I was, for thirty-odd years, a regular subscriber to a New York based magazine called "Newsweek". In the days before the Internet, it was one magazine I read throughly every week, along with newspapers and whatever magazines I could snap up or read in the library. Sort of a "platform" periodical as it were.
I could pretty much account for any slants of all the commentators like George Will, the late Meg Goodman and Robert Samuelson and the good upfront reportage of writers like Eleanor Clift, Mark Starr, Michael Isakoff, and Gloria Borger. Back then, there was something called "investigative journalism" and no one in power in Washington or Wall Street was immune from getting their bad behavior blown up in the pages of this magazine.
It's true that time passes, but it's also true that many institutions like the media do not just slide down the chute in terms of value. But Newsweek certainly has done it. In fact, it can slide no longer I would say thanks to the efforts of ex-glamour magazine editor Tina Brown and her staff of fact-check free hacks who now fill what is left of that periodical with lies and half-truths and other muck.
I refer to the latest issue as exhibit "A" of bad journalism--a hit piece against Barack Obama. Reading this I was struck by how unusually close Mr. Niall Freguson's column was to the speakers at the Republican National Convention. If only this snotty Tory intellectual had actually made his case based on facts and evidence. But that was not to be. Apparently Ferguson feels he can say anything and his work will not get spiked or reviewed. Or if it is reviewed he will just weasel out of the argument by backtracking and quoting Margaret Thatcher to justify his inaccuracies. Makes you wonder what he's up to?
That such a story made it to the cover of the magazine shows just how sensationalistic this former news publication turned rag has become.
Gene Lyons, who formally wrote for the magazine did the best commentary on the Ferguson piece.
Ferguson’s surely entitled to his opinions (although not his vote, as he’s a British subject, not an American citizen) but to paraphrase the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, he’s not entitled to his own facts. Riddled with ludicrous errors and manifest deceptions, the article’s publication on the cover of a major news magazine at first struck me as ominous.
That Ferguson’s a professor made things worse. Academics theoretically hold themselves to more strenuous standards than journalists. I even found myself rummaging around in the University of Virginia honor code, where I went to school, for definitions of academic fraud.
And yes, it’s that bad. Vote for whomever you like. But if you make your choice based upon the following howler, then you’ve been had: “The president pledged that health-care reform would not add a cent to the deficit,” Ferguson charged. “But the CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation now estimate that the insurance-coverage provisions of the ACA will have a net cost of close to $1.2 trillion over the 2012–22 period.”
In fact, as New York Times columnist and Princeton economist Paul Krugman pointed out, the Congressional Budget Office concluded that Obamacare will actually reduce the yearly budget deficit by an estimated $210 billion over the decade. There’s a chart documenting that non-obscure fact on page two of the CBO report.
Krugman demanded a correction by Newsweek.
Instead, editor Tina Brown’s latest plaything allowed Ferguson to double-down. Rather than apologize, he posted an online rejoinder calling Krugman’s objection “truly feeble,” and boasting that he’d “very deliberately” written “‘the insurance coverage provisions of the ACA,’ not ‘the ACA.’”
In short, Ferguson very deliberately misled his readers to the tune of $1.4 trillion–considering only the debit half of Obamacare’s balance sheet, but not its revenues and savings. Then he falsely cited the CBO to cover his tracks.
Even his alibi quoted the CBO report out of context. Internet sleuths quickly caught him out.
http://www.nationalmemo.com/23853/
And it wasn't just Lyons or the New York Times' Paul Krugman who went after Ferguson. John Cassidy of "The New Yorker" and others did as well.
What is pretty remarkable about the latest dustup is the weakness of the arguments presented by Ferguson, a streetwise public intellectual who, according to his Web site, now holds positions at four different élite academic institutions. If called upon three months before an election to pen a provocative cover story in a national newsmagazine clamoring for the President to be chucked out, most writers would make every effort to avoid giving the other side easy opportunities to tear down their arguments. And yet, here comes Ferguson blatantly twisting a report from the Congressional Budget Office and presenting numerous other distortions and half-truths that anybody with access to Google could discredit in a few hours.--
Of course, conservatives might remember this recent cover of the magazine where Mitt Romney was derided as a "Wimp" (See below) and say "See, Newsweek goes after Mitt Romney, too. So both sides are being judged with vitriol and distortions. So its all fair!"
That isn't the point.
The point is that such covers would not have even made the final cut at the old magazine under editors like Richard Smith or Jon Meacham. These editors knew the difference between their magazines and trash tabloids that appeal to the lowest common denominator crowd with its thirst for the name-calling and the sensational.
Tina Brown isn't in business to sell information backed up with accuracy--she is in this to sell magazines apparently, period, and do so with apparently little reliable and verifiable facts on the table. Journalism without any respect for facts is just bias on a rampage.
A convention is taking place in Tampa. Mitt Romney has been nominated and his wife thinks he's a swell guy.
The only suspense right now is how the GOP are going to hide Ron Paul away--an old campaigner who keeps popping up as a NPR commentator put it, like the pesky puppet- groundhog that plagued Bill Murray back in the movie "Caddyshack".
As someone pointed out quite a while ago, political party conventions are no longer very suspenseful. The days of the pre-television and pre-primary age, the were smoke-filled rooms of king-makers and power players. These were called "brokered conventions" and they were numerous:
The closest thing we have seen in the modern age to a "brokered" convention goes all the way back to 1976 when President Gerald Ford came to the GOP convention just shy of enough delegates to defeat former California Governor Ronald Reagan. Ford managed to gain the delegates before the actual roll call vote, but their at least was a measure of suspense.
The 1976 Republican Convention was also interesting for another reason---there was no speech or even a sign of Ford's predecessor, Richard Nixon, 37th President of the United States and the first and only President ot resign in disgrace for office. Few Republicans missed "Tricky Dick", the man whose cover-ups and crimes had help push Republicans to a massive defeat in the 1974 Congressional elections. No one wanted a pardoned felon to represent the Republicans in front of a national audience.
We are seeing something of a Nixonian situation played out in Tampa this week. Where is two-term President George W Bush, the hero of "9/11" and the man who promised to bring democracy to Iraq on the war front and prosperity and jobs to the domestic front ?
This is the most interesting thing to me about the convention is not who is speaking---the usual group of mainly women, black Hispanic and younger political speakers who are the human wall paper the Republicans need to make the party look less white, worried, older and male then they really are. Not only are these two not speaking, but Bush and Cheney are literally not in the building and are as scarce as Elvis sightings.
I'm talking about former President George W. Bush and his Vice President, Dick Cheney, of course. These guys served two terms in the offices of the Chief Executive and where the hell are they?
Officially, they are just taking the convention off to go fishing or something.
I, for one, don't buy it.
They are not in Tampa because both men are a major liability for the GOP. If they thought about coming, these twins of economic and human rights disasters were dissuaded. In a very polite and respectful way, I'm sure, but, believe me, if they asked to address the delegates, they were dissuaded.
The Bush Administration was the worst failure for the GOP since Nixon--but at least Nixon left office with only a mild recession for the country to cope with, a recession caused mainly by the "oil shocks" caused by the OPEC nations in the Middle East in the wake of the Israeli-Egyptian "Yom Kippur War" of October, 1973.
What Bush left behind was far worse in my view. Millions of jobs were lost by the end of his term, sparked by a housing bubble fueled by an unregulated Wall Street "perfect storm" of greedy investors and irrational mortgage companies and home buyers. And none of this bothered Bush anymore then his trillions spent on two untaxed "credit card" wars fought halfway around the world.
The man who proved that "trickle-down" economics and perpetual tax cuts don't create jobs would be a major turd in the GOP punchbowl were he to address the GOP Convention. And that doesn't mention his water-boarding-enthusiast pal, Dick Cheney.
It's a good thing these guys were dissaudable, good for the Romney-Ryan Ticket at least.
i'll leave the last words to columnist and editor Froma Harrop of the Providence Rhode Island Journal:
"The Bush tax cuts drained the Treasury of money needed to pay for what the Republicans wanted, never mind the Democrats. Ryan now calls for even more tax cuts with the proviso that they be partly offset by closing loopholes. Broadening the tax base is not a bad idea, but Ryan's plan fails to impress because it does not specify what loopholes would go. How about doing away with the big popular deductions, like those for health coverage or mortgageinterest? Ryan's lips are sealed.
"So while the Tampa convention hosts no George W. Bush, it has his plan. More defense spending. Less regulation. More tax cuts for the upper incomes. As another famous Republican might have said: Here we go again." http://www.creators.com/opinion/froma-harrop.html
Your Humble Correspondent tried to do something I had been threatening myself to do for some time--to stop blogging about the current elections. Anyone who knows me from my Multiply blog knows this a radical step for me. I' wasn't t even sure I could stop it--is there such a thing as Election Junkies anonymous?
As it turns out I can't keep that promise. Not even for a day. Politics is my nicotine. Here I go again.
One thing that is clear is that we have two and one half months to go before the General Election and, honestly, if anyone hasn't decided whom they are going to vote for (Obama, Romney, Jill Stein of the Greens, The Libertarian Guy Who I Can Never Remember) than they really haven't been paying attention.
Part of the reason for this has been my sheer frustration in seeing candidates like Romney get away with not disclosing the most basic information one should have about their candidacy in the modern Presidency; at least 5-7 years of their tax returns. Why did isn't a law that all candidates to high office need to disclose their taxes when they are running for national office baffles me! The other is the notion that Romney and Obama are essentially the same. In some ways, perhaps they are I'll admit in foreign policy matters; but Romney candidacy will have a very different impact on professional, and middle and lower income families and the elderly.
In plain terms the Romney Ryan ticket will devastate the social safety net for the jobless, those who are seriously ill , the elderly and for all people who actually have to work for a living. And then give yet another round of tax breaks to millionaires! So while the policies of the USA in the Middle East may not change so much if one or the other of these political birds wins, it makes a huge difference to a middle-aged and middle class guy like me.
As it should to anyone who has paid into the Medicare system since I started working and now, because I am just under 55 at this point, I and million of others will face paying thousands of extra dollars for health care for the "crime" of living to age 65 or 67, and/or be handed a "voucher" for health care and put to the tender mercies of the private health care system when I am in my 70s if I have the good or bad luck of living that long. And, even if I don't, no one of my age bow should have to face that!
So, yes, there is a difference in this election, at least to me and some of my co-horts, even among the two candidates.
The USA has a lot of problems right now, at home and abroad. We have had high unemployment since 2008 and a stagnant economy in part because greedy people played fast and loose with the personal housing market, and investment bankers on Wall Street shovelled money into a system that created a huge bubble that burst on us and took an estimated 14 trillion dollar out of the pockets of people who were the bedrock of our economy.
This economic tsunami will not be cleared up by anyone in four years or even eight. The country is in a state of slow and painful recovery. I see the only way out is to for the average income Americans coming together and saying "NO" to anyone who wants to take us back to the Wild West days on Wall Street. No one likes being regulated but we all have to drive on the right hand side of the road and stop at a red light over here to drive. Just as a driver of a car or a truck needs regulations, so do mortgage holders and bankers. Romney and Ryan want to pretend that 30 years of deregulation and increased income inequality under Reagan, and the Bushes didn't happen. Sorry it did. We need to restore a serious regulatory system such has the Glass-Stegall Act again and we need to start making the wealthy pay their fair share again---not 13 percent or 17 percent but more like 30-35 percent to build up our infrastructure. And cut the loopholes back as even Ronald Reagan and the Democrats in Congress did in 1986.
And lest you cry our "class warfare" my visiting Republican friends bare in mind that the last and longest post-World War II growth we had was under Bill Clinton and he raised taxes through Congress to a top rate of 39 percent.
As Warren Buffett the enlightened billionaire investor ruefully put it, "Yes, there is class warfare in this country. And my side is winning."
It's time we change that course, once and for the rest of the decades to come.
A bad situation is only more worse with a bad plan. This is something to remember the next time you hear someone in the media talking about Paul Ryan, the new Vice Presidential pick Here we have a man who claims to be both a Roman Catholic and a follower of the cold-hearted elitist Ayn Rand, a woman who took the terrors of the Russian Revolution of her youth and assumed--wrongly-- that the United States could either be a country of individualism or a collectivist nation. If you don't believe me, read her book "The Virtue of Selfishness" some time.
The truth that this manichean thinking is not what the reality of American politics is about. To try and find a way to preserve Medicare and create an affordable health care insurance plan for Americans cannot be solved by caving in to one extreme faction over another. It will take balance and compromise, the sort of unity and common purpose you will not find in the modern conservative movement, bankrolled by casino billionaire Sheldon Alderson and the Koch Brothers and sold to America with the "wink and giggle" antics a pseudo-celebrity like Sarah Palin.
The plain facts are that Paul Ryan voted to turn Social Security over to the Stock Exchanges in 2005 and he still wants to end Medicare, giving people like myself who have worked for decades and paid into the program a "voucher' and throwing millions of middle and working class Americans unto the "tender mercies" of the mega-rich and bureaucratized private health insurance industry.
Health care is not like buying a car or choosing a restaurant. Those who will get old will nveery likely need health care---most of you reading this now know in your heart this is true. We cannot afford to go back on the Affordable Health Care Act and we cannot cut 5 trillion out of the domestic budget and let the wealthy score yet another big tax break.
I believe Barack Obama and others are right--we build an economy from the middle out----the more people can buy goods and services the more jobs we will have. The idea of the trickle-down school of econommics---where money given to the rich creates jobs has been proved wrong in the last decade by the Bush-Cheney Administration where after eight years we had nearly zero job growth.
Paul Ryan is not George W. Bush. His tea party pals in Congress are worse, more idealogical and more committed to staying in office by attracting as much wealth from the top and anger from below to stay in power in perpetuity so they will never have to face the real economy most of us have work or worked in. They are creatures of political power from well-off families and, unlike men like FDR, Theodore Roosevelt and John Kennedy, they have no empathy for average-income Americans.
Our economy barely survived the last economic meltdown. Can we afford another. Are the two candidates really just all the same. Well, no, not for people who plan to live in this nation and see it not become a temperate-zone version of a banana republic.
There are various Republican-dominated state legislatures from Texas to Pennsylvania engaged in promoting a passel of new laws designed to disenfranchise as many young, minority-group and working-class voter as possible to ensure continued ascendancy of their party. The voter identification laws have been challenged at the federal level by Attorney General Eric Holder and will likely face stiff court battles from citizens groups who will not take the disfranchisement of millions (an estimated 700,000 in Pennsylvania alone, and a million voters in Texas, the biggest states involved) in their respective states lying down.
This goes beyond the sort of healthy rough-and-tumble politics we have had for generations in the United States. This is a giant step backwards to a time when wealthy groups used racism and gender-hegemony and xenophobia against immigrant groups to create a solution to a "problem"---the problem of a mature and open democracy.
The "dangerously radical" idea put forth by many of the Jeffersonian/Jacksonian groups in early America was that an expanded voting franchise was the natural outgrowth of the great Enlightenment experiment in perfecting government. But to the elites there was an inherent flaw--a flaw first grasped upon by elitist forces like the Federalist Party of Alexander Hamilton in the 1790's. The "flaw" is that the "common man" is not to be trusted with the public business.
This elitism had to give way as Western Expansion gave more and more power to voting arenas far from the major cities of the eastern seaboard. The Jacksonian Democrats fought for reform of the franchise for all white men-- taking it as politically feasible. Then came the issue of slavery and freedom and its containment that sent 650,000 men to their graves and wounded and nearly destroyed a nation. There are many causes cited for the American Civil War, but one of them has to be that a powerful agrarian-based culture in the South would not yield to the idea that slavery was a pernicious evil and they were on the wrong side of history to wish for its expansion. Eradication had already happened in nations as diverse from each other as Great Britain and Russia.
To block the newly-freed slaves from voting after the war, the "Jim Crow Laws " were instituted. A quick refresher course in them shows their long-lasting power in many states.
"The Jim Crow laws were state and local laws in the United States enacted between 1876 and 1965. They mandated de jureracial segregation in all public facilities in Southern states of the former Confederacy, with, starting in 1890, a “separate but equal” status for African Americans. The separation in practice led to conditions that tended to be inferior to those provided for white Americans, systematizing a number of economic, educational and social disadvantages. De jure segregation mainly applied to the Southern United States. Northern segregation was generally de facto, with patterns of segregation in housing enforced by covenants, bank lending practices, and job discrimination, including discriminatory union practices for decades."
The established order of institutional racism and laws that extended to voter supression of poor whites with onerous literacy tests at the polls were all predicated by the notion that African-Americans and many upstart poor people of all stripes were easily swayed by "outside agitators" (northerners, "radicals" of any stripe from liberal to Communist, union organizers, et al.) Many of these "agitators" were citizens falsely tarnished as "unAmerican" or tarnished as being in league with Moscow or Greenwich Village, whichever suited the slanderer.
Voter suppression 1.0 (Old school)
Also targeted were human rights advocacy groups like the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the National Association for the Advancent of Colored People (NAACP), dissenting Christian organizations who organized boycotts and demonstrations led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Rev. Ralph Abernathy, and Rev William Sloane Coffin. One of the men who fought back in the 1950s and 60 against Jim Crow is Congressman John Lewis. He had been badly injured in a police riot by cops during a peaceful march from Montgomery to Selma Alabama.
"On March 7, 1965, 525 civil rights activists began a march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. Just outside Selma, heavily armed police and deputies broke up the march with billy clubs and tear gas, injuring sixty-five people and hospitalizing 17 in a melee that became known as "Bloody Sunday."
That same year President Lyndon Johnson got a Voting Rights Act thorough Congress and signed the most signifigant piece of Civil Rights legislation for the first time in US history since the years directly after the end of the Civil War.
Lewis stood his ground again in May of this year over a reintroduction of "states rights" skullduggery, and against a Congressman from his own state of Georgia who wanted to gut the Voting Rights Act.
voter suppression debate: t a
Most would say these are battles that have been fought and won and the "bad old days" are behind America. But the straight linear path of progress occasionally gets caught for a spin.
It's clear that Jim Crow 2.0 will not feature men in white robes and flaming torches burning the crops and houses of blacks people and immigrants. But it is also clear that the aim of these measures is the same---to protect the conservative status quo from the college students, poor seniors, non-Cuban Latinos (especially those in Texas where new Congressional Districts should help Hispanics gain representation), African Amerians and others from voting.
The numbers suggest that the legitimate votes rejected by the laws are far more numerous than are the cases of fraud that advocates of the rules say they are trying to prevent. Thousands more votes could be in jeopardy for this November, when more states with larger populations are looking to have similar rules in place.
More than two dozen states have some form of ID requirement, and 11 of those passed new rules over the past two years largely at the urging of Republicans who say they want to prevent fraud.
Democrats and voting rights groups fear that ID laws could suppress votes among people who may not typically have a driver’s license, and disproportionately affect the elderly, poor and minorities. While the number of votes is a small percentage of the overall total, they have the potential to sway a close election. Remember that the 2000 presidential race was decided by a 537-vote margin in Florida.
A Republican leader in Pennsylvania said recently that the state’s new ID law would allow Romney to win the state over President Barack Obama.
Much has been made about the efforts of Republican backed groups to pass legislation in states like Arizona, Pennsylvania and Florida to suppress the vote in the upcoming November election. (And well it should, since voting suppression is likely the only way a lot of "tea bagger" first-term Republicans are going to hold onto their seats in Congress.) The usual plan is to make it harder to use ordinary identification like a student I.D. card or non photo-I.D. card to vote. (But not a gun carry permit, oddly enough.)
This all might make sense if there was massive fraud in, say, Florida, but so far while thousands of Floridians were about to be struck off the rolls by a GOP-backed bill, the federal government stepped in and said "hold on!". It has been pointed out that only 12 potential fraud cases state-side even were reported in the last election.
But in the newly created Seventh District of California , near and in part of the capital city of Sacramento, a reverse strategy is taking place. Fraudulent voting registration cards are flooding the California Secretary of State's office--up to 3,000 suspected undocumented voter cards--in order to help secure a seat for House Representative Dan Lundgen (R), a pro-torture "hero" and unflagging big-oil company stalwart. http://www.sacbee.com/2012/06/20/4574761/efesf-sepfsek-fp-skefp-sfpes.html
While signing up non-existent voters or overlooking status does not constitute fraud at the polling stations, it is clear someone was trying to pull a fast one---to overstate the amount of support Lundgren had, quite possibly, to discourage voter turnout for his challenger. In a close race, which this will be in Sacramento, such an overstatement could make all the difference.
Here's Dan a few years back giving the thumbs-up to water-boarding captured prisoners: "I disagree with John McCain"--(a Senator and former POW who spent years in a North Vietnam prison and WAS tortured) -" that water-boarding is, in fact, torture."--Dan Lundgren, December 2007.
And now, maestro, a little tax-payer rip-off music if you please:
By VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV, Associated Press – 1 hour ago
"MOSCOW (AP) — U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton sparked controversy this week when she accused Russia of escalating the conflict in Syria by sending it attack helicopters. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov rejected the claim, saying that Russia is only shipping air defense systems under previously signed contracts.
The State Department acknowledged Thursday that the helicopters Clinton referred to were being returned to Syria after refurbishment and are not new tools against Syrian opposition groups. Nonetheless, Russia has shipped billions of dollars' worth of missiles, tanks, artillery and other military gear to Syria over more than four decades."
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Recent events I've seen and heard make it sound as if the United States and Russia (most of which made up the former USSR) are at it again. Washington and Moscow used to use military equipment issues to Israel and Syria, respectively ,as a way to preserve power-blocs and hegemony in the Middle East triangle of Israel, Syria and Lebanon during and after the October 1973 "Yom Kippur" war and the rape of Lebanon in the 1970s and 80s.
So much time has passed, but what has changed?
Meanwhile, the 23 million people of Syria have become the newest nation to descend into a state of insurrection. With the "soft-coup" military crackdown reported in Egypt, it appears that the Arab Spring is over. As the report above from the Al-Jezzera news agency last week reports, there are thousands of refugees fleeing into Turkey and some rebel fighters crossing back over the border with neighboring Syria.
It's doubtful to me given the sparse on-site reporting we are getting from a variety of sources that anybody really knows where these arms are winding up or who they are being used upon. Many of the rebel groups are apparently deserters from Assad's army, some are violent sectarians and others are involved in the conflict because of hatred for the Assad Dynasty which has ruled this nation, ruthlessly when needed, since 1970.
The State Department says the Russians and the Iranians are supplying the Assad government and other sourcess say that NATO and other groups are supporting the various opposition forces. Others like RT television, the main Russian government conduit to the outside world, say most of the arming and butchery is on the rebel side and the USA and NATO is to blame.
One thing is certain: more arms shipments from any source will NOT lead to peace!
All the Security Council nations in the UN should stand aside and call for a peace program. Finger-pointing while men are beaten, women are raped and children are being blown to pieces is less than inhumane.
"(Reuters) - The Syrian town of Haffeh was smoldering and nearly deserted on Thursday after days of clashes between government forces and rebels, while activists reported more army assaults on pro-opposition areas across the country.
"United Nations monitors had been trying to enter the town after several days of fighting but were forced to turn back on Tuesday when a crowd attacked them.
"They finally gained access on Thursday to find state buildings burnt down, shops abandoned and a body lying in the street. Smoke rose from destroyed buildings and burnt-out cars littered the roads. There were signs of heavy bombardment."
(Right) Young Mitt Romney protesting against anti-war protesters while enrolled at Standford University. He supported the Vietnam War but ducked the draft with deferments, in the proud tradition of Dick Cheney, Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich and quite a few other chicken hawks who supported that war and plague us with their patriotic hypocrisy today. But, wait, folks, it gets weirder: In addition to the more bizarre behavior of Mitt Romney that has been well already publicized (such as the dog on the roof of the family car in the 1980's, or the hair-cutting/forced assault on a gay student at the Cranbrook Preparatory Academy in 1965 when he was a 17-year old hooligan,) we can now another eccentric and disturbing bit of weird and unsettling behavior to the would-be president---he was a cop impersonator. From the article in The Daily Beast: "'One former classmate told the National Memo, "He (Romney) told us that he'd gotten the uniform from his father," then the governor of Michigan. "He told us he was using it to pull over drivers on the road. He also had a red flashing light that he would attach to the top of his white Rambler."
(right: Cartoon depicting the state of Florida's unpopular governor, Rick Scott, and his napalm approach to voter registration irregularities.)
As some have no doubt heard, the states of Florida, Texas, Wisconsin and several other states dominated by freshly-minted GOP hard liners have recently undertaken attempts to strike voters from the rolls to stay in office or throw the upcoming November election to folks they want to see in office.
In Florida there were attempts to disenfranchise a couple thousands voters, over eighty percent of which were non-white. One particular instance of attempted disenfranchisement has caught the attention of the regular media. According to a recent editorial by the Miami Herald's Pulitzer-Prize Winning editorialist, Leonard Pitts,Jr:
"Bill Internicola had to show his papers.
"He received a letter last month from the Broward County, Fla., Supervisor of Elections informing him the office had "information from the state of Florida that you are not a United States citizen; however, you are registered to vote." So Internicola had to prove he is an American. He sent the county a copy of his Army discharge papers.
"Internicola is 91. He was born in Brooklyn. He is a veteran of the Second World War. He earned a Bronze Star for his part in the Battle of the Bulge. Yet he was required to prove to a county functionary that he is entitled to vote in a U.S. election.
"We learn from a story in last week's Miami Herald that this is part of a campaign by Florida Gov. Rick Scott, a Republican, to weed non-citizens off the rolls of the state's voters. Initially, Florida claimed 180,000 were possible non-citizens. That number was eventually whittled way down to about 2,600 people. In Miami-Dade County, where the largest number of them live, 385 have been verified as citizens. Ten -- 10! -- have admitted they are ineligible or asked to be removed from the rolls.
So out of 2,600 voters there was 10 voters. This, out of millions registered in the "Sunshine State", who needed to be weeded out. Clearly this was not a major problem in the first place and is more of a scare tactic to suppress ethnic votes that would be unfavorable to the party in power (the Republicans) during a major election. This flies in the face of the spirit of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and shows how desperate some politicos are of the changing demographics of the southern, southwestern and midwest states where these tactics are the most often applied.
Currently the Attorney General's office and parts of our judicial court system have done a pretty good job keeping this sort of disenfranchisement from getting out of hand. But of course that could change starting this November. It's clear with enough money and enough fear of "the other" (mainly Hispanics, it seems) these campaigns are so brazen they will not be stalled without plenty of public interest.
Even this very day, there are attempts at voter intimidation and misinformation going on right now in the Governor Scott Walker recall election in Wisconsin.
These tactics are not new, as African-American voters who are aware of long fight over Jim Crow Laws are aware, with the long history of "poll taxes" and outright violent suppression of voting rights know about, as women who recall the Suffergate Movement are aware, as Hispanic Americans who face being asked for their citizenship papers thanks to draconian laws in Arizona are well aware.
What is new in the modern American political scene is the fervor of it all. White conservatives know the demographics of this nation are changing and not to their betterment. The America of Richard Nixon's white and worried "Silent Majority" and Ronald Reagan's "Morning in America" crowd is seeing their ranks thinning and time marching on. But they will try to keep the clock back, and try all they can to enforce an internal colonization over the new voting blocs that are more open-minded about issues from economic empathy and marriage rights than they ever were.
it's a strong indication that, as Thomas Jefferson said, "the price of liberty is, [indeed], eternal vigilance!"
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.”
― Dwight D. Eisenhower
"More, more, more How do you like it, how do you like it? More, more, more How do you like it, how do you like it?" More, more, more"--Lyrics from the disco hit "More, More, More" by Andrea True Connection (1976)
It is said one cannot travel in two directions at once. But it seems that's just the way we will be going after the 2012 Elections when the foks in Congress and The White House will take time off from the endless political campaign season to actually propose and try to pass a budget and a few laws for a couple months or three before the campaigning starts all over and the mainstream media gets all frothy about who is running for what seat in 2014 or the top job in 2016.
One direction they will cover is the budget deficit, the accumulated debt the nation has borrowed to pay its bills. To do this many politicians will scare the middle class into supporting drastic cuts in spending programs like education, senior services and public health care. We are after all in serious overall debt to the tune of about 11 trillion dollars and its legitimate to want to address that issue in a comprehensive manner.
But let's say Obama is re-elected and the tea party Republicans don't advance like they did in the 2010 mid-terms. And maybe parts of the GW Bush Era tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 are really repealed, the ones passed in the middle of two wars that resulted in a net loss of jobs after the 2008 Wall Street banking/mortgage meltdown. OK, well maybe some modest cuts in some domestic programs and increased tax revenue will actually both stimulate the economy and bring down the deficit.
That's a best case scenario by the way. If Romney wins the election, he's already signaled he is going to push for cuts in just about all government spending in the domestic realm. He is marching in lock-step with that social Darwinist/Ayn Rand enthusiast, Paul Ryan of the House Budget Committee. The tax cuts will stay in place and the cuts will be deeper and the poor and the middle class will suffer as will anybody who is trying to get back on their feet in this economy.
Whoops! I left out the other direction we'll be heading in and it looks like we will be headed into it no matter who is in the White House and how the two parties count noses in the Senate.
It's a big omission called the National Security State. These are the people at Lockheed Martin and Pratt and Whitney and Boeing and McDonnell Douglas, General Dynamamics, et al. They have lobbyists who press our elected leaders to continue increasing the defense budget no matter how much we have already spent, how muc hwe need money for schools and police and job training programs. No matter how much we are already over stretched in foreign wars, no matter how many weapons systems we are buying----to the exclusions of basic military equipment and care for soldiers and marines after they return from tour after tour with physical and mental wounds.
How do you handle these guys, they got national defense on their side? Well, you don't handle them. You give in, even if, say, Pratt and Whitney or General Dynamics wants a program that the Pentagon itself doesn't want.
Think I'm kidding you on that last part? I wish I was! Here's a recent editorial in "The Baltimore Sun" that says otherwise:
"...Republicans are once again trying to save weapons systems that the military doesn't actually want. That's the kind of micromanagement that inevitably harms national security; Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has already warned that saving a low-priority weapon could result in harmful cutbacks to hardware the military actually needs.
"But wait, you may say, that's just the authorization — the shopping list, if you will. Unfortunately, the House Appropriations Committee, which actually helps decide how much to spend, is moving in the same direction. Earlier this week, the defense subcommittee approved more than $3 billion in additional Pentagon spending in 2013.
"What makes all this misplaced generosity toward the military-industrial complex all the more ludicrous is that the Pentagon still has the proverbial Sword of Damocles hanging over its head in the form of sequestration. Unless Congress and the White House reach some sort of budget compromise between now and the end of the year, automatic cuts will be triggered including more than $500 billion in future spending at the Pentagon, about $55 billion of it next year.
"Needless to say, Democrats and Republicans alike are unhappy with that threat, but it's the GOP that seems most interested in sidestepping it. "We shouldn't be cutting national defense spending and imperiling our security to meet arbitrary caps," was how Rep. Paul Ryan put it this week.
"To which we can only say, Mr. Ryan is absolutely correct. The problem is, that "train wreck" budget plan is there for a reason. The plan was adopted last summer, when Republicans and Democrats failed to reach agreement on a deficit-reduction deal. The required cuts were meant to be as painful as possible to force the two sides into negotiation.
"Naturally, that hasn't happened. The parties appear no closer to resolving their differences than they were when the automatic cuts were set in place. But if this is a game of chicken, the approaching cars are still a mile or two away, and there's time to swerve — just not a lot of it, given that the Pentagon must make some budget-related decisions by early next year.
"Mr. Ryan would avoid sequestration by foisting much more of the cutbacks on entitlement programs. It's essentially the same tune he has been singing for a couple of years now, and Democrats aren't dancing to it now any more than they did last year. Reducing the deficit can't be entirely at the expense of the nation's most vulnerable citizens in the form of cutbacks to Medicare and Medicaid, food stamps, school nutrition or other safety net programs."
The United States spent in 2011 over 41 percent (!) of all the military spending in the world with one -twentieth the population. China spent about 8.1 percent and Russia 4.2 percent. This according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. For a list of all major countries and their defense spending, see the link below.
William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF) has taught at the Air Force Academy and the Naval Postgraduate School, and now teaches History at the Pennsylvanis College of Technology. He also has written a book Confesions of a recovering Weapons Addict. One ofhis most recent posts at Tom Dispatch is "The National Security State Wins (Again)! Here is a section from that blog. It makes for very interesting analysis of the power of the NSS. The full link is below.
"Despite his record as a “warrior-president,” despite the breathless “Obama got Osama” campaign boosterism, common inside-the-Beltway wisdom has it that the president has backed himself into a national security corner. He must continue to appear strong and uncompromising on defense or else he’ll get the usual Democrat-as-war-wimp label tattooed on his arm by the Republicans.
Similarly, to have a realistic chance of defeating him -- so goes American political thinking -- candidate Romney must be seen as even stronger and more uncompromising, a hawk among hawks. Whatever military spending Obama calls for, however much he caters to neo-conservative agendas, however often he confesses his undying love for and extols the virtues of our troops, Romney will surpass him with promises of even more military spending, an even more muscular and interventionist foreign policy, and an even deeper love of our troops.
Indeed, with respect to the national security complex, candidate Romney already comes across like Edward G. Robinson’s Johnny Rocco in the classic film Key Largo: he knows he wants one thing, and that thing is more. More ships for the Navy. More planes for the Air Force. More troops in general -- perhaps 100,000 more. And much more spending on national defense."
Johnny Rocco was a gangster in a play that became a movie a long, long time ago. But is this type of character---willing to scare and harm people just to make more money--really more modern than we think at first glance? I think so. He lives in the attitude of any politican or lobbyist or CEO who views high-cost arms program as a sacred cow. Hei s any arms merchant who wants to make a personal fortune on the backs of a nation whose greatest challenges are how we treat our neighbors and our neighbors' children.
In summation: In a time of great deficits, and an attitude that taxing the one percenters is off the table for an entire politcal party, and that sophisicated and expensive weapons ALWAYS trump a fraying social safety net, just how many "Johnny Roccos" from a National Security State can we afford?
The path of justice moved just a bit upward today in America.
Although it is only legal in a handful of states (and none of them the important swing-states like Florida and Virginia), President Obama told Robin Roberts of ABC News he now supports the rights of same-sex couples to be married.
Meanwhile, Mitt Romney is silent on how to react to the President's remarks. No doubt he will have to huddle for a time with his handlers to figure out the best way to strike out at this plea for tolerance without appearing to be the total panderer to tea-party far-right policies he had to be for securing the Republican nomination from tea party and priggish activists.
No state in the Union has voted in public referendum to permit gay and lesbian couples to marry, not even in California where there was heavy out-of-state monetary opposition to the issue in the Proposition 8 Amendment battle last year. Much of the opposition came from the Latter-Day-Saints Church that Mitt Romney belongs. I do not happen to believe this election in November will be decided mainly or perhaps in major part on marriage equality, I do feel Obama should be given credit here since a lot of his support even in the African American community is divided on the issue. A political Rubicon has been crossed here and it should be noted and Obama given credit for standing with a minority for the sake of the spirit of equal rights for all citizens.
“Observe how many people evade, rationalize and drive their minds into a state of blind stupor, in dread of discovering that those they deal with- their "loved ones" or friends or business associates or political rulers- are not merely mistaken, but evil. Observe that this dread leads them to sanction, to help and to spread the very evil whose existence they fear to acknowledge.” ― Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness
Let me admit I'm not a keen student of philosopher and novelist Ayn Rand (1905-1985). I certainly was aware in college of fellow students who read her novels and admired or deplored her Objectivist philosophy. Most of the articles I read about her made me think her philosophy of hyper-individualism was an overreaction to the collectivist ethics of revolutionary Russia, the place of her birth. I didn't think I had to to read a book saying people needed to be more selfish, less charitable. Nor one to give more credit to elitists than other writers and pundits already provided in surplus. But I supposed one book needed to be read since she was so controversial and liked by many.
Rand's background I think is a clue to her obsessions. Her family were Russian Jews, and they were alos part of the urban bourgeoisie, an urban and well-educated family with some property interests (her father was a pharmacist and a supported of a rival socialist party, the Menshieiks.) Her father lost his business to the Bolsheviks in Petrograd when Ms. Rand was a teenager and they fled to the Crimea. Later the family returned to the metropolis--later called Leningrad--after the civil war. She received an education at a state university, and was expelled with other students for a time for not following the doctrines of the new state system.
She left Russia in the mid-twenties and came to New York City. She really liked the skyscrapers and the bustle of the new world so she stayed, living with family members for a time in Chicago. Eventually like many young people looking for become something, she found her way out to Hollywood where she worked as a an extra in movies like Cecil B. DeMille's 1927 story of Jesus, "King of Kings". She worked in the costume department of RKO studios and began writing screenplays and plays in her spare time.
By the mid-thirties she had a play --a murder mystery--running on Broadway. She worked on movie scenarios in the studio factory system and wrote "The Fountainhead", a book about an uncompromising architect named Howard Roack. It was published in 1941 and was a best seller. A movie was made of the film in 1949 with Cary Cooper and Patricia Neal. In a ironic twist, like her book's main character, Rand didn't like the film adaptation on many levels.
The book that she is best remembered for is "Atlas Shrugged", published in 1957. She had by this time developed an intellectual circle in New York City centered around her ideas. One of her followers was the future Treasury Secretary and Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan. Mr. Greenspan later presided over the Fed when it adopted a "hands off" policy toward the Wall Street securities and credit-default boomlet that led up to the economic crash of 2008.
America in the Cold War era (1947-1992) was already a nation where collectivism or even the most watered-down versions were despised. Self-centered persons of all financial stripes were quite amply rewarded. So, where was the fire, Ayn?
Objectivism was, to me, nothing more or less than a philosophy more geared to commercial success than intellectual rigor. There's something to be said for simple ideas clearly brought out, but the American philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson--with the great emphasis on "Self-Reliance"---and the careful personal protection of the people from government laid out by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and later on propelled to modernity by the modern conservative movement seemed already to have staked out the place for the individual in the "polis".
Besides, even as a non-believer in God as I was as a student in college , I realized that any decent philosophy and religious teaching I was aware of called on people to try, in Aldous Huxley's phrase, "to just be a little nicer to each other".
The major work by Rand I have read and have returned to from time to time is a slim tome of essays called "The Virtue of Selfishness". Co-written with psychologist and Rand acolyte Nicholas Brenden, it was published in 1964. The book essentially is warmed-over, cold blooded cruel-to-be-kind social Darwinism only with a fetish for eliminating anything society asks people to do for the greater good or for the poor or victimized or handicapped, no matter how small.
Nothing in that book's fifteen or so essays--or in the film documentary or articles about her--inspired me to want to read any of her famous novels "The Fountainhead" (1941) or "Atlas Shrugged" (1957).
"Virtue of Selfishness" as a book is a dedication to stamping out anything that supported the notion of the modern American or European "mixed economy" where government has a role, though not a predominant one, in regulation and protection for citizens of all levels in a private economy. All state action for the benefit of others is seen as irrational and unjustified. To Rand and her ilk, all roads that would benefit thy neighbors or the larger society is a slippery slope to collectivism. There are no compromises, no mixed-economic regulations and supports for small or large business or individuals and so on.
Ms. Rand, to me, seemed to be overreacting to her family misfortunes and experiences under Bolshevism and the chaos and political turmoil of the revolutionary Russia of her youth. She thought any help for just about anybody was irrational, and would lead society inevitably to totalitarianism. To me, a very secular atheist at the time as she was, this seemed too much, a fear of state power in a nation where state power was more diffused than almost any other capitalist-pluralistic society. She and Dr. Branden seemed to be providing a cure for a social "disease" that didn't exist in 1980's America.
Even an ultra-conservative like William F. Buckley (who said jokingly ot an interviewer in 2003 that he had to be "flogged" into reading through "Atlas Shrugged"), the late neo-Conservative Christopher Hitchens, and former Reagan aide and best-selling conservative writer Dinesh D'Sousa had or have sharp reservations about her teachings.
So it surprises me that Ms. Rand and her teachings are still popular, especially with the new breed of ultra-conservatives . GOP House Budget guru Paul Ryan is a big fan, although he recently denounced her teachings when he was criticized by Catholic officials for trying to meld Randism with church teachings. We'll see how others in the Republican far right do, trying to "square the circle" of being a practitioner of economic heartlessness and still pretend to prescribe to basic Judeo-Chrisitan precepts.
A preface to the video, from ThinkProgress.org:
"Some of the right's leading political and media lights have heaped praise upon Rand. The author of the Republicans' new budget plan to gut Medicare and Medicaid, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), has said Rand is the reason he entered politics. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) and Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) have both declared themselves devotees of her writing. Conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has his law clerks watch the film adaptation of Rand's book The Fountainhead. She's also received accolades from right-wing pundits Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, John Stossel, and Andrew Napolitano.
"During her lifetime, Rand advocated "the virtue of selfishness," declared altruism to be "evil," opposed Medicare and all forms of government support for the middle-class and the poor, and condemned Christianity for advocating love and compassion for the less fortunate:
Rand also dismissed the feminist movement as a "false" and "phony" issue, said a female commander in chief would be "unspeakable," characterized Arabs as "almost totally primitive savages," and called government efforts to aid the handicapped and educate "subnormal children" an attempt to "bring everybody to the level of the handicapped."
