Building Alternatives: Yes We Can

How I became a hillbilly

2011-04-03T08:55:00.000-07:00

Scavenger: How my grandmother taught me to eat weeds

Maki showed me miner's lettuce during long rambles in the woods. Now, it's how I make a simple, cheap spring salad

Felisa Rogers

The author as a child with her grandmother

Scavenger is a personal essay and recipe series about budget cooking during a recession. To read the first piece in the series, click here.

My grandmother Maki was the sort of person who was apt to have a conversation with her own sweater. It wasn't senility or schizophrenia, but rather an abiding and unspoken belief that all things -- animate and inanimate -- were possessed with souls. When her youngest son, Andy, grew too old for his stuffed tiger, Maki adopted it and carried it everywhere in her purse. Twenty years later, when I was a child, Tigger still lived in Maki's purse, as bedraggled as a drowned rat, his ears sewn back on with rough stitches, one of his green glass eyes hanging by a thread. Maki talked to him and for him, and to me he seemed as real as any family member.

My grandmother lived in a trailer, which she never properly cleaned. It smelled horribly of cat pee and moldering potatoes and Comet-choked drains. My dad would wait until Maki was distracted and he'd sneak in and attempt to clear out the clutter -- removing garbage bags full of water-stained biographies and mouse-chewed finery. Maki behaved as though every book, item of clothing, or bit of trash had a personality, but her deepest allegiance was to plants -- from the ratty African violet that lived on her windowsill to the majestic Douglas fir in the yard. She read a little bit of "Walden" every day for the same reasons that the truly devout read the Bible.

When I was very young and Maki was still reasonably spry, she'd take me on long rambles -- across the orchards or along the gravel road through the woods. As she stumped along with her twisted walking stick, she told me about the wild plants -- terrifying me with tales of children who ate poison hemlock and delighting me with trillium, and columbines, and bleeding hearts, which she insisted we call valentines ("Why on earth would you give such a pretty flower such an awful name?" she asked, stooping to gently touch the bruised-looking pink blossoms).

Spring beauties were perhaps her favorite flower ("Now that's an appropriate name," she said approvingly, pointing out the tiny veins of pink in the dainty white blossoms). She showed me that you could eat the spade-shaped leaves, which had a pleasingly fleshy texture. "Just don't pull up the whole plant," she said severely. For someone who loved flowers, Maki hated to see them picked and scolded me and my cousins if we tried to bring her bouquets of daisies or even buttercups.

As though influenced by the plants she communed with, Maki moved slowly. When my dad read me "The Lord of the Rings" and we got to the part about the ents, I immediately thought of my grandmother with her long hair like silver lichen and her habit of sitting outdoors for hours, alone and silent, as though drinking in the sun and the sky and the plants.

I moved away from the woods when I was 15, and I didn't come home to visit as much as I should have. Maki never reproached me. I'd arrive at her trailer to surprise her and she'd be sitting outside reading the comics or a biography ("I just like stories about people," she said) and she'd ask me, "Tell me about your life in the city."

I wish I'd moved back to Oregon while my grandmother was still alive. Instead, I waited until I had to -- the recession made my husband, Rich, and me painfully aware that we could no longer afford our effete urban lifestyle. Having grown up in rural Oregon, I knew that rent would be cheaper, garden space more ample, and that being away from the temptation of shops and restaurants and bars would help us conserve money. Rich agreed.

When we imagined a better quality of life, I think we were imagining summer in the country, not winter. And I know we weren't thinking about wet firewood, a leaking roof, invasive skunks, or pack rats, which look like chipmunks, sound like a claw-head hammer scraping at the inside of your walls, and are generally more destructive than your average human 2-year-old. It's been a long winter -- longer and damper and more broke than we imagined.

I've been looking for signs of spring, and last week I found one -- miner's lettuce or Claytonia perfoliata, otherwise known as spring beauties. Claytonia perfoliata is called miner's lettuce because miners ate it during the gold rush to prevent scurvy. It's rich in vitamin C, as well as vitamin A, and iron. The plant is native to the western United States, and can be found as far east as Ohio. The British, appreciating its vitamin-rich qualities, took seeds to Cuba and Australia, and back home to England, where it is now a common garden weed. It grows in moist shady spots, which pretty much describes my home.

While gathering Claytonia perfoliata and sorrel in the woods where we used to ramble, I remember my grandmother. I think also of the 49ers -- though I'm not exactly suffering from scurvy, these greens will be a fresh infusion to a rural winter diet that has been heavy on bread, beef and root vegetables. The plants aren't flowering yet, but the leaves are tender and succulent. In deference to Maki, I'm careful to snip leaves individually, instead of picking the whole plant. It takes about 10 minutes to gather enough greens for a salad, but time seems an appropriate tribute.

The miner's lettuce tastes like the woods, with a faint metallic undertone; the flavor is subtle, yet distinct. It's a nice base note to the sour yet delicate sorrel. I peel a carrot, and then use the peeler to make fine orange ribbons, which I add to the greens. Toss in a lime mint vinaigrette and garnish with sunflowers seeds; the salad is vivid and delicious. I've never quite been able to bring myself to consider a salad a meal in itself, but at an approximate cost of .29 per person (including dressing), it makes a nice accompaniment to my sandwich, which consists of an egg from my aunt's chickens, cheddar, mustard, mayonnaise and home-baked bread (approximate total cost = .39).

My grandmother taught me that there's more to the world than meets the eye. Given her personality and her consuming love for nature, it seems appropriate that reminders of her life come in the form of spring beauties: weeds, sustenance, harbingers of better times.

Ingredients

Dressing:

1 tablespoon of olive oil
1 teaspoon of balsamic vinegar
½ lime
1 clove of garlic (minced)
4-5 mint leaves (minced)
Salt to taste

Salad:

2 cups of miner's lettuce and/or sorrel
1 carrot (peeled)
1 teaspoon sunflower seeds
ground pepper to taste

Directions

Add olive oil, balsamic, mint, lime juice, salt and garlic to bowl. Let sit for 5-10 minutes.
While you wait, use a vegetable peeler to peel a carrot into thin ribbons.
Add carrot and greens to dressing in bowl. Toss.
Top with sunflower seeds and fresh ground pepper.

Felisa Rogers studied history and nonfiction writing at The Evergreen State College and went on to teach writing to kids for five years. She lives in Oregon’s coast range where she works as a freelance writer and editor. More: Felisa Rogers

How Wisconsin Can Turn Austerity into Prosperity: Own a Bank

2011-03-08T13:28:00.000-08:00

How Wisconsin Can Turn Austerity into Prosperity: Own a Bank

by Ellen Hodgson Brown / March 8th, 2011

Public sector man sitting in a bar: “They’re trying to take away our pensions.”
Private sector man: “What’s a pension?

— Cartoon in the Houston Chronicle

As states struggle to meet their budgets, public pensions are on the chopping block, but they needn’t be. States can keep their pension funds intact while leveraging them into many times their worth in loans, just as Wall Street banks do. They can do this by forming their own public banks, following the lead of North Dakota — a state that currently has a budget surplus.

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, whose recently proposed bill to gut benefits, wages, and bargaining rights for unionized public workers inspired weeks of protests in Madison, has justified the move as necessary for balancing the state’s budget. But is it?

After three weeks of demonstrations in Wisconsin, protesters report no plans to back down. Fourteen Wisconsin Democratic lawmakers — who left the state so that a quorum to vote on the bill could not be reached — said Friday that they are not deterred by threats of possible arrest and of 1,500 layoffs if they don’t return to work. President Obama has charged Wisconsin’s Governor Scott Walker with attempting to bust the unions. But Walker’s defense is:

“We’re broke. Like nearly every state across the country, we don’t have any more money.”

Among other concessions, Governor Walker wants to require public employees to pay a portion of the cost of their own pensions. Bemoaning a budget deficit of $3.6 billion, he says the state is too broke to afford all these benefits.

Broke Unless You Count the $67 Billion Pension Fund…

That’s what he says, but according to Wisconsin’s 2010 CAFR (Comprehensive Annual Financial Report), the state has $67 billion in pension and other employee benefit trust funds, invested mainly in stocks and debt securities drawing a modest return.

A recent study by the PEW Center for the States showed that Wisconsin’s pension fund is almost fully funded, meaning it can meet its commitments for years to come without drawing on outside sources. It requires a contribution of only $645 million annually to meet pension payouts. Zach Carter, writing in the Huffington Post, notes that the pension program could save another $195 million annually just by cutting out its Wall Street investment managers and managing the funds in-house.

The governor is evidently eying the state’s lucrative pension fund, not because the state cannot afford the pension program, but as a source of revenue for programs that are not fully funded. This tactic, however, is not going down well with state employees.

Fortunately, there is another alternative. Wisconsin could draw down the fund by the small amount needed to meet pension obligations, and put the bulk of the money to work creating jobs, helping local businesses, and increasing tax revenues for the state. It could do this by forming its own bank, following the lead of North Dakota, the only state to have its own bank — and the only state to escape the credit crisis.

This could be done without spending the pension fund money or lending it. The funds would just be shifted from one form of investment to another (equity in a bank). When a bank makes a loan, neither the bank’s own capital nor its customers’ demand deposits are actually lent to borrowers. As observed on the Dallas Federal Reserve’s website, “Banks actually create money when they lend it.” They simply extend accounting-entry bank credit, which is extinguished when the loan is repaid. Creating this sort of credit-money is a privilege available only to banks, but states can tap into that privilege by owning a bank.

How North Dakota Escaped the Credit Crunch

Ironically, the only state to have one of these socialist-sounding credit machines is a conservative Republican state. The state-owned Bank of North Dakota (BND) has allowed North Dakota to maintain its economic sovereignty, a conservative states-rights sort of ideal. The BND was established in 1919 in response to a wave of farm foreclosures at the hands of out-of-state Wall Street banks. Today the state not only has no debt, but it recently boasted its largest-ever budget surplus. The BND helps to fund not only local government but local businesses and local banks, by partnering with the banks to provide the funds to support small business lending.

The BND is also a boon to the state treasury. It has a return on equity of 25-26%, and it has contributed over $300 million to the state (its only shareholder) in the past decade — a notable achievement for a state with a population less than one-tenth the size of Los Angeles County. In comparison, California’s public pension funds are down more than $100 billion — that’s billion with a “b”— or close to half the funds’ holdings, following the Wall Street debacle of 2008. It was, in fact, the 2008 bank collapse rather than overpaid public employees that caused the crisis that shrank state revenues and prompted the budget cuts in the first place.

Seven States Are Now Considering Setting Up Public Banks

Faced with federal inaction and growing local budget crises, an increasing number of states are exploring the possibility of setting up their own state-owned banks, following the North Dakota model. On January 11, 2011, a bill to establish a state-owned bank was introduced in the Oregon State legislature; on January 13, a similar bill was introduced in Washington State; on January 20, a bill for a state bank was filed in Massachusetts (following a 2010 bill that had lapsed); and on February 4, a bill was introduced in the Maryland legislature for a feasibility study looking into the possibilities. They join Illinois, Virginia, and Hawaii, which introduced similar bills in 2010, bringing the total number of states with such bills to seven.

If Governor Walker wanted to explore this possibility for his state, he could drop in on the Center for State Innovation (CSI), which is located down the street in his capitol city of Madison, Wisconsin. The CSI has done detailed cost/benefit analyses of the Oregon and Washington state bank initiatives, which show substantial projected benefits based on the BND precedent. See reports here and here.

For Washington State, with an economy not much larger than Wisconsin’s, the CSI report estimates that after an initial start-up period, establishing a state-owned bank would create new or retained jobs of between 7,400 and 10,700 a year at small businesses alone, while at the same time returning a profit to the state.

A Bank of Wisconsin Could Generate “Bank Credit” Many Times the Size of the Budget Deficit

Economists looking at the CSI reports have called their conclusions conservative. The CSI made its projections without relying on state pension funds for bank capital, although it acknowledged that this could be a potential source of capitalization.

If the Bank of Wisconsin were to use state pension funds, it could have a capitalization of more than $57 billion – nearly as large as that of Goldman Sachs. At an 8% capital requirement, $8 in capital can support $100 in loans, or a potential lending capacity of over $500 billion. The bank would need deposits to clear the checks, but the credit-generating potential could still be huge.

Banks can create all the bank credit they want, limited only by (a) the availability of creditworthy borrowers, (b) the lending limits imposed by bank capital requirements, and (c) the availability of “liquidity” to clear outgoing checks. Liquidity can be acquired either from the deposits of the bank’s own customers or by borrowing from other banks or the money market. If borrowed, the cost of funds is a factor; but at today’s very low Fed funds rate of 0.2%, that cost is minimal. Again, however, only banks can tap into these very low rates. States are reduced to borrowing at about 5% — unless they own their own banks; or, better yet, unless they are banks. The BND is set up as “North Dakota doing business as the Bank of North Dakota.”

That means that technically all of North Dakota’s assets are the assets of the bank. The BND also has its deposit needs covered. It has a massive, captive deposit base, since all of the state’s revenues are deposited in the bank by law. The bank also takes other deposits, but the bulk of its deposits are government funds. The BND is careful not to compete with local banks for consumer deposits, which account for less than 2% of the total. The BND reports that it has deposits of $2.7 billion and outstanding loans of $2.6 billion. With a population of 647,000, that works out to about $4,000 per capita in deposits, backing roughly the same amount in loans.

Wisconsin has a population that is nine times the size of North Dakota’s. Other factors being equal, Wisconsin might be able to amass over $24 billion in deposits and generate an equivalent sum in loans – over six times the deficit complained of by the state’s governor. That lending capacity could be used for many purposes, depending on the will of the legislature and state law. Possibilities include (a) partnering with local banks, on the North Dakota model, strengthening their capital bases to allow credit to flow to small businesses and homeowners, where it is sorely needed today; (b) funding infrastructure virtually interest-free (since the state would own the bank and would get back any interest paid out); and (c) refinancing state deficits nearly interest-free.

Why Give Wisconsin’s Enormous Credit-generating Power Away?

The budget woes of Wisconsin and other states were caused, not by overspending on employee benefits, but by a credit crisis on Wall Street. The “cure” is to get credit flowing again in the local economy, and this can be done by using state assets to capitalize state-owned banks.

Against the modest cost of establishing a publicly-owned bank, state legislators need to weigh the much greater costs of the alternatives – slashing essential public services, laying off workers, raising taxes on constituents who are already over-taxed, and selling off public assets. Given the cost of continuing business as usual, states can hardly afford not to consider the public bank option. When state and local governments invest their capital in out-of-state money center banks and deposit their revenues there, they are giving their enormous credit-generating power away to Wall Street.

Ellen Brown is an attorney in Los Angeles and the author of 11 books. In Web of Debt: The Shocking Truth About Our Money System and How We Can Break Free, she shows how a private banking cartel has usurped the power to create money from the people themselves, and how we the people can get it back. Read other articles by Ellen, or visit Ellen's website.

This article was posted on Tuesday, March 8th, 2011 at 8:01am and is filed under Banks/Banking.

The Restorative Revolution: It's Coming

2011-03-05T13:59:00.000-08:00

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Peacemeal

Creating a life of harmony one choice at a time.

by Elaine Shpungin

The Restorative Revolution: It's Coming

This revolution will not be bloody but it's coming just the same.

Published on February 28, 2011

Call me crazy - but I think we are ready for a Revolution.

I'm talking about a revolution in the way we approach justice, transgression, punishment, crime, and every day conflict among ordinary people. I am talking about the way we treat each other after we hurt each other - even in very deep ways - and the way we treat those who are less powerful than us when "justice" is placed in our hands.

I am talking a transformational, society-wide, lens-shifting, all-affecting revolution the scale of the 1960's civil rights and women's rights movements, a revolution in how we think about who we are and how we live, work, and love together.

Not a solution to everything. Not panacea, utopia, peace and love for all. But a fundamental shift in the collective understanding of what might be possible.

I feel it in my bones, like the rumble of a train coming down the tracks way before you see its lights appear from behind the bend.

People are sensing the heavy creaking of the current justice system, the way it is over-burdened and under-humane, the way it takes our sons and daughters and nieces and nephews and puts them back into our communities more hardened and less integrated than they were before, the way it creates rifts among us, decreasing rather than increasing the sense of safety for which we all long.

And people are becoming dissatisfied with the way we inadvertently replicate that same model in our homes, with people most precious to us, and in our communities, the places where we spend our waking hours.

I work with a lot of communication modalities and I have been talking to people about empathy and healing and dialogue for a long time.

But when I mention the restorative practices work in which I am involved, people respond with the kind of excitement, the kind of energy I have not seen before. Their eyes light up. They smile. They want to learn more. They want to get involved.

I am talking about people across all economic, class, age, and race differences: administrators working in the formal justice system and grandmothers of boys in the local jail, academics and activists, rabbis and conservative ministers, teachers and parents, college students and poets. When I share what might be possible, there is a spark, an electrical surge of hope.

And what is possible is a way of doing conflict and justice in which each voice and each side gets heard, in which people who have been hurt get to ask their toughest questions and those who have caused pain get to experience the impact of what they have done and come out feeling more human, not less. What is possible are solutions to conflicts that are not believable until you hear them, that stem from human creativity that is untapped by the current way we do things, and are agreed upon by everyone who is impacted by the conflict.

Restorative practices, as ancient as human society, have been making their way back into our collective knowledge. Some of them, like the Restorative Circles practice which I have been learning, are laced with a modern edge, an edge forged in the fires of inner-city Brazilian favelas where drugs, gun violence, racialized tensions and numbing poverty overlay the struggle for daily survival.

And that is what makes the possibility so palpable. There is another way and it works. It works to re-humanize people to each other in the most trying of circumstances across deeply etched lines. In a place where unbelievable beauty and unbelievable disparity go hand in hand, restorative practices are growing and being embraced by school districts, youth courts, youth prisons, neighborhoods and homes, presidential candidates and major news networks. Restorative Circles are winning awards and changing circumstances, changing lives, changing how people think about and live with conflict.

Not a solution to everything. Not panacea, utopia, peace and love for all. But a fundamental shift in the collective understanding of what might be possible.

A Restorative Revolution. It's coming.

Wanna get on board?

Don't Sit on the Sidelines -- This Saturday, Be Part of the Uprising Sweeping the Country from Wisconsin to Your Home Town

2011-02-25T07:58:00.000-08:00

AlterNet.org

ECONOMY

AlterNet / By Joshua Holland

Don't Sit on the Sidelines -- This Saturday, Be Part of the Uprising Sweeping the Country from Wisconsin to Your Home Town

A huge coalition of progressive groups have organized rallies across the country to stand up against harsh budget cuts and tax cheats, and protect the middle class.

February 25, 2011 |

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Noam Chomsky was asked in a recent interview whether it's possible to make our government work for ordinary Americans rather than a rarified elite. “What has to be done,” he replied, “is what’s happening in Madison, or what’s happening in Tahrir Square in Cairo. If there’s mass popular opposition, any political leader is going to have to respond to it, whoever they are.”

Today, we may be seeing the emergence of just such a force in American politics. This Saturday, the sleeping giant will stir as progressives across the country rally in solidarity with public-sector workers and in opposition to the draconian cuts to our already threadbare safety net proposed by the Tea Party-infused GOP.

There's a new militancy in the air. Inspired not only by the protesters standing tall in Wisconsin, Ohio and a half-dozen other states but also by the seismic upheaval taking place around the world, progressive America, long overshadowed by the media-friendly Tea Parties, will show up in force in all 50 states this Saturday to demand that budgets aren't balanced on the backs of working people and the most vulnerable among us.

In Wisconsin, there has even been talk of organizing a general strike, an event not seen in this country since the 1930s, if right-wing Governor Scott Walker manages to push his union-busting bill through the legislature. Labor hasn't flexed its muscles like that for generations, but there is a growing sense that we, as working people, face a defining moment in our democracy.

On Saturday, there will be two opportunities to make your voice heard above the astroturfed right-wing din. First, a coalition of grassroots progressive groups are staging a nationwide “Rally to Save the American Dream” in front of every state house in the country at noon local time to express support for the working people of Wisconsin.

In Wisconsin and around our country, the American Dream is under fierce attack. Instead of creating jobs, Republicans are giving tax breaks to corporations and the very rich—and then cutting funding for education, police, emergency response, and vital human services.

But this weekend's rallies won't be the end of this effort. Taking a page from the noisy town-hall meetings that marked last year's health-care reform debate, an unnamed labor organizer told Politico that union members “have been urged to attend congressional town hall meetings to ask Republican lawmakers 'pointed questions' about the cuts they supported last week. ...We are targeting various House Republicans in town hall meetings during the recess to let them know these budget cuts are beyond the pale,” the organizer said.

You can find out more about the Rally to Save the American Dream, and get involved in the action, here.

The other major actions this weekend are being organized by US Uncut, which is targeting the corporate power behind the elites' assault on our middle-class. Modeled on the UK Uncut movement that was organized to push back against the “austerity” measures being imposed by the Cameron government (and inspired by an excellent essay by Johann Hari titled, “How to Build a Progressive Tea Party”), they have an exceedingly simple yet powerful message: there is a simple alternative to imposing economic pain on working people to balance budgets: make corporate tax cheats pay.

The questions US Uncut is trying to inject into the discourse are: “If we pay our taxes, why don’t they?” and “If corporations profit here, shouldn't they pay here?”

Enjoying record profits and taxpayer-funded bailouts as the economy slowly recovers from a financial crisis, nearly two-thirds of US corporations don't pay any income taxes, instead opting to abuse tax loopholes and offshore tax havens. According to this studyfrom the non-partisan Government Accountability Office, 83 of the top 100 publicly traded corporations that operate in the US exploit corporate tax havens. Since 2009, America’s most profitable companies such as ExxonMobil, General Electric, Bank of America and Citigroup all paid a grand total of $0 in federal income taxes to Uncle Sam. Tax havens alone account for up to $1 trillion in tax revenue lost every decade, money that could be invested in K-12 education, colleges, public health, job creation and hundreds of other worthy public programs.

US Uncut is a decentralized operation, and local activists can choose their own targets. But the main event this Saturday will be at Bank of America branches across the country. It's an appropriate choice, as the organizers explain:

Despite ruining the economy with their reckless greed, Bank of America has consistently avoided any form of accountability to the American taxpayer. In fact, in 2009, Bank of America actually received a net tax benefit. Yes, last year, the federal government gave Bank of America $2.3 billion.

That money alone could almost completely cover the proposed $2.5 billion cuts to the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), which helps low-income families pay their heating and cooling bills and affects 34 million households.

Learn more about US Uncut, and sign up to protest outside of BofA, or another corporate tax cheat of your choice, here.

But the most militant response to the Right's push came from Madison, Wisconsin this week, when the local AFL-CIO federation voted to make preparations to hold a general strike if Walker pushes his bill through the legislature. This is a big deal -- a sign of how threatened the American labor movement feels after seeing its representation in the private sector fall under a withering campaign of union-busting from a third of all wage-earners 30 years ago to just 7 percent today.

General strikes don't target a single company or industry; they're an expression of power by all workers in a region or country. Greece had a one-day general strike this week, but in the U.S., the last one occurred in San Francisco in 1934.

So far, they are only threatening to call a general strike. Actually doing so – having unions walk out in support of other organized workers – has been illegal since the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in the 1940s. The law, called the “slave act” by opponents, outlaws all strikes by workers who don't have a direct interest in the issue at hand.

As such, it would be a powerful act of civil disobedience. But violating Taft-Hartley exposes unions to costly judgments that could potentially wipe out some of the smaller unions. Nevertheless, labor journalist Mike Elk reports that some public employee unions – with their backs against the wall -- may take that risk.

It's important to understand that only labor unions are barred from organizing a general strike, and around 90 percent of American workers don't belong to a union. When the Wisconsin labor federation adopted its resolution, one long-time progressive activist remarked that it was “the most exciting idea I've heard in a long time.” With the power of online organizing, perhaps the next iteration of progressive power will be a general strike not of union workers, but of ordinary Americans who are sick of a government that's done everything for Wall Street while practically ignoring a 9 percent unemployment rate and a devastating foreclosure crisis.

It looks increasingly likely that we will see a government shutdown over the GOP's proposals to kill any economic progress we've made since the crash with their draconian cuts. Why not shut down the private sector in response? It's hard to imagine a more full-throated rejection of the political games being played in Washington.

All of this energy may be short-lived, but it could be the start of a more active progressive movement in the U.S. By and large, progressives have held their fire since the election of Barack Obama in 2008. Organizers of the protests spreading across this country in a decaying economy are tapping into a deep reserve of frustration with the status quo, and resurrecting a populist tradition long missing on the American Left.

This Saturday, we might witness the beginning of some real push-back against the plutocracy from a newly energized progressive movement. This is something you really shouldn't miss.

US Uncut

Rally to Save the American Dream

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet. He is the author of The 15 Biggest Lies About the Economy (and Everything else the Right Doesn't Want You to Know About Taxes, Jobs and Corporate America). Drop him an email or follow him on Twitter.

Top 5 Reasons Why Wisconsin Matters To Us All

2011-02-22T20:32:00.000-08:00

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Wisconsin Matters To Us All
Public workers in Wisconsin and in several other states where they are under assault are fighting for the dignity of every worker. If these workers lose their ability to fight for fair wages and decent working conditions, we all lose

Top 5: Why Wisconsin Matters To You

By Bill Scher

February 22, 2011 - 3:14pm ET

Thousands are rallying in Wisconsin and across the nation to oppose conservative governors who are attacking the collective bargaining rights of our civil servants. And the people in the streets are not just public sector union members.

Why? Why are so many who are not part of a union so committed to protecting the role of organized workers in our government and our economy?

1. Weak Economies Need More Demand: Our economy is struggling and our state budgets are distressed because increased unemployment and falling home prices have reduced economic demand. Weakening the ability of any workers to negotiate fair pay and secure retirements will only weaken demand further, hurting the overall economy.

2. Strong Standards Strengthen The Middle Class. When public sector workers can negotiate for fair pay, healthy workplaces and secure retirements, that puts pressure on private sector CEOs to do the same, or else they risk losing talent to the public sector. Making public sector work less inviting does nothing to make private sector jobs pay better. We need to raise the bar, not lower it.

3. Decent Government Pay Means Decent Government: Most everyone wants our federal, state and local governments to function effectively. That means being able to attract skilled, productive workers with fair pay, healthy workplaces and secure retirements, all of which will be lost if public workers can no longer bargain for their compensation packages.

4. Public Employees Are Not The Problem: Study after study shows the public employees do not receive extravagant compensation, and that the problems with state public pension systems are largely overblown. State budgets are reeling from an economic recession caused by reckless Wall Street speculators, top end tax cuts and corporate tax avoidance. The projected shortfalls in public retirement benefits derive mostly from skyrocketing health care costs thanks to private insurers, and poorly performing pension investments thanks to deregulated Wall Street firms.

Furthermore, civil servants in Wisconsin and elsewhere have repeatedly said they are willing to make concessions regarding pay and benefits. Unlike conservative corporate executives, they have proven their willingness to share the sacrifices. What we can't negotiate is their right to negotiate.

5. Scapegoating Lets The Culprits Get Away: Right-wing billionaires like the Koch brothers are pumping millions into a nationwide effort to break the public employee unions. Why would they bother? Because if they can get most people to blame public employees for the nation's economic ills, they won't hold irresponsible corporations accountable and force the ultra-rich to make any sacrifices, such as higher taxes and tougher regulations.

Now that you know why the assault on public employee unions affects us all, what can we do about it?

Sign The Petition: The AFL-CIO has a petition supporting fair pay and worker rights, to be delivered to all 50 state legislatures

Attend A Rally: SEIU and Jobs With Justice both have compiled lists of rallies taking place all across the country this week.

Share This Blog Post: Share with your friends, neighbors and colleagues the reasons why we all should care about the attack on our civil servants.

This is a critical moment in our nation's history. Will we be a nation where workers can thrive, or where workers are nickel and dimed? Will we have a vibrant economy that works for all, or will we have a stagnant economy that serves the few?

Now's the time to stand up.

First, they attacked PBS and NPR. Now AmeriCorps

2011-02-21T11:14:00.000-08:00

First, they went nuclear on PBS and NPR. Now, they have voted to totally shut down AmeriCorps -- the groundbreaking national service program that has transformed the lives of millions of Americans.

In the dead of night on Saturday, a Tea Party-driven group of House members voted to kill AmeriCorps, completely eliminating all funding. With a potential government shutdown looming on March 4th, the fate of 85,000 AmeriCorp community organizers, teachers, and tutors will now be decided by the U.S. Senate.

Here is the heart of the matter: AmeriCorps volunteers help and protect our country's most vulnerable. Every day, AmeriCorps organizers work in many of the poorest communities in America, lessening the pain of those suffering in this brutal economy. As their work rebuilding New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina exemplifies, these organizers are the backbone of our country’s service community -- a Peace Corps for our own country.

After hearing the shocking news, former AmeriCorps volunteer Caleb Jonas decided he had to do something. From a coffee shop in Massachusetts, Caleb logged in to Change.org from his laptop and created a petition asking Congress to "Save AmeriCorps." Caleb’s inspiring action has already been signed by 17,266 Americans -- without significant promotion from any major organization. Until now.

Click here now to quickly sign your name to Caleb’s "Save AmeriCorps" petition to the Senate. Your signature will help Caleb reach his personal goal of 85,000 signatures -- one signature for every AmeriCorps member currently serving their country. DEADLINE: Thursday, 5 p.m.

Why does Caleb care so much about AmeriCorps? Because he spent a year improving the quality of tutoring programs for low-income kids in Minnesota -- and witnessed AmeriCorps members build houses for Habitat for Humanity, help political refugees start new lives, improve reading test scores for elementary school students, and help disadvantaged high school students get into college.

As Caleb told us over the phone, it breaks his heart that this vital national service program could be shut down at a time when people in the most marginalized communities in America need it the most. That’s why Caleb was inspired to start his "Save AmeriCorps" petition from a coffee shop -- and why AmeriCorps supporters are sharing it on Facebook and forwarding messages like this to their friends around the country.

With AmeriCorps on the chopping block, it’s time for us to stand up for Caleb and thousands of other volunteers who have committed years of their lives to community service. Will you click here now to sign your name and tell the Senate not to kill AmeriCorps?

http://www.change.org/petitions/save-americorps?alert_id=NNHcGQVECl_BqLSMFmEBk&me=aa

Thank you for joining Caleb and Change.org members across our country fighting to save AmeriCorps before it’s too late.

-- Patrick and the Change.org team

Reopening Health Care Reform

2011-02-20T09:32:00.000-08:00

Reopening Health Care Reform

Daniel Greenwood

While the constitutional challenges to last year’s health care reform act barely pass the snicker test, the fact remains that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is badly flawed.

We have two existing, popular, successful, and relatively efficient government-based health care plans: Medicare, which provides nationalized medical insurance for all Americans over sixty-five; and the VA system, which provides nationalized medical care for veterans.

The simplest form of national health care reform, thus, would have been simply to extend one of these existing systems to all Americans. Better still, we could have retained both the advantages of those reasonably well-run systems and added competition and choice by offering all Americans the option of choosing one of the two government-run systems or a nongovernmental, for-profit alternative.

Instead, the Obama Administration decided to take a fundamentally Reaganite approach. The PPAC Act imposes privatization without true competition, by subsidizing customers rather than creating a cheaper provider without the excess layers of costs and inefficiency that private insurance imposes. Despite its significant cost-reduction provisions, its fundamental structure was designed to overcome insurance company and GOP opposition by protecting the profits of incumbent insurance companies and, to a lesser extent, care-providers, at the expense of the taxpayers. The basic problems of private insurance—the strong incentives to cherry pick customers and deny needed care in order to protect executive pay and shareholder profits—remain in place, and regulation can only do so much to counteract them.

Now is the time to preempt GOP claims that health care finance reform is a disguised attack on Medicare, Tea Party attempts to repeal all forms of reform, court attacks on the constitutionality of this particular system, and insurance company attempts to enhance profits by capturing the regulators entrusted with resisting their pursuit of profits at the customers’ expense.

The Democratic leadership should propose the reform we really needed and that polls suggest Americans really want: a simple statute, mandating that every American have medical insurance, but offering every American the opportunity to enroll in Medicare or the VA system at the current fee schedule. If private companies can compete, let them do so. Don’t repeal, replace—with Medicare for all.

Health Care Reform, Health Care, Medicare, Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act

Our Founding Fathers Would Be Proud of the Egyptian People & Disgusted at the Spineless Sheep Most Americans Have Become

2011-02-13T14:05:00.000-08:00

February 11, 2011 at 22:17:15

Our Founding Fathers Would Be Proud of the Egyptian People & Disgusted at the Spineless Sheep Most Americans Have Become

By Richard Clark (about the author)

opednews.com

America 's founding fathers stood up for their freedom, winning it from the British. The Egyptian people have stood up for their freedom, too, winning it from the Mubarak dictatorship, finding their courage even when Mubarak's thugs flew fighter jets low over their heads, beat and murdered protesters, and otherwise threatened violence.

The American people, on the other hand, have been cowed into passivity by an irrational fear of terrorism, laziness and mindlessness .

Some would point out, however, that the American government is nothing like the Egyptian government. So let's make some comparisons:

There is a stunning amount of inequality in Egypt. But America is even worse

Mubarak stole billions from his people, while the American oligarchs have stolen trillions. See this, this, this and this

Egypt has been living under a state of emergency for 30 years, yes. But Americans have been living under a continuous state of emergency for 10 years straight.

Mubarak was supported by the military. But the military-industrial complex has taken over America as well (moreover, there is a tradition in countries like Turkey for the military to ensure that religious fanatics do not take over the country)

Mubarak ignored the wishes of his people. But has the American government been listening to its people? Consider the 2010 Rasmussen poll which found that "just 21% of voters nationwide believe that the federal government enjoys the consent of the governed." A 2010 Gallup poll determined that nearly half of all Americans believe "the Federal government poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens." Poll after poll shows that "both national parties are deeply unpopular with an electorate looking for something new and different." Polls reveal that 82% of all Americans wanted Wall Street to be reined in, in a substantial and meaningful manner, and yet our government has let Wall Street have its way on all the important issues. Polls find that Americans want the big financial players who acted with fraud to be punished, and yet our government has let all of the big fish off the hook. In fact, our government has ignored many other desires of the American people, as well, including investigations into torture and spying on Americans, impeaching George W. Bush if he lied about Iraqi WMDs (which he did).

Mubarak repressed his people and stifled dissent. Bush and Obama have haven't been all that protective of liberty either

Mubarak murdered and tortured people without following the rule of law. America hasn't been exactly saintly in this regard over the last 10 years either

And if you think our problems started on 9/11, remember that virtually all of the current domestic and foreign policies were already in place, or planned, before 9/11.

Unlike the Egyptian people, however, Americans have become scared of their own shadow. We have forgotten that courage and hope are choices -- which do not have to come from JohnWayne levels of testosterone, but can simply arise from loving something enough to want to protect it.

How Did We Turn Into the Oppressor?

England oppressed America. We were the downtrodden who broke free. But now, America has helped to repress the Egyptian people (see this and this).

So how did we get on the wrong side of history?

Minister Jim Wallis provides some answers in an open letter that he wrote to the Egyptian protesters. Here are some excerpts:

"The United States was not talking about democracy in Egypt, not advocating it, not saying a transition is necessary and urgent, UNTIL you risked your security, safety and lives for the sake of democracy. You changed the conversation, a conversation that would be the same as it has been for decades if you hadn't done what you did. Your generational peers are now watching what you are doing in countries across the Arab world, and beyond. This is the moment for you and for us."

"You represent a new generation, a new leadership, and a new hope for the possibility of real democracy. So keep leading. My government, which still calls itself the beacon of freedom, has sacrificed democracy in your region of the world (and many other places) for the sake of American "interests": Our foreign policy around the globe has put our interests before our principles. But they are not really the interests of the American people, but of oil companies, big banks and corporations. Their interest in "stability" and continuity is very different from ours in democracy. So don't be fooled, don't listen to the so-called "wise" voices that have been part of the old reality and want to now thank you for your service to democracy, but are offering to take it from here."

"Don't let them. Keep demanding democracy -- real democracy. Because, for the rest of us, democracy is the best defense of our interests, and the best path to genuine stability. And, for our part, we will do our best to stand with you."

* * *

With thanks to "George Washington" at Zerohedge.com.

http://groups.google.com/groups/profile?enc_user=JCpLDBUAAAC

Several years after receiving my M.A. in social science (interdisciplinary studies) I was an instructor at S.F. State University for a year, but then went back to designing automated machinery, and then tech writing, in Silicon Valley. I've always (more...)

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Ain't That Good News!

2011-02-13T10:22:00.000-08:00

CounterPunch Diary

Ain't That Good News

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

“Ain’t that good news,
Yeah, ain’t that news.”

-- Sam Cooke.

We need good news. When was the last time we had some, here in this country? The Seattle riots against the WTO? That was back in 1999. Around the world? Hard to remember – it’s been a long dry spell. It reminds me of the old Jacobin shivering in the chill night of Bourbon restoration, and crying out, “Oh, sun of ’93, when shall I feel thy warmth again!”

We raise our glass to the Egyptian people. In the end Mubarak propelled them to irresistible fury with his dotty broadcast on Thursday. It seems that for some years now he’s been drifting in and out of senile dementia, same way Reagan did in his second term. The plan had been to run his son Gamal in the last elections, but that turned out to be a non-starter so they rolled the semi-gaga Hosni out one more time and fixed the results, ringingly endorsed by the US. On Thursday morning Mubarak probably told Suleiman and the US that he was going to quit, then forgot and, braced by a supportive call from the Israelis and a pledge by the Saudis to give him $1.4 billion if the US withheld it, announced that he would be around till September.

The talk about the US calling all the shots, including a final peremptory injunction to the Army chiefs to dump Mubarak is surely off the mark, part of a tendency to deprecate any notion that the Empire has hit a bump in the road and is in total control. Most of the time the current executives of Empire have been panting along, trying to stay abreast of events.
Obama’s call for “clarity” on the part of Mubarak on Thursday didn’t do it. Phone calls from the Defense Department and Langley and the National Security Council didn’t do it.

The brave Egyptian demonstrators did it. Conscripts ready to mutiny if ordered to fire on the crowds did it. Immensely courageous Egyptian union organizers active for years did it. Look at the numbers of striking workers enumerated by Esam al-Amin on this site today. This was close to a general strike. It reminds me of France, its economy paralysed in the uprising in the spring of 1968. That was when President de Gaulle, displaying a good deal more energy and sang-froid that Mubarak, flew to meetings with senor French military commanders to get pledges of loyalty and received requisite assurance.

And next for Egypt? These chapters are unwritten, but the world is bracingly different this week than what it was a month ago. The rulers of Yemen, Jordan and Algeria know that. Rulers and tyrants everywhere know that. They know bad news when they see it, same way we know good news when we hear its welcome knock on the door of history.

The Reagan Cult

The Reagan cult celebrates the centenary of their idol’s birth this month, and the airwaves have been tumid with homage to the 38th president, who held office for two terms – 1981-1988 – and who died in 2004. The script of these recurring homages is unchanging: with his straightforward, sunny disposition and aw-shucks can-do style the manly Reagan gave America back its confidence. In less flattering terms he and his pr crew catered expertly to the demands of the American national fantasy: that homely common sense could return America to the vigor of its youth and the economy of the 1950s.

When he took over the Oval Office at the age of 66 whatever powers of concentration he might have once had were failing. The Joint Chiefs of Staff mounted their traditional show-and-tell briefings for him, replete with simple charts and a senior general explicating them in simple terms. Reagan found these briefings way too complicated and dozed off.

The Joint Chiefs then set up a secret unit, staffed by cartoonists. The balance of forces were set forth in easily accessible caricature, with Soviet missiles the size of upended Zeppelins, pulsing on their launchpads, with the miniscule US ICBMs shrivelled in their bunkers. Little cartoon bubbles would contain the points the joint chiefs wanted to hammer into Reagan's brain, most of them to the effect that "we need more money". The president really enjoyed the shows and sometimes even asked for repeats.

Reagan had abolished any tiresome division of the world into fact or fiction in the early 1940s when his studio's PR department turned him into a war hero, courtesy of his labors in "Fort Wacky" in Culver City, where they made training films. The fanzines disclosed the loneliness of R.R.'s first wife, Jane Wyman, her absent man (a few miles away in Fort Wacky, home by suppertime) and her knowledge of R.R.'s hatred of the foe. "She'd seen Ronnie's sick face," Modern Screen reported in 1942, "bent over a picture of the small, swollen bodies of children starved to death in Poland. 'This,' said the war-hating Reagan between set lips, 'would make it a pleasure to kill.'" A photographer for Modern Screen recalled later that, unlike some stars who were reluctant to offer themselves to his lens in "hero's" garb, Reagan insisted on being photographed on his front step in full uniform, kissing his wife goodbye.

The problem for the press was that Reagan didn't really care that he'd been caught out with another set of phony statistics or a bogus anecdote. Truth, for him, was what he happened to be saying at the time. When the Iran/contra scandal broke, he held a press conference in which he said to Helen Thomas of UPI, "I want to get to the bottom of this and find out all that has happened. And so far, I've told you all that I know and, you know, the truth of the matter is, for quite some time, all that you knew was what I'd told you." He went one better that George Washington in that he couldn't tell a lie and he couldn't tell the truth, since he couldn't tell the difference between the two.

His mind was a wastebasket of old clippings from Popular Science, SF magazines (the origin of “Star Wars”, aka the Strategic Defense Initiative) lines from movies and homely saws from the Reader's Digest and the Sunday supplements.

Like his wife Nancy, he had a stout belief in astrology, the stars being the twinkling penumbra of his incandescent belief in the "free market," with whose motions it was blasphemous to tamper. He believed Armageddon was right around the corner. He also believed tomato ketchup could be classified as a school meal, striking back at the nose-candy crowd who, as Stevie Earle once said, spent the Seventies trying to get cocaine classified as a vegetable.
Hearing all the cosy talk about the Gipper, young people spared the experience of his awful sojourn in office, probably imagine him as a kindly, avuncular figure. Not so. He was a callous man, with a breezy indifference to suffering and the consequences of his decisions. This indifference was so profound that Dante would surely have consigned him to one of the lowest circles of hell, to roast for all eternity in front of a tv set on the blink and a dinner tray swinging out of reach like the elusive fruits that tortured Tantalus.

It was startling, back in 2004 when he died, to see the lines of people sweating under a hot sun waiting to see Reagan's casket. How could any of them take the dreadful old faker seriously? The nearest thing to it I can think of is the hysteria over Princess Di.

The explosion of the Challenger space shuttle of January 28, 1986,, which disaster prompted one of the peak kitsch moments in a presidency that was kitsch from start to finish. Reagan ended his address to the nation thus: "We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved good-bye and 'slipped the surly bonds of earth' to 'touch the face of God'."

In fact it was the White House that had doomed Christa McAuliffe and her companions to be burned alive in the plummeting Challenger. The news event required the Challenger to go into orbit and be flying over Congress while Reagan was delivering his state of the union address. He was to tilt his head upward and, presumably gazing through the long-distance half of his spectacles, (one lens was close-up, for speech reading,) send a presidential greeting to the astronauts. But this schedule required an early morning launch from chill January Canaveral. Servile NASA officials ordered the Challenger aloft, with the frozen O-ring fatally compromised.

Reagan dozed through much of his second term, his day easing forward through a forgiving schedule of morning nap, afternoon snooze, TV supper and early bed. He couldn't recall the names of many of his aides, even of his dog. Stories occasionally swirled around Washington that his aides pondered from time to time whether to invoke the Twenty-fifth Amendment. Earlier this month his sons disagreed whether or not his Alzheimer’s began when he was president. “Normalcy” and senile dementia were hard to distinguish. The official onset was six years after he left Washington DC.

As an orator or "communicator" he was terrible, with one turgid cliché following another, delivered in a folksy drone. His range of rhetorical artifice was terribly limited.

The press flattered him endlessly and vastly exaggerated his popularity and his achievements, starting with the nonsense that he “ended the cold war”. He did nothing of the sort, the Soviet Union’s sclerosed economy having doomed it long before Reagan became president.

He lavished money on the rich and the Pentagon. The tendencies he presided over were probably inevitable, given the balance of political forces after the postwar boom hit the ceiling in the late 1960s. Then it was a matter of triage, as the rich made haste to consolidate their position. It was a straight line from Reagan's crude attacks on welfare queens to Clinton's compassionate chewings of the lip (same head wag as RR's) as he swore to "end welfare as we know it". As a pr man, it was Reagan's role, to reassure the wealthy and the privileged that not only might but right was on their side, and that government, in whatever professed role, was utterly malign.

How the Empire Screwed Up

Fresh off the presses and off into the ether or the US mail goes our latest newsletter. It’s another crackerjack issue, Subscribers get a piercing investigation by Stan Cox.

Here’s how it begins:

“Late on the night of December 22, 2001, a mammoth merchant vessel, the Christopher, was caught in a North Atlantic storm. Captain Deepak Gulati radioed to shore that his ship was “taking a beating” from 15-meter waves but otherwise was in good shape. On that or a later call, he said the hatch cover closest to the ship’s bow had become dislodged. Soon after, contact was lost; no mayday call was ever received.

“It is hard to believe that a ship the length of three football fields could have gone from fully afloat to completely submerged in as little as five minutes, but that could well have been what happened. Once the storm had moved out of the area, a helicopter search was ordered. But there remained no trace of the accident beyond an oil slick, an empty lifeboat, a raft, and one lifejacket. The search was called off on Christmas Day. The Christopher’s twenty-seven crew members – citizens of Ukraine, the Philippines, and India – were all presumed dead.

“Deepak Gulati was my brother-in-law. A resident of Mumbai, India, he had been guiding the Greek-owned, Cyprus-flagged, coal-laden bulk carrier from Puerto Bolívar, Colombia, to a steelworks in the north of England when, west of the Azores, he and his crew ran into the storm that ended their lives…

“As I learned more about the world in which Deepak had lived and worked, I came to realize just how wrong I had been, not only about the fate of the Christopher but also about the fragility of merchant shipping in an age of uninhibited globalization. Meanwhile, bulk carriers keep sinking and seafarers keep dying.”

Cox takes us into the deadly world of international shipping, where speed-up, slack regulation and “flags of convenience” are turning bulk carriers into death traps that can and have doomed crews to drowning in as little as five minutes.

Also in this issue, Kathy Christison takes us through more secret State Department cables acquired by CounterPunch showing how obsession with Israel prompted US policy makers to utterly misunderstand Egypt’s situation.

Finally, Larry Portis contributes a powerful essay on “sociocide”. He writes,

“I am convinced that genocide now must be recognized as mainly a means of committing another, and even more fundamental, international crime – ‘sociocide.’

“The ultimate aim of sociocide is not the physical destruction of peoples, or of a loosely defined culture, or of a state, as it is sometimes confusedly said, but rather the destruction of the relationships between the different groups constituting a society. This is what governments of the United States have done in Iraq, what Western governments encouraged in ex-Yugoslavia, what the Zionists did in Palestine. If “ethnic cleansing” in all its physically and culturally destructive forms can contribute to sociocide – the destruction of social bonds between diverse groups – the way is clear for colonial or imperialist domination and exploitation of a region, whether it be for expropriation of the land, exploitation of its economic resources or occupation of its strategic location.”

Read his important piece in our newsletter.

Subscribe now! And have this newsletter in your inbox, swiftly deliveredas a pdf, or – at whatever speed the US Postal Service first-class delivery system may muster – in your mailbox.

And once you have discharged this enjoyable mandate I also urge you strongly to click over to our Books page, most particularly for our latest release, Jason Hribal’s truly extraordinary Fear of the Animal Planet – introduced by Jeffrey St Clair and already hailed by Peter Linebaugh, Ingrid Newkirk (president and co-founder of PETA) and Susan Davis, the historian of Sea World, who writes that “Jason Hribal stacks up the evidence, and the conclusions are inescapable. Zoos, circuses and theme parks are the strategic hamlets of Americans’ long war against nature itself.”

Alexander Cockburn can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com.

Ethos: New Documentary Calls for Consumers to Reclaim Power

2011-02-11T15:17:00.000-08:00

AlterNet.org

MEDIA

AlterNet / By Megan Driscoll

Ethos: New Documentary Calls for Consumers to Reclaim Power

In his new documentary, Pete McGrain details the ever-expanding systemic quandaries that plague our society and the steps necessary to resolve them.

January 31, 2011 |

From left to right: Director Pete McGrain, host Woody Harrelson, co-executive producer Isabella Michelle Marles

“The romantic idea of revolution with riots in the streets and heroic deeds that our children will sing songs about in years to come is just that - a 'romantic myth' - it has never worked,” explains film director Pete McGrain. “The real revolution will be an evolution. No bloodshed, just common sense, people learning the facts and then acting accordingly. Not as romantic, but effective and sustainable.”

Common sense progression is precisely the idea that the documentary filmmaker hopes to rouse audiences with through his new film, Ethos, a compelling picture that offers an inside look at some of society’s most daunting problems. Hosted by Woody Harrelson, the documentary is supported by an array of interviews from several of the world’s leading thinkers, including Noam Chomsky and the late Howard Zinn, to whom the film is dedicated. Tackling a slew of issues – from the U.S.’s current state as a plutocracy to the military-industrial complex – the documentary highlights numerous examples that illustrate the demise of governmental power and the mounting corporate takeover.

Free enterprise has permeated every facet of life, Ethos explains, as Big Business now appears to maintain total control, from the major media conglomerates to the White House. Sam Gibara, chairman and former CEO of Goodyear says, “Governments have become powerless compared to what they were before,” citing the evolution of corporations and their expansion into major political players. Another commentator notes that this realization of power is largely due to the very basis of corporations, as protected by the government, stating, “[Corporations] are required by law to please the interests of their owners above all else, even the public good.”

As a result, corporations, and the politicians who financially depend on them, function with a singular purpose: to make the rich richer.

Such corporate reliance can be observed in a plethora of ways. The military has rendered itself dependent on private defense contractors and the media remains all but entirely governed by a small collective of firms that aim to serve their own interests. Ira Jackson, director of the Center for Business and Government at Harvard’s Kennedy School, says, “Capitalism today commands the towering heights and has displaced politics and politicians as the new high priests.” The result of such a concentration of control has inevitably led to a grave exploitation of power and the use of the public as passive consumers.

Ethos, however, is not simply a film designed to show viewers what is wrong with society. Rather, McGrain uses his medium as a platform of motivation. Though capitalism appears to be the root cause of many of the world’s problems, it also supplies populations with the tools needed to resolve them: power. Power of the people, that is. With such an emphasis on consumerism, corporations inevitably find themselves dependent on the consumers themselves. It is because of their capacity to manipulate populations into herd mentalities that they have been able to control the thoughts of the masses. If the consumers themselves become aware of these tools of manipulation, they can reclaim that power and force Big Business to listen to their wants and needs. Conscious consumerism is what is required to overcome the status quo.

To bolster the movement of conscious consumerism, McGrain, in association with Media For Action, has opted to provide Ethos to viewers for free online and available for download. The film’s Web site is also filled with ideas for action – from purchasing sustainable products to utilizing the range of alternative media sources (such as AlterNet) available to the public.

While so many seemingly independent and progressive modes of media turn out to be essentially profit-driven, McGrain offers Ethos simply as a means of motivation and empowerment to his audience, hoping to spread the word and ultimately affect change.

Visit www.ethosthemovie.com to watch Ethos and learn more.

Megan Driscoll is the editorial and communications assistant at AlterNet.

We Need to Swap Obama for Chavez

2011-02-09T16:03:00.000-08:00

Can We Swap Obama for Chavez?

by Mike Whitney / February 9th, 2011

On Monday, while Barack Obama was hob-nobbing with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Hugo Chavez was busy handing out laptop computers to second graders at a school in Caracas. After that, the Venezuelan president rushed off to a meeting at a food distribution plant which is providing $110 million in prepared meals for Venezuela’s poor. Finally, he ended his afternoon by making an appearance at one of the many construction sites where new homes are being built for the victims of January’s massive floods.

It’s all in day’s work for Hugo Chavez.

While Obama has turned out to be the most disappointing president in the last century, Chavez continues to impress with his resolve to improve the lives of ordinary working people. For example, in just 12 years, Chavez has created a thriving national public health care system with 533 diagnostic centers and medical facilities spread throughout the capital. Health care is free and there have been over over 55 million medical consultations since Chavez launched the Misión Barrio Adentro program. Compare that to Obama’s wretched cash-giveaway to the giant US HMO’s which he has tried to promote as universal health care.

What a joke!

Chavez has also led the way to greater political engagement and activism by establishing over 30,000 communal councils and 236 communes, all focused on entering more people into the political process and empowering them to bring about change. In the US, grassroots organizations are shrugged off by party leaders who take their marching orders from the deep-pocket elites who control both parties. And, as far as Obama is concerned, he could care less what his supporters think, which is why he went groveling to the Chamber of Commerce.

And what has Chavez done to loosen the stranglehold that corporations have on media? Here’s what Gregory Wilpert says in his article titled “An Assessment of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution at Twelve Years”:

With regard to the media, ordinary Venezuelans now participate in the creation of hundreds of new and independent community radio and television stations across the country. Previous governments persecuted community media, but state institutions now actively support them – not with ongoing financing, but with training and start-up equipment.

The combination of greater inclusion and greater participation has led to a greater acceptance of Venezuela’s democratic political system, according to the annual Latinobarometro opinion polls, which allow for comparisons with other democracies in Latin America. That is, more Venezuelans believe in democracy than citizens of any other country in Latin America. Eighty-four percent of Venezuelans say, “democracy is preferable to any other system of government.

Last week, Chavez joined the battle against Coca-Cola by attending a rally of striking workers in the city of Valencia, home to the main Coca-Cola bottling plant in Venezuela. Chavez blasted Coke saying that if they didn’t want to follow “the constitution and the laws” then Venezuela could “live without Coca-Cola”.

Right on, Hugo! Tell Coke to pack sand!

The 1,300 striking workers are only asking for a meager raise to meet their growing expenses, but, of course, that cuts into corporate profits, so Coke is fighting their demands tooth-and-nail.

Try to imagine a scenario in which “business-friendly” Obama would take-on a major corporation?

Last week, Chavez announced that his government would spend another $700 million to fight homelessness and build another 40,000 houses. The president has stepped up his efforts since floods ravaged the country earlier in the year leaving tens of thousands without shelter. Chavez is determined not to make the same mistakes George Bush made following Katrina, when disaster victims were left to fend for themselves forcing a third of the New Orleans population to flee to other parts of the country.

And what effect has Chavez had on the Venezuelan economy? Here’s Wilpert again:

“Just as the Chavez government has democratized Venezuela’s political system over the past 12 years; it has done the same with its economic system, both on a macro-economic level and on a micro-economic level.

On a macro-economic level this has been achieved by increasing state control over the economy and by dismantling neo-liberalism in Venezuela. The Chavez government has regained state control over the previously quasi-independent national oil industry. The government nationalized private sub-contractors of the oil industry and incorporated them into the state oil company, giving workers full benefits and better pay. It also partially nationalized transnational oil company operations so that they control no more than 40% of any given oil production site. Then, the government eliminated the practice of “service agreements,” whereby transnational oil companies enjoyed lucrative concessions for oil production. Perhaps most importantly, the government increased royalties from oil production from as low as 1% to a minimum of 33%.

In the non-oil sector the government nationalized key (previously privatized) industries, such as: steel production (Sidor), telecommunications (Cantv), electricity distribution (production was already in state hands), cement production (Cemex), banking (Banco de Venezuela), and food distribution (Éxito).”

So, dear reader, are people better off with the telecommunications and electric companies privately owned by cutthroats like Enron (and the other Wall Street pirates) or should they be turned into public utilities?

How about oil? Are BP and Exxon better suited for the task than the public sector?

And what about banking: Would you feel safer with Uncle Sam or Goldman Sachs?

Chavez has slashed the poverty rate in half, lowered unemployment from 15% in 1999 to 7% today, and shrunk inequality to the lowest level in Latin America. In Venezuela people are getting healthier and living longer. They’re better paid and more politically engaged. “84% of Venezuelans say that they are satisfied with life, which is the second highest level in Latin America.” And guess what? Chavez is strengthening social security and retirement programs, not trying to destroy them by handing them over to Wall Street in the form of private accounts.

And Chavez’s generosity has not been limited to Venezuela either. In fact, he was the first world leader to offer medical and food aid to Katrina victims. (Although you won’t read that in an American newspaper!) And he still provides free heating fuel to poor people in the northeast United States. Venezuela-owned Citgo joined with Citizens Energy “to provide hundreds of thousands of gallons of free and low-cost heating oil to needy American families and homeless shelters across the US.” According to Citizens Energy President Joseph P. Kennedy, “Every year, we ask major oil companies and oil-producing nations to help our senior citizens and the poor make it through winter, and only one company, CITGO, and one country, Venezuela, has responded to our appeals.”

That’s right; no other oil company has given even one stinking dime to the charity. Chavez has provided over 170 million gallons of heating oil since 2005.

In contrast, Barack Obama has done nothing for the poor, the homeless, ordinary workers, or the middle class. Zilch. He’s been a dead-loss for everyone except the richest of the rich. Maybe we should swap him for Chavez?

Mike Whitney lives in Washington state. He can be reached at: fergiewhitney@msn.com. Read other articles by Mike.

This article was posted on Wednesday, February 9th, 2011 at 8:00am and is filed under Obama, Venezuela.

Walk Like An Egyptian

2011-02-06T21:52:00.000-08:00

Courage is standing in the streets demanding the end of a thirty year despotic dictatorship, in a country with no tradition of democracy or the protection human rights.

Cowardice is talking about how other people should have human rights delivered to them by foreign militaries.

Courage is risking your life to bring democracy to your country.

Cowardice is talking about democracy for others while actually undermining it when you don’t like the results.

Courage is walking like an Egyptian.

Cowardice is talking like a neocon.

It’s impossible not to admire the courage of the Egyptian people, walking daily into the maws of a repressive regime and its violent goon squads, willing to sacrifice everything in order to end decades of American-backed autocracy in their country.

And it’s impossible not to be embarrassed by the silence of the American right, who bloviate endlessly about bringing democracy to the Middle East, but have gone somehow all quiet lately. These folks couldn’t have been more excited two years ago when the Iranian public was doing exactly what the Egyptians are doing now, but for some reason they aren’t out there cheering this time. Hmm. I wonder, what could be the difference?

Actually, it’s just most of them that are silent. We should be so lucky where the others are concerned. Glenn Beck is completely out of his tree, although that’s about as surprising as stink on a turd, and about as pleasant. He has decided that the democracy movement in Egypt is the beginning of the much-predicted and much-feared rise of the Muslim caliphate. Um, even though it is being led by young people with a secular agenda, and the Muslim Brotherhood has been on the sidelines. He has declared that this is part of some great big ol’ conspiracy that involves jihadists and socialists and lesbians and Barack Obama. Um, even though, those aren’t crowds who normally have lots to do with one another. Oh well, if his (thankfully diminishing, not to mention diminished) audience can buy the fantasy that the secularist Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11 and thus belly up for a ten-year war on that basis, why not see Obamacare-death-panel-commie-pinko-fag conspiracies on the streets of Cairo as well? It makes about as much sense. It’s about as contradictory as Jesus supporting capitalism, a notion which any good regressive will be happy to argue today. Logic never before stopped that locomotive from going off the rails at a hundred miles per hour, and it isn’t now.

Okay, well, Beck is sorta sui generis (or so it’s a bit comforting to think). What’s happening on the ‘sane’ right, where politics is only sometimes based on wild conspiracy theories? The answer that they don’t know what the hell to do with themselves. Egypt has exposed them as liars, hypocrites and autocrats, and it ain’t exactly a comfortable place to be in.

Take the exquisitely appropriately named Charles Krauthammer (please) as an example. You won’t need to devote a whole lot of processing cycles from the CPU between your ears to figure out what he’s up to once you see the title of his latest piece: “Egypt's Dangerous Road Ahead: The Muslim Brotherhood's A Force, ElBaradei's A Useful Idiot”. Just the same, he starts off the piece by asking “Who doesn't love a democratic revolution? Who is not moved by the renunciation of fear and the reclamation of dignity in the streets of Cairo and Alexandria?”

Great question, but guess who, after all, it turns out doesn’t seem to love a democratic revolution so very much?!?! Instead of waxing joyous about the redemptive delivery of democracy to the Middle East – you know, like he did when Iran’s public was rising up, or like when he was justifying the Iraq invasion – Herr Blitzkrieg is instead all full of warnings, danger signs and bogeymen. ‘Cause, you know, we all remember how the French Revolution went awry: “The romance could be forgiven if this were Paris 1789. But it is not. In the intervening 222 years, we have learned how these things can end.”

Wait, didn’t the Americans once have a revolution too? Would Krauthammer have warned against that one? You bet. As a matter of fact, just about the only thing that allows regressives to continue to exist at all is the severe historical amnesia of the American public. The plain truth is that the right opposes every progressive movement in its time – just as they oppose gay rights today, and women’s rights yesterday, and racial civil rights just before that – and then pretends to celebrate it a generation or two later. Of course they would have opposed the American Revolution. We know that because: They did! They were called tories, and they in fact sided with the monarchical, repressive Brits. No doubt Hamiltonians would have been seen as the surreptitious Muslim Brotherhood equivalents of the time, threatening the freedom that monarchy provides, with George Washington playing the role of their useful idiot. He’d be even more ‘idiotic’ if, like ElBaradei, he also happened as head of the IAEA to have committed the cardinal sin of making the WMD-chanting neocon lunatics who demanded the Iraq adventure look like, well, idiots.

The right gives themselves away when they are confronted with the possible outcome they claim to desire in the public interest, but which turns out to be nothing more than marketing blabber. Why, for example, do their tax cuts for the wealthy always seem to be paramount, even when they result in a massive increase to the national debt that regressives are so fond of ranting against? Why must Cuba be strangled, but China traded with? And why does Krauthammer write, concerning Egypt, that “We are told by sage Western analysts not to worry about the Brotherhood because it probably commands only about 30% of the vote. This is reassurance? In a country where the secular democratic opposition is weak and fractured after decades of persecution, any Islamist party commanding a third of the vote rules the country.”

The bloody truth is that these regresso-monsters couldn’t possibly care less about democracy, except to be sure to block it wherever it interferes with their real agenda. In the case of Egypt, the exposure of their hypocrisy could not be more complete if we had video from a neocon nude beach party. Wait, never mind. Dick Cheney and Peggy Noonan in the buff? Euw. Some metaphors are too horrible to contemplate, despite their illuminating power.

On and on went the likes of Wolfowitz and Rice and Krauthammer about the need to bring democracy to the Middle East, even if that meant launching a war in Iraq which was disastrous in every way imaginable. But, of course, democracy was neither the goal nor outcome in that country, which today has three far more likely scenarios in front of it: either a reversion to Saddam-like dictatorship, civil war, and/or centrifugal explosion into at least three countries instead of one.

Similarly, the Bush administration went on and on about the need for the Palestinians to embrace democracy, until they actually did it. Lo and behold, when elections were held and Hamas won a crushing defeat, the US immediately began undermining the new government’s legitimacy. But that’s hardly news. American efforts to undermine democracy in the Middle East date back to at least 1953, with the toppling of the democratically elected Iranian government, whose great crime was to piss-off British Petroleum by asserting the ludicrous notion that Iranian oil should belong to Iranians. What cheeky little brown bastards, eh?!

But killing Iraqis to set them free was always logically absurd, anyhow, for anyone who doesn’t take their politics as a religion (literally and figuratively), and is willing to examine with even the slightest scintilla of scrutiny the right’s daily dose of dogma for dummies. Iraq was supposed to be a model in the region, which other states would then follow. But that concept was always idiotic from the get-go because the model was already there – indeed, had been there, more or less, for a century – right next door. Turkey was and is a majority Islamic state that is nevertheless pretty solidly democratic and mostly secular, often quite adamantly so. Why did perhaps a million people have to die in order to have a democratic model in the Middle East when there already was one, right there?

Even more ludicrous was the continuing close relationship between the United States – especially Republicans, and especially especially the House of Bush – with the autocracies of the Middle East we’re supposedly meant to be democratizing. I mean, really, if the US government wanted to democratize the Middle East, why not just pull a Saudi prince or two aside for a chat at the next family barbeque? Why not pick up the phone, call Mubarak and tell him to quit screwin’ around with his whole secret police thing? And, if he didn’t get the message, why not just stop sending him gobs of money? Or stop training those very secret police? You know, why not apply a little of that much-vaunted conservative tough love?

The reason is the same explanation for why no one on the right is embracing real democracy as it is occurring right before our eyes in Egypt, right now. It isn’t democracy that is desired by these chickenhawk cowards, who all seemed to have been quite preoccupied with studying Machiavelli or business administration when the US was ‘bringing democracy’ to Vietnam during their era, and thus, goshdarnit, unfortunately had to miss the war. Despite the breathtaking bravery of the Egyptian public seeking to overthrow their American stooge-tyrant and his violent squads of mercenary goons, regressives don’t seem quite moved, other than to cynicism. And as for Nobel Peace Prize winners who are out on the streets risking life and limb, and who might be the perfect match for the moment, they are “useful idiots”. Instead, says Krauthammer, let’s have a military dictatorship to replace the political one, and give us what we really want: “The overriding objective is a period of stability during which secularists and other democratic elements of civil society can organize themselves for the coming elections and prevail. ElBaradei is a menace. Mubarak will be gone one way or the other. The key is the military. The U.S. should say very little in public and do everything behind the scenes to help the military midwife – and then guarantee – what is still something of a long shot: Egyptian democracy.”

The military? Does Krauthammer mean the same military that has been propping up the Mubarak regime for thirty years? The one with deep ties to the US and even Israel? The one that seems to be doing little of use during the current crisis? Gosh, I’m confused. Maybe he’s thinking of a different Egyptian army.

Did I mention Israel? That is, of course, one of the main – if not the top – reason that neocons hate the idea of democracy in region, and undermine it everywhere they can, except in places like Iran. What is happening in Egypt is brilliant and inspirational for any number of reasons, but one of them is that it will effectively knock the stool out from underneath the arrogant, repressive and petulant foreign policy of the Israelis. Their ongoing unwillingness to forsake a transparent colonialism project in exchange for peace in the region will now likely be far less sustainable. As long as Israel no longer had to worry about neighbors like Egypt and Jordan reacting to their land-grabs and wholesale human rights violations, they could act with impunity. For years, everyone has been waiting for an American government to clip Israel’s wings, as seemingly the only solution to the protracted crisis, but it never happened. No one ever thought about the other fundamental assumptions on which Israeli policy is predicated. Now they are.

Which is, also, no doubt why Barack Obama is once again playing the role of historical bystander he seems to find so comforting. Mr. Incremental. Mr. Behind-The-Scenes. Mr. Change-You-Believe-In-As-Long-As-You-Do-It-For-Yourself. It’s disgusting. Look, you’re either the bat or you’re the ball, and Obama’s got plenty of stitches to show emphatically which side of the equation he’s on, despite the awesome powers of the American presidency that he possesses, something none of the rest of us have at our disposal. Including every one of those kids on the streets of Cairo, Alexandria and Suez getting their heads cracked open. They know a thing or two about the effect of baseball bats. And they know which side America has always been on, and which side it is on now. Is this supposed to be prudent, realist, foreign policy? Just exactly how do they think a new regime is going to treat America after decades of US sponsored repression and then hostility to a liberating revolutionary movement at the moment when crunch time hits? Gee, I dunno. Can you say ‘Iran’? Why does ‘Mubarak’ all of a sudden improbably rhyme so well with ‘Pahlavi’?

The train of liberation has left the station, and may traverse across much of the Middle East before all is said and done. The question is not whether the train will roll, but only whether each of us will be on board, on the platform, or digging up the rails.

Bottom line, ladies and gentlemen, these are our moral choices:

Walk like an Egyptian.

Talk like a Neocon.

Gawk like an Obama.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m with the kids on the streets of Cairo.

As for the United States and its leadership of old men dressed in young people’s clothing, the world is passing us by.

It should. We’re dinosaurs.

On a good day.

Keep Guns Out of the Hands of Dangerous People: Gun Owners

2011-02-06T21:37:00.000-08:00

Change.org

Keep Guns Out of the Hands of Dangerous People

Targeting: The U.S. Senate and The U.S. House of Representatives

Started by: Mayors Against Illegal Guns Action Fund

Every day, 34 Americans are murdered with guns, and we can't accept the flaws in our background check system that lead to these tragic deaths.

The recent shooting in Tucson is another tragic reminder of how easy it is for dangerous people to get their hands on guns.

Our gun laws are designed to prevent felons, the mentally ill, and drug abusers from purchasing guns. But the background check system is broken, and loopholes in the law allow criminals to buy guns with no questions asked.

Please join 550 Mayors from around the country in sending a message to Congress to Fix Gun Checks by taking two important steps:

1) Get all the names of people who should be prohibited from buying guns into the background check system.

2) Require a background check for every gun sale in America.

Targeting: The U.S. Senate and The U.S. House of Representatives

Started by: Mayors Against Illegal Guns Action Fund

Every day, 34 Americans are murdered with guns, and we can't accept the flaws in our background check system that lead to these tragic deaths.

Please join 550 Mayors from around the country in sending a message to Congress to Fix Gun Checks by taking two important steps:

1) Get all the names of people who should be prohibited from buying guns into the background check system.

2) Require a background check for every gun sale in America.

Keep Guns Out of the Hands of Dangerous People

Greetings,

The recent shootings in Tucson have once again exposed flaws in America’s efforts to keep guns out of the hands of criminals, drug abusers, the mentally ill and other dangerous people.

I am joining more than 550 U.S. Mayors in calling on Congress to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people by taking two critical steps:

1) Get all the names of people who should be prohibited from buying guns into the background check system.

2) Require a background check for every gun sale in America.

Every day in America, 34 people are murdered with guns. We can't accept the flaws in our background check system that lead to these tragic deaths.

[Your name]

Press Inquiries

Petition Activity

Updates (1) Comments (4) Signatures (16,224)

15,000 signatures and counting! Let's go for 25,000. · 4 days ago

Sign the Petition

How Wikileaks could Enhance Our Collective Awareness

2011-02-06T21:18:00.000-08:00

February 6, 2011 at 09:13:25

How Wikileaks could Enhance Our Collective Awareness

By Joan Marques (about the author)

opednews.com

The recent disclosures on Wikileaks about alleged pre 9/11 awareness from top government officials about the pending calamities in 2001 has stirred up a wide array of emotions among many, varying from disbelief to anger, sadness to skepticism, contempt to despair: no sentiment is left behind. While the story validates suspicions that had lived within many through the years, there are also skeptics who question the credibility of the source.

The question about credibility of Wikileaks informants actually came up in a workshop on ethical leadership among MBA's, mostly working adults, the night before Wikileaks posted the report on the 2001 occurrences. A student asked how readers would know whether the leaked information is truthful, and not merely conjured up by some melodramatic, disgruntled, or malicious-minded individual or entity who wants to stir up turmoil or, in the case of 9/11, tear open old wounds.

The response to this question was practically unanimous among the workshop participants: any source could be questioned on legitimacy if we choose to go that route, because every piece of information we receive through any medium is based on one person or group's perspectives, often driven by particular interests, while there are almost always other perspectives and interests that are in direct opposition to that one. We experience it all the time in all settings. When it comes to media releases we even know which station to tune to or newspaper to read when we want to hear criticism, and which one to find when we want to hear or read about praise for any given subject. The truth we ultimately adopt depends on our capacity to engage in critical thinking, because the is how we weave together a story that sounds acceptable to us.

Wikileaks: some perspectives

There is still quite some confusion about Wikileaks. The source is gaining attention from increasingly larger crowds, thanks to the widely diverging exposure it receives from the media. Nonetheless, many still seem to struggle with their opinion about this emerging giant that has been rather latent in its first few years of existence, but is now steadfastly demanding attention of all who have even the slightest interest in the whereabouts of our world and its occupants.

Asking around in the earlier mentioned ethical leadership workshop with about 20 working adults in grad school what they thought of Wikileaks, some interesting statements surfaced. Some admitted that they were curious about many things throughout history that were never clearly addressed, and hoped Wikileaks would shine some long withheld light on these matters. Others questioned the driving motives behind Wikileaks and its operators. Yet others expressed their caution about the disclosure of government secrets. One participant stated that exposure of sensitive information may not only embarrass governments and other powerful sources, but can actually disrupt relationships between nations and even lead to new wars.

This point was, of course, as sensible as the others. Disclosing sensitive material is never enjoyable or appreciated by all, especially when reputations and multilateral relationships are involved.

Conscious question

A serious question we should ask ourselves, however, is: should we continue to hush matters for the short-term sake of what is usually a small group of powerful manipulators? Admitted: when the many secrets that undoubtedly exist in all governments, big businesses, and other powerful entities, will first be divulged, we may expect some turbulence. There may even be some disturbing events erupting from these disclosures. Nonetheless, the long term advantages should also seriously be considered:

1. Fewer manipulative practices. With the arrival of Wikileaks, a powerful outlet has been established for whistleblowers worldwide. The psychological effect is that decision-making entities may think more carefully before engaging in practices that shun the light of day from now on, as the chance is imminent that these practices could leak out and place these entities in the dreadful position of losing more than they could possibly win with their act.

2. Increased collective intelligence of the human race. If we can achieve a point where there is sufficient transparency in the reasons and outcomes of things, we would simultaneously have established a more equity based availability of information to all who want to know, instead of the current situation in which much information is sealed in the hands, minds, or vaults of a small elite.

3. End of global segregation. When there is nothing to hide, openness is not a problem. Greater openness encourages increased mutual acceptance and tolerance. Increased mutual acceptance and tolerance results in elimination of anger and hate, since there is no reason for "us" versus "them" thinking. On the long run, then, we could reach a point of greater integration, ensuing from the awareness that, once all barricades have been pulled down, we are more alike than we have admitted or realized for centuries.

4. Enlarged mental horizons. Supported by the unstoppable trend of social networks, the openness that Wikileaks can instigate may lead to a broader mindset within human beings, in which mainstream thinking patterns will no longer be limited to cities, states, countries, or continents, but in which the wellbeing of all living beings worldwide will be considered as easily as we now consider the wellbeing of our families or communities. This may finally give way to a global compact which is not just an ethereal dream, but actually the 8th Millennium Development Goal as formulated by the United Nations under leadership of Kofi Anan in 2000.

5. Restoring of global balance. This may sound farfetched, but is a consequence of the four previous points. With more caution in decision-making, greater transparency and increased average human intelligence, end of segregative practices, and enlarged mental horizons, we could attain a point of expanded awareness on the fulfillment of a larger purpose than mere individual gain and grandeur.

Wikileaks Cycle of Collective Awareness by Dr. Joan Marques

Reviewing the long-term possibilities that could be achieved when using Wikileaks properly, I couldn't help but think of John Lennon's almost 40 year old "Imagine":

Imagine there's no countries.

It isn't hard to do.

Nothing to kill or die for.

And no religion too.

Imagine all the people living life in peace"

I guess I could be considered just as much a dreamer as Lennon was, but my dream seems to be closer to reality than his. Time will tell.

Joan Marques is the author of "Joy at Work, Work at Joy: Living and Working Mindfully Every Day" (Personhood Press, 2010), and co-editor of "The Workplace and Spirituality: New Perspectives in Research and Practice" (Skylight Paths, 2009), an (more...)

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author
and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors.

Rebooting the American Dream: 11 Ways to Rebuild Our Country

2011-01-31T09:43:00.000-08:00

Rebooting the American Dream: 11 Ways to Rebuild Our Country

by: Thom Hartmann, t r u t h o u t | Serialized Book

Truthout is proud to bring you an exclusive series from America's No. 1 progressive radio host, Thom Hartmann. We'll be publishing weekly installments of Hartmann's acclaimed new book, "Rebooting the American Dream: 11 Ways to Rebuild Our Country."

We invite Truthout readers to join us as, chapter by chapter, we explore these groundbreaking ideas for national transformation.

Rebooting The American Dream

Introduction: Back to the Future

I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.

- Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Charles Jarvis, September 28, 1820

On April 14, 1789, George Washington was out walking through the fields at Mount Vernon, his home in Virginia, when Charles Thomson, the secretary of the Continental Congress, showed up on horseback. Thomson had a letter for Washington from the president pro tempore of the new, constitutionally created United States Senate, telling Washington that he’d just been elected president and the inauguration was set for April 30 in the nation’s capital, New York City (1).

This created two problems for Washington.

The first was saying goodbye to his 82-year-old mother, which the 57-year-old Washington did that night. She gave him her blessing and told him it was the last time he’d see her alive, as she was gravely ill; and, indeed, she died before he returned from New York.

The second problem was finding a suit of clothes made in America. For that he sent a courier to his old friend and fellow general from the American Revolutionary War, Henry Knox.

Washington couldn’t find a suit made in America because in the years prior to the American Revolution, the British East India Company (whose tea was thrown into Boston Harbor by outraged colonists after the Tea Act of 1773 gave the world’s largest transnational corporation a giant tax break) controlled the manufacture and the transportation of a whole range of goods, including fine clothing. Cotton and wool could be grown and sheared in the colonies, but it had to be sent to England to be turned into clothes.

This was a routine policy for England, and it is why until India achieved its independence in 1947 Mahatma Gandhi (who was assassinated a year later) sat with his spinning wheel for his lectures and spun daily in his own home. It was, like his Salt March, a protest against the colonial practices of England and an entreaty to his fellow Indians to make their own clothes to gain independence from British companies and institutions.

Receive Thom Hartmann's "Rebooting the American Dream" as a thank-you gift with a donation of $35 or more to Truthout.

Fortunately for George Washington, an American clothing company had been established on April 28, 1783, in Hartford, Connecticut, by a man named Daniel Hinsdale, and it produced high-quality woolen and cotton clothing as well as items made from imported silk (2). It was to Hinsdale’s company that Knox turned, and he helped Washington get—in time for his inauguration two weeks later—a nice, but not excessively elegant, brown American-made suit. (He wore British black later for the celebrations and the most famous painting.)

When Washington became president in 1789, most of America’s personal and industrial products of any significance were manufactured in England or in its colonies. Washington asked his first Treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton, what could be done about that, and Hamilton came up with an 11-point plan to foster American manufacturing, which he presented to Congress in 1791. By 1793 most of its points had either been made into law by Congress or formulated into policy by either President Washington or the various states, which put the country on a path of developing its industrial base and generating the largest source of federal revenue for more than a hundred years.

Those strategic proposals built the greatest industrial powerhouse the world had ever seen and, after more than 200 successful years, were abandoned only during the administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Bill Clinton (and remain abandoned to this day). Modern-day China, however, implemented most of Hamilton’s plan and has brought about a remarkable transformation of its nation in a single generation.

Hamilton’s 11-point plan for “American manufactures” is a primary inspiration for this book (see sidebar). It was part of a larger work titled Alexander Hamilton’s Report on the Subject of Manufactures: Made in His Capacity of Secretary of the Treasury.

Alexander Hamilton’s 11-point Plan for “American Manufactures”
A full view having now been taken of the inducements to the promotion of manufactures in the United States, accompanied with an examination of the principal objections which are commonly urged in opposition, it is proper, in the next place, to consider the means by which it may be effected.…

In order to a better judgment of the means proper to be resorted to by the United States, it will be of use to advert to those which have been employed with success in other countries. The principal of these are—

I. Protecting duties—or duties on those foreign articles which are the rivals of the domestic ones intended to be encouraged.

Duties of this nature evidently amount to a virtual bounty on the domestic fabrics, since by enhancing the charges on foreign articles, they enable the national manufacturers to undersell all their foreign competitors.…[I]t has the additional recommendation of being a resource of revenue. Indeed, all the duties imposed on imported articles, though with an exclusive view to revenue, have the effect in contemplation; and, except where they fill on raw materials, wear a beneficent aspect towards the manufacturers of the country.

II. Prohibitions of rival articles, or duties equivalent to prohibitions.

This is another and an efficacious mean of encouraging national manufactures;…Of duties equivalent to prohibitions, there are examples in the laws of the United States…but they are not numerous.…[I]t might almost be said, by the principles of distributive justice; certainly by the duty of endeavoring to secure to their own citizens a reciprocity of advantages.

III. Prohibitions of the exportation of the materials of manufactures.

The desire of securing a cheap and plentiful supply for the national workmen, and, where the article is either peculiar to the country, or of peculiar quality there, the jealousy of enabling foreign workmen to rival those of the nation with its own materials, are the leading motives to this species of regulation.…It is seen at once, that its immediate operation is to abridge the demand and keep down the price of the produce of some other branch of industry, generally speaking, of agriculture, to the prejudice of those who carry it on; and though if it be really essential to the prosperity of any very important national manufacture, it may happen that those who are injured in the first instance, may be eventually indemnified, by the superior steadiness of an extensive domestic market depending on that prosperity: yet in a matter, in which there is so much room for nice and difficult combinations, in which such opposite considerations combat each other, prudence seems to dictate, that the expedient in question ought to be indulged with a sparing hand.

IV. Pecuniary bounties.

This has been found one of the most efficacious means of encouraging manufactures, and it is in some views the best; though it has not yet been practised upon by the government of the United States, (unless the allowance on the exportion of dried and pickled fish and salted meat, could be considered as a bounty,) and though it is less favoured by public opinion than some other modes, its advantages are these—

1. It is a species of encouragement more positive and direct than any other, and for that very reason, has a more immediate tendency to stimulate and uphold new enterprises, increasing the chances of profit, and diminishing the risks of loss, in the first attempts.

2. It avoids the inconvenience of a temporary augmentation of price, which is incident to some other modes, or it produces it to a less degree; either by making no addition to the charges on the rival foreign article, as in the case of protecting duties, or by making a smaller addition. The first happens when the fund for the bounty is derived from a different object (which may or may not increase the price of some other article, according to the nature of that object); the second when the fund is derived from the same or a similar object of foreign manufacture. One per cent. duty on the foreign article converted into a bounty on the domestic, will have an equal effect with a duty of two per cent. exclusive of such bounty; and the price of the foreign commodity is liable to be raised, in the one case, in the proportion of one per cent; in the other, in that of two per cent. Indeed, the bounty, when drawn from another source, is calculated to promote a reduction of price; because, without laying any new charge on the foreign article, it serves to introduce a competition with it, and to increase the total quantity of the article in the market.

3. Bounties have not, like high protecting duties, a tendency to produce scarcity.…

4. Bounties are sometimes not only the best, but the only proper expedient, for uniting the encouragement of a new object.…

The true way to conciliate these two interests, is to lay a duty on foreign manufactures, of the material, the growth of which is desired to be encouraged, and to apply the produce of that duty by way of bounty, either upon the production of the material itself, or upon its manufacture at home, or upon both.…

[P]ecuniary bounties are in most cases indispensable to the introduction of a new branch.…Bounties are especially essential, in regard to articles, upon which those foreigners who have been accustomed to supply a country, are in the practice of granting them.

The continuance of bounties on manufactures long established, must almost always be of questionable policy; because a presumption would arise in every such case, that there were natural and inherent impediments to success But in new undertakings, they are as justifiable, as they are oftentimes necessary.…

V. Premiums.

These are of a nature allied to bounties, though distinguishable from them in some important features.

Bounties are applicable to the whole quantity of an article produced or manufactured, or exported, and involve a correspondent expense—Premiums serve to reward some particular excellence or superiority, some extraordinary exertion or skill, and are dispensed only in a small number of cases. But their effect is to stimulate general effort.…

VI. The exemption of the [raw] materials of manufactures from duty.

The policy of that exemption, as a general rule, particularly in reference to new establishments, is obvious.…Of a nature, bearing some affinity to that policy, is the regulation which exempts from duty the tools and implements, as well as the books, clothes, and household furniture of foreign artists, who come to reside in the United States; an advantage already secured to them by the laws of the Union, and which it is, in every view, proper to continue.

VII. Drawbacks of the duties which are imposed on the materials of manufactures.…

[S]uch drawbacks are familiar in countries which systematically pursue the business of manufactures; which furnishes an argument for the observance of a similar policy in the United States; and the idea has been adopted by the laws of the Union, in the instances of salt and molasses. It is believed that it will be found advantageous to extend it to some other articles.

VIII. The encouragement of new intentions and discoveries, at home, and of the introduction into the United States of such as may have been made in other countries; particularly, those which relate to machinery.

This is among the most useful and unexceptionable of the aids which can be given to manufactures. The usual means of that encouragement are pecuniary rewards, and, for a time, exclusive privileges. The first must be employed, according to the occasion, and the utility of the invention, or discovery. For the last, so far as respects “authors and inventors,” provision has been made by law.…

It is customary with manufacturing nations to prohibit, under severe penalties, the exportation of implements and machines, which they have either invented or improved.…As far as prohibitions tend to prevent foreign competitors from deriving the benefit of the improvements made at home, they tend to increase the advantages of those by whom they may have been introduced; and operate as an encouragement to exertion.

IX. Judicious regulations for the inspection of manufactured commodities.

This is not among the least important of the means by which the prosperity of manufactures may be promoted. It is, indeed, in many cases one of the most essential. Contributing to prevent frauds upon consumers at home, and exporters to foreign countries—to improve the quality and preserve the character of the national manufactures…

X. The facilitating of pecuniary remittances from place to place—

Is a point of considerable moment to trade in general, and to manufactures in particular; by rendering more easy the purchase of raw materials and provisions, and the payment for manufactured supplies. A general circulation of bank paper, which is to be expected from the institution lately established, will be a most valuable mean to this end.

XI. The facilitating of the transportation of commodities.

Improvements favouring this object intimately concern all the domestic interests of a community; but they may without impropriety be mentioned as having an important relation to manufactures. There is perhaps scarcely any thing, which has been better calculated to assist the manufacturers of Great Britain, than the meliorations of the public roads of that kingdom, and the great progress which has been of late made in opening canals. Of the former, the United States stand much in need…

These examples, it is to be hoped, will stimulate the exertions of the government and citizens of every state. There can certainly be no object, more worthy of the cares of the local administrations; and it were to be wished, that there was no doubt of the power of the national government to lend its direct aid, on a comprehensive plan. This is one of those improvements, which could be prosecuted with more efficacy by the whole, than by any part or parts of the Union.…

The following remarks are sufficiently judicious and pertinent to deserve a literal quotation: “Good roads, canals, and navigable rivers, by diminishing the expense of carriage, put the remote parts of a country more nearly upon a level with those in the neighborhood of a town. They are upon that account, the greatest of all improvements.”…

It may confidently be affirmed, that there is scarcely any thing, which has been devised, better calculated to excite a general spirit of improvement, than the institutions of this nature. The are truly invaluable.

In countries where there is great private wealth, much may be effected by the voluntary contributions of patriotic individuals; but in a community situated like that of the United States, the public purse must supply the deficiency of private resource. In what can it be so useful as in prompting and improving the efforts of industry?

All which is humbly submitted.

ALEXANDER HAMILTON,
Secretary of the Treasury

Note: This excerpt has been edited for length by the author, eliminating Hamilton’s debate with Jeff erson over an industry- versus agriculture based economy. The italics are Hamilton’s.

Source: http://www.archive.org/details/alexanderhamilt00caregoog

Hamilton looked at the nation and determined what needed to be done to rebuild the country after the Revolutionary War had devastated it and subservience to England’s Tudor Plan “free trade” policies had left Americans without any significant domestic industrial base.

In the same tradition, this book goes through 11 steps we can take today to rebuild our country in the wake of the devastation of 30 years of Reaganomics and how we can recover the industrial base we’ve lost to the “free trade/flat earth” idiocy of the Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush era.

Eleven Ways

Chapter 1, “Bring My Job Home!” covers how economies work and why we need to heed Alexander Hamilton’s advice. It points out that simply moving money around or creating a service economy (“Do you want fries with that?”) doesn’t produce long-lasting wealth in a country; only manufacturing does. Political economist Adam Smith pointed out that it’s the application of human labor to raw materials—his example was turning a tree branch into an axe handle—that fuels a growing economy. We’ve gone from more than 20 percent of our economy being based on manufacturing before Reagan to around 11 percent now. This has left us in the precarious position of being unable to make a missile or an aircraft carrier that we may need if we have to defend Taiwan from China without parts from the communist dictatorship of China. These “free trade/flat earth” policies are stupid on national security grounds as much as anything else, but their major impact has been to dismantle the American middle class and consequently put our democracy itself at risk.

Chapter 2, “Roll Back the Reagan Tax Cuts,” points out how when top income-tax rates on millionaires and billionaires are above 50 percent, not only does the gap between the very rich and the working poor shrink but the nation’s economy stabilizes and grows. One of the most interesting features of this chapter is a little-known study done by the chairman of the libertarian Cato Institute, which found that Ronald Reagan’s and George W. Bush’s tax cuts actually stimulated the growth of the size of government, whereas the higher taxes that had preceded Reagan and the increased taxes under Clinton (passed into law without a single Republican vote) actually shrunk the size of government.

Chapter 3, “Stop Them from Eating My Town,” covers the ground of monopoly- and crony-capitalism, an economic system born and bred when Reagan stopped enforcing the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. From too-big-to-fail to too-big-to-allow-competition, oligarchic corporations have come to dominate virtually every major sector of the American economy; the result has been the devastation of local economies and the prevention of new entrepreneurial small ventures. In the 200 years before Reagan, the downtowns and the business districts of every city in this nation were unique—and locally owned and operated. There was a certain inefficiency associated with it, but that inefficiency guaranteed healthy local businesses and communities. Only when we roll back Reagan’s hands-off policies on Big Business and re-embrace “trust-busting” practices of Republican Theodore Roosevelt will we see a revitalization of Main Streets across America.

Chapter 4, “An Informed and Educated Electorate,” begins by showing how badly our news media has deteriorated, how it only caters to what people want and not to what they need, and how important it is that we take our media back from the profit-hungry corporations that have abandoned the public-service mission of media. This chapter also tells the story of Thomas Jefferson’s dream—made explicit when he founded the University of Virginia as this nation’s first free college—that every American, regardless of birth or station, should be able to get an education from primary school through postgraduate university programs—at no cost. Spending on the education of young people pays back handsomely when they go on to make the society richer and, because of their higher incomes, provide higher income-tax revenues. When Reagan took a budgetary axe to the University of California and ended its free admissions policy, he handed to the countries of Europe and Asia the opportunity to overtake us in everything from patent applications to doctor-to-patient ratios to excellence in engineering and invention. And they’ve taken that opportunity. We need to take it back.

Chapter 5, “Medicare ‘Part E’—for Everybody,” points out how a nation that liberates its citizens from worrying about getting proper medical care is a nation of entrepreneurs, innovators, and stress-free families. It’s also a nation that can successfully compete internationally for manufacturing work, when companies are free of health insurance burdens. Instead of handing off trillions of dollars to for-profit health insurance companies—which are forbidden by law in every other industrialized nation on earth from providing basic health insurance—we have attached giant corporate leeches to our own backs. The salt we need to pour on them is a national single-payer health insurance system—simply by expanding Medicare to include all Americans and plugging the loopholes in it that have been drilled by corporate lobbyists and their wholly-owned prostitutes…er…politicians.

Chapter 6, “Make Members of Congress Wear NASCAR Patches,” tackles the problem of our private money–fueled electoral system and all the havoc it has wreaked. We need to fix—seal, really—the revolving door between government and industry; repair our monetary, investment, and banking systems; and change how we finance campaigns in this country. The idea of public financing of campaigns has recently been made very problematic by five Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court, who ruled in 2010 that corporations are “persons” with full “free speech” rights under the First Amendment. This chapter offers some workarounds, and chapter 10 takes on the problem of the Court’s decision directly.

Chapter 7, “Cool Our Fever,” shows the incredible problems that arise from our own addiction to oil, especially in transportation, and it calls out the corporations and the billionaires who are making fortunes by pumping carbon into our atmosphere, putting all life on earth at risk—including us. The solutions include a carbon tax, but we must act soon.

Chapter 8, “They Will Steal It!” is based on one of the greatest foreign policy insights I’ve ever gotten, shared with me by activist and comedian Dick Gregory at around 3:00 A.M. as we were well into our third glass of wine and about five miles above the Atlantic Ocean on our way to Uganda. It is about how we cannot force other countries through military might to adopt our values of democracy and an open society—and how they will steal our ideas and our values if we engage them constructively so they can see how they can benefit from those ideals. It’s high time that America became less dependent on the military by cutting back our defenses, by bringing back the draft, and by returning to a functional democratic republic like our Founders envisioned and most of the developed countries of the world enjoy.

Chapter 9, “Put Lou Dobbs out to Pasture,” addresses the problem of what’s popularly referred to as “illegal immigration,” when, in reality, it is a problem of economics and illegal hiring by American companies. The problem started in 1986, when Reagan granted a blanket amnesty to millions of people who’d come into this country illegally, declared war on unions, and broke down the main barrier to entry to the workforce for people here without citizenship. The result has been more than 10 million non-citizens flowing across our borders (from countries all over the world—many come in on tourist or student visas and simply stay after their visa has expired), producing a massive dilution of the labor market. Add to that incendiary mixture a few right-wing racists pointing out the immigrants and telling frightened American workers, “Those brown people want your jobs!” and you have explosive brew. We can fix all of this by cracking down on companies illegally hiring “undocumented workers” and by tightening the labor market to shore up wages for American workers.

Chapter 10, “Wal-Mart Is Not a Person,” tells the story of how back in the 1880s corporations—then the railroad corporations, the giants of the Robber Baron Era—turned to the U.S. Supreme Court to give them human rights under the Constitution. Although the Court didn’t actually do that, the court reporter wrote that they did, and for 130 years we’ve seen the creeping encroachment of the corporate form into the house of rights our Founders fought and died for to give exclusively to humans. The pinnacle of this came in 2010 when the Supreme Court ruled that corporations are people and have political free-speech rights to spend millions, even billions, of dollars for or against political candidates and ballot initiatives. The result—if not fixed soon—will be the complete transformation of this country from a democracy into a corporate plutocracy. We need to block the Court in this superactivist behavior by amending the Constitution to say that only people are people.

Chapter 11, “In the Shadow of the Dragon,” tells the story of a visit to the Mondragon Corporation headquarters in the town of the same name in the Basque region of Spain in late 2009. We saw one of the world’s largest worker-owned businesses, with more than 90,000 employees turning over more than $14 billion a year worldwide. There are alternatives to the traditional top-down investor-owned corporate form, and people around the world are increasingly embracing these alternatives because they are better for local communities, better for the workforce, and better for the environment. The only losers are billionaires, particularly those who own most of our media and thus never tell you that every corporation in Germany, for example, must have at least 50 percent of its board of directors coming directly from the ranks of labor.

The conclusion, “Tag, You’re It!” is about tried-and-true methods—most that we’ve used before in this country and all that we’ve at least flirted with—that can bring back a strong middle class and restore America to stability and prosperity without endangering future generations. It’s straightforward, easily understood, and the only obstacle to implementing virtually every chapter’s suggestion is the power of vast wealth (usually corporate wealth). Past presidents—most famously Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt—have openly challenged this corporate power, and the time has come for the current or next president (and Congress) to do the same. But they won’t if We the People don’t demand it.

Here’s an outline to lay down the demands. Good luck!

1. Benson J. Lossing, Our Country (1877), http://www.publicbookshelf.com/public_html/Our_Country_vol_2/georgewas_bfb.html.

2. This section taken from Rosemary E. Bachelor, Washington’s American Made Inaugural Clothes, http://americanhistory.suite101.com/article.cfm/washingtons-american-made-inaugural-clothes.

Thom Hartmann is a New York Times bestselling Project Censored Award winning author and host of a nationally syndicated progressive radio talk show. You can learn more about Thom Hartmann at his website and find out what stations broadcast his program. He is also now has a daily television program at RT Network. You can also listen to Thom over the Internet.

Copyright Thom Hartmann and Mythical Research, Inc. Truthout has obtained exclusive rights to reprint this content. It may not be reproduced, and is not covered by our Creative Commons license.

Want a copy of the book? Receive "Rebooting the American Dream: 11 Ways to Rebuild Our Country" as a thank-you gift with a donation of $35 or more to Truthout.

All republished content that appears on Truthout has been obtained by permission or license.

Chapter One: Bring My Job Home!

Chapter Two: Roll Back the Reagan Tax Cuts

Chapter Three: Stop Them From Eating My Town

Chapter Four: An Informed and Educated Electorate

Chapter Five: Medicare “Part E”- for Everybody

Chapter Six: Make Members of Congress Wear NASCAR Patches

Chapter Seven: Cool Our Fever

Chapter Eight: They Will Steal It!

Chapter Nine: Put Lou Dobbs Out to Pasture

Chapter Ten: Wal-Mart Is Not a Person

Chapter Eleven: In the Shadow of the Dragon

Conclusion: Tag, You're It!

All republished content that appears on Truthout has been obtained by permission or license.

A Secular Humanist Declaration

2011-01-30T11:48:00.000-08:00

A Secular Humanist Declaration

Issued In 1980 By The
Council for Democratic and Secular Humanism
(now the Council for Secular Humanism)

Secular humanism is a vital force in the contemporary world. It is now under unwarranted and intemperate attack from various quarters. This declaration defends only that form of secular humanism which is explicitly committed to democracy. It is opposed to all varieties of belief that seek supernatural sanction for their values or espouse rule by dictatorship.

Democratic secular humanism has been a powerful force in world culture. Its ideals can be traced to the philosophers, scientists, and poets of classical Greece and Rome, to ancient Chinese Confucian society, to the Carvaka movement of India, and to other distinguished intellectual and moral traditions. Secularism and humanism were eclipsed in Europe during the Dark Ages, when religious piety eroded humankind's confidence in its own powers to solve human problems. They reappeared in force during the Renaissance with the reassertion of secular and humanist values in literature and the arts, again in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with the development of modern science and a naturalistic view of the universe, and their influence can be found in the eighteenth century in the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment.

Democratic secular humanism has creatively flowered in modern times with the growth of freedom and democracy. Countless millions of thoughtful persons have espoused secular humanist ideals, have lived significant lives, and have contributed to the building of a more humane and democratic world. The modern secular humanist outlook has led to the application of science and technology to the improvement of the human condition. This has had a positive effect on reducing poverty, suffering, and disease in various parts of the world, in extending longevity, on improving transportation and communication, and in making the good life possible for more and more people. It has led to the emancipation of hundreds of millions of people from the exercise of blind faith and fears of superstition and has contributed to their education and the enrichment of their lives.

Secular humanism has provided an impetus for humans to solve their problems with intelligence and perseverance, to conquer geographic and social frontiers, and to extend the range of human exploration and adventure. Regrettably, we are today faced with a variety of antisecularist trends: the reappearance of dogmatic authoritarian religions; fundamentalist, literalist, and doctrinaire Christianity; a rapidly growing and uncompromising Moslem clericalism in the Middle East and Asia; the reassertion of orthodox authority by the Roman Catholic papal hierarchy; nationalistic religious Judaism; and the reversion to obscurantist religions in Asia.

New cults of unreason as well as bizarre paranormal and occult beliefs, such as belief in astrology, reincarnation, and the mysterious power of alleged psychics, are growing in many Western societies. These disturbing developments follow in the wake of the emergence in the earlier part of the twentieth century of intolerant messianic and totalitarian quasi religious movements, such as fascism and communism. These religious activists not only are responsible for much of the terror and violence in the world today but stand in the way of solutions to the world's most serious problems.

Paradoxically, some of the critics of secular humanism maintain that it is a dangerous philosophy. Some assert that it is "morally corrupting" because it is committed to individual freedom, others that it condones "injustice" because it defends democratic due process. We who support democratic secular humanism deny such charges, which are based upon misunderstanding and misinterpretation, and we seek to outline a set of principles that most of us share.

Secular humanism is not a dogma or a creed. There are wide differences of opinion among secular humanists on many issues. Nevertheless, there is a loose consensus with respect to several propositions. We are apprehensive that modern civilization is threatened by forces antithetical to reason, democracy, and freedom. Many religious believers will no doubt share with us a belief in many secular humanist and democratic values, and we welcome their joining with us in the defense of these ideals.

Free Inquiry

The first principle of democratic secular humanism is its commitment to free inquiry. We oppose any tyranny over the mind of man, any efforts by ecclesiastical, political, ideological, or social institutions to shackle free thought. In the past, such tyrannies have been directed by churches and states attempting to enforce the edicts of religious bigots. In the long struggle in the history of ideas, established institutions, both public and private, have attempted to censor inquiry, to impose orthodoxy on beliefs and values, and to excommunicate heretics and extirpate unbelievers. Today, the struggle for free inquiry has assumed new forms. Sectarian ideologies have become the new theologies that use political parties and governments in their mission to crush dissident opinion. Free inquiry entails recognition of civil liberties as integral to its pursuit, that is, a free press, freedom of communication, the right to organize opposition parties and to join voluntary associations, and freedom to cultivate and publish the fruits of scientific, philosophical, artistic, literary, moral and religious freedom. Free inquiry requires that we tolerate diversity of opinion and that we respect the right of individuals to express their beliefs, however unpopular they may be, without social or legal prohibition or fear of sanctions. Though we may tolerate contrasting points of view, this does not mean that they are immune to critical scrutiny. The guiding premise of those who believe in free inquiry is that truth is more likely to be discovered if the opportunity exists for the free exchange of opposing opinions; the process of interchange is frequently as important as the result. This applies not only to science and to everyday life, but to politics, economics, morality, and religion.

Separation Of Church And State
Because of their commitment to freedom, secular humanists believe in the principle of the separation of church and state. The lessons of history are clear: wherever one religion or ideology is established and given a dominant position in the state, minority opinions are in jeopardy. A pluralistic, open democratic society allows all points of view to be heard. Any effort to impose an exclusive conception of Truth, Piety, Virtue, or Justice upon the whole of society is a violation of free inquiry. Clerical authorities should not be permitted to legislate their own parochial views - whether moral, philosophical, political, educational, or social - for the rest of society. Nor should tax revenues be exacted for the benefit or support of sectarian religious institutions. Individuals and voluntary associations should be free to accept or not to accept any belief and to support these convictions with whatever resources they may have, without being compelled by taxation to contribute to those religious faiths with which they do not agree. Similarly, church properties should share in the burden of public revenues and should not be exempt from taxation. Compulsory religious oaths and prayers in public institutions (political or educational) are also a violation of the separation principle. Today, nontheistic as well as theistic religions compete for attention. Regrettably, in communist countries, the power of the state is being used to impose an ideological doctrine on the society, without tolerating the expression of dissenting or heretical views. Here we see a modern secular version of the violation of the separation principle.
The Ideal Of Freedom
There are many forms of totalitarianism in the modern world - secular and nonsecular - all of which we vigorously oppose. As democratic secularists, we consistently defend the ideal of freedom, not only freedom of conscience and belief from those ecclesiastical, political, and economic interests that seek to repress them, but genuine political liberty, democratic decision making based upon majority rule, and respect for minority rights and the rule of law. We stand not only for freedom from religious control but for freedom from jingoistic government control as well. We are for the defense of basic human rights, including the right to protect life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In our view, a free society should also encourage some measure of economic freedom, subject only to such restrictions as are necessary in the public interest. This means that individuals and groups should be able to compete in the marketplace, organize free trade unions, and carry on their occupations and careers without undue interference by centralized political control. The right to private property is a human right without which other rights are nugatory. Where it is necessary to limit any of these rights in a democracy, the limitation should be justified in terms of its consequences in strengthening the entire structure of human rights.
Ethics Based On Critical Intelligence
The moral views of secular humanism have been subjected to criticism by religious fundamentalist theists. The secular humanist recognizes the central role of morality in human life; indeed, ethics was developed as a branch of human knowledge long before religionists proclaimed their moral systems based upon divine authority. The field of ethics has had a distinguished list of thinkers contributing to its development: from Socrates, Democritus, Aristotle, Epicurus, and Epictetus, to Spinoza, Erasmus, Hume, Voltaire, Kant, Bentham, Mill, G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, and others. There is an influential philosophical tradition that maintains that ethics is an autonomous field of inquiry, that ethical judgments can be formulated independently of revealed religion, and that human beings can cultivate practical reason and wisdom and, by its application, achieve lives of virtue and excellence. Moreover, philosophers have emphasized the need to cultivate an appreciation for the requirements of social justice and for an individual's obligations and responsibilities toward others. Thus, secularists deny that morality needs to be deduced from religious belief or that those who do not espouse a religious doctrine are immoral. For secular humanists, ethical conduct is, or should be, judged by critical reason, and their goal is to develop autonomous and responsible individuals, capable of making their own choices in life based upon an understanding of human behavior. Morality that is not God-based need not be antisocial, subjective, or promiscuous, nor need it lead to the breakdown of moral standards. Although we believe in tolerating diverse lifestyles and social manners, we do not think they are immune to criticism. Nor do we believe that any one church should impose its views of moral virtue and sin, sexual conduct, marriage, divorce, birth control, or abortion, or legislate them for the rest of society. As secular humanists we believe in the central importance of the value of human happiness here and now. We are opposed to absolutist morality, yet we maintain that objective standards emerge, and ethical values and principles may be discovered, in the course of ethical deliberation. Secular humanist ethics maintains that it is possible for human beings to lead meaningful and wholesome lives for themselves and in service to their fellow human beings without the need of religious commandments or the benefit of clergy. There have been any number of distinguished secularists and humanists who have demonstrated moral principles in their personal lives and works: Protagoras, Lucretius, Epicurus, Spinoza, Hume, Thomas Paine, Diderot, Mark Twain, George Eliot, John Stuart Mill, Ernest Renan, Charles Darwin, Thomas Edison, Clarence Darrow, Robert Ingersoll, Gilbert Murray, Albert Schweitzer, Albert Einstein, Max Born, Margaret Sanger, and Bertrand Russell, among others.
Moral Education
We believe that moral development should be cultivated in children and young adults. We do not believe that any particular sect can claim important values as their exclusive property; hence it is the duty of public education to deal with these values. Accordingly, we support moral education in the schools that is designed to develop an appreciation for moral virtues, intelligence, and the building of character. We wish to encourage wherever possible the growth of moral awareness and the capacity for free choice and an understanding of the consequences thereof. We do not think it is moral to baptize infants, to confirm adolescents, or to impose a religious creed on young people before they are able to consent. Although children should learn about the history of religious moral practices, these young minds should not be indoctrinated in a faith before they are mature enough to evaluate the merits for themselves. It should be noted that secular humanism is not so much a specific morality as it is a method for the explanation and discovery of rational moral principles.
Religious Skepticism
As secular humanists, we are generally skeptical about supernatural claims. We recognize the importance of religious experience: that experience that redirects and gives meaning to the lives of human beings. We deny, however, that such experiences have anything to do with the supernatural. We are doubtful of traditional views of God and divinity. Symbolic and mythological interpretations of religion often serve as rationalizations for a sophisticated minority, leaving the bulk of mankind to flounder in theological confusion. We consider the universe to be a dynamic scene of natural forces that are most effectively understood by scientific inquiry. We are always open to the discovery of new possibilities and phenomena in nature. However. we find that traditional views of the existence of God either are meaningless, have not yet been demonstrated to be true, or are tyrannically exploitative. Secular humanists may be agnostics, atheists, rationalists, or skeptics, but they find insufficient evidence for the claim that some divine purpose exists for the universe. They reject the idea that God has intervened miraculously in history or revealed himself to a chosen few or that he can save or redeem sinners. They believe that men and women are free and are responsible for their own destinies and that they cannot look toward some transcendent Being for salvation. We reject the divinity of Jesus, the divine mission of Moses, Mohammed, and other latter day prophets and saints of the various sects and denominations. We do not accept as true the literal interpretation of the Old and New Testaments, the Koran, or other allegedly sacred religious documents, however important they may be as literature. Religions are pervasive sociological phenomena, and religious myths have long persisted in human history. In spite of the fact that human beings have found religions to be uplifting and a source of solace, we do not find their theological claims to be true. Religions have made negative as well as positive contributions toward the development of human civilization. Although they have helped to build hospitals and schools and, at their best, have encouraged the spirit of love and charity, many have also caused human suffering by being intolerant of those who did not accept their dogmas or creeds. Some religions have been fanatical and repressive, narrowing human hopes, limiting aspirations, and precipitating religious wars and violence. While religions have no doubt offered comfort to the bereaved and dying by holding forth the promise of an immortal life, they have also aroused morbid fear and dread. We have found no convincing evidence that there is a separable "soul" or that it exists before birth or survives death. We must therefore conclude that the ethical life can be lived without the illusions of immortality or reincarnation. Human beings can develop the self confidence necessary to ameliorate the human condition and to lead meaningful, productive lives.
Reason
We view with concern the current attack by nonsecularists on reason and science. We are committed to the use of the rational methods of inquiry, logic, and evidence in developing knowledge and testing claims to truth. Since human beings are prone to err, we are open to the modification of all principles, including those governing inquiry, believing that they may be in need of constant correction. Although not so naive as to believe that reason and science can easily solve all human problems, we nonetheless contend that they can make a major contribution to human knowledge and can be of benefit to humankind. We know of no better substitute for the cultivation of human intelligence.
Science And Technology
We believe the scientific method, though imperfect, is still the most reliable way of understanding the world. Hence, we look to the natural, biological, social, and behavioral sciences for knowledge of the universe and man's place within it. Modern astronomy and physics have opened up exciting new dimensions of the universe: they have enabled humankind to explore the universe by means of space travel. Biology and the social and behavioral sciences have expanded our understanding of human behavior. We are thus opposed in principle to any efforts to censor or limit scientific research without an overriding reason to do so. While we are aware of, and oppose, the abuses of misapplied technology and its possible harmful consequences for the natural ecology of the human environment, we urge resistance to unthinking efforts to limit technological or scientific advances. We appreciate the great benefits that science and technology (especially basic and applied research) can bring to humankind, but we also recognize the need to balance scientific and technological advances with cultural explorations in art, music, and literature.
Evolution
Today the theory of evolution is again under heavy attack by religious fundamentalists. Although the theory of evolution cannot be said to have reached its final formulation, or to be an infallible principle of science, it is nonetheless supported impressively by the findings of many sciences. There may be some significant differences among scientists concerning the mechanics of evolution; yet the evolution of the species is supported so strongly by the weight of evidence that it is difficult to reject it. Accordingly, we deplore the efforts by fundamentalists (especially in the United States) to invade the science classrooms, requiring that creationist theory be taught to students and requiring that it be included in biology textbooks. This is a serious threat both to academic freedom and to the integrity of the educational process. We believe that creationists surely should have the freedom to express their viewpoint in society. Moreover, we do not deny the value of examining theories of creation in educational courses on religion and the history of ideas; but it is a sham to mask an article of religious faith as a scientific truth and to inflict that doctrine on the scientific curriculum. If successful, creationists may seriously undermine the credibility of science itself.
Education
In our view, education should be the essential method of building humane, free, and democratic societies. The aims of education are many: the transmission of knowledge; training for occupations, careers, and democratic citizenship; and the encouragement of moral growth. Among its vital purposes should also be an attempt to develop the capacity for critical intelligence in both the individual and the community. Unfortunately, the schools are today being increasingly replaced by the mass media as the primary institutions of public information and education. Although the electronic media provide unparalleled opportunities for extending cultural enrichment and enjoyment, and powerful learning opportunities, there has been a serious misdirection of their purposes. In totalitarian societies, the media serve as the vehicle of propaganda and indoctrination. In democratic societies television, radio, films, and mass publishing too often cater to the lowest common denominator and have become banal wastelands. There is a pressing need to elevate standards of taste and appreciation. Of special concern to secularists is the fact that the media (particularly in the United States) are inordinately dominated by a pro religious bias. The views of preachers, faith healers, and religious hucksters go largely unchallenged, and the secular outlook is not given an opportunity for a fair hearing. We believe that television directors and producers have an obligation to redress the balance and revise their programming. Indeed, there is a broader task that all those who believe in democratic secular humanist values will recognize, namely, the need to embark upon a long term program of public education and enlightenment concerning the relevance of the secular outlook to the human condition.

Conclusion

Democratic secular humanism is too important for human civilization to abandon. Reasonable persons will surely recognize its profound contributions to human welfare. We are nevertheless surrounded by doomsday prophets of disaster, always wishing to turn the clock back - they are anti science, anti freedom, anti human. In contrast, the secular humanistic outlook is basically melioristic, looking forward with hope rather than backward with despair. We are committed to extending the ideals of reason, freedom, individual and collective opportunity, and democracy throughout the world community. The problems that humankind will face in the future, as in the past, will no doubt be complex and difficult. However, if it is to prevail, it can only do so by enlisting resourcefulness and courage. Secular humanism places trust in human intelligence rather than in divine guidance. Skeptical of theories of redemption, damnation, and reincarnation, secular humanists attempt to approach the human situation in realistic terms: human beings are responsible for their own destinies. We believe that it is possible to bring about a more humane world, one based upon the methods of reason and the principles of tolerance, compromise, and the negotiations of difference.

We recognize the need for intellectual modesty and the willingness to revise beliefs in the light of criticism. Thus consensus is sometimes attainable. While emotions are important, we need not resort to the panaceas of salvation, to escape through illusion, or to some desperate leap toward passion and violence. We deplore the growth of intolerant sectarian creeds that foster hatred. In a world engulfed by obscurantism and irrationalism it is vital that the ideals of the secular city not be lost.

A Secular Humanist Declaration was drafted by Paul Kurtz, Editor, Free Inquiry.

A Secular Humanist Declaration has been endorsed by the following individuals:

(Although we who endorse this declaration may not agree with all its specific provisions, we nevertheless support its general purposes and direction and believe that it is important that they be enunciated and implemented. We call upon all men and women of good will who agree with us to join in helping to keep alive the commitment to the principles of free inquiry and the secular humanist outlook. We submit that the decline of these values could have ominous implications for the future of civilization on this planet.)

United States Of America

George Abell (professor of astronomy, UCLA)
John Anton (professor of philosophy, Emory University)
Khoren Arisian (minister, First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis)
Isaac Asimov (science fiction author)
Paul Beattie (minister, All Souls Unitarian Church; president, Fellowship of Religious Humanism)
H. James Birx (professor of anthropology and sociology, Canisius College)
Brand Blanshard (professor emeritus of philosophy, Yale)
Joseph L. Blau (Profelsor Emeritus of Religion, Columbia)
Francis Crick (Nobel Prize Laureate, Salk Institute)
Arthur Danto (professor of philosophy, Columbia University)
Albert Ellis (executive director, Institute for Rational Emotive Therapy)
Roy Fairfield (former professor of social science, Antioch)
Herbert Feigl (professor emeritus of philosophy, University of Minnesota)
Joseph Fletcher (theologian, University of Virginia Medical School)
Sidney Hook (professor emeritus of philosophy, NYU, fellow at Hoover Institute)
George Hourani (professor of philosophy, State University of New York at Buffalo)
Walter Kaufmann (professor of philosophy, Princeton)
Marvin Kohl (professor of philosophy, medical ethics, State University of New York at Fredonia)
Richard Kostelanetz (writer, artist, critic)
Paul Kurtz (Professor of Philosophy, State University of New York at Buffalo)
Joseph Margolis (professor of philosophy, Temple University)
Floyd Matson (professor of American Studies, University of Hawaii)
Ernest Nagel (professor emeritus of philosophy, Columbia)
Lee Nisbet (associate professor of philosophy, Medaille)
George Olincy (lawyer)
Virginia Olincy
W. V. Quine (professor of philosophy, Harvard University)
Robert Rimmer (novelist)
Herbert Schapiro (Freedom from Religion Foundation)
Herbert Schneider (professor emeritus of philosophy, Claremont College)
B. F. Skinner (professor emeritus of psychology, Harvard)
Gordon Stein (editor, The American Rationalist)
George Tomashevich (professor of anthropology, Buffalo State University College)
Valentin Turchin (Russian dissident; computer scientist, City College, City University of New York)
Sherwin Wine (rabbi, Birmingham Temple, founder, Society for Humanistic Judaism)
Marvin Zimmerman (professor of philosophy, State University of New York at Buffalo)

Canada

Henry Morgentaler (physician, Montreal)
Kai Nielsen (professor of philosophy, University of Calgary)

France

Yves Galifret (executive director, Union Rationaliste)
Jean Claude Pecker (professor of astrophysics, College de France, Academie des Sciences)

Great Britain

Sir A.J. Ayer (professor of philosophy, Oxford University)
H.J. Blackham (former chairman, Social Morality Council and British Humanist Association)
Bernard Crick (professor of politics, Birkbeck College, London University)
Sir Raymond Firth (professor emeritus of anthropology, University of London)
James Herrick (editor, The Free Thinker)
Zheres A. Medvedev (Russian dissident; Medical Research Council)
Dora Russell (Mrs. Bertrand Russell) (author)
Lord Ritchie Calder (president, Rationalist Press Association)
Harry Stopes-Roe (senior lecturer in science studies, University of Birmingham; chairman, British Humanist Association)
Nicholas Walter (editor, New Humanist)
Baroness Barbara Wootton (Deputy Speaker, House of Lords)

India

B. Shah (president, Indian Secular Society; director, Institute for the Study of Indian Traditions)
V. M. Tarkunde (Supreme Court Judge, chairman, Indian Radical Humanist Association)

Israel

Shulamit Aloni (lawyer, member of Knesset, head of Citizens Rights Movement)

Norway

Alastair Hannay (professor of philosophy, University of Trondheim)

Yugoslavia

Milovan Djilas (author, former vice president of Yugoslavia)
M. Markovic (professor of philosophy, Serbian Academy of Sciences & Arts and University of Belgrade)
Svet. Stojanovic (professor of philosophy, University of Belgrade)

The Affirmations of Humanism: A Statement of Principles

2011-01-30T11:26:00.000-08:00

This alternative is in no way a challenge to any established religion but rather to non-theistic views. It is assumed that the highest values of secular humanism are either derived from or shared with the religious community. The challenge is that we all hold these values as a part of our shared heritage as humans.

The Affirmations of Humanism:
A Statement of Principles

We are committed to the application of reason and science to the understanding of the universe and to the solving of human problems.
We deplore efforts to denigrate human intelligence, to seek to explain the world in supernatural terms, and to look outside nature for salvation.
We believe that scientific discovery and technology can contribute to the betterment of human life.
We believe in an open and pluralistic society and that democracy is the best guarantee of protecting human rights from authoritarian elites and repressive majorities.
We are committed to the principle of the separation of church and state.
We cultivate the arts of negotiation and compromise as a means of resolving differences and achieving mutual understanding.
We are concerned with securing justice and fairness in society and with eliminating discrimination and intolerance.
We believe in supporting the disadvantaged and the handicapped so that they will be able to help themselves.
We attempt to transcend divisive parochial loyalties based on race, religion, gender, nationality, creed, class, sexual orientation, or ethnicity, and strive to work together for the common good of humanity.
We want to protect and enhance the earth, to preserve it for future generations, and to avoid inflicting needless suffering on other species.
We believe in enjoying life here and now and in developing our creative talents to their fullest.
We believe in the cultivation of moral excellence.
We respect the right to privacy. Mature adults should be allowed to fulfill their aspirations, to express their sexual preferences, to exercise reproductive freedom, to have access to comprehensive and informed health-care, and to die with dignity.
We believe in the common moral decencies: altruism, integrity, honesty, truthfulness, responsibility. Humanist ethics is amenable to critical, rational guidance. There are normative standards that we discover together. Moral principles are tested by their consequences.
We are deeply concerned with the moral education of our children. We want to nourish reason and compassion.
We are engaged by the arts no less than by the sciences.
We are citizens of the universe and are excited by discoveries still to be made in the cosmos.
We are skeptical of untested claims to knowledge, and we are open to novel ideas and seek new departures in our thinking.
We affirm humanism as a realistic alternative to theologies of despair and ideologies of violence and as a source of rich personal significance and genuine satisfaction in the service to others.
We believe in optimism rather than pessimism, hope rather than despair, learning in the place of dogma, truth instead of ignorance, joy rather than guilt or sin, tolerance in the place of fear, love instead of hatred, compassion over selfishness, beauty instead of ugliness, and reason rather than blind faith or irrationality.
We believe in the fullest realization of the best and noblest that we are capable of as human beings.

Egypt and America: Both Must Become More Truly Democratic

2011-01-29T17:06:00.000-08:00

January 28, 2011 at 19:32:48

Egypt and America: Both Must Become More Truly Democratic

By Prof. Sam Hamod (about the author)

opednews.com

"The times they are changin'." Woody Guthrie song adapted by Bob Dylan

Egypt is going its own way. This means that America and Israel both will have lost their hold on this massive Arab Muslim country that has been their handmaiden since the time of the late Anwar Sadat through the regime of Hosni Mubarak. But let us not think that Americans are any better off than Egyptians, considering the loss of our Constitutional rights, the soaring unemployment and the desire by both political parties to cut social services to the citizenry as they carry on with their pork-barrel politics. America is in the hands of not one, but a group of oligarchs -- corporations, banks, media moguls, congress and the president.

The people of Egypt have long felt more allied with their Arab and Muslim brothers than with the West and Israel, but because of the regimes in power since the time of the great Egyptian leader; the leader of the Pan Arab and Pan Islamic movement, Gamal Abdel Nasser, the wishes of the people have not been heard or met. Although the American government may look at Egypt as a loss -- and it will be for the governing oligarchs of America (the corporations, the media, the banks, the congress and the president) -- it must realize its own pot is also boiling.

We are not only in the hands of oligarchs, we are also in the hands of Israel. Each Israeli gets over $48,000.00 in American aid, while Americans in need of social services are being shut out because, according to the president and the congress, "we have no money for them" -- while at the same time -- banksters and the military bleed the country dry. Once more Americans understand this; once they consider the billions spent on over 1,000 bases around the world and our ongoing wars in the Middle East, Asia and Africa, maybe they will speak up and say, "We are 80% against your continuing wars, and why is it that the president and congress keep funding the military in this way, while we the people starve and lose our social services that we paid into and deserve?"

Thus, though Egypt and Tunisia seem far away, America should also take heed.

But let us understand also, that the Egyptian people are cousins to the Palestinians and will open the Gaza gate to Palestinians who come for medical care and medicines, and even weapons to be used against the common enemy of the Muslims and Arabs -- Israel. Israel no longer has a puppet in Cairo, nor does America. Some say America is the 2nd state of Israel, not Israel as the 51st state of America, and one has but to see the behavior of Binyamin Netanyahu and those before him to see how often they have spit in the face of American presidents.

President Jimmy Carter was knocked out of the presidency by the notorious Kissinger lover, Ted Koppel, who raged night after night against Carter for not attacking Iran. But few knew that Koppel was doing the bidding of the Zionists who surrounded the Reagan candidacy, whereas Carter had stood up to Menachim Begin, who had violated the "peace treaty" he had signed with Presidents Carter and Sadat. Carter's stand against Israel's Begin was his downfall -- aided and abetted by Koppel, who some say has dual U.S.-Israeli citizenship, as has Paul Wolfowitz, Rahm Emmanel, Karl Rove, William Kristol, Richard Pearl, NY Congressman Peter King, and others who "govern" America.

Thus, even in our media, the Egyptian revolution has shaken some "talking heads." Wolf Blitzer had a hard time giving the news in an honest fashion tonight on CNN when he saw, as an Israeli citizen (Wolf was born in Israel) that Israel's tentacles now might lose their hold in Egypt, so he had a hard time praising the oncoming revolution that so many others praised. Too often we have had talking heads speaking to one another, but today CNN finally had an Egyptian who spoke the truth, he pointed out that the people in Egypt are sick and tired of their great country being a handmaiden and lackey to America and Israel, and that the people were fearless in the face of bullets and tanks. This courage should be a wake-up call for Americans to respect Arabs and Muslims who have a greater belief in God than our worshippers of the golden calf -- the dollar -- in America and Israel. As the song says, "The times they are a changin'."

On the other hand, it is clear to the American government that Mubarak is finished and they had best hope for the new regime to re-establish some kind of new ties with America. But I assure you, Egypt will no longer be America's and Israel's lackey. I believe the spirit of Nasser will once again rise from Egypt's youth and even the middle class so that a new and better relationship with other Muslim and Arab countries will prevail. The dictators in other places will hasten to correct their imbalances with the young who have come home filled with the spirit of DEMOCRACY (even though we have less of it in America than we speak of), and their degrees, PhD's, MBA's, MA's, MD's, BA's, etc., who have found little work in their respective countries.

Yes, the revolution is here in Egypt, in the Arab world, and it will be coming to America in due time if our oligarchs do not straighten up and fly right. Because at some point, we Americans should no longer tolerate the oligarchs who collect money from us, yet who do not listen to us, the taxpayers and citizens. Our situation is no different than that of the Tunisians and Egyptians -- we have no real representation in Congress or the White House, and needless to say, the corporations and banks love the mega slave state they have created in America.

WE all lived with THE AMERICAN DREAM, but as M.L. King, Jr. and the poet, said, "A dream deferred is a dream denied." At this time, it is clear that our American dream is lost to the oligarchs, much as it was lost in Tunisia and Egypt. How long will it be before the American people also ask for a REAL DEMOCRACY -- not this faux Democracy we now have?

http://www.todaysalternativenews.com

Sam Hamod, Ph.D. is a graduate professor; he has taught courses in creative writing, politics, religion, mass media and intercultural relations. He has one of the very few PhDs awarded by The Writers Workshop of The Univ. of Iowa, has published 12 (more...)

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author
and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors.

The Egyptian Revolution: A Very Good Thing

2011-01-29T09:25:00.000-08:00

The Egyptian Revolution: A Very Fine Thing

by Gary Leupp / January 29th, 2011

I’m watching live coverage of the Egyptian revolution on Al-Jazeera TV. Cairo is swarming with hundreds of thousands, defying the curfew, hurling stones at the police. The images recall the Palestinian youth waging their Intifadas. The National Democratic Party headquarters is in flames. Downtown Suez has been taken over by the people, two police stations torched. The security forces are out in strength and shooting into crowds. But the people have lost their fear.

Reporters and commentators on Al-Jazeera and other channels have no choice but to note that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak is widely hated, and that those in the street are seeking freedom from a dictatorship. But they also keep saying “The situation is getting worse.”

Worse?

I think of Mao Zedong’s response to critics of peasant rebellion in China in 1927. He noted that “even progressive people” saw uprisings as “terrible.” “But it’s not terrible,” he declared. “It is anything but ‘terrible.’ It’s fine!”

Watching the live coverage, I see the people of Egypt, fed up with their oppression, and inspired by the revolution in Tunisia, doing something very, very fine. It is inspiring. It is profoundly hopeful.

The Obama administration line (as summarized by Joe Biden, interviewed by Jim Lehrer on PBS), can be summarized as follows: Egyptians have the right to protest. Many are middle class folks, with legitimate concerns. But we should not refer to Mubarak as a dictator. It’s not time for him to go. He has been a key ally of the U.S. and Israel, in the “Middle East peace process” and the War on Terror. Egypt is dissimilar to Tunisia, and it would be “a stretch” to suggest that a trend is underway. The U.S. should encourage those protesting and Mubarak to talk. Everyone should avoid violence.

The mainstream infotainment media spin can be summarized like this: The “unrest” in Egypt puts the U.S. in a difficult position. On the one hand Mubarak has abetted U.S. “national interests” and been Israel’s only Arab ally. (These two are always assumed to be closely linked; the notion that an Arab leader is a friend of the U.S. to the extend that he kisses Israel’s ass is never questioned.) On the other hand, U.S. officials have been saying for years that the Middle East needs “democratic reform.”

This puts in the U.S. in bind, we are told. The U.S. confronts a “dilemma.” The talking heads depict the U.S. as somehow a victim in this situation. (Isn’t it terrible, they’re implying, that the Egyptian people by their militancy in favor of supposed U.S. ideals are trying to topple the USA’s best friend in the Arab world? What a headache to have to deal with!)

Seems to me, however, that this is another of those instances of chickens coming home to roost.

The U.S. has supported Mubarak primarily in appreciation for his stance towards Israel. (The mainstream media is referring to him as an “ally” of Israel.) It’s not really because he’s been a “partner in the peace process”—because there is no real peace process. Relentless Israeli settlement activity on Palestinian land supported by the Lobby in the U.S. has insured that.

Wikileaks documents indicate that Mubarak has been content for the “process” to lag indefinitely so that he could represent himself as the vital Arab middleman while enjoying two billion in U.S. military aid per year. But Palestinians hate him for cooperating with the demonization of democratically elected Hamas and the embargo imposed on Gaza. And Egyptians hate him for, among many other things, betraying their Palestinian brothers and sisters.

Rather, the U.S. has supported Mubarak because he’s provided an Arab fig leaf for the unequivocal support for Israel that the U.S. has provided for decades. U.S. diplomats have, as Wikileaks reveal, at times expressed concern that the dictator might be causing some problems by his “heavy-handed” treatment of dissidents. But this is not a matter of moral indignation, or concern about the lives of Egyptians. It’s nothing more than an expression of concern that his fascistic rule might jeopardize his ability to help U.S.-Israeli policy in the region and keep the Suez Canal open.

And now that brutal rule has caused an explosion. The reaction from U.S. officials and political commentators is, “We never expected this.”

Well surprise, surprise! (These folks were dumbfounded by the Iranian Revolution of 1979 as well. Don’t they understand that people eventually fight back?)

I think of that old Langston Hughes poem:

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore–
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over–
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?

Egypt is exploding. The deferred dreams of the Arab world are exploding. And even the corporate media acknowledges that the people are jubilant (while warning that none of this might be in “our interest”). But for people with some basic morals, concerned about the happiness of humanity in general, is this not totally fine?

Al-Jazeera shows viewers how U.S. officials are changing the tone of their comments, backing off more and more each day from support of Mubarak. They’re reiterating with increasing emphasis that the demonstrators indeed have legitimacy. (Did these people just figure this out?) What sheer opportunism!

Obama, always the centrist opportunist wanting to be everybody’s friend, wants to be the Egyptian people’s friend. He showed that in Cairo in 2009. In his celebrated speech to the Muslim world he on the one hand spouted platitudes about U.S. acceptance of Islam and on the other insulted everyone’s intelligence by calling the invasion of Afghanistan a “war of necessity.” He (accurately) described the vicious assault on Iraq as a “war of choice,” but said anything about how those responsible for such a crime ought to be punished. He does not support any investigation that would show how neocon Zionists in his predecessor’s administration faked a case for war that has killed hundreds of thousands of Arabs.

His real message is: the U.S. can lie and kill, and then posture as the moral exemplar (maybe even apologizing slightly when crimes are embarrassingly exposed). Even so, the people of the world are supposed to understand that alignment with the U.S. is their best hope.

And now Obama wants the best of both worlds: an ongoing engagement with Mubarak (if he survives), and a hand outstretched to the people of Egypt, tainted by so many other handshakes with so many dictators so far.

Demonstrators in Cairo note that tear gas canisters on the street are marked “Made in USA.” What should they make of that? Who’s really encouraging their dreams? Who’s caused them to defer them, decade upon decade? It’s the same foe that has caused the deferment of dreams here in this country and around the world.

I learned to say shukran in Cairo. To my friends there now, engaged in this fine, fine battle, I say that now.

Shukran, shukran for inspiring the world, showing that another world might be possible.

Gary Leupp is a Professor of History at Tufts University, and author of numerous works on Japanese history. He can be reached at: gleupp@granite.tufts.edu. Read other articles by Gary.

This article was posted on Saturday, January 29th, 2011 at 8:00am and is filed under Egypt, Obama, Revolution.

Vision: 8 Reasons Global Capitalism Makes Our Lives Worse -- And How We Can Create a New Kind of Economy

2011-01-17T08:33:00.000-08:00

AlterNet.org

ENVIRONMENT

AlterNet / By Tara Lohan

Vision: 8 Reasons Global Capitalism Makes Our Lives Worse -- And How We Can Create a New Kind of Economy

A new film explores how globalization has resulted in crises of the economy, the environment and the human spirit -- and points the way to a new path.

January 16, 2011 |

To many of us, a society where no one goes hungry, where there is no unemployment, where people are happy and they have spacious homes and lots of leisure time seems like fantasy. But it's not a fantasy for Helena Norberg-Hodge -- she saw it firsthand in the tiny Himalayan region of Ladakh, a remote mountain community that borders Tibet.

During the course of 35 years there, she also saw what happened when Ladakh was suddenly thrown open to the outside world in the 1970s and subsidized roads brought subsidized goods to the region. The local economy was undermined, the cultural fabric was torn apart. Unemployment, pollution and divisiveness emerged for the first time.

"This was Ladakh's introduction to globalization," says Norberg-Hodge. The "story of Ladakh can shed light on the root causes of the crises now facing the planet."

The account of Ladakh's transformation opens the new film, The Economics of Happiness, created by Steven Gorelick, John Page and Norberg-Hodge, the founder and director of the International Society for Ecology and Culture. As Bill McKibben says early on in the film, according to a poll conducted every year since the end of World World II, happiness in the U.S. peaked in 1956. "It's been slowly downhill ever since," he says. "But in that time we've gotten immeasurably richer, we have three times as much stuff. Somehow it hasn't worked because that same affluence tends to undermine community."

Our consumer culture, driven by the engine of globalization, has resulted in an economic and environmental crisis -- and, the film's creators say, a crisis of the human spirit.

Through interviews with experts and activists like McKibben, Vandana Shiva, Zac Goldsmith, Richard Heinberg, David Korten, Keibo Oiwa, Samdhong Rinpoche, Balaji Shankar and Andrew Simms, among others, the film crosses six continents examining the pitfalls of globalization and how people are envisioning a more sustainable economy. It begins by exploring eight inconvenient truths about globalization.

1. Globalization makes us unhappy. More stuff and more wealth has meant less contact with community, rising levels of depression, jobs with longer hours, more time spent working at home and longer commutes. "Lonely people have never been happy people and globalization is creating a very lonely planet," says author and activist Vandana Shiva.

2. Globalization breeds insecurity. Corporations are raising our children and driving what they eat, buy, wear and what they care about. Identity that was once shaped by one's culture and language, molded by community leaders and family, is now filled by marketers. Across the world, sales of blue contact lenses are on the rise, along with products to lighten skin and hair as people try to fulfill a Western ideal and an emulation of American life.

3. Globalization wastes natural resources. Consumerism is threatening the planet, natural resources are stretched to the breaking point and yet we have an economic system that encourages us to consume more and more, says Norberg-Hodge. Consumer culture is increasingly urban and when rural people move to the city the food they used to grow themselves is now grown on industrial-sized chemical-intensive farms. Food must be trucked to cities, waste must be trucked out. Large dams are needed to provide water and huge centralized power plants must be fueled by coal and uranium mines.

4. Globalization accelerates climate change. Globalization's "success" is often attributed to efficiencies of scale, but mostly it is fueled by deregulation and hidden subsidies that make food from around the globe cost less than food from down the street. With efficiencies of scale, it's really the opposite, says British MP Zac Goldsmith, "Tuna caught off the east coast of America is flown to Japan, processed and flown back to America to be sold to consumers; English apples are flown to South Africa to be waxed, flown back to England to be sold."

Treaties like NAFTA promote international growth through economic trade, which sounds good on paper, except that you end up with countries importing and exporting nearly identical amounts of the same products -- which means we're needlessly shipping goods across the world that we are already producing at home.

5. Globalization destroys livelihoods. Pension funds are now at the mercy of speculation. In the Global South, small farmers are being displaced from their land and forced to move to urban areas where they become cheap labor for factories producing more goods.

6. Globalization increases conflict. In Ladakh, Buddhists and Muslims who lived side by side for 500 years without conflict turned on each other after globalization caused unemployment and stiff competition for new commodities. Around the world, competition for scarce resources and jobs has resulted in the demonization of differences that were once accepted.

7. Globalization is built on handouts to big business. "If there is one thing that political parties from the left to the right seem to agree on today, it is the power and value of the free market," says Goldberg. "But the irony is that the majority of really polluting things that happen today wouldn't exist in a genuinely free market -- nuclear power, for example, wouldn't exist without massive state support ... We're about as far away from a free market as it's possible to be."

Globalization has resulted in subsidies for some of the wealthiest multinationals as well as the deregulation of trade and finance. "It is basically a system that criminalizes the small producer and processor and deregulates the giant business," says Shiva.

8. Globalization is based on false accounting. Our current economic model is based on infinite growth on a finite planet, which is a recipe for disaster. Political leaders believe that more economic growth is the answer to all our problems -- bailouts to big banks, stimulus to make us spend more, carbon trading schemes -- but all these do is reinforce a system that is inherently broken.

Our way of measuring our worth is so twisted says Helena Norberg-Hodge, that when there is "an oil spill, the GDP goes up; when drinking water is so polluted we have to buy it in bottles, GDP goes up. War, cancer, epidemic illnesses -- all of these involve an exchange of money, so they end up on the positive side of the balance sheet."

A Different Path Forward

The first half of The Economics of Happiness provides a detailed reminder of why globalization has been a failure for the environment and for the economy. The second half of the film explores the movements that are providing us with an alternative. Instead of letting corporations dictate policy and regulation, instead of measuring the success of our lives by GDP, we can take a cue from countries like Bhutan. In 1972 the King of Bhutan initiated a measurement of Gross National Happiness and sought to embed that in his development policies.

Since that time we've also seen the advent of the Genuine Progress Indicator, which is based on "full cost accounting." How much does an item cost once you figure in the environmental and social metrics? The sticker price of what we pay for goods today is only part of the story. The GPI tells the whole story:

The things we measure and count -- quite literally -- tell us what we value as a society and determine the policy agendas of governments. The Genuine Progress Index (GPI) presents a better way to measure our societal progress and well being. The GPI assigns explicit value to environmental quality, population health, livelihood security, equity, free time, and educational attainment. It values unpaid voluntary and household work as well as paid work. It counts sickness, crime and pollution as costs not gains.

So how do we truly improve our standard of living -- including protecting our environment, building healthy communities, having a stable economy? Localize, the filmmakers say. We don't need to eliminate international trade entirely or be completely self-reliant, says Norberg-Hodge. But we do need to create "more accountable and sustainable communities by producing what we need closer to home."

This means that taxes, subsidies and regulations should not favor multinationals over local businesses. Studies have proven that more money spent at local businesses has meant more money staying in communities, which is a win-win. The benefits are similar with local food and energy systems.

Already there are examples of this in motion: Ecovillages, Transition Towns and Post Carbon Cities are working to rebuild economies with a focus on localization. The organization Via Campensina is "an international movement which coordinates peasant organizations of small- and middle-scale producers, agricultural workers, rural women, and indigenous communities from Asia, Africa, America, and Europe." It has members in 69 countries and represents millions.

Two new books build on many of the ideas in The Economics of Happiness. The Post Carbon Reader: Managing the 21st Century's Sustainability Crisis looks at the convergence of population, water, energy, food and climate threats. All That We Share: A Field Guide to the Commons shows how communities are reclaiming shared spaces and resources to better the economy and the environment.

Those books and the film bring home three essential points. First, we simply cannot continue to follow the trajectory we're on. Local economies are being decimated and the global economy hangs by a thread that will snap, likely in short time. Our planet cannot support our hunger for resources, our disregard for sustainability and our shortsightedness.

And second, there are alternatives to globalization and suicidal capitalism. As Asher Miller writes in The Post Carbon Reader:

Our starting point for future planning must be the realization that we are living today at a critical moment in the long arc of human history when numerous crises are not only converging simultaneously, they are interdependent and affect virtually every living thing on the planet. The sheer scale and complexity of the challenges at hand are unprecedented ... It may sound bombastic to say, but it's nevertheless the truth: The success or failure of the human experiment may well be judged by how we manage the next ten to twenty years.

Which brings up the third point: It's time to get going.

To find a screening near you, visit the Economics of Happiness.

Tara Lohan is a senior editor at AlterNet. You can follow her on Twitter @TaraLohan.

How to Avoid Polarizing Others

2011-01-16T12:02:00.000-08:00

Thomas Moore

Has been a monk, a musician, a professor, a psychotherapist, an author and a lecturer

Posted: November 5, 2010 08:40 AM

How to Avoid Polarizing Others

We live in a dangerously polarized country, and we could all avoid being coerced into divided camps. You can resist being polarized, but you have to be alert and creative. Sometimes, when simply watching a football game, I try not to identify with either team. It isn't easy, but it's a good everyday exercise in staying in the tension between two competing groups.

When we choose to polarize, friendship, community and intimacy suffer. It happens in school, when teachers treat their students like they are on the other side of a fence; in marriages, when partners fail to work at their union; in medicine, when doctors and nurses forget that they, too, get sick and need help. And of course it happens in politics, when Democrats and Republicans fail to keep in mind their common objectives and treat each other as enemies.

Two elections ago I had an opportunity to address delegates at the Democratic convention. I urged them to resist the temptation to treat the opposition as the enemy. I recommended that they try to make connections rather than divisions, even if the other side shows no taste for such a lofty enterprise.

"It's difficult to find common ground," they complained.

"It's impossible most of the time," I said.

Maybe common ground isn't the best means of moving past bitter divisiveness. Maybe we should instead focus on our common humanity. I doubt that in most polarized situations common ground will solve the problem. It's too intellectual. It might be better to just see each other as human beings. Former U.N. ambassador and mayor of Atlanta, Andrew Young, once told me he often made progress in getting past sharp divisions by playing tennis with the opposition. I understand that it's one thing to feel camaraderie on the tennis court or golf course and another to join hands in politics, but the principle seems sound. Connect somehow, even obliquely, at a basic human level.

There's another way to deal with polarization: not falling into it unconsciously. It may help to have forged a philosophy of life for yourself, in which you decide to try to avoid divisiveness when it creeps into your life. Albert Schweitzer said that he had a three-word philosophy: "Reverence for life." He applied it whenever a situation called for it. You may need a slogan, too: "Division no, connection yes."

Writing this post will probably help me keep the philosophy of non-polarization in mind.
Americans, politicians included, talk frequently about ideals of unity and then indulge in polarization. So a simple personal slogan or even a developed philosophy of life won't work unless you take it seriously and live by it. It has to become a habit, so automatic that when divisiveness appears, your philosophy kicks in.

I'm not talking about agreeing with the opposition or losing or weakening important values that you hold dear. Polarization is usually more about feelings and issues that lie deeper than the matters being discussed. Republicans may keep their distance from Democrats because they see them as heathens. In turn, Democrats may imagine Republicans as aristocrats.

The polarizing may go deeper. One side sees any opposition as an attack on everything they believe and consider holy. A political party often operates like a religion: it's all a matter of belief, faith, dogma and morality. Of course, politics isn't, by nature, a religion, and yet a political party often acts and talks like a religious group defending its tradition.

A few years ago I came across a Christian fundamentalist professor who had attacked one of my books. I wrote to him and tried to dissolve the polarization, at least a little. I failed. Another time, I found myself being interviewed on the radio by a preacher who thought I was a fundamentalist. At first there was some tension, but I kept my philosophy of non-polarization very much in mind. That, combined with this man's basic good will, left us at the end looking forward to another conversation. A rare victory. But after the radio show I had to take a shower because I had sweat so much in the strenuous effort not to polarize.

A kingdom divided against itself cannot survive. I worry about America more because of its inner tensions than those with the outside world. It appears to me that each of us has to try hard not to polarize in our everyday interactions. If we stop doing it, maybe the politicians will catch the drift.

Most of the time in sports I want to root for my favorite team. But it's a good exercise once in a while to try to find joy in either team winning. That kind of extended, double vision comes in handy when someone comes along thinking and talking in ways that seem crazy to you. Listen to yourself. Your ideas are probably just as nuts and just as worth defending.

"It's difficult to find common ground," they complained.

"It's impossible most of the time," I said.

Third Way Aims for Front and Center

2011-01-13T11:03:00.000-08:00

POLITICO

Third Way aims for front and center

Third Way looks to play a central role as the Democratic Party comes to a 'major fork in the road.'

By JAMES HOHMANN | 11/2/10 4:07 AM EDT

The long-simmering battle between moderates and liberals for the soul of the Democratic Party is about to explode.

That presents a golden opportunity for Third Way, a five-year-old think tank that remains largely unknown outside the Beltway.

The group has spent months preparing to capitalize on this moment and take a more central role in the party.

And it’s coming down squarely on the side of centrism — and planning to vigorously challenge the left.

“The party is about to come to a major fork in the road,” said Jonathan Cowan, Third Way’s president. “A left turn at this juncture is a turn toward permanent minority status.”

The group’s efforts reflect the underlying tension President Barack Obama faces as he heads into the last two years of his first term. Liberals say there’s an enthusiasm gap with Republicans because Democrats are disappointed that the party was too timid about the size of the stimulus, compromised on the public option in health care reform and ran away from its accomplishments. Those closer to the middle say a more moderate face for the party is the only hope to win back independents, reelect Obama and retake the House in 2012, assuming it is lost Tuesday.

Cowan’s group wants to play a role in 2011 akin to the Democratic Leadership Council’s in 1995. Then, the last time Democrats lost the House, President Bill Clinton’s willingness to “triangulate” between traditional Democratic orthodoxies and the Republicans who controlled Congress led to welfare reform, community policing and a slew of smaller accomplishments that helped propel Clinton to a second term.

Third Way, with a staff of 35 and a $7 million budget for next year, has filled a vacuum left by the DLC’s loss of influence in the wake of founder Al From’s 2009 departure.

Third Way remains small compared with the Center for American Progress, the left’s most powerful think tank and the one most plugged into the White House. For context, CAP gets around $30 million a year in revenue and employs nearly 300 people.

Capitalizing on Hill turnover that will make high-level talent available, Third Way plans to hire several new employees.

The group is commissioning a post-election poll, to go into the field Wednesday, which will explore why people who voted to elect Obama president in 2008 either backed Republicans or stayed home Tuesday. A sample of 500 “flippers” and 500 “droppers” will be questioned about what they want to see from Democrats going forward. The results are due next week.

In addition, the group’s fellows and policy advisers will start rolling out memos and studies that offer a framework for how Democrats could reach common ground with Republicans. The economic team is developing a proposal that it thinks could win bipartisan support. It includes tort reform and incentives for research and development. And Cowan’s writing a paper with a colleague about “the danger of left-wing economic populism.”

With cap and trade effectively dead in a Republican House, Third Way will release a “Plan B” for energy reform. On Dec. 7, it’s hosting a summit on nuclear energy — one of the group’s big causes — with Energy Secretary Steven Chu and Obama energy czar Carol Browner.

It will come out with a paper on the need for changes that could save Social Security, which it presents as a direct challenge to economist Paul Krugman, a New York Times columnist who has said Obama didn’t go far enough with the stimulus and other programs.

And the group will advocate for education reform that focuses on middle-class, not low-income, schools. Third Way is also pushing for more trade agreements and a new approach to immigration.

The biggest challenge facing the ambitious group: It’s not completely clear there will be an appetite from the left or the right for what it has to offer.

Republicans will probably be unwilling to cooperate on most of the group’s issues. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said in a recent interview that he sees his most important job as getting a Republican elected president in 2012. Would-be Speaker John Boehner must manage tea partiers who want bold moves, not compromise.

Third Way quickly built up its influence by working with moderate congressional Democrats. Two other cofounders, Jim Kessler and Matt Bennett, became close with several freshman and sophomore Democrats by offering messaging advice on everything from health care to national security at regular briefings organized by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

In addition, many of Third Way’s most sympathetic Democratic allies now appear likely to lose. Of 255 House Democrats, 102 are members of the Blue Dog or New Democrat caucuses. Only 38 of those running for reelection face non-competitive reelections, according to the latest issue of a monthly newsletter analyst Bill Schneider writes for Third Way (where he is a resident scholar).

Because of the reddish districts the new members represent, the moderates will suffer the heaviest losses. This means the Democratic caucus in the next Congress will be more liberal on the whole and thus potentially more leery of a third-way philosophy.

“A big tent is great but not just for the sake of having a big tent,” said Ari Berman, a contributing writer for The Nation and the author of “Herding Donkeys: The Fight to Rebuild the Democratic Party and Reshape American Politics.”

“What I don’t understand is: why is Third Way expending all this energy justifying people who are consistently voting against Obama’s agenda?” he said in an interview. “It seems to me like they’re using Democratic defeats as an excuse to once again blame the liberals, which happens pretty much every single time the Democrats lose.”

Bennett, the group’s vice president, rejects the criticism. “These two years do not have to be wasted, regardless of who is running Congress,” he said. “But if we follow the advice of folks who are counseling a return to the bunkers, then absolutely nothing will happen.”

The Third hird Way is helped by a few key relationships. Kessler was a longtime senior aide to Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who could become majority leader if Harry Reid loses in Nevada. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, who could become minority leader if Republicans take over the House, is one of many strong sympathizers. The senators they helped in 2006 and 2008 will still be around.

“We’re going to have to look at what we did wrong and figure out where we lost our way with independents and swing voters,” said an aide to a senior congressional Democrat. “Third Way — that is their wheelhouse.”

Regardless, 2011 is not 1995. Obama tacking to the center will be much easier said than done. Clinton had been chairman of the DLC before he ran for president. Third Way embraces Obama as one of them, a pragmatist eager to accomplish big things but willing to compromise to get results, but he won his party’s nomination largely by transcending the “new” vs. “old” Democrat debate. And he has no personal ties to the group.

Third Way’s leaders argue that the president and congressional leaders recognize moderates matter more than ever.“I believe Barack Obama is a believer in the art of the possible,” said Bennett, who served as the Clinton administration’s principal liaison to governors. “That is how he has lived his life. He believes not in compromising principle but in finding solutions even when the politics of a situation are changed.”

To be sure, there are other groups advocating center-left views. The Progressive Policy Institute, which spun off from the DLC, remains in the research and education field under Will Marshall. Simon Rosenberg, a former DLC field director, runs the NDN, previously known as the New Democrat Network.

While it’s not what it once was, the DLC hasn’t disappeared. They won’t disclose their budget, except to say they employ 15 people (including part-time fellows). Bruce Reed, who succeeded From as leader of the DLC before taking a leave of absence to become executive director of the president’s fiscal commission, will return in December.

“They have talented people, there’s no doubt about that, but I don’t think there’s a replacement really for original policy work,” DLC President Ed Gresser said of Third Way. “I think they do some, but what I see of their work is sort of political memos, ‘Here’s how you should talk about such and such an issue.’ Those are valuable, but they’re not setting an agenda.”

Brookings’ William Galston and Harvard’s Elaine Kamarck wrote the seminal studies that helped launch the DLC. Third Way is now paying the duo to complete a study about what moderates believe and what they want from Democrats. Both praise Third Way for filling a niche that’s otherwise unfilled.

“There’s no question,” Galston said, “about the fact that the DLC is not what it was and that Third Way, as sort of an operational entity, has filled some of the void opened by the downsizing of the DLC and its shift to a more modest and less visible mission.”

Swearing off the Rhetoric of Violence

2011-01-09T07:24:00.000-08:00

Swearing off the rhetoric of violence

Can't we agree to stop urging supporters to "reload" or pursue "Second Amendment remedies?"

MSNBC

Rep. Gabrielle Giffords

We won't know for a while exactly why the gunman identified as Jared Lee Loughner, 22, shot 18 people, including Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, and we may never know why. From the shards of maybe-evidence he left behind – to my knowledge it's unconfirmed whether any of the MySpace, YouTube or Facebook posts being cited were created by the suspect – people can find reason to call him a right-wing nut-job or a left-wing fanatic. He supposedly railed against the government like Tea Partiers do, he was a gold-fanatic like Glenn Beck, but he also listed the Communist Manifesto as a favorite book on his alleged MySpace page.

But while we wait to learn the motivation behind Saturday's shooting, which killed six, including federal Judge John Roll, nine-year old Christine Taylor Green and Gabe Zimmerman, Giffords' community outreach director, is it really controversial to suggest that the overheated anti-government rhetoric of the last two years, with its often violent imagery, ought to be toned down? Really?

Sadly, to my knowledge, no conservative leader has yet called for dialing back the rage on the right in the wake of the Giffords shooting. Sarah Palin sent condolences to Giffords' family, but said nothing about her unconscionable SarahPAC map putting 20 House members, including Giffords, in actual crosshairs for supporting healthcare reform, or her infamous Tweet telling conservatives "don't retreat, reload." Giffords' 2010 Tea Party challenger, Jesse Kelly, hasn't apologized for inviting supporters to "shoot a fully automatic M16" to "get on target for victory" and "remove Gabrielle Giffords from office." Nevada GOP Senate candidate Sharron Angle hasn't yet recanted her statement about the need to pursue "Second Amendment remedies" if political change lags behind the Tea Party's dreams.

Although there's no evidence Tea Party rhetoric had anything to do with Giffords' shooting, it can be no surprise that her father, when asked if his daughter had enemies, told the New York Post tearfully, "Yeah, the whole Tea Party."

Maybe in the days to come conservatives will listen to Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, who denounced "the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about the government" at a Saturday night press conference. The 50-year law enforcement veteran, who courageously bucked his state's anti-immigrant racial profiling law last year, declared that "the bigotry that goes on in this country is outrageous, and unfortunately…Arizona has become the mecca for prejudice and bigotry." Dupnik noted that Giffords had a meeting disrupted in 2009 when "someone dropped a weapon out of their pants," that a door was shattered at her headquarters after she voted for healthcare reform last March, and also revealed that "a suspicious package" had been delivered to her Tuscon office and is still being investigated.

There's no evidence tying Loughner to any of the right-wing rhetoric used against Giffords, but it would be crazy not to notice that such rhetoric has already claimed victims, and will almost certainly continue to. I'll never apologize for suggesting that Bill O'Reilly's crusade against Dr. George Tiller – and his dozens of segments labeling him "Tiller the Babykiller" – might have created the context in which Tiller was murdered in May 2009. It shocked me watching cable news all day Saturday that almost no one talked about anti-tax nut Joe Stack flying his plane into an Austin IRS building as the Tea Party's anti-tax crusade took off, or Glenn Beck fan Byron Williams driving into San Francisco locked and loaded to shoot up the obscure left-wing Tides Foundation, which Beck had repeatedly railed against on Fox.

Rebecca Traister wrote a moving tribute to Giffords today, noting that the Blue Dog Democrat was to her right politically (and to mine as well) but that her vote for healthcare reform, in a conservative district, took real courage. That courage was on display Saturday, while Giffords was fighting for her life in a Tuscon hospital, as MSNBC repeatedly replayed an interview with Giffords last March, discussing the attacks on her office as well as Sarah Palin's "crosshairs" ad. If you haven't seen it, you should. It is devastating. Chuck Todd and Savannah Guthrie go out of their way to defend Palin and the GOP from any attempt to link their rhetoric with the attacks on Giffords and other Democrats, "In fairness, campaign rhetoric and war rhetoric has been interchangeable for years," Todd insisted, and Giffords graciously acknowledged "extremes on both sides, frankly, not just on the Republican side."

But she delivered a poignant patriotic defense of American democracy, which is "a beacon to the world," she told Todd, "because we effect change at the ballot box, not because of these outbursts of violence." She had the courage to name Palin: "We're on Sarah Palin's targeted list, but the thing is that the way that she has it depicted has the crosshairs of a gun sight over our district, and when people do that, they've gotta realize there are consequences to that action."

We have no idea why Loughner allegedly tried to kill Giffords Saturday. But the fact that a well-liked, centrist, pro-gun rights Democrat like Giffords faced threats and attacks for her healthcare vote, or that she was targeted with violent imagery by the 2008 Republican nominee for vice president as well as her 2010 GOP opponent, ought to make conservatives pause. More than pause, it ought to make them denounce those in their ranks who are using extremist, eliminationist rhetoric. Let's hope it does in the days to come. In the meantime, our prayers and good wishes are with Gabrielle Giffords and her family and all the other victims of Saturday's cruelty.

Joan Walsh is Salon's editor at large. More: Joan Walsh

Vision: 8 Ways We're Making America a Better Place -- in Spite of the Disasters Coming out of Washington

2011-01-02T20:47:00.000-08:00

AlterNet.org

VISION

Hightower Lowdown / By Jim Hightower

Vision: 8 Ways We're Making America a Better Place -- in Spite of the Disasters Coming out of Washington

We can have the kind of economy, government, environment, and country we want, if we keep pushing, organizing, building, and otherwise doing the work of democracy.

January 1, 2011 |

Joe Ely, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, and Butch Hancock form the Flatlanders, a powerhouse trio of Texas singer/ songwriters now based in Austin. But each of them was raised on the West Texas flatlands (hence the group's name) around Lubbock. They were shaped, both musically and personally, by the full 'Lubbock experience,' which includes a few cultural oddities. Several years ago, Butch explained one of these on a national radio talk show that Susan DeMarco and I hosted.

He pointed out that growing up in the straight-laced, God-fearing Protestant churches of that region could be very confusing for hormone-driven teenagers like him. "They told us that sex was the most vulgar, nastiest thing on earth," Butch said. "And that we should save it for someone we loved."

Politics is not sex, but these days it can be almost as confusing. Obama and the Democrats are in power, but they've been unwilling to assert it with any boldness on the big issues America faces. Instead, they keep capitulating to petulant, recalcitrant Republicans in the vain hope of engaging these pious, right-wing fundamentalists in some sort of bipartisan Kumbaya.

Meanwhile, the GOP's new wave of neo-Neanderthal leaders (Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Glenn Beck, the Koch Brothers, Jim DeMint, the entire menagerie of Fox TV's nattering nabobs, et al.) have plunged the party of Lincoln (and of Reagan, for that matter) headlong into the abyss of political absurdity. EXAMPLE: Obama, they insist, is not merely the centrist, establishment liberal that he has proven to be, but an Islamo-socialist-fascist-marxist Kenyan, a spawn of Satan.

Seriously. Heed the babbling of Newt, who was always strange, but has now turned scary, having loosened all of the nuts and bolts on his sanity to free his inner lunatic. In September, the former leader of the House of Representatives of the United States of America embraced the nutty 'birthers' to declare that Obama exhibits "Kenyan anti-colonial behavior," and that the President's long-dead African father is channeling revolutionary thoughts through his son to rule America from beyond. Remember Newt is a guy who actually thinks he can be elected your president in 2012.

We live in strange times, do we not? Perhaps it's no cosmic coincidence that the balloting for November's congressional/gubernatorial elections began only 31 hours after Halloween.

But now it's the holidays, which raises the big question: is there anything political in 2010 for which we progressive/ populist Americans should be thankful?

Happily, yes! As I've rambled from town to town this year (crisscrossing from Chico to New York City, Cape May to Santa Fe, Pittsburgh to Princeton, Fort Worth to Fort Collins, Buffalo to San Francisco, Portland to Portland, the Wisconsin Dells to my old home place of Denison... and points beyond), I've found that while people are vastly disappointed by the meekness of the Democrats and totally dismayed by the willful weirdness of Republicans, neither has deterred them from pushing on with the groundwork that still must be done to revitalize our country's democracy.

However, rather than looking to Washington for the changes America needs, progressives are now uniting locally, focusing on direct actions they can take in their cities and states. As a young woman in Colorado Springs put it: "We voted for change, but we see that the money monsters in Washington eat change for breakfast. We don't have the power to fix that, not yet, but that doesn't mean we're powerless. We can make a difference where we live, gain more strength, and show the way. A national movement has to come from down here."

She's right. First of all, don't forget that it was the grassroots organizing, energy, and enthusiasm of progressives (especially young people) that created the Obama candidacy and presidency, so the activist base is far more solid and extensive than the corporate and political elite (forgive the redundancy there) want us to realize.

More importantly, local activism and success is intensifying as fast as faith in national politics is dissipating. The media mavens don't cover it (being far too busy touting the 11 percent of the public who say they identify with the corporate-backed teabag groups), but progressives are forging surprising coalitions, not only in San Francisco and New York City, but also in such places as Iowa, Houston, Syracuse, central Missouri, New Haven, Ohio, and Rhode Island. Here, outside the country's media centers, people are producing new solutions and structural changes that add up to real hope for a progressive America. On issues big and small, there's much we can be thankful for... and build on.

Wall Street

Rarely does the plutocracy reveal itself to the hoi polloi as crudely and flagrantly as it has done with Washington's ongoing bailout and shameless coddling of the Wall Street greedheads who wrecked our economy. While Republicans and Democrats alike have loudly decried the greed, they continue to reward the narcissistic barons and increase the power of the monopolistic financial giants.

Obama Democrats passed a meek reform bill that allows top bankers to keep grabbing obscene bonuses for continuing to run their banks as casinos, while letting the banks gain a tighter grip on our wallets and get away with no requirement to invest in productive enterprises, middle-class jobs, and housing. Worse than meek, Republicans are mendacious, having shamefully and openly tried to kill even the modest reforms offered by Democrats, in exchange for getting millions of dollars in campaign cash from Wall Streeters. Then comes the Tea Party, which initially rose from the public's red-faced outrage at banker greed, but got co-opted by GOP operatives. Far from going after Wall Street, the party has largely put its electioneering clout behind a host of congressional candidates taking banker money (often indirectly) and wailing about "big government" efforts to "punish" rich bankers.

Is there anyone who'll push honestly for justice and real change on Wall Street? Yes--the people themselves! Here are a few important grassroots efforts underway and gaining oomph:

1. National People's Action.

This is a growing network of more than two dozen community organizations across the country (workers, farmers, small business owners, retirees, students, clergy, homeowners, et al.) focused squarely on the unchecked greed of big banks. They have successfully confronted Federal Reserve honcho Ben Bernanke and bankers who secretively finance and profit from payday lenders (who charge 400 percent interest for 30-day loans). Deploying more than 200 organizers, their Showdown In America.org campaign seeks to break up the too-big-to-fail banks, decentralize Wall Street power into small and medium-sized banks, impose a moratorium on home foreclosures, and recover some $140 billion of bonus money being siphoned off this year by banker elites.

2. Financial Speculation Tax.

Having poured trillions of the public's dollars into the rescue of Wall Street, the Republicans, 'Blue Dog' Democrats, and Tea Party leaders insist that there is no money left for the bold job creation initiatives (such as a nationwide program for green jobs and for repairing and extending our country's essential infrastructure) that America and the middle class desperately need. Disingenuously, they ask: where would you get the money?

Easy. Get it from where it went--the pockets of Wall Street's high-rolling, casino-style speculators. They do nothing but game the system for their own fast-buck profits, dumping trillions into rapid-fire computer trades involving such nonsensical, unproductive schemes as credit default swaps. Put even a tiny tax on these gaming transactions (ranging from 0.02 to 0.25 percent), and America could recoup over $100 billion a year for job creation and deficit reduction.

After all, we tax Las Vegas' casinos, why not Wall Street's? This is nothing new--for 50 years, up until 1966, the US had a transaction tax in place, and it was doubled in 1932 to help recovery efforts in the Great Depression. Also, England has a very successful one working for it today.

Such groups as the AFL-CIO and SEIU are mounting a major organizing campaign behind the FST. Called 'Make Wall Street Pay,' the effort already has congressional backing, and is gaining strength. As usual, the media isn't covering this, but a growing number of activist groups are joining the call for this policy of common sense fairness. For more information and action suggestions, check out the 'Action Center' at www.banksterusa.org.

3. Elizabeth Warren.

Grassroots clout has already produced one bright spot in Washington's dim response to Wall Street greed. The Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection survived a ferocious onslaught of banker lobbying to be included in the otherwise lukewarm reform bill.

This idea came from a levelheaded, plainspoken, populist-minded bankruptcy expert, Elizabeth Warren. A Harvard professor of law, Warren also is a graduate of the University of Hard Knocks, having seen her own hardscrabble Oklahoma family endure bankruptcy. "I learned early on what debt means, how vulnerable it makes people."

By rallying outsider progressive forces to the cause, Warren became a major inside player, pushing relentlessly to get this important consumer position included in the final law. Having the position is nice, but who would fill it? Bankers wanted one of their own, but consumer and community groups had sprung into action even before the bill passed, organizing tens of thousands of regular folks to demand that Obama name Warren herself to head the agency. Despite furious pressure from bank lobbyists, the people were clear: the President had to give us this one. Warren accepted, but--showing the savvy she'll need to be effective--she agreed to be named special adviser to the President in charge of overseeing the new agency. This avoided the long, brutal, and iffy confirmation fight that the financial giants would've mounted to kill an outright nomination. As a result, she'll probably have a shorter tenure, but she starts right away, allowing her (and us) to fend off the lobbyists and give the fledgling bureau a strong, consumer-oriented beginning.

4. Move Your Money.

For your own private rebellion against the financial finaglers and manipulators, withdraw your money from them--and tell them why you're doing it. Viable options for stashing and investing your funds abound, including credit unions, community banks, and socially responsible credit card and investment firms. MoveYourMoney.info is a spreading movement that literally helps you move, allowing you to escape the tainted tentacles of Wall Street. In addition to your personal funds, look into shifting the accounts of your business, union, church, co-op, neighborhood association, and other organizations into financial institutions closer to home... and much closer to your values. After all, it's your money --why let the bastards have it? Talk it up with friends and family, write letters to the editor, send emails, post blogs, and find other ways to expand the movement.

5. Dog Poop.

It's worth recalling that even the smallest dog can lift its leg on the tallest building. Indeed, when trying to change the world, even small steps can make a big difference, so turn your creative impulses loose.

Take the 'Park Spark,' built by Matthew Mazzotta, an artist in Cambridge, Massachusetts. At his local dog park, he thought about all that canine excrement being bagged and tossed into trashcans. A bulb lit in Mazzotta's head: why not convert the waste into poop power?

He put two 500-gallon oil tanks, painted a cheery yellow, in the park where people can deposit their pooch's poop. Microbes in one tank digest the waste and send methane gas into the second tank, which fuels a gaslight lantern to illuminate the park. Mazzotta's functional sculpture tidies up, provides free renewable energy, and helps us think differently about what's in front of us, including seeing waste as a resource.

6. De-Paving.

Another small step with a big progressive payoff is being taken in such cities as Boston, Davenport, Houston, Portland, and Seattle. People in these places have come together to address the seemingly pedestrian matter of pavement (this is but one of many freewheeling ideas for local activism spun from the fertile mind of enviro-maestro Bill McKibben, who has prompted thousands of local folks to form 'work parties' that come up with hands-on solutions for their communities--check it out at www.350.org). In this case, the problem is that cities simply have too much of their land locked under pavement, which causes flooding, toxic runoff, heat, and an inhuman disconnect from nature. Thus, the rise of a de-paving movement.

Somerville, Massachusetts, for example, has 77 percent of its land coated in asphalt, concrete, and other impervious slabs. So teams are volunteering to free the land, bit by bit, reclaiming green spaces in yards, school grounds, traffic medians, etc... It's hard, hard work, and it's slow, but the payoff is tangible as gardens, parks, and life emerge. A similar group in Oregon has put up a website (Depave.org) that offers planning tips, a list of tools, and step-by-step instructions for others who want to uncover the joy of the green earth. As one de-paver says, "There's some-thing really empowering about literally taking things into your own hands and restoring your community."

Buying Our Democracy

This will sound loopy, but I think we must also be grateful to the Koch brothers this year. Yes, the billionaire, laissez-faire extremists whom we outed in the February Lowdown, detailing dozens of front groups (including the Tea Party) that Charles and David funded and orchestrated in a secretive, long-term effort to impose corporate rule over our nation.

We owe them a huge "thank you," because their political excesses and ideological overreach have finally shredded the cloak of secrecy around these front groups. Now, even such establishment media outlets as The New Yorker are covering the Kochs (see Jane Mayer's extensive, well-written story in the August 30 issue). The brothers are turning into the bobblehead dolls of the emerging plutocracy. Thanks to these free-spending zealots, the public is beginning to see that there really is a vast right-wing conspiracy to undermine public supremacy over corporate power.

The Federalist Society, Cato Institute, Heritage Foundation, and Mercatus Center are just a few of the brothers' creations that for years have tried to remake the judiciary into a governmental monkey wrench to undo our people's democratic authority. In January, this perfidious effort culminated in the constitutional coup that five Supreme Court corporatists pulled off with their decree in the hoked-up 'Citizens United' case (Lowdown, March 2010). As you'd expect, congressional Republicans applauded the coup, and, while Obama and the Democrats have merely complained about this raw power grab, they've essentially accepted it as a done deal. That would be that--except for one thing: you. Ordinary people, who usually pay little attention to arcane court decisions, grasped the import of this one from the moment it was issued, and 80 percent oppose it (including 76 percent of Republicans). This has fueled two important, though little reported, uprisings across the country:

7. Amend the Constitution.

Amending is not easy to do, though it's hardly impossible (twelve amendments were added in the past century), and it is the definitive way to halt the Court's enthronement of corporate money. Also, the very attempt to amend can be a big positive, for the process educates and enlists people in a historic democratic cause that is worthy of them.

Several pro-amendment coalitions have come together to work on this important issue. FreeSpeechForPeople.org includes Public Citizen, Voter Action, the Center for Corporate Policy, and the American Independent Business Alliance. The MovetoAmend.org coalition includes such groups as the Program on Corporations and Law in Democracy (POCLAD), the Alliance for Democracy, Family Farm Defenders, Reclaim Democracy, the National Lawyers Guild, the Center for Media and Democracy, and the Liberty Tree Foundation. The coalitions press for a broader approach that would eliminate the fiction of 'corporate personhood,' explicitly stating that only humans are persons with constitutional rights. MoveOn.org, Common Cause, People for the American Way, and other groups are also working on this issue.

8. Clean Elections.

Long overdue, this would bring the public financing alternative (which a growing number of states and cities have successfully implemented) to all Congressional elections. Maine, North Carolina, Arizona, and New Mexico are among the pioneers of this system, which disarms the corrupt, pay-to-play lobbyists by giving candidates the ability to forego the corporate campaign funds that influence peddlers dole out in exchange for legislative favors. This is a game-changing, structural reform that works, which is why it's getting vehement opposition from Republicans and only lip service from the Obamacans.

Despite this, the idea is on the move. Thanks to a grassroots coalition organized through FixCongressFirst.org and to a national network of clean election experts and organizers called PublicCampaign.org, the Fair Elections Now Act is moving through Congress. It has over 25 co-sponsors in the Senate and 160 co-sponsors in the House. The bill made it out of a House committee last month.

Shine Where You Are

The message here is simple: we can have the kind of economy, government, environment, and country we want... IF we keep pushing, organizing, building, and otherwise doing the work of democracy. Producing change we really can believe in is up to us--not to Obama or the Democratic Party. They are not the progressive movement, we are.

It's never easy to confront the corporate order, to challenge the moneyed powers. As Henrik Ibsen instructed us long ago: "Never wear your best trousers when you go out to fight for freedom and truth."

But fight we must, for freedom, truth, justice, and democracy don't just happen. We The People have to produce them. The good news is that even when the national political scene momentarily darkens, we can be thankful for the thousands of candles, torches, and other lights beaming with such promise all across the country, lit by people like you. In fact, you're probably already one of those hopeful beams, so we're thankful for you, too. If not, become one, and join with others to keep America's grassroots shining bright.

Jim Hightower is a national radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and author of the new book, "Swim Against the Current: Even a Dead Fish Can Go With the Flow." (Wiley, March 2008) He publishes the monthly "Hightower Lowdown," co-edited by Phillip Frazer.

Solution: End the Insurance Gap for People With Preexisting Conditions

2011-01-02T20:36:00.000-08:00

Solution: End the Insurance Gap for People With Preexisting Conditions

Wednesday 29 December 2010

by: Dina Rasor, t r u t h o u t | Solution

(Photo: takomabibelot; Edited: Jared Rodriguez / t r u t h o u t)

In this Solution, Dina Rasor takes on a little-understood but truly draconian provision in the massive health care reform bill. The provision, requiring the most sick and most vulnerable to forgo any medical insurance coverage for six months in order to qualify for government coverage, could have devastating economic and social consequences if it is not addressed.

-Matt Renner, Truthout

For the 12.6 million Americans who have preexisting health care issues and have been turned down by insurance companies in the past three-plus years.

The good news: The health care reform law's stopgap Preexisting Condition Insurance Plan (PCIP) program will get you to 2014, when discriminating by preexisting condition will be illegal.

The bad news: You have to put your health problems on hold for six months.

In 2014, it will be illegal to discriminate against any American who has a preexisting health condition when applying for health insurance. Since there are millions of Americans with preexisting conditions (over 57 million of us under the age of 65 - one in five of us), the health care law set up a high-risk pool in each state to allow those who have been turned down by insurance companies to buy insurance at a reasonable cost until the full enactment of the law in 2014. There were political fights about these pools - some people viewed them as a sneaky way to create a public option - and a recent Washington Post article suggests that there might not be enough money allocated to the programs. The states had a choice between creating the pools themselves or letting the government set them up, and the feds were pleased that they were able to set up all the pools within six months. But as of November 1, 2010, only a little more than 8,000 people have qualified for the pools.

One of the reasons that enrollment is so low could be that the law has a serious Achilles heel: You can't be accepted into the PCIP high-risk pool until you've gone six months without any health care.

What is the world is that all about? There were fights over this provision, which was inserted into the bill because some in the Senate Finance Committee were afraid that people with preexisting conditions who already had health insurance would dump it for the high-risk pool's potentially lower premiums. In the House version of the bill, people were concerned that employers or insurance companies would dump their employees or enrollees with preexisting conditions onto the government pool to lower their existing insurance costs. The House bill suggested that companies and insurance providers be fined for attempting that maneuver. The Senate, determined to prevent sick individuals from "gaming the system," decided that these people would have to pay the physical and financial price of not having health care for six months.

Here is how FOX news reported the dilemma while the bill was being debated:

"If you are a cancer patient and have cancer now, you can't wait six months to go into a plan because your condition can go from bad to death," said Stephen Finan, a policy expert with the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network. He called the waiting period in the Senate bill "unacceptable."

…"If you are somebody with cancer or a heart condition who needs immediate coverage and immediate treatment, that's not very helpful," said Karen Pollitz, a Georgetown University health policy professor.

Senate Finance staffers say the restriction is meant to prevent people switching from more expensive coverage to take advantage of government assistance.

But the House health care bill unveiled last week by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., doesn't include a waiting period. Instead, it would require insurance plans who "dump" seriously ill patients to repay the federal pool. "The House provision will provide immediate relief for people with high-risk conditions who have no alternative for coverage," said Finan.

The Senate version won. Now we are stuck with an untenable situation for potentially millions of sick Americans: no health care for six months.

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For those who have a chronic or potentially fatal disease, who are just one job loss away from no health care, this is a scary situation. Having a preexisting condition can be viewed as a civil rights issue, because most of us who have one have no control over it, just as we don't have control over whether we are black, white, Hispanic or Asian, or whether we are male or female.

During the health care debate, Jonathan Alter of Newsweek, a cancer survivor himself, put it this way:

The core principle behind health-care reform is - or should be - a combination of Social Security insurance and civil rights. Passage would end the shameful era in our nation's history when we discriminated against people for no other reason than that they were sick. A decade from now, we will look back in wonder that we once lived in a country where half of all personal bankruptcies were caused by illness, where Americans lacked the basic security of knowing that if they lost their jobs they wouldn't have to sell the house to pay for the medical treatments to keep them alive. We'll look back in wonder - that is, if we pass the bill.

Because of the provision requiring six months without health insurance, this discrimination against people with illness will continue another three years.

Beyond the personal dilemmas faced by people with preexisting conditions, this provision will produce serious unintended consequences that will weigh on our economy and American society as a whole. If these individuals cannot get insurance for six months, they can try to pay for the treatment themselves, avoid any treatment and risk deeper illness or even death, bankrupt themselves and their loved ones in order to afford the expensive health care that can keep them alive and functioning, use their mortgage money to pay for treatment and lose their homes or, if all else fails, go to the emergency room and put the high cost of their fight for life and health onto the people who do have health insurance - and we'll all pay higher premiums.

During those six months, these individuals could become too sick to work. They may never return to work or pay taxes again, leaving them on the unemployment and disability rolls, or they may go bankrupt or have foreclosed homes: three problems that we know are already bedeviling our economy. These are very real possibilities, because an astounding 62 percent of bankruptcies and 23 percent of foreclosures in this country are due to medical bills.

The six-months-without-insurance requirement was passed in such a way that the executive branch can't regulate it away. The Obama administration has adjusted the preexisting pools to give them more options and lower premiums, but the six-months rule must be changed legislatively.

In this new hyper-charged political atmosphere, in which many new Congress members will be trying to eliminate the health care law altogether, it may seem a tough undertaking to introduce legislation to eliminate this last vestige of discrimination against people who get sick. However, I think that there may be a way to convince a majority in each chamber that this is not only the compassionate thing to do, but also the fiscally responsible thing to do.

My solution to this problem would be for one or several members of Congress to ask the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) to use its best economic modeling to project the cost to the federal and state governments and to the economy if, during the six-month waiting period, a reasonable portion of at-risk Americans stop working and paying taxes due to increasing and untreated illness, go on unemployment insurance or disability, go bankrupt, lose their homes or visit the emergency room, with those costs draining the rest of the health care system. The model should project those costs over the three-year period until 2014 when the discrimination ends, and should also consider that many baby boomers are reaching the age when a majority of them will have a preexisting condition, which may be as simple as high blood pressure or as deadly as treatable cancer that is allowed to progress to stage four.

In a Congress that promises to be consumed with cost scrutiny rather than compassion, I believe that this study would show that the cost to the government and the economy far outweighs the cost of lifting the rule. Armed with facts of the expensive consequences of this provision, a new bill could be introduced that would lift the perilous and expensive six-month waiting period. The bill could incorporate safeguards from the original House bill to prevent employers or insurance plans from dumping individuals onto the government, by making the fine for such action higher than the cost of keeping individuals with preexisting conditions on the health plan.

While the cost of the 12 million people who have been rejected from health plans could make a severe impact on our wobbly economy, there is a larger group of people with preexisting conditions who are just one job loss away from making the costs of this six-month wait even more ominous. Consider this study from Families USA, as reported in Politico:

Approximately 57.2 million people under the age of 65 - more than one in five (22.4 percent) of America's non-elderly population - have a diagnosed preexisting condition that could lead to a denial of coverage in the individual health insurance market, according to a report released today by the consumer health organization Families USA.

Whether you point to the civil rights and humanitarian consequences of waiting six months for insurance or illustrate the fiscal costs to our government and our society, this rule needs to be eliminated legislatively for the next three years until we, as a nation, finally put an end to this discrimination against those who suffer. There is no hold button on disease.

Will there be courageous members of Congress who will step up to the task?

This work by Truthout is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

Jimmy Carter Inches Towards Stunning Accomplishment

2010-12-26T09:19:00.000-08:00

The Huffington Post

Jimmy Carter's Fight Against Guinea Worm Approaches Victory

First Posted: 12-25-10 04:56 PM | Updated: 12-26-10 12:03 PM

ABUYONG, Sudan — Lily pads and purple flowers dot one corner of the watering hole. Bright green algae covers another. Two women collect water in plastic jugs while a cattle herder bathes nearby.

Samuel Makoy is not interested in the bucolic scenery, though. He has an epidemic to quash.

Makoy points out to the women the fingernail-length worm-like creatures whose tails flick back and forth. Then a pond-side health lesson begins on a spaghetti-like worm that has haunted humans for centuries.

This fight against the guinea worm is a battle former U.S. President Jimmy Carter has waged for more than two decades in some of the poorest countries on earth. It is a battle he's almost won.

In the 1950s the 3-foot-long guinea worm ravaged the bodies of an estimated 50 million people, forcing victims through months of pain while the worm exited through a swollen blister on the leg, making it impossible for them to tend to cows or harvest crops. By 1986, the number dropped to 3.5 million. Last year only 3,190 cases were reported.

Today the worm is even closer to being wiped out. Fewer than 1,700 cases have been found this year in only four countries – Ethiopia, Ghana, Mali and Sudan, where more than 95 percent of the cases are. The worm's near-eradication is thanks in large part to the efforts of Carter and his foundation.

"I'm still determined to outlive the last guinea worm," Carter told The Associated Press in a phone interview. The 86-year-old set that goal in the 1980s, when his center helped eliminate guinea worm from Pakistan and other Asian nations.

The Carter Center has battled the worm for 24 years through education and the distribution of strainers that purify drinking water. It has helped erase guinea worm in more than 20 countries, and it believes the worm will follow smallpox – which was wiped out in the late 1970s – as the next disease to be eradicated from the human population.

But Carter staff members say ending the disease in Southern Sudan may prove the most difficult, because of how remote the remaining endemic areas are and the fact that the worm is found in semi-nomadic pastoralists who have little education and low sanitation standards.

Another complicating factor: Southern Sudan is scheduled to hold an independence referendum Jan. 9, a vote that is likely to lead to separation from the Khartoum-based north. The process has been peaceful so far, but any conflict that arises would derail eradication efforts.

As Carter put it: "War and good health are incompatible."

"There's no way we can go into an area that is at war," he said.

Although the Carter Center has been fighting guinea worm in Sudan since 1994, its efforts only made significant headway following the signing of a 2005 peace deal that ended two decades of north-south civil war.

The 20 years of fighting prevented the Carter Center and other authorities like the World Health Organization from conducting a comprehensive assessment of guinea worm here until 2006. Since then, eradication programs have reduced the number of yearly cases by about 90 percent.

The few remaining cases exist in off-the-map places. In many sites, the Carter Center is the only outside presence – no other international or Sudanese organizations have set up shop. Even a government presence is rare.

"We are in the most remote places because that's where the guinea worm is," said Doug Tuttle, 31, a technical adviser with the Carter Center who lives in a tent in the village of Abuyong. He oversees a staff of paid field officers and guinea worm volunteers whom he visits on his motorcycle or by walking anywhere from 30 minutes to two hours.

Reaching Abuyong requires abandoning the dirt road for a narrow path hacked through dense woods that was only forged after the Carter Center moved in. On a recent bone-rattling ride to Abuyong in the center's hulking, Russian-made truck, the vehicle forded flooded ravines as the occasional baboon scampered away.

At the picturesque pond outside Abuyong, Makoy explains to the women that if someone enters the pond with a guinea worm hanging out of a blister, the worm will dump larvae that will mate with the white worm-like creatures – copepods – and render the pond endemic with guinea worm.

Makoy doesn't use the words "endemic" or "copepods" with the women. His aim is to deliver a more pragmatic message: that filtering water is the key way to avoid contracting the disease.

"This work requires a passion inside you to keep you going day after day. Even if you must repeat the same things 100 times to the same person – education, education, education," said Makoy, who works for the Southern Sudanese government's Ministry of Health and has collaborated with the Carter Center since 1996.

Makoy hands both women mesh filters and explains how to use them. Then he repeats a message he has delivered thousands of times – that even one person with a hanging worm who enters a water source can trigger scores of cases in the next transmission season, roughly a year after someone drinks tainted water.

Change is difficult here. As someone who comes from a pastoralist tribe, Makoy knows that cattle herders on the move don't think twice about drinking from a brown puddle. In a place like Abuyong, where the few water hand pumps each cost thousands of dollars because water lies so deep under ground, accessing any water – infected or clean – is a blessing.

By January, the cattle camp next to Abuyong will have cleared out and the large pond dry. The 500-plus cattle and their keepers will move to the Nile River, where they will remain for the blisteringly hot dry season.

It won't be until May that some begin to notice red puffy blisters developing on their legs and feet, the sign of a soon-to-emerge guinea worm.

That's what 7-year-old Ajak Kuol Nyamchiek had to deal with a couple weeks ago as a worm exited her foot at a Carter Center clinic in Abuyong, where worm victims stay while the worms make their painful exits. Nurse John Lotiki slowly pulled the thin, white worm out of the girl as Ajak looked on with pain – and appreciation.

Pulling a worm out is a weekslong process of rolling out the worm by coiling it on a pinkie-length stick, about an inch (2.5 centimeters) a day. Aside from surgery, this centuries-old extraction method is the only way the guinea worm can be removed safely.

Carter, whose center began working in Sudan in 1987, said he knows the people appreciate the work his team does.

"They know we're working for freedom and they know we're working for peace," Carter said. "And they know that we are there to end the plight of diseases that they should not still have."

___

On the web:

The Carter Center: http://www.cartercenter.org/health/guinea_worm/mini_site/index.html

Humanists Find Meaning in Christmas

2010-12-24T17:20:00.000-08:00

Humanists Find Meaning in Christmas

John J. Dunphy

The following article is from the Secular Humanist Bulletin, Volume 22, Number 4 (Winter 2006/2007).

People often ask me if I, as a humanist, celebrate Christmas and, if so, why. After all, they point out, Christmas is the observance of the birth of Jesus, the Christian savior who is son of God. Don’t I, as a humanist agnostic, feel more than a bit awkward at this time of year?

They seem genuinely surprised, even astonished, when I reply that I feel perfectly comfortable joining in this annual celebration, since there was a Christmas long before there was a Christ.

Humanity has celebrated a winter solstice festival virtually since the dawn of our species. Our primitive forebears rejoiced that the menacing tide of increasingly short days and long nights had at last ceased and that the newly reborn sun would continue to grow more powerful with its promise of renewed life for all on earth. As civilization advanced, so did the nature and sophistication of winter- solstice festivals. The Romans, for example, observed the Saturnalia celebration from December 17 to December 24.

But how, I am frequently asked, did December 25 come to be recognized as the date of Jesus’ birth? Is it clearly designated as such in the Bible? Alas, the answer is no!

Luke writes that the savior was born in Bethlehem while shepherds were “keeping watch over their flock by night.” In that area of the world, this would have occurred from mid-March to mid-November. Shepherds would never have had their flocks out during the cold midwinter.

The earliest Christians did not observe Jesus’ nativity on December 25—or any other date, for that matter. They believed that the celebration of birthdays was a decidedly pagan, secular custom.

Mithra, the Persian god of light and embodiment of the sun, was said to have been born out of a rock on December 25, and that date was recognized as an important festival in the religion of Mithraism. In the third century, the Roman Emperor Aurelian, who had embraced that religion, established December 25 as Dies Invicti Solis—the Day of the Invincible Sun—and Mithraism became the official state religion of Rome. When Christianity supplanted Mithraism in the fourth century, pragmatic Christians chose to transform the Day of the Invincible Sun into the day of the son of God’s birth, since December 25 was so firmly entrenched in the popular mind as a festival date.

Through the centuries, any number of Christian sects, uncomfortable with the pagan origins of Christmas, have sought to ban the holiday. Puritans in early America fined anyone caught celebrating Christmas, and the holiday remained forbidden in much of New England until the mid-nineteenth century. Cromwell’s England actually tried to ban Christmas from that nation by an act of Parliament.

Regardless of its non-Christian genesis, Christmas will always be exalted as the birth of the Christian savior, a truth that brings us back to the matter of why a humanist such as myself has no reservations in joining with my Christian friends to celebrate Christmas. How do I find meaning in this Christian holy day?

For me, this beautiful season is a joyous paean to life and love, a time that reminds us that, beneath the veneer of race, religion, and nationality, we are all members of a universal family. I celebrate Christmas as the victory of light over darkness, not merely the defeat of the winter darkness by the waxing sun, but the triumph every person of good will feels when our innate warmth and compassion rout our tendencies toward selfishness and malice. I celebrate Christmas as the resurgence of that sacred flame that dwells within every woman and man. I celebrate Christmas not so much as the recognition of a divine child’s birth but as the recognition of a divine essence in all of us.

Not celebrate Christmas because I am a humanist? I celebrate it because I am a humanist.

John Dunphy is a writer and bookstore owner. His essay “A Religion for a New Age” was the basis for the Religious Right’s charge that secular humanism was invading public education. This essay was originally published in The (Alton, Illinois) Telegraph on December 24, 1995.

10 Most Hopeful Stories of 2010

2010-12-23T10:25:00.000-08:00

Published on Thursday, December 23, 2010 by YES! Magazine

10 Most Hopeful Stories of 2010

There was plenty of disappointment and hardship this year. But the year also brought opportunities for transformation.

by Sarah van Gelder

It was a tough year. The economy continued its so-called jobless recovery with Wall Street anticipating another year of record bonuses while most Americans struggle to get work and hold on to their homes. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continued, and spilled over into Pakistan and Yemen, and more American soldiers died by suicide than fighting in Afghanistan. And it was a year of big disasters, some of them indicators of the growing climate crisis.

World leaders, under the sway of powerful corporations and banks, have been unable to confront our most pressing challenges, and one crisis follows another.

Nonetheless, events from 2010 also contain the seeds of transformation. None of the following stories is enough on its own to change the momentum. But if we the people build and strengthen social movements, each of of these stories points to a piece of the solution.

1. Climate Crisis Response Takes a New Direction. After the failure of Copenhagen, Bolivia hosted a gathering of indigenous people, climate activists, and grassroots leaders from the global South—those left out of the UN-sponsored talks. Their solution to the climate crisis is based on a new recognition of the rights of Mother Earth. Gone are notions of trading the right to pollute (which gives a whole new meaning to the term "toxic assets"). Instead, life has rights, and we can learn ways to live a good life that doesn’t require degrading our home.

The official climate agreement that came out of Cancún was weak and disappointing, although it did represent a continued commitment to work to address the challenge. But the peoples' mobilizations, and the solutions born in Cochabamba, continue to energize thousands.

Meanwhile, Californians voted to uphold their ambitious climate law, despite millions spent by oil companies to rescind the measure in November's election. And cities—Seattle, for one—are moving ahead with their own plans to reduce, and even zero-out, their climate emissions.

2. Wikileaks Lifts the Veil. The release of secret documents by Wikileaks has lifted the veil on U.S. government actions around the world. While the insights themselves don't change anything, they do offer grist for a national dialogue on our role in the world—especially at a time when our federal budget crisis may require scaling back on our hundreds of foreign military bases, our protracted overseas wars, and our budget-busting weapons programs. Likewise, the traumas inflicted on civilian populations and on our own military are spurring fresh thinking. We now have data points for a bracing, reality-based conversation on the future of war—the kind of conversation that makes democracy a living reality.

3. Momentum is Building for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons. The ratification of the START Treaty is an important step in the right direction. And the National Council of Churches, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the U.S. Conference of Mayors, and others from across the political spectrum have joined UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in calling for an even more ambitious goal: the end of nuclear weapons.

4. Resilience is the New Watchword. As familiar sources of security erode, people are rebuilding their communities to be green and resilient. Detroit, a city abandoned by industry and many of its former residents, now has over 1,000 community gardens, a six-block-long public market with some 250 independent vendors, and a growing support network among small businesses. Around the country, faith groups and others are forming Common Security Clubs to help members weather the recession and consider more life-sustaining economic models. Communities are becoming Transition Towns as a means to prepare for breakdowns in society that may result from any combination of the triple crises of climate change, an end to cheap fossil fuels, and an economy on the skids.

5. Health Care—Still in Play. The passage of the Obama health care package seemed to lock us into a reform package that maintains the expensive and bureaucratic role of private insurance and props up the mega-profits of the pharmaceuticals industry. But the story is not over. The decision by U.S. District Judge Henry Hudson to strike down the individual mandate in the health care reform may begin unraveling the new health care system.

As insurance premiums continue their steep climb, some are advocating expansion of Medicare to cover more people—or everyone. Thom Hartmann points out this could be done with a simple majority vote in Congress—expanding Medicare to everyone was what its founders had in mind in the first place, he says.

Vermont is exploring instituting a statewide single-payer healthcare system. The United States may wind up following Canada’s path to universal coverage, which began when the province of Saskatchewan made the switch to single-payer health care, and the rest of Canada, seeing the many benefits, followed suit.

6. Corporate Power Challenged. Small businesses are distancing themselves from the Chamber of Commerce, which promotes the interests of mega-corporations over Main Street businesses. And there are more direct confrontations to corporate power. The citizens of Pittsburgh, Penn., passed a law prohibiting natural gas “fracking,” and declaring that the rights of people and nature supersede the rights of corporations. Other towns and cities are adopting similar laws. The biggest challenge will be undoing the damage of the Citizens United decision, which opened the floodgates to wealthy special interests to spend what they like on elections. Groups around the country are gearing up to take on the issue, with a constitutional amendment just one of the potential fixes.

7. A local economy movement is taking off as it becomes clear that the corporate economy is a net drain on our well-being, the environment, communities, and even jobs. A “Move Your Money” campaign inspired thousands to close their accounts with predatory big banks, and instead, to open accounts at credit unions and locally owned banks. Schools, hospitals, local retailers, and families are increasingly demanding local food. Farmers markets are spreading. Independent, local stores have huge cachet as people look local for a sense of community. And the experience of one state with a budget surplus and very low unemployment is capturing the imagination of other states—North Dakota’s state bank is creating a buzz.

8. Cooperatives Make a Comeback. A new model for local, just, and green job creation is gaining national attention. Leaders in Cleveland, Ohio, created worker-owned cooperatives with some of the strongest, local institutions (a hospital and university) promising to be their customers. The result: formerly low-income workers now own shares in their workplace and earn family-supporting wages. They can plan for their families’ futures, knowing that their jobs can be counted on not to flee the country. The model is spreading, and people now talk about how to bring "the Cleveland model" to their cities.

9. A Turn Away from Homophobia. The revoking of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is just the most dramatic sign that the country has turned away from homophobia. A widespread anti-bullying campaign sparked by the suicide of Rutgers freshman Tyler Clementi led to an “It Gets Better” campaign with videos created by celebrities and others.

10. Social Movements Still Our Best Hope. Thousands gathered in Detroit in June for the second US Social Forum, an event that galvanized grassroots social movements from across the United States. In Toronto, the meeting of the G20 was greeted by thousands of protesters, many of whom were subjected to police beatings and gassing. The Cancún climate talks brought caravans of farmer/activists and global justice activists as well as greens to press for a meaningful response to the climate crisis. Social movements are alive and well, even though they are disparaged or ignored by the corporate media, which choose to instead shower attention on the well-funded Tea Party. And movement leaders are connecting the dots between Wall Street’s plunder, growing poverty, and the climate crisis, and setting priorities instead for people and the planet.

The turbulence of our lives is increasing, spurred by the crises in the economy and the environment, growing inequality and debt, military overreach, deferred peacetime investments, and species extinctions. Turbulent times are also times when rigid belief systems and institutions are shaken, and change is more possible. Not automatic, and definitely not easy, but possible. The question of our time is how we use these openings to work for a better world for all life.

Sarah van Gelder is co-founder and executive editor of YES! Magazine, a national, independent media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions for a just and sustainable world. Sarah is executive editor of YES!

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Medicare for All: Yes We Can

2009-09-26T22:04:00.001-07:00

Published on Saturday, September 26, 2009 by CommonDreams.org

Medicare for All: Yes We Can

by Holly Sklar

More Americans die of lack of health insurance than terrorism, homicide, drunk driving and HIV combined.

Grandma could be dead from lack of health insurance before she turns 65 and gets Medicare - 80 percent of first-time grandparents are in their 40s and 50s.

America is the only country that rations the right to health care to those 65 and older.

Lack of health insurance kills 45,000 American adults a year, according to a new study published in the American Journal of Public Health. One out of three Americans under age 65 had no private or public health insurance for some or all of 2007-2008.

You can't go the emergency room for the screening that will catch cancer or heart disease early, or ongoing treatment to manage chronic kidney disease or asthma. And even emergency care is different for the insured and uninsured. Studies show uninsured car crash victims receive less care in the hospital, for example.

Even with health insurance, many Americans are a medical crisis away from bankruptcy. Research shows 62 percent of all bankruptcies in 2007 were medical, a share up 50 percent since 2001. Most of the medically bankrupt had health insurance - the kind insuring profits, not health care.

Health insurance executives don't worry about going bankrupt from getting sick. Forbes reports that CIGNA's CEO made $121 million in the last five years and Humana's CEO made $57 million.

We're harmed by health industry and political leaders following the Hypocritic Oath: Promise a lot, and deliver as little as possible.

Wendell Potter, CIGNA's chief of corporate communications until quitting in 2008, testified to Congress, "The status quo for most Americans is that health insurance bureaucrats stand between them and their doctors right now, and maximizing profit is the mandate." He said, "Every time you hear about the shortcomings of what they call 'government-run' health care, remember this: what we have now ... and what the insurers are determined to keep in place, is Wall Street-run health care."

Premiums for employer-sponsored family health insurance jumped 131 percent between 1999 and 2009 - from $5,791 to $13,375 - hurting businesses, employees and families.

Contrary to myth, the United States does not have the world's best health care. We're No. 1 in health care spending, but No. 50 in life expectancy, just before Albania, according to the CIA World Factbook. In Japan, people live four years longer than Americans. Canadians live three years longer. Forty-three countries have better infant mortality rates.

One or two health insurance companies dominate most metropolitan areas in the United States.

Health industry lobbyists and campaign contributors have gotten between you and your congressperson so they can keep getting between you and your doctor. There are 3,098 health sector lobbyists swarming Capitol Hill - nearly six for every member of Congress.

As Business Week put it in August, "Health insurers are winning." They "have succeeded in redefining the terms of the reform debate to such a degree that no matter what specifics emerge in the voluminous bill Congress may send to President Obama this fall, the insurance industry will emerge more profitable."

President Obama should listen to his doctor. Dr. David Scheiner was Obama's doctor for 22 years in Chicago. On the July 30 anniversary of Medicare, Scheiner said, "I have never encountered an instance where Medicare has prevented proper medical care ... Insurance companies frequently interfere and block appropriate care."

Scheiner belongs to Physicians for a National Health Program, which, like a majority of Americans, favors Medicare for All - 58 percent favored "Having a national health plan in which all Americans would get their insurance through an expanded, universal form of Medicare-for-all" in the July 2009 Kaiser Health Tracking Poll, for example.

Tell President Obama and Congress, Yes we can have Medicare for All. Rep. Anthony Weiner's amendment would substitute the text of the Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act (HR 676), which has 86 co-sponsors, for House legislation HR 3200. Like the even worse Baucus bill in the Senate, HR 3200 would feed for-profit insurers more customers without providing the universal health care Medicare could provide at much lower cost.

It's time to stop peddling health reform snake oil.

Medicare for All won't kill Grandma, but it may save her children and grandchildren.

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune News Service

Holly Sklar is co-author of "Raise the Floor: Wages and Policies That Work for All of Us" and "A Just Minimum Wage: Good for Workers, Business and Our Future." She can be reached at hsklar@aol.com.

Single-payer Everywhere! To members of Progressive Democrats of America

2009-09-02T09:42:00.000-07:00

Conor Boylan September 2 at 12:20am Reply

Leaders in the movement for the only real solution for health care reform—Medicare for All—met in the Medina, Ohio, at the home of PDA member, supporter, and always gracious host, Dave Kelley for strategy sessions and a panel discussion on August 23-24.

Joining members of the PDA national team at the weekend gathering were Rep. Dennis Kucinich, community organizer and legislative advocate Donna Smith of the California Nurses Association, Healthcare-Now’s assistant national coordinator and “Baucus 8” arrestee Katie Robbins, and the tireless executive director of HealthCare4AllPA, Chuck Pennacchio. Dozens of members of Single-Payer Action Network of Ohio (SPAN Ohio) also attended the weekend events, along with Midwest PDA leadership, to organize future plans. Read the full report here

http://pdamerica.org/articles/chapters/oh-2009-08-27-11-21-59-chapters.php

Watch Dennis Kucinich speak http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVHNz03qQp8#, and check out some photos from the eventhttp://www.flickr.com/photos/pdamerica/sets/72157622131060114/

And, there are more events coming up in which PDA national team members will be particpating--please try to attend:

On September 12, Tim Carpenter will be a panelist at the Fighting Bob Fest VIII. https://www.thedatabank.com/dpg/309/mtgdetail.asp?formid=meet&caleventid=15426

On October 20, join us at the Single-Payer Rally in Harrisburg, Penn.https://www.thedatabank.com/dpg/309/personalopt1.asp?formid=meet&c=9799962

Keep an eye out for the Mad as Hell Doctors Care-a-Van coming to a city near you. https://madashelldoctorstour.com/Our_Route.html

We're in constant communication with our friends at California Nurses Association, Healthcare NOW!, Physicians for a National Health Program and the member groups of the Leadership Conference on Guaranteed Healthcare as we follow the healthcare reform debate, and the progress of the Kucinich and Weiner amendments. We'll keep you informed!

In solidarity,

Tim Carpenter, National Director,

Laura Bonham, Deputy Director,

Conor Boylan, Field Coordinator.

Upgrading the Way We Do Politics

2009-08-26T13:12:00.000-07:00

Published on Wednesday, August 26, 2009 by YES! Magazine

Upgrading the Way We Do Politics

by Sandy Heierbacher

Town hall meetings being held on health care legislation across the country are exploding with emotion, frustration, and conflict. Citizens are showing up in throngs to speak out, and sometimes to shout, about health care—turning the meetings into a vivid demonstration of what's missing from American democracy.

Many of the most vocal protesters at town hall meetings are motivated not by the legislation itself, but by their fears and sense of exclusion from the process. The health care debate has illustrated the need for a better method of public input–not only to help prevent those feelings of alienation, but also to produce legislation that actually meets the needs of citizens.

At the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation (NCDD), our members are involved in a flurry of discussion about how we can encourage public engagement that’s more participatory and more productive than what we’ve seen in the news lately.

Scrap the typical “town hall meeting” format

"The term 'town hall' conjures up images of townsfolk gathering in some New England hamlet, writes deliberative democracy scholar Jim Fishkin. But today's typical "town hall meetings" don't live up to that tradition. They don't allow citizens to feel they've been truly heard, or to discuss issues in any depth. Like public hearings, town hall meetings tend to largely be gripe sessions, where the most passionate and bold attendees take turns giving three-minute speeches—usually after enduring long speeches from the front of the room.

Arkansas Senator Blanche Lincoln, one of the members of Congress who did not plan a large town hall meeting during the recess, has suggested that the raucous nature of the town-hall-style sessions has made them counterproductive. “If people genuinely wanted to have a constructive conversation, then that would be a different thing,” she said. “But that has not been what we’ve seen.”

She's right on one count: the town hall design sets the stage for activist groups and special interest groups to try to 'game' the system and sideline other concerned citizens in the process. As Martin Carcasson, director of Colorado State University’s Center for Public Deliberation, recently pointed out, “the loudest voices are the ones that get heard, and typically the majority voices in the middle don't even show up because it becomes a shouting match.”

False accusations and misinformation have certainly played a role in fueling the furor, but they might not be as effective if people hadn’t already felt cut off from the process. As Tom Atlee, founder of the Co-Intelligence Institute noted, many of the recent town meetings were originally organized to promote the Democratic health care agenda, not to provide opportunities for real dialogue with and among citizens. “So in a sense they invited disruption from those who felt unheard,” he said. And when a person or group feels ignored, their frustration often shows up later “with increasing and often dysfunctional energy.”

Upgrade to higher-quality meeting formats

So how can officials hold more effective open-to-the-public meetings with their constituents? Dozens of effective public engagement techniques have been developed to enable citizens to have authentic, civil, productive discussions at public meetings—even on highly contentious issues. These techniques have names like National Issues Forums, Study Circles, 21st Century Town Meetings, Open Space Technology, and World Cafe, to name just a few.

When done well, these techniques create the space for real dialogue, so everyone who shows up can tell their story and share their perspective on the topic at hand. Dialogue builds trust and enables people to be open to listening to perspectives that are very different from their own. Deliberation is often key to public engagement work as well, enabling people to discuss the consequences, costs, and trade-offs of various policy options, and to work through the emotions that tough public decisions raise.

Skilled facilitation is key to almost all forms of dialogue and deliberation. Alexander Moll, who is facilitating a health care deliberation using the National Issues Forums method in Washington, D.C. later this month, describes his role this way: “My job is to elicit the best ideas from each of you, regardless of ideology... I do not ask 'leading' or 'loaded' questions that bias the conversations; instead I'll ask questions like, 'Why do you believe this to be true?' or 'Can you explain your position further?’” Skilled facilitators know how to translate conflict and anger into specific interests, needs and concerns so that what's behind the emotion can actually be understood and addressed.

“Ground rules” or “agreements” are also par for the course in dialogue and deliberation. Typical agreements establish a kind of golden rule for everyone present, asking people to treat each other as they would want to be treated. By refraining from interrupting each other and by listening with the intent to understand rather than to seek points to argue with (two typical ground rules), participants are more likely to be heard and to hear each other.

To involve a broader representation of the public, events should be publicized widely and thoughtfully enough so a variety of people attend (not just the usual suspects). Furthermore, it’s helpful to organize participants into smaller groups (fewer than 10 at a table is ideal) to ensure each person gets the chance to speak and to make it less likely that one individual or interest group will dominate the whole meeting.

No matter what technique is used, legislators can help all attendees feel heard by diligently recording what citizens say, and being clear about how they plan to use the information gathered (perhaps to share with other constituents or with fellow legislators). Another proven strategy is to “reflect back” the concerns, values, and desires they are hearing. Ideally, public officials join in the dialogue as participants, after which they can publicly reflect on some of the things they've heard. The more thorough and authentic they are in doing this, the more impact it will have on those attending.

Reflecting back, using ground rules, working with facilitators, and having people engage with each other in small groups are all basic but critical elements of quality public engagement. To allow people to deliberate, or wrestle with the complexities of the issue, some important work must also be completed before the public meeting. Balanced information must be provided about the issue at hand, and a fairly-framed spectrum of possible policy choices can be put on the table for attendees to discuss.

Perhaps most importantly, the legislator hosting the meeting must genuinely be open to learning from what his or her constituents think should be done to address the issue at hand. One major barrier to putting these ideas to play right now is that public input should be requested—and heeded—much earlier in the policy-making process. Now that there are draft bills floating around, citizens (rightly) would not trust that their nuanced input would have much impact on what happens in Washington. At this point in the policy process, loud voices and outrageous accusations actually are more likely to impact health care policy—but not necessarily in a productive way.

Atlee observed that “when people are only invited to participate when there is a final battle between (for example) Republican and Democratic proposals for health care, this fact alone invites polarization. When an issue is in crisis mode, it is easier to manipulate people with fear and extreme language and imagery; there is less time to get information and issues clarified; there is less patience on all sides to delve into the actual complexities; and nonpartisans get the sense they are being sold false alternatives.”

One NCDD member recommended asking two legislators from different parties to co-host deliberative events on contentious issues like health care reform. Many citizens on the right distrust politicians on the left—and vice versa. A joint deliberative forum held early in the decision-making process can help build trust beyond party lines, and help legislators get a sense of what their constituents are willing and unwilling to support, and why.

It is also vital to find ways for attendees to wrestle with the trade-offs inherent in all complex policy issues. As President Obama said at a town hall meeting in Grand Junction, Colorado, “there is no perfect, painless silver bullet out there that solves every problem, gives everybody perfect health care for free. There isn't.” Americans need to discuss the trade-offs involved (in the proposals as well as the current system) with each other and with policy-makers, to clarify the values that are embodied in different approaches to health care reform, and to identify the needs that are most important to them. Legislators need to trust us enough to listen.

Most Americans feel strongly that the voice of the people should have an influence on public policy and that the right to speak up and dissent is anything but “un-American.” A recent joint statement by several leading organizations in the field of participatory democracy noted that “beyond simply having a voice, people should have a chance to be informed, to hear each other, to work through tough decisions with each other and their elected officials, and to use democratic processes to figure out how to solve the problems that face us.”

Though it may not seem like it when we watch clips from health care town halls, the truth is that people can come together to have a positive impact on national policy, not only in spite of our differences, but because we can use those differences to make better decisions. It is my hope that what may have seemed like a utopian ideal a few weeks ago—democratic debate in which the people are informed and involved from the beginning—may now seem like a necessary but long-overdue upgrade in the way we do politics.

Sandy Heierbacher wrote this article for YES! Magazine. Sandy is the co-founder and director of the National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation (NCDD), a network of 1200 groups and professionals who bring together Americans of all stripes to discuss, decide and act together on today's toughest issues.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License

Making It In America

2009-08-09T14:44:00.000-07:00

Campaign for America's Future

Making It In America

By Robert Borosage

Washington's special genius is for gridlock. As we're seeing in the health care debate, the entire system is designed to frustrate action — even when Democrats have a popular president, 60 votes in the Senate and a large majority in the House. Moneyed interests trump party loyalty. Partisan politics trumps national purpose. Congressional rules and egos favor dithering and delay.

So on health care, Republicans have lurched into partisan opposition, hoping that obstructing change will lead to Obama's "Waterloo," and they can replay 1994 and take back the Congress. Blue dog Democrats remain lap dogs for special interests, blind to the fury that they will face if reform fails.

But at least on health care, the administration is leading the charge. We haven't even begun an adult conversation about the fundamental question of America's global economic strategy. What is the economy we will build out of the ashes of the old?

Obama has raised the subject. He understands that we can't go back to the old economy — and shouldn't want to. We can't go back to borrowing $2 billion a day, largely from the Chinese, to serve as consumer to the world. We can't go back to an economy in which finance captures 45% of the nation's profits. We can't keep shipping good jobs, technology, and manufacturing capacity abroad and expect to sustain a broad middle class at home. We've got to start making it in America again. As Obama has declared, "The fight for American manufacturing is the fight for America's future."

As Louis Uchitelle in the New York Times reports, the United States now ranks behind every industrial nation except France in the percentage of overall economic activity devoted to manufacturing. We've been shedding manufacturing jobs for years, and the recession has been brutal, with nearly two million industrial jobs disappearing since it began.

But we haven't even begun a serious conversation about what it would take to revive manufacturing in a global economy. The president's trade representative, Ron Kirk, seems clueless, intent on passing free trade agreements with Panama, Columbia and South Korea that are but tribute to the old unsustainable ways. The president calls sensibly for investment in education and training, in 21st century infrastructure, in research and development — but his budgets project reducing domestic expenditures to levels lower as a percentage of GDP than the early 1960s. And conservatives in both parties say that isn't low enough.

Obama has suggested that America must lead in the green industries that surely will grow in the future — new energy, more efficient appliances, more sophisticated building efficiencies — and the supply chains associated with windmills, solar cells, batteries, fast trains, electric cars and more. Yet, Obama opposed the weak "buy America" provision put into the stimulus bill. His energy bill contained no serious effort at insuring that these products would be built here. Amendments designed to help manufacturers here were introduced into the bill in the dead of night because the administration needed the votes of industrial state Democrats to pass it. And because Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown and the Apollo Alliance had put together elements of a new energy industrial policy that House members could elbow into the legislation.

Contrast that with China. China has determined that new energy will be one of its strategic industries. It is now the largest manufacturer of solar panels — exporting 95% of its production, largely to Europe and the US.

While Obama felt it necessary to distance himself from the "buy America" provisions put in the stimulus bill, China has no such compunctions. As the Times reports, "when China authorized its first solar power plant this spring, it required that at least 80 percent of the equipment be made in China. When the Chinese government took bids this spring for 25 large contracts to supply wind turbines, every contract was won by one of seven domestic companies. All six multinationals that submitted bids were disqualified on various technical grounds, like not providing sufficiently detailed data."

The European companies weren't exactly foreigners. They had built turbine factories in China to meet the government's requirement that the turbines contain 70 percent local content. But having no doubt benefited from that transfer of technology and engineering experience, the Chinese contracted with home—grown companies, rejecting the bids of the Chinese based European companies while approving those of Chinese companies that had never built a turbine before. European wind turbine makers have now stopped bidding on Chinese contracts, concluding that their bids had no chance.

China is intent on dominating the new energy markets of the future. If its past practices are any indication, it will subsidize exports, manipulate its currency, buy China at home, force multinationals to transfer technology and partner with Chinese companies, and engage in industrial piracy to make its way.

If the US wants new energy to be the centerpiece of a new economy in which — in the president's words — the US "consumes less and produces more," then it will have to have an industrial strategy. It doesn't have to mimic the Chinese, but it has to respond to them, rather than invoking old shibboleths about "free trade," and ignoring the reality of the world marketplace.

A new book issued by the Alliance for American Manufacturing with the ungainly title of Manufacturing for a Better Future for America shows how China is not alone, detailing the practices that our trading partners use to sustain their industrial capacity and export markets.

A new global strategy is essential. But getting there won't be easy. Just as the insurance companies impede sensible reforms in health care, and big oil and coal block vital changes in energy, and Wall Street guts vital reform of finance, global corporations and banks will spend a lot of money to defend the unsustainable trade policies of the old economy.

This can lead to cynical resignation or to fury. But one thing is clear. Little will get done until Americans show politicians that while the lobbies can pay for their campaigns and provide employment in retirement, they can't defend them against the justified anger of a citizenry no longer willing to put up with gridlock.

Action Alert: Single Payer on the Table

2009-07-20T09:05:00.000-07:00

Representative Weiner goes for broke with single-payer proposal

Today, Monday July 20, the silence in the House of Representatives around single payer and H.R. 676 will end. Rep. Anthony Weiner, (D-NY09), who has already rankled Republicans and Blue Dogs with his no-nonsense statements before the House Energy and Commerce hearing on H.R. 3200, will move to amend the current bill. His proposal is essentially to replace H.R. 3200 with H.R. 676—single payer Medicare for All.

This exciting and potentially monumental move needs our support. We pushed Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s amendment to victory last Friday, and we can do it for Representative Weiner, too.

The full committee and its five subcommittees are spending the next three days debating the bill and performing their markups. This is the time to act, and Representative Weiner is making his move.

Call or fax the committee members and tell them you want them to support Representative Weiner’s proposal. Listen to his blunt analysis in Friday’s session of what real healthcare reform is made of, and you’ll get some good ideas of what to say when you call or fax. It’s a no-holds-barred, take-no-prisoners approach to the legislative process almost never heard on the House floor.

Energy and Commerce Committee Phone: (202) 225-2927, Fax: (202) 225-2525
Henry A. Waxman, CA, Chair Phone: (202) 225-3976, Fax: (202) 225-4099
John D. Dingell, MI Phone: (202) 225-4071, Fax: (202) 226-0371
Edward J. Markey, MA Phone: (202) 225-2836, Fax: (202) 226-0092
Rick Boucher, VA Phone: (202) 225-3861, Fax: (202) 225-0442
Frank Pallone, Jr., NJ Phone: (202) 225-4671, Fax: (202) 225-9665
Bart Gordon, TN Phone: (202) 225-4231, Fax: (202) 225-6887
Bobby L. Rush, IL Phone: (202) 225-4372, Fax: (202) 226-0333
Anna G. Eshoo, CA Phone: (202) 225-8104, Fax: (202) 225-8890
Bart Stupak, MI Phone: (202) 225-4735, Fax: (202) 225-4744
Eliot L. Engel, NY Phone: (202) 225-2464, Fax: (202) 225-5513
Gene Green, TX Phone: (202) 225-1688, Fax: (202) 225-9903
Diana DeGette, CO Phone: (202) 225-4431, Fax: (202) 225-5657
Lois Capps, CA Phone: (202) 225-3601, Fax: (202) 225-5632
Mike Doyle, PA Phone: (202) 225-2135, Fax: (202) 225-3084
Jane Harman, CA Phone: (202) 225-8220, Fax: (202) 226-7290
Jan Schakowsky, IL Phone: (202) 225-2111, Fax: (202) 226-6890
Charles A. Gonzalez, TX Phone: (202) 225-3236, Fax: (202) 225-1915
Jay Inslee, WA Phone: (202) 225-6311, Fax: (202) 226-1606
Tammy Baldwin, WI Phone: (202) 225-2906, Fax: (202) 225-6942
Mike Ross, AR Phone: (202) 225-3772, Fax: (202) 225-1314
Anthony D. Weiner, NY Phone: (202) 225-6616, Fax: (202) 226-0218
Jim Matheson, UT Phone: (202) 225-3011, Fax: (202) 225-5638
G.K. Butterfield, NC Phone: (202) 225-3101, Fax: (202) 225-3354
Charlie Melancon, LA Phone: (202) 225-4031, Fax: (202) 226-3944
John Barrow, GA Phone: (202) 225-2823, Fax: (202) 225-3377
Baron P. Hill, IN Phone: (202) 225-5315, Fax: (202) 226-6866
Doris O. Matsui, CA Phone: (202) 225-7163, Fax: (202) 225-0566
Donna M. Christensen, VI Phone: (202) 225-1790, Fax: (202) 225-5517
Kathy Castor, FL Phone: (202) 225-3376, Fax: (202) 225-5652
John P. Sarbanes, MD Phone: (202) 225-4016, Fax: (202) 225-9219
Christopher S. Murphy, CT Phone: (202) 225-4476, Fax: (202) 225-5933
Zachary T. Space, OH Phone: (202) 225-6265, Fax: (202) 225-3394
Jerry McNerney, CA Phone: (202) 225-1947, Fax: (202) 225-4060
Betty Sutton, OH Phone: (202) 225-3401, Fax: (202) 225-2266
Bruce L. Braley, IA Phone: (202) 225-2911, Fax: (202) 225-6666
Peter Welch, VT Phone: (202) 225-4115, Fax: (202) 225-6790

Check out PDA’s Healthcare for All Issue Organizing Team (IOT) pages for recent news on healthcare reform and single payer, as well as resources on legislation and issues.

In solidarity,

Tim Carpenter, National Director
Laura Bonham, Deputy Director
Conor Boylan, Field Coordinator

Progressive Democrats of America is a grassroots PAC that works both inside the Democratic Party and outside in movements for peace and justice. Our goal in 2009: Expand progressive influence in Congress as we build on our 2008 electoral successes. PDA's advisory board includes seven members of Congress and activist leaders such as Tom Hayden, Medea Benjamin, Thom Hartmann, Jim Hightower, and Lila Garrett.

Spread the Progressive Word

Stop Dirty Coal in Michigan

2009-07-16T11:38:00.000-07:00

CREDO Action

Stop Dirty Coal in Michigan

The skies are getting darker in Michigan.

Right now, while Congress is debating climate change, the coal industry is moving quickly to build two more expensive, dirty coal plants in Michigan. Why the push to build more coal plants now, when Michigan's energy use is declining?

Coal industry lobbyists have been successful in introducing gaping loopholes into the climate change bill pending in Congress. As a result, most of the provisions aimed at reducing coal's massive effect on climate change only apply to new plants coming online As a result, most of the provisions aimed at reducing coal's massive effect on climate change only apply to new plants coming online years from now. That means Big Coal will try to build as many dirty plants as possible before these rules go into effect.

It gets even worse. The coal industry is trying to build these plants without full public hearings on the matter. People in Michigan deserve the right to speak out.

The Department of Environmental Quality and the Public Service Commission are taking public comments right now on the proposed coal plants, and we need to let them know that Michiganders want a clean energy future, and no new dirty coal plants. We've got to tell them: No new coal.

It's now or never in the fight against climate change The more people who respond with the message "No New Coal," the more chance we have at stopping these dirty and expensive coal plants, and moving Michigan towards a clean energy future.

Sign this petition now to tell the Department of Environmental Quality and the Public Service Commission: Michigan needs a clean energy future. No more coal.

Participate with your State PIRGs

2009-07-16T10:10:00.000-07:00

U.S. PIRG, the federation of state Public Interest Research Groups (PIRGs), takes on powerful interests on behalf of the American public, working to win concrete results for our health and our well-being. The state PIRGs are independent, state-based, citizen-funded organizations that advocate for the public interest. Since 1970, we have been delivering results-oriented citizen activism to protect our environment, encourage a fair and sustainable economy, and foster a responsive democratic government. We uncover threats to public health and well-being and fight to end them, using the time-tested tools of investigative research, media exposés, grassroots organizing, advocacy and litigation.

At each state PIRG, the staff works to achieve concrete, practical changes on issues ranging from air and water pollution to campaign finance reform, from genetic engineering to consumer privacy.

The state PIRGs employ close to 400 organizers, policy analysts, scientists and attorneys, and are active in 47 states and Washington, D.C.

Read more about the work of individual state PIRGs at their Web sites:

AkPIRG / Arizona PIRG / CALPIRG / CoPIRG / ConnPIRG / Florida PIRG / Georgia PIRG / Illinois PIRG / INPIRG / Iowa PIRG / Maryland PIRG / MASSPIRG / PIRGIM (PIRG in Michigan) / MoPIRG / NCPIRG / NHPIRG / NJPIRG / NMPIRG / NYPIRG / Ohio PIRG / OSPIRG / PennPIRG / RIPIRG / TexPIRG / WashPIRG / WISPIRG

CRUNCH TIME FOR HEALTH CARE REFORM

2009-07-16T09:28:00.000-07:00

Hi Friends,

Right now it's crunch time for health care reform.

The president knows it: Our advocates on Capitol Hill have learned that Obama cleared his schedule for the next two weeks so that he can focus on health care.

The health care industry knows it, too: They're spending $1.4 million EVERY DAY to sway fence-sitting lawmakers and weaken or defeat the reforms.

If the leader of the free world has set all other business aside to accomplish real health care reform, can you help him out at this critical moment?

Please take a minute right now to call your senator and ask her to support the president's health care plan.

You can find talking points and report your call on our website.

Here's what else we'll be doing across the country:
* Building a grassroots movement. Our canvassers are talking with hundreds of thousands of Americans face-to-face about health care, to swell the ranks of our supporters.

* Dispelling myths. Big industry and their Washington lobbyists are trying to convince Mom and Pop small businesses that they can't afford health care reform. So next week, we're holding press conferences in 18 states to release a new report on how small businesses can tackle their health care problems.

* Working in the Capitol. We're meeting with lawmakers in D.C. and organizing support for health care reform in their districts.

* Foiling the opposition. We're also going to tour health care swing states, and we're bringing a special guest to help us sway fence-sitters. Stay tuned.
The House leadership just introduced the America's Affordable Health Choices Act, and is racing to win House passage by the August congressional recess. If your health care premiums are rising, if anyone you knew ever was denied care they needed, if you're sick of our broken health care system, now is the time you can actually do something about it.

Please click below to call your senator and demand real health care reform now.

http://www.uspirg.org/action/health-care/call-your-senator?id4=ES

Sincerely,

Andre Delattre
U.S. PIRG Executive Director
AndreD@uspirg.org
http://www.uspirg.org

P.S. Thanks for your continued support. Please feel free to share this e-mail with your friends and family.

P.P.S. To read members' testimonials on our health care crisis, or submit your own, visit our health care stories page.

Tell Congress to support the president's plan to reform health care this year!

Current Campaign

Making Health Care Work

Health care costs have doubled in the past 10 years.

We need to seize the opportunity for real changes that can make health care more affordable, secure and dependable for all Americans by passing President Barack Obama’s health care plan. Read more.

How You Can Help

Tell Congress to support the president's plan to reform health care this year!

Contact your senators and tell them to support the President's comprehensive health reform plan.

U.S. PIRG's Larry McNeely talks about the public plan option and how it will make all insurers more competitive at the same time as it gives Americans a choice. Tune in every Monday for a new video briefing or catch all the briefings on our channel, here.

News

Washington, D.C.: Health Care Reform and the Biologics Bill - U.S. PIRG Supports Innovation, Not Monopoly 7/14/2009

Washington D.C.: U.S. PIRG Statement Supporting Senator Dodd’s Amendment to End Insurance Rescissions 7/10/2009

Washington, D.C.: New Weekly Video Briefings on Health Care Reform 7/07/2009

Newsroom

Reports

The Facts about Comparative Effectiveness Research 7/07/2009

More Bang for the Health Care Buck 5/21/2009

More Bang for the Health Care Buck: How an Efficiency Standard for Health Insurers Can Reduce Overhead and Deliver More Patient Care 5/05/2009

More Reports

Healthcare NOT Warfare, Sign the Petition

2009-07-13T10:38:00.000-07:00

Healthcare NOT Warfare, Sign the Petition

As Martin Luther King Jr. observed forty years ago, "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death." While the insurance and pharmaceutical industries post huge profits, the U.S. health care crisis grows steadily worse.

Today, nearly one in six Americans has no health insurance. Tens of millions of others are woefully under-insured. Meanwhile the war in Iraq drains our resources and overburdens our budget. Our government's duty is to protect us--security begins with our health and well-being at home. In 2009, we have an historic opportunity to turn from warfare to health care for all.

We call on the Democratic Party at all levels--in party platforms and resolutions--to commit to redirecting wasteful and unnecessary military spending to meet human needs. This commitment must start with comprehensive, guaranteed health care--driven by the needs of patients and the judgment of doctors. We call on Democrats to support a plan that eliminates any financial barriers between the patient and healthcare providers, resulting in a patient not receiving medically necessary care.

We call on members of Congress to bring the troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan/Pakistan and to pass H.R. 676, Rep. John Conyers' bill which guarantees comprehensive publicly-funded, privately-delivered health care for everyone in the U.S.

Please fill out the form completely--we need your street address to determine who your member of Congress is.

Continue

Overcome the power of the military-industrial complex

2009-07-09T13:10:00.000-07:00

Dear Friends,

We are working on a several fronts when it comes to war and peace: torture accountability, stopping the ongoing wars and reducing the military budget.

These are big challenges but to achieve them elected officials need to be pushed further than they want to go. Right now, the Pentagon and weapons industry have the stronger voice. But, organized and persistent voices of voters can overcome the power of the military-industrial complex.

To be effective we need to expand the number of people working on these issues.

Please forward information to people you know who are concerned about these issues.

Click here to use the tell a friend tool and urge people to take action against torture. Or give them this link: http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/1312/t/6850/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=27281

And, you can urge people to stop the ongoing wars by clicking here. Or give them this link: http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/1312/t/9050/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=27366

If you want to keep up on the latest economic news, you can get our free daily news summary sent to your email box. To do so, register by clicking here.

Visit the activist toolbox for more ways you can help.

Thank you for your support.

Sincerely,

Kevin Zeese
Executive Director

VotersForPeace is a nonpartisan organization that does not support or oppose candidates for office.

VotersForPeace.US

2842 N. Calvert St.

Baltimore, MD 21218

443-708-8360

PDA Priorities: Mobilizing the Progressive Vote and Voice

2009-06-27T21:53:00.000-07:00

PDA Priorities

1. End the War, Redirect Funding

PDA wants all troops withdrawn promptly, and war funds redirected toward social needs at home and humanitarian aid in Iraq. Toward that end, we call on the Democratic-led Congress to use its powers to 1) cut off funding that prolongs the military occupation of Iraq, and 2) fully investigate false White House claims justifying the invasion and occupation of Iraq. If such investigations lead to moves toward impeachment, so be it.

PDA is working closely with members of Congress to enact a fullyfunded, prompt, orderly withdrawal of all U.S. troops and military contractors from Iraq. We support stand-alone legislation or amendments to defense and appropriations bills that will accomplish that goal. And we support measures in Congress to prevent an attack on Iran and to renounce any interest in Iraqi oil or in permanent military bases in Iraq. We do not support Democratic leadership proposals with prolonged and porous timelines that allow tens of thousands of U.S. troops to remain in Iraq on vaguely-defined “training” or “anti-terrorism” measures. PDA coordinates its “Out of Iraq” efforts with dozens of Congress members, including Reps. Barbara Lee, Lynn Woolsey and Maxine Waters.

End the War, Redirect Funding

2. Health Care for All

It is immoral for a country as wealthy as ours to have 45 million people with no health coverage, and tens of millions more with inadequate or overly expensive coverage. It also makes no economic sense; despite spending twice as much as other industrialized nations on healthcare, our system performs poorly because the private U. S. insurance bureaucracy soaks up nearly one-third of all health care money in waste, profits, paperwork and advertising. Poor health and poor health care are drags on the economy and job creation; up to half of all personal bankruptcies are caused by health care crises.

PDA supports Rep. John Conyers bill, H.R. 676, which establishes streamlined, nonprofit national health insurance--enhanced Medicare for All--which would negotiate drug and treatment costs. By replacing private insurers and recouping administrative savings of up to $300 billion per year, this single-payer approach provides topnotch health care to everyone. Care would be privately delivered by healers and hospitals, but publicly financed--with no bills, co-pays, deductibles, denials or medically-induced bankruptcies. PDA also supports health care initiatives at the state and local level that move us toward a nonprofit single-payer system.

Single-payer Health Care

3. Economic Justice
When working people reject their economic interests and vote Republican on wedge issues of abortion and gay rights, it is partly because they haven't heard a Democratic economic agenda that speaks strongly to their needs. PDA proposes to win over "soccer moms," "NASCAR dads" and "swing voters" through an agenda of progressive tax reform, fair trade and economic security measures.

PDA calls on Democrats in Congress to roll back Bush tax breaks for the wealthy--so that the richest 1 percent of Americans (with yearly incomes averaging $1.3 million) will not pocket $300 billion over the next four years. Tax burdens on the middle class can be eased if the wealthy pay their share. PDA supports fair trade that protects workers' rights and the environment, while opposing wage-reducing "free trade" agreements that protect only corporate rights to globally exploit unprotected labor. This year, PDA will work closely with allies like Sen. Sherrod Brown to block renewal of "fast track" authority, which allows the White House to enact trade deals without Congressional amendment.

Along with unfair trade deals like NAFTA, attacks on the right to unionize are a key factor in the decline of America's middle class. PDA endorses the Employee Free Choice Act, which establishes unions in any workplace where a majority of workers sign up. PDA also supports middle-class job creation through federal investment, such as the Apollo Alliance for renewable energy, and investment in wireless Internet networks.

Employee Free Choice Act
Apollo Alliance

4. Clean, Fair, Transparent Elections
The U.S. election system is in crisis. Big-money interests dominate U.S. politics in ways unknown in other industrialized countries, with social and environmental progress often blocked by officials who cater to big donors to insure re-election funds. Incumbents are unfairly insulated by district gerrymandering and rules obstructing independent candidates and parties. In recent years, voters themselves have faced political and even racial obstacles in casting votes and in getting their votes counted.

Soon after its formation, PDA worked with Rep. John Conyers in exposing the 2004 election irregularities in Ohio that helped elect Bush. PDA activists engaged in "election protection" monitoring during the 2006 voting. We support federal legislation that bans the further use of touch-screen (DRE) voting machines for counting votes, establishes a paper ballot as the official record for deriving voter intent, and requires rigorous mandatory audits of elections. To eliminate big-money dominance, PDA supports comprehensive campaign finance reform at the state and national level, including Clean Money public financing of the public's elections, plus free TV time for candidates. PDA opposes the racially-biased disenfranchisement of felons who've served their time, and supports reforms like "Instant Runoff"/proportional voting, paper ballots which assure more accurate and broader representation than winner-take-all elections.

Clean Elections
Instant Runoff Voting

5. Stop Global Warming
No issue reveals more clearly the flaws of the U.S. political-economic system than global warming--the dominance of greed and corporate power over the public good, and the near-sighted focus on the short-term over the welfare of future generations. The departing Republican chair of the Senate's environment committee used his final meeting in December 2006 to blame Hollywood and the media for "alarmism" and for "hyping" the problem of global warming. But as shown by the stunning success of Al Gore's documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," the public is ready to act to save the planet and to protect our remaining wild places from further degradation in the pursuit of oil. PDA calls on the Democratic majority in Congress to lead boldly in reducing our country's oil dependence and use of fossil fuels by raising auto fuel economy and imposing mandatory caps on carbon pollution while investing in public transportation, energy conservation technologies and alternative energy development. (Such investments create good-paying jobs.)

Building Alternatives: Yes We Can

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Maki showed me miner's lettuce during long rambles in the woods. Now, it's how I make a simple, cheap spring salad

Ingredients

Dressing:

Salad:

Directions

How Wisconsin Can Turn Austerity into Prosperity: Own a Bank

The Restorative Revolution: It's Coming

Don't Sit on the Sidelines -- This Saturday, Be Part of the Uprising Sweeping the Country from Wisconsin to Your Home Town

Top 5 Reasons Why Wisconsin Matters To Us All

Today's Ideas & Actions

First, they attacked PBS and NPR. Now AmeriCorps

Reopening Health Care Reform

Our Founding Fathers Would Be Proud of the Egyptian People & Disgusted at the Spineless Sheep Most Americans Have Become

Ain't That Good News!

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We Need to Swap Obama for Chavez

Walk Like An Egyptian

Keep Guns Out of the Hands of Dangerous People: Gun Owners

Petition Activity

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Rebooting the American Dream: 11 Ways to Rebuild Our Country

A Secular Humanist Declaration

Contents

The Affirmations of Humanism: A Statement of Principles

The Affirmations of Humanism:A Statement of Principles

Egypt and America: Both Must Become More Truly Democratic

The Egyptian Revolution: A Very Good Thing

The Egyptian Revolution: A Very Fine Thing

Vision: 8 Reasons Global Capitalism Makes Our Lives Worse -- And How We Can Create a New Kind of Economy

How to Avoid Polarizing Others

Third Way Aims for Front and Center

Swearing off the Rhetoric of Violence

Vision: 8 Ways We're Making America a Better Place -- in Spite of the Disasters Coming out of Washington

Solution: End the Insurance Gap for People With Preexisting Conditions

Jimmy Carter Inches Towards Stunning Accomplishment

Humanists Find Meaning in Christmas

Humanists Find Meaning in Christmas

John J. Dunphy

10 Most Hopeful Stories of 2010

There was plenty of disappointment and hardship this year. But the year also brought opportunities for transformation.

Medicare for All: Yes We Can

Medicare for All: Yes We Can

Single-payer Everywhere! To members of Progressive Democrats of America

Upgrading the Way We Do Politics

Upgrading the Way We Do Politics

Scrap the typical “town hall meeting” format

Upgrade to higher-quality meeting formats

Making It In America

Action Alert: Single Payer on the Table

Stop Dirty Coal in Michigan

Participate with your State PIRGs

CRUNCH TIME FOR HEALTH CARE REFORM

Current Campaign

How You Can Help

News

Washington, D.C.: Health Care Reform and the Biologics Bill - U.S. PIRG Supports Innovation, Not Monopoly 7/14/2009

Washington D.C.: U.S. PIRG Statement Supporting Senator Dodd’s Amendment to End Insurance Rescissions 7/10/2009

Washington, D.C.: New Weekly Video Briefings on Health Care Reform 7/07/2009

Reports

The Facts about Comparative Effectiveness Research 7/07/2009

More Bang for the Health Care Buck 5/21/2009

More Bang for the Health Care Buck: How an Efficiency Standard for Health Insurers Can Reduce Overhead and Deliver More Patient Care 5/05/2009

Healthcare NOT Warfare, Sign the Petition

Overcome the power of the military-industrial complex

PDA Priorities: Mobilizing the Progressive Vote and Voice

The Affirmations of Humanism:
A Statement of Principles