. But it cannot allow mass rallies to get too large. Hence the calculated use of the snipers, and the ongoing trickle of demonstrator deaths. Over a four-day period in December, the Army killed 13 in the square. Another element of the military's strategy is to promote more disorder by pulling back its security forces across the city outside Tahrir. Morqos Girgis, a young lawyer, explains: "If you report a problem to the police now, they say it is not their concern. They are hoping that the rising insecurity will force the people to demand that they return."

Hosni Mubarak resigned as president in February 2011 following weeks of mass protests in the square, but many of the military and industrial elites that surrounded him still hold on to power, and are now delaying civilian rule--and trying to remain above it--despite their professed support of democracy. The generals who run the country via the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces say they will step aside after a new president is sworn in. (As protesters continue to die, the United States remains close to the country's military, giving it $1.3 billion a year, and perhaps the "made in the U.S.A." tear gas canisters sometimes left in the square.)

Demonstrators are predominately middle class, and most Egyptians respect their courage in pushing Mubarak from power last year (he and his two sons are now on trial). But the poor majority is also anxious about continuing disorder and the sputtering economy.

Impoverished Egyptians' wariness has been partly reflected in the three-stage parliamentary election, which ends on January 23. After a historic turnout, the two big winners were the more cautious Islamist parties: the Muslim Brotherhood and the even more conservative Salafists. The "liberals"--those who started Egypt's revolution on January 25, 2011, and who continue to risk their lives in Tahrir Square to safeguard it--came in third. No one doubts that, despite some irregularities, the election results represent the will of the Egyptian people. Just about everyone is delighted that the candidates linked to the Mubarak family, the so-called felool, or "remnants," are doing worse than expected.

Those remnants, along with the still-ruling military, underestimate the determination of the Egyptian people. Every time the Supreme Council tries to delay or undermine the revolution, demonstrators flood into Tahrir Square again. Its efforts to sharply limit the powers of the new Parliament have been blocked, for now, as was its attempt to postpone the election of a president.

A key factor in the months to come is the Muslim Brotherhood, the organization founded in 1928 that, with about 40 percent of its seats, will almost definitely be the largest single party in the new Parliament. Islamophobes in the United States and elsewhere have long slandered the nonviolent Brotherhood, which runs a network of health clinics and other neighborhood services that provided a contrast to the Mubarak regime's corrupt or nonexistent facilities.

Despite ongoing violence, Egypt remains a place of hope and possibility. Girgis, a Coptic Christian who fears sectarian conflict and who has risked his life in Tahrir Square, points out that previous upheavals in Egypt's history were associated with a single leader. "This time, there was no single leader," Girgis says. "This time, the Egyptian people rose up together."

The Susan B. Anthony List’s Situational Feminism

Sady Doyle — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 13:57:47 +0000

To say that the SBA List is interested in defunding Planned Parenthood is an understatement. The anti-abortion political advocacy group has made defunding Planned Parenthood a sport. Literally: On its website, you can find the scoreboard. It's right under the banner that reads "DEFUNDING PLANNED PARENTHOOD", in all caps.

So the attitude of the SBA List, in regard to Planned Parenthood, and the funding thereof, seems clear. And it is, not surprisingly, furthered by the piece of model legislation, crafted as part of a plan to work with state legislators by promising "grassroots effort" and potential campaign funding, which I recently reviewed: the "Whole Woman's Health Priorities Funding Act," the expressed "priorities" of which are to (surprise) defund organizations that provide abortion, such as Planned Parenthood. Or, as the model bill puts it, to direct state funds toward "primary and preventive care" for "maternal and fetal patients" from primary care providers, and to cut it from "providers of health care services that are specialized to particular medical services or discrete patient populations," which is a very polite way to say "abortions" and "women."

All of which is puzzling, given that the SBA List promotes itself as a feminist organization.

The fact is that the SBA List's "feminism" is, at best, situational, and at most, founded on a deeply casual relationship to truth. It claims to exist to elect pro-life women to Congress; but it supports male pro-life candidates (through its connected political action committee, the Susan B. Anthony List Candidate Fund). It claims that SBA List is a model for anti-abortion feminists; but Susan B. Anthony did not organize against abortion. And the "Whole Woman's Health Priorities Funding Act," for example, bills itself as aiming to improve prenatal care, when that is the opposite of what its impact will be.

Make no mistake: The proposed legislation does spend an exceptionally long time talking about the importance of prenatal care before making its point. By the time you get to the portion of the bill in which the state is not allowed to contribute to the rent payments of abortion providers, you've swallowed so many lines about folic acid supplements and diabetes screenings that you're somehow surprised. And yet, this bill has one distinct goal; it's the goal that is spelled out in big capital letters, once you look away from the bill and turn to the organization's actual website.

"I think that what people say and what people do is very different," says Jodi Jacobson, of RH Reality Check. "I look at what people do. They claim to be very woman-friendly, but only if you agree with their specific idea of what women should be doing."

Jacobson describes the SBA List's selective feminism as an extension of the Right Wing's efforts to package anti-choice policies in a way that will sell. "Adequate prenatal care," for example, is not a divisive issue. And so, in promoting a bill that is primarily about cutting all state funding from an organization like Planned Parenthood, which provides pre-natal care and assistance for low-income women, it's useful to claim that it is a bill that provides more state funding for better prenatal care. Which has seemingly never been a priority of the SBA List, outside of the issue of abortion.

"They really have bought into the [GOP presidential candidate Rick] Santorum approach to all of this," Frances Kissling, former president of Catholics for a Free Choice and now a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania. "Anti-abortion, anti-contraception, anti-gay rights."

In many ways, the fight against Planned Parenthood, and public funding for reproductive healthcare generally is not even about abortion at all. It's about the relatively virulent strain of anti-choice ideology that in 2011 became more mainstream than ever: The fight against access to contraception.

This is not an overt goal of the SBA List's proposed act--it allows, graciously enough, that "abortion" and "contraception" are not the same thing, and that the latter may still be funded--but its aim is still to remove one reliable source of birth control from the field. Despite its language, this plan is not distinct in its impact from any other bill that aims to restrict the rights of citizens to choose their own plans for avoiding, terminating or coping with pregnancy.

One sure way to understand the SBA List, Kissling notes, is to note what it seems to claim as a triumph: Its push to defeat anti-choice Democrats, and replace them with more extremely anti-choice Republicans, during the 2010 elections.

But the SBA List may not be as powerful as it thinks, despite its prominence and its fervent push to eliminate all but the most extremist candidates from political races. It sweet-talks state legislators with tales of its capacity to win and fund elections, but, in truth, the elections it has helped win may not have been for the reasons it claims.

Those Democrats, Kissling says, "didn't lose their seats because of the Susan B. Anthony fund, and they didn't lose their seats because they were pro-life. They lost their seats because they were Democrats in an election year... it was a rejection of the Democrats on the economy far more than it was on abortion issues."

There's what you say, and there's what you do. And then, there's what you say you do, which usually sounds much, much better than reality. When it comes to the SBA fund, and its distinctively selective approach to truth--Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906), who never organized against safe and legal abortion because it did not exist in her era, was anti-abortion; the organization supports male candidates against female ones but is supposedly dedicated to electing more female candidates; its model bill that would restrict healthcare access for pregnant women supposedly expands healthcare access for pregnant women--the gap between rhetoric and reality is very hard to ignore.

People vs. Putin Power

Fred Weir — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 10:00:52 +0000

MOSCOW--The Russian frost broke last month, literally and figuratively, as a surprise December thaw brought the warmest temperatures in more than a century to Moscow and as two equally unexpected massive pro-democracy street rallies fundamentally challenged the Putin-era status quo. Though winter will undoubtedly return, few believe the political climate here will ever be the same again.

Ironically, those who attended the two protests to demand that an allegedly fraudulent parliamentary election be overturned were overwhelmingly the winners, not the losers, of the past decade under Vladimir Putin's authoritarian leadership. Call them the Putin Generation: mostly young, social media-savvy, highly educated and relatively well-to-do urban professionals who have until now accepted the Kremlin's "social contract," which required only that they stay out of politics in return for the chance to build their careers, enjoy their private lives, travel wherever they wish and safely vent their feelings on the Internet.

Until last month, it seemed to be working. Putin's Kremlin strategist, Vladislav Surkov, engineered the elaborate political system that has been dubbed "managed democracy," featuring carefully-controlled electoral choices, a straitjacketed media and a civil society in which politically-active groups are either co-opted into the state-run Public Chamber or suffocated under tax inspections, computer anti-piracy laws or a variety of other pseudo-legal pretexts. In the 2003 and 2007 parliamentary elections, the pro-Kremlin behemoth United Russia was the clear victor.

But in the December 4 Duma elections, United Russia barely squeaked to a 49-percent win and even that, opposition parties and bloggers argued, was called into question by extensive fraud and shameless vote-rigging. The first small post-election protests, involving the usual liberal and left-wing dissident groups, were brutally put down by police. But then the unexpected happened. Police grudgingly granted opposition groups a permit to gather on December 10; at least 30,000 filled Bolotnaya Square. After police approved another permit for a December 24 rally, at least 60,000 swarmed onto barricaded Sakharov Avenue to demand the elections be cancelled and re-staged under fair rules and for Putin to abandon his plans to run for a third term in presidential polls slated for March 4. He is eligible for two more six-year terms.

The opposition parties that called the rallies appeared totally blindsided by these turnouts. Summoned not so much by political organizers as by viral social media messages, the multitudes suddenly showed up with a staggering variety of individual signs and messages. Most insisted that they had no political affiliation.

"We're tired of all the lies, the endless corruption, and feel like we are ready to participate in making decisions," said Vladimir Kuvshinsky, a network administrator in an IT firm, when asked his thoughts on the mood of the crowd.

"We don't want 12 more years of Putin's dictatorship," said Ksenia Atarova, who described herself as a writer and critic. "The people have woken up at last, and they want fair elections and a chance to voice their resentment about a lot of things that are happening in this country."

Protest organizers promise to be back on the streets in February, as Putin vies with a lackluster field of opponents in presidential elections now likely to be under close public scrutiny. Some experts argue that the real revolt is likely to begin in the spring. Many segments of Russian society haven't been heard from yet, although public opinion polling suggests they too are upset--not only at the deficiencies of "managed democracy," but also by spiraling inflation and government plans to "reform" pensions and other social benefits.

"The real protests are yet to come," says Boris Kagarlitsky, a veteran left-wing activist and director of the independent Institute for Study of Globalization and Social Movements. "The vast majority of Russians, who saw their lives improve in the early Putin years, have experienced sharply worsening living standards since the economic crisis began in 2008. Now [the street rallies] in Moscow have shown them that protesting is a possibility. ... We're looking at a classic revolutionary situation."

America’s Real Occupiers

David Sirota — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 10:00:34 +0000

Last week, my local twittersphere momentarily erupted with allegations that Denver's public school superintendent, Tom Boasberg, is sending his kids to a private school that eschews high-stakes testing. Boasberg, an icon of the national movement pushing high-stakes testing and undermining traditional public education, eventually defended himself by insisting that his kids attended that special school only during pre-school and that they now attend a public school. Yet his spokesman admitted that the school is not in Denver but in Boulder, Colo., one of America's wealthiest enclaves.

Boasberg, you see, refuses to live in the district that he governs. Though having no background in education administration, this longtime telecom executive used his connections to get appointed Denver superintendent, and he now acts like a king. From the confines of his distant castle in Boulder, he issues edicts to his low-income fiefdom--decrees demonizing teachers' unions, shutting down neighborhood schools over community objections and promoting privately administered charter schools. Meanwhile, he makes sure his own royal family is insulated in a wealthy district that doesn't experience his destructive policies.

No doubt this is but a microcosmic story in a country whose patrician overlords are regularly conjuring the feudalism of Europe circa the Middle Ages. Today, our mayors deploy police against homeless people and protestors; our governors demand crushing budget cuts from the confines of their taxpayer-funded mansions; our Congress exempts itself from insider-trading laws and provides itself health care benefits denied to others; and our nation's capital has become one of the world's wealthiest cities, despite the recession.

Taken together, we see that there really are "Two Americas," as the saying goes--and that's no accident. It's the result of a permanent elite that is removing itself from the rest of the nation. Nowhere is this more obvious than in education--a realm in which this elite physically separates itself from us mere serfs. As the head of one of the country's largest urban school districts, Boasberg is a perfect example of this--but he is only one example.

The Washington Post, for instance, notes that it has become an unquestioned "tradition among Washington's power elite"--read: elected officials--to send their kids to the ultra-expensive private school Sidwell Friends. At the same time, many of these officials have backed budget policies that weaken public education.

Outside of Washington, it's often same story; as just two recent examples, both New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel have championed massive cuts to public education while sending their kids to private school.

In many cases, these aristocrats aren't even required to publicly explain themselves. (Boasberg, for example, is never hounded by local media about why he refuses to live in Denver.) Worse, on the rare occasions that questions are posed, privacy is the oft-used excuse to not answer, whether it's Obama defenders dismissing queries about their Sidwell decision, Christie telling a voter his school choices are "none of your business" or Emanuel storming out of a television interview and then citing his "private life" when asked about the issue.

This might be a convincing argument about ordinary citizens' personal education choices, but it's an insult coming from public officials. When they remove themselves and their families from a community--but still retain power over that community--they end up acting as foreign occupiers, subjecting us to policies they would never subject their own kin to.

Pretending this is acceptable or just a "private" decision, then, is to tolerate ancient, ruling-class notions that are no longer sustainable in the 21st century. Indeed, if this nation is going to remain a modern republic, it can't also be a medieval oligarchy--no matter how much America's elite wants to keep governing from behind the palace walls.