Is this man Presidential?

Presidential candidate Mitt Romney refuses to release his income tax records beyond the last two years and he will not talk about his dealings when he was at Bain Capital. Yet, he claims to have created “100,000″ jobs through the process of “creative destruction.” Given this claim, it’s worth emphasizing that, for a private equity firm to make money and provide high yield returns to its investors and partners, the number one enemy of such an organization is labor. If you keep that one fact in mind, then you can understand why Romney doesn’t like to talk about his history at Bain and his absurd claim to have created “100,000 jobs.” Anyone running a private equity firm that did not reduce labor costs in the new company, sometimes by firing workers and hiring them back at reduced wages, would himself be fired or voted out by the company partners. With that in mind, it’s a little easier to see that what counts for job creation by Romney, takes place for example,  when a retirement fund that made profits through Bain investments goes out and hires someone or takes on a retiree for benefits. And since Bain is a private company, they have no obligation to make their actions and investments known to the public, which suits Romney just fine.

While Romney tries to make a case that he was a job creator at Bain, others have done enough homework to show that this was not the case, and a recent article in City Pages by Pete Kotz provides a good summary of Romney’s record as a “job creator.” Just reading that article alone will help you understand why candidate Romney doesn’t want to talk about his history at Bain Capital. Texas Governor Rick Perry, former Presidential candidate, claimed that Mitt Romney practiced “vulture capitalism” at Bain, but author Pete Kotz has a more accurate description of Romney’s role at Bain as an “American Parasite.” Private equity firms take perfectly healthy striving companies and destroy them by saddling them with excessive debt and management fees. Indeed, Romney parasitized healthy manufacturing companies many of which went bankrupt.  Given the stories that Kotz describes, we can only imagine how many manufacturing jobs would have stayed here in America, if we had made it illegal to have “leveraged buyouts” back in the early days of the Reagan Presidency, when this activity first got underway. But, unchecked, the leveraged buyout contributed to the destruction of manufacturing in America.

When Romney ran against Ted Kennedy for his Senate seat in 1994, early in the campaign, it seemed like he might be successful. But then Kennedy learned of Bain Capital’s purchase of a company called “AMPAD” (American Pad and Paper) in 1992 and how Bain had loaded the company with debt and management fees and laid off workers. Kennedy ran television ads of interviews with workers who had lost their jobs at AMPAD and won re-election rather handily. So here’s a good question for Romney: how many more manufacturing jobs would exist in America today if there had been no leveraged buyouts and no private equity firms?  The man who believes that corporations are people should have no trouble responding to this form of interrogation, yet he wants to avoid the discussion altogether. Leveraged buyouts evolved into private equity firms and contributed to the predatory reach of business and finance. Private equity firms–the destroyer of labor. If somehow we could rewrite the Old Testament, that line should be in there somewhere and Moses should be asked to deal with it.   As for Romney and his Bain Capital experience, will the mainstream media cooperate with Romney and let him remain silent on his doubtful past as a job creator? I am betting that the Occupy movement has now raised income inequality in American consciousness, such that Romney will not be able to dodge the fact that his actions at Bain contributed to the pathological state of our income distribution and the silly boring state of our politics, where trivial topics rule the airwaves.  Romney is betting that people won’t give a damn and he can throw enough advertising at the problem to distract voters from thinking his job creation history. But, Romney made his fortune destroying businesses in ways that should have been illegal;  we need to help fan the flames of the Occupy Movement to return our country to economic sanity. We need to rebuild America and force our financial institutions to play a role in financing that task, or form new banks and force them to do it. Had we broken free from the rescue of our banks and created new ones, with restrictions on how they could use the money, we would already be seeing signs of solid recovery and not the anemic one we are in now where people at the top are thinking about debt, rather than thinking about jobs.
RFM

Representative Jason Altmire D-PA voting in primary 2012 (Keith Srakocic - AP)

One of the major problems with the Democratic party is that it has too many conservative members, too many Blue Dog Democrats that  vote with Republicans on many issues and often support positions of the Tea Party–anti-healthcare and anti-climate change legislation to name just two issues. They are fiscal conservatives at a time when our government needs to respond very differently to our economic circumstances–they are Hooverites! While many conservative Democrats come from Southern states, others come from states like Pennsylvania and other regions of the Midwest. At a time when it should be obvious that our economy is badly in need of a second stimulus to address jobs, student loans and mortgage foreclosures, like their Republican counterparts, conservative Democrats are interested in solving the Great Recession by austerity, which can only make things worse. To endorse a strategy other than providing stimulation to the economy is dispiriting to the entire nation–not just the unemployed. In these times, those that have employment worry about losing their job and by hearing stories about the unemployed (which our mainstream media tries to hide from us), the gloom of helplessness cuts an ever wider swath through our culture. There’s a reason they call it a depression. Couple the issue of decent jobs to the ongoing mortgage crisis, which must also be solved before we can think about trimming the sails of our economy, and one can begin to see the depth of the problem and why governments are in a state of denial and paralysis.  But these issues are not insoluble. We tackled similar problems during the Great Depression and the longer the current recession goes on, the more we are in danger of sliding backwards rather than moving forwards in our economy.  Add to that the idea that we have to fix the planet and you realize we must bring back Rosy the Riveter, while adding Ronny the Riveter to the new mix. We need to make things again, and use the ingenious, creative character of an energized Middle Class to fan the flames of a new economy. It is too dangerous for us to have an economy dominated by the financial industry, which does not serve Main Street very effectively. The bankers know this as well as anyone.  Paul Krugman has an editorial in the NY Times describing how leaders in Europe and the United States are finally beginning to admit that the austerity plans they have imposed on their economies are making things worse, even though they probably won’t do anything about it, at least not yet. British Prime Minister David Cameron is experiencing sinking popularity as he tries to explain why he didn’t follow the economic prescription described in the Economics 101 textbook–good old fashioned Keynesianism. Belt-tightening works for a person who is in debt and wants to cut spending to balance their own personal economic circumstance, but it does not work for a nation, because then everyone’s belt gets tightened whether they like it or not. Greek Economist Yanis Varifoukas explains this simple concept very effectively. Anyone comparing  the impact of austerity on a person’s single budget, claiming the outcome would be the same for the economy at large, has flunked Economics 101, and he/she is in need of remedial course work.

One reason we still have a hard time doing something more effective about our chronic unemployment situation is that within the Democratic Party, we have too many conservatives and not enough liberal, more progressive-minded representatives: the Republicans are against anything that would work, hoping to have the bad economy stick around until the election this fall, thus leading perhaps  to a victory by Romney over Obama and a trifecta for the party, giving them command of the Senate, House of Representatives and the Presidency. Then they can get busy and really screw things up. But conservative Democrats are also part of the problem.

You only have to look what’s happening in Europe to understand that they are going down the wrong path; by doubling down on austerity they are doubling down on misery. When recession hits, it’s the responsibility of  government to temporarily create demand to soften the blow and in the United States we did that when Obama was first elected and it worked. But it wasn’t big enough or long enough, as the magnitude and depth of our recession wasn’t properly calibrated. But, with the huge Republican victory of 2010, the Democrats were forced out of control in the House and are in the process of rebuilding their party, so the interesting elections to watch are those taking place in the Democratic primaries–right now.  Of course, we have the recall election of Governor Scott Walker  in Wisconsin at the head of our watch list, but we already have results in a few test cases in the country.  The NYT reported on the results of a Democratic primary in Pennsylvania, where two conservative House Democrats, Representatives Jason Altmire and Tim Holden lost out to two more progressive opponents. In Altmire’s case, he lost to fellow incumbent Mark Critz in a district that had been redrawn because of census realignment: both representatives ran against each other for the same, newly created district. Tim Holden lost out to newcomer Matt Cartwright. In each case the opponents criticized their more conservative incumbents for their opposition to the healthcare bill and votes against global climate change issues. As the Times pointed out in their article “The ouster of the Democratic incumbents — and the tough primaries being waged against some House Republicans — suggest that redistricting ultimately is going to send more liberal Democrats and more conservative Republicans to the House.” If the Democrats gain control of the House, through primaries like those in Pennsylvania, it will mean that a more progressive Democratic Party will be in charge. What this might mean too, is instead of Obama leading the party in a more progressive direction, something his policy of triangulation has largely prevented, the newly elected Democrats in Congress, could mean that a more progressive party would be leading Obama in a direction more favorable for progressive causes. So instead of hope that arrived on the day Obama was elected in 2008, we might have hope through more effective legislation that deals with the real problems of this country and avoids the devastating budget cuts scheduled to go in place during the first of 2013. This year, the Democratic primaries are everything, though redistricting has probably created lots of safe seats for Republicans and Democrats. It has been estimated that the effects of redistricting means that only about 100 of the 435 seats are up for grabs–true contests. However, the Blue Dog Democrats, who peaked at 54 members in 2010, have dropped to 23 and could drop further in the future. If the Supreme Court rules against The Affordable Health Care Act, these new progressive Democratic candidates could be further energized with the message that a single payer plan is already waiting for us–it’s “Medicare for All”–a simple one page bill.
RFM

Shortly after the 2010 election dust had cleared, we began to hear about the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and their fabrication of legislative templates for state laws that can be passed in the wink of an eye or the nod of a head. ALEC-sponsored laws were rapidly introduced by Republican legislators only too eager to cooperatively destroy our tattered democracy. ALEC recruits right-wing state legislators and meets with them, in sessions not open to the public, where they extract promises from legislators to introduce ALEC’s template laws into their state legislative process to further advance their neoliberal cause. But just within the past week, public outrage over the  shooting death of Trayvon Martin and its connection to Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law (coupled with the very sluggish legal system in Florida) has started to focus on how such a law got on the books in the first place. The “Stand Your Ground Law” was promoted by the National Rifle Association (NRA), working through ALEC, who is also responsible for introducing photo-ID voting laws and disbanding unions for public employees, something that caught our attention in Wisconsin and was associated with massive public demonstrations in Madison, followed by an ongoing effort to recall Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker  (Walker has assisted the recall effort when  many members of his staff, during his position as Milwaukee County Executive, now face criminal charges for mishandling funds: this is discussed in Ruth Conniff’s article in The Progressive– stay tuned on this one).

Now ALEC is becoming more infamous through increased exposure from websites like ALEC EXPOSED a site that separately lists the state legislators and governors that have ties to ALEC and Color of Change. Democracy Now recently did a piece on ALEC, adding additional insight into their very shady techniques and raising serious doubts as to whether they are in violation of the rules for tax-exempt organizations. On Sunday, April 22, the NYT has a front page, above- the-fold article on ALEC, revealing more about how the organization works and the corporate influence in the design of specific bills. The article points out that ALEC has 2000 state legislators as members and all but one are Republicans. These legislators get their marching orders from ALEC and push these bills through their state houses, without acknowledging the source of the legislation. ALEC is funded almost entirely by major corporations and, in the wake of the national outrage over the Trayvon Martin shooting, many of these corporations have announced they will no longer support ALEC (according to the ALEC EXPOSED site, Coke, Pepsi, Kraft, McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Intuit, Reed-Elsevier, and others have dropped their membership in the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and in turn ALEC quickly announced they will no longer push “social legislation” (one of their next projects is to get a law passed that prevents family members of patients who die, as a result of taking FDA-approved drugs, from suing the pharmaceutical company, giving drug companies increased motivation to introduce new, unproven drugs at an accelerated pace).   ALEC’s immediate drop of its social agenda, whatever that mans, is an attempt to stop the bleeding of corporate sponsorship. What the Trayvon Martin shooting case has demonstrated, lest there was some doubt, is that our mainstream media are brain dead. The only chance left for Democracy in America is through the power of the internet to make issues go viral and have demands land on the desks of corporate officers–no corporate CEO wants to stand up for issues that will hurt sales and diminish profits. Put ALEC in the way of corporate profits through a national boycott of the products of the corporation (foundations are more problematic–but they have boards) and profits will prevail every time. But if we have found a medium that can challenge groups like ALEC, we are also confronted, by the rise of social media within the internet, a force which seems to be converting Americans into narcissistic tools of capitalism.

RFM

Relative Healthcare Costs as a % of GDP

I am sure you have all read/heard or speculated about the many different scenarios that could unfold should the Supreme Court nullify all or part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, passed as the signature legislative achievement during the first term of President Barack Obama. Whether Obama has a second term might well depend on the outcome of the Supreme Court decision and, if negative, his reaction to it.  Many have argued that if the “individual mandate” of the law is declared unconstitutional, many other valuable features of the bill will still remain intact. The “individual mandate,” which forces individuals to purchase insurance if they don’t have it through their place of employment, will be part of a $477 billion government subsidy to the insurance companies and without that critical source of funds, the entire healthcare plan could easily unravel. While this healthcare bill is projected to provide health insurance for 30 million Americans who lack this fundamental component of a civilized society, it will still leave about 20 million Americans without health insurance; it is thus an incomplete solution to our problem. Yet, isn’t it odd how things have been twisted, as the Democrats are now hoping that the Supreme Court will not rule against a bill that just a few years ago was a Republican plan for national healthcare, not a Democratic solution.

I can personally see the rationale for declaring the bill unconstitutional because the individual mandate forces people to buy insurance from a private company, thereby subsidizing their profits and insuring corporate survival by a mechanism different from the “free market.” We have a 5/4 “free market” Supreme Court, but in this case it’s hard to know how the court will react because government support of corporations is a big, non-verbal part of our “free market economy” (consider for example the government-subsidized military industrial complex or our government subsidies to oil companies that make obscene profits). In contrast to the new healthcare legislation, our other social programs, such as Medicare and Social Security, are government-run organizations, paid for through payroll deductions, not through subsidizing private companies. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was conceived by the Heritage Foundation and its 2000 pages were written by corporate lobbyists representing them–it was designed to meet the needs of the for-profit health insurance industry. When the law was first passed, the stock value of the for-profit healthcare organizations went up–it was perceived as a victory for them by their investors.

There is another downside and inefficiency to the new healthcare law: it doesn’t separate us from our employment. The new law will still connect our healthcare to our jobs and if you lose your job, you lose your healthcare and have to replace it with something else, hopefully something less expensive than the nightmare, very costly alternatives we have now: we still don’t know how well that component will work, as it is not yet part of the system in motion. As we expand government subsidies to the private healthcare industry, we will make them more profitable and more effective in lobbying Congress to chip away at the healthcare laws and rules to make these healthcare giants ever more profitable. We have a history that includes the inability to resist that kind lobbying, particularly in the current iteration of our government: indeed that’s how our system works.  Money means influence and more money means more influence.  Just as we don’t want financial institutions that are too big to fail (even though we have them), we don’t want private healthcare providers to become so rich that they have ample profits to spend money on lobbying against our own healthcare laws. Remember, these companies describe themselves as healthcare organizations and no matter what their ads say, they are determined to get more profit and to do so by minimizing the care they deliver–it’s in their DNA.  Buried in those 2000 pages of the new healthcare bill are exceptions and exemptions that companies can use to deny care in the interests of profits. It is simply not possible to have a national healthcare system where one of the main components is trying to maximize its profits and compete against the interests of a population trying to get decent healthcare.  It’s not that these companies should be regulated more effectively–they should be eliminated as obstructionists to a decent healthcare system. The mere existence of these for-profit health insurance companies will pose a constant threat to our healthcare system, no matter where the Supreme Court decision on this bill should fall.

Chris Hedges, writing in Truthout, visited the demonstrations held outside the Supreme Court building when the debate was going on. There were those supporting what has become known as Obamacare while the right-wing was entrenched against it and refers to it as socialism (despite its Heritage Foundation origins).  But there were also a small number of thoughtful people, with whom Chris identified, including Dr. Margaret Flowers, who is a well known healthcare activist,  lobbying for the destruction of Obama’s individual mandate and replacing the entire Obamacare with a single payer system that would gut the for-profit healthcare industry and replace it with “Medicare for all.” They have a single payer website which you can visit, join and help advance the cause for a more rational healthcare system. Margaret Flowers’ point is this (quoted from the Hedges article): “If you are trying to meet the goal of universal health coverage and the only way to meet that goal is to force people to purchase private insurance, then you might consider that it is constitutional,” Flowers said. “Our argument is that the individual mandate does not meet the goal of universality. When you attempt to use the individual mandate and expansion of Medicaid for coverage, only about half of the uninsured gain coverage. This is what we have seen in Massachusetts.” Thus the healthcare system in Massachusetts, which has implemented basically the same healthcare system we plan to put in place under the new law, by experiential history , does not lead to universal coverage, something that should be the goal of any national healthcare system. Many people who support this bill believe it’s a start, that an early beginning can lead to later expansion of the system to cover all Americans. I don’t believe that will happen–I think it’s more likely that we will have a two tier system that won’t change for many years, simply because we are too divided as a country to agree on something as profound as universal healthcare–that has to happen through a surging political mandate. The cost factor of our present system is also problematic and seemingly doesn’t get fixed with the new healthcare law and we already top the charts compared to other countries (see chart): currently, our healthcare system costs twice as much as that of most other countries (as a percentage of our GDP) and one reason is the administrative costs incurred by the for-profit system as well as the many unnecessary medical procedures created from the profit motive. If you paid doctors a salary, like the Mayo Clinic and Cleveland Clinic do, you could reduce the motivation behind unnecessary medical procedures. When you consider that we already have the most expensive medical care system in the world, but still leave 20 million uninsured, you have the ingredients of a very sick system, even if the new law gets full backing from the Supreme Court.

But, suppose the Supreme Court rules against the healthcare system? Then imagine that Obama, faced with the reality of a Supreme Court, whose ideological composition may be in place for many years and motivated by public outrage at the Court’s decision, decides to campaign for a single payer system embodied in “Medicare for All.” Although polls show that the majority of Americans are opposed to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, many of them are opposed to it because it doesn’t go far enough in support of a single payer option. Many of us were very unhappy when Obama didn’t give the single payer option more of an opportunity to resonate with the American people before it got pushed aside as an option that couldn’t be passed. Obama’s failure to give the public option more support served as one of the first disappointments in what turned out to be a long string of triangulating and seemingly cowardly attempts to placate the right at a time when everyone but the White House knew that they would not compromise. Not a single Republican voted for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.  Obama has faced this problem for his entire Presidency.  But, the polls show that when the polling questions are formulated properly, the majority of Americans favor a single payer system. The bill that was proposed in favor of such a system was written on a single page, containing a few sentences describing who would be included in Medicare–all those between birth and death. What could be simpler; Medicare already works and has been serving people for more than fifty years. There is enough money to support this system, but part of it must be removed from the expensive, absurd costs of supporting for-profit healthcare and the excessive costs of drugs for seniors passed by a Republican congress and signed into law by GW Bush.  And we should not forget, that by making the for-profit healthcare companies even wealthier, we will be setting the stage for the lobbyist erosion of the best parts of the Affordable Care Act, because those parts will mean less profit to the healthcare corporations and serve as the first targets of their lobbying efforts. These efforts are already underway–these companies will forever be sending lobbyists to Washington to chip away at our healthcare system in order to enhance their profitability. When Bush announced his perception of candidates for the “axis of evil,” he forgot to include medicine for profit in the mix. I for one would be energized if the Supreme Court declared “Obamacare” unconstitutional.What about you?

RFM

Hacker-Pierson Winner-Take-All Politics

Graphing an American story: the Bill Moyers website shows a graph derived from Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson and their excellent book “Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer–and Turned its Back on the Middle Class.” The book itself is worth a read, while the graph, electronically upgraded so when you move your mouse pointer over different features of the graph (like the downward arrows at along the top), pop-ups appear and give some of the historical context to explain how income was  dramatically elevated for the top 1% while that for the bottom 90% changed very little. The graph uses the dollar value in 2008 to illustrate gains for the top 1 percent, while the bottom 90% have been flat-lined for 38 years. The period covered is from 1970 to 2008, so it included the decline and fall of The New Deal and the rise and dominance of the neoliberal financial agenda. During that period of flat-lining for everyone else,  the top 1% of wage earners started in 1970 at more than $ 318,000 and by 2008 they tipped the scales at more than $905,000. The graph covers the presidencies of Nixon all the way through to GW Bush; a few of the facts along the way included Reagan’s firing of PATCO (Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization), which began the steep downward decline in union representation in the United States work force and the introduction of supply-side economics, the idea that lowering taxes actually increases Federal Revenue: the execution of this concept pushed the Reagan budgets into deep debt. Before Reagan, America was the biggest creditor nation in the world and after Reagan, we were the biggest debtor country on the planet. If a graph about income distribution can make you angry this one should do the trick. We now have a culture where the neoliberals consider most Americans to be a bunch of losers, with a small number of winners based strictly on income; since the most recent recession/depression, we have done nothing to change this hostile dynamic, and, as we all know, this trend continues unabated and will not change until we change it. By change, I don’t mean just recovering what we lost during the current recession/depression, but making gains in such a way that everyone in our culture can be treated as a stakeholder, living a life with the expectations of someone who is living in a wealthy country that cares for its citizens, not the soundbite, throw-away culture that we have created by chasing the illusory objective of winning the lottery. This graph does not illustrate the creation of new wealth–that is not what happened–the differences between the 1% and the 90% were created by the transfer of wealth from the middle and lower classes to the wealthy. It does not reflect creativity, but exploitation and it cannot continue. Our current version of casino capitalism has failed to create a just and decent society and, if anything, the Tea Party members are merely the most recent victims, even though they are too obliging for comfort.  We need to demand changes in the way we grow, educate and care within our society. We need a new revolt!

Michael Klare on America as the new Third World petro-state. If you still have energy left after reading about our wage history from the 1970s on, then you won’t want to miss Michael Klare’s article in Tomdispatch which appeared today. Klare discusses how Big Oil has exhausted its search for oil reserves in Third World countries and is increasingly focused on North America as the new epicenter of oil and gas exploration. But to be successful in this new enterprise the major oil companies will have to roll back years of regulatory restrictions that have prevented oil and gas drilling because of environmental concerns. Of course the environmental concerns were precipitated by disastrous oil spills that did extensive environmental damage, like that in Santa Barbara in 1969, the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989 and the Macondo blowout in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.   Using their influential weight in the art of political persuasion, Big Oil is intent on unraveling these restrictions as they lay an aggressive  strategy to establish North America as another Third World energy source. One component to their motivation for refocusing on North America is the increasing resistance that Third World countries have against giving Big Oil a blank check for extracting their oil while trampling on the environment. Oddly enough this resistance to unfettered access to Third World oil has been created by more democratic or socialist governments who either nationalize their oil reserves or demand a far larger share of the oil wealth extracted from their oil fields. Thus, in North America, we can expect a far more intensive push from the oil companies in the coming months and the high cost of gasoline will keep pressure on any U.S. President to continue giving out leases for oil exploration even on our most environmentally sensitive regions that have heretofore been off limits. As Klare puts it, “in the process, as has so often been the case with Third World petro-states, the rights and wellbeing of local citizens will be trampled underfoot.” Will we allow oil companies to run roughshod over our national parks and other Federal lands that have long been considered off limits to these interests? Are we willing to reverse the long-standing taboos against oil exploration in sensitive regions in order to serve the interests of economic arguments and our failure to engage in a more robust development of alternative energy sources?

None of us expect that North America will become another Nigeria, which has been described by NY Times writer Adam Nossiter as (quoting from Klare’s article) “the Niger Delta, where the [petroleum] wealth underground is out of all proportion with the poverty on the surface, has endured the equivalent of the Exxon Valdez spill every year for 50 years by some estimates.” But do we carry with us today, the same capacity for public outrage that we demonstrated over the Exxon Valdez oil spill (where today you can put a shovel into the nearby shoreline and see oil oozing around the shovel mark)? And will it make any difference who is elected President and who controls Congress in this coming debate? The oil companies see our internal weakness in the form of a bad economy and deep concerns about our economic future and they see the opportunity to strike while the iron is hot, while we are disarmed and confused.  Oil exploration will be pushed as a source of new jobs and the model of North Dakota, with the lowest unemployment in the country as a result of their oil reserves, will make it difficult for any politician to resist, especially if the environmental lobby remains on life support. It seems that in the present climate, Big Oil may have the upper hand.  Congress has already banned the EPA from regulating the controversial method of hydro-fracking in which huge quantities of water and toxic chemicals are forced under pressure to release oil and gas and the growth of this technique is unparalleled as a potentially dangerous source of contamination to our water supply.  We cannot allow energy companies to make decisions about threats to our health and safety and yet this is precisely what Big Oil is pushing to achieve in this coming election. If the oil industry gets their way, then as Micheal Klare would say, stay tuned for the Third Worldification of the North American continent. To win this war we will first have to mobilize and declare one of our own.

RFM

Cave diggings in Southwest China have revealed fossilized remains of what may turn out to be a new human species, now referred to as the Red Deer Cave People. Skulls and other bone fragments have been dated to 14,300 and 11,500 years ago, with features distinct from modern man. This is an unusual finding, because human remains that recent would ordinarily be expected to resemble modern humans. However,  distinctive skull features include thick skulls, prominent orbital protrusions, jutting jaws and very large molar teeth. Their diet was rich in venison, hence the Red Deer Cave People name.
The Guardian features a wonderful lineup of the major human ancestors,beginning with Australopithecus afarensis, ‘the southern ape’, which lived between 3.8 and 2.9 million years ago. The Guardian has one of the best science search features I have ever seen on a newspaper site. You first click on the “News” tab, then the “Science” tab, then the “A-Z” tab at the end of the choices and voila–you have a huge menu before you that covers a broad array of scientific topics; for this particular story click on “anthropology” and you see the many links related to the subject, including the  story on the Red Deer Cave People. The entire Guardian is organized that way. It certainly gets my recommendation as the best way to organize an online news and information organization.

Red Deer Cave People (from The Guardian: possible human ancestor who lived 14,000 to 11, 500 years ago)

According to former Miami Police Chief John F. Timoney, writing an opinion piece in the NYT on Friday, March 23, 2012,  “Trying to control shootings by members of a well-trained and disciplined police department is a daunting enough task. Laws like “stand your ground” give citizens unfettered power and discretion with no accountability. It is a recipe for disaster.” Timoney and many other police chiefs in Florida were opposed to the law, though their concerns were ignored when the bill was passed in 2005. According to Timoney, “Homicides categorized as justifiable have nearly tripled since the law went into effect.” As he points out, Florida was the first state to pass a “stand your ground” law, but since then at least 20 other states have passed laws of their own. He recommends that current Florida Governor Rick Scott could do the citizens of Florida a big public service by being the first governor to reject and repeal this odious ALEC-NRA-driven law: it serves to increase public apprehension and sharpen racial tension at a time when we should be concerned with reducing these conflicts, as we try to develop a badly needed more holistic society.

The right-wing corporatist culture of America is concerned about diminishing opportunities for profits and wants to convert our public functions into new opportunities for profiteering. Among the the right-wing wealth that funds ALEC are such luminaries at the Koch brothers. Organizations like ALEC approach their objectives by promoting fear in our society–fear not just from our many inflated enemies abroad, but fear from our own citizens, perhaps our next door neighbors, fear of people violating our voting laws, fear from people of other races or minorities, fear of illegal immigrants, fear of Muslims and even fear of those belonging to other Christian religions. Religious fundamentalism promotes a literal interpretation of the Bible and creattes attitudes of Biblical solutions to our problems. The post-9/11 era that we are in has been promoted as a post-apocalyptic period in which freedom from fear is found in the false promise of having more guns in the streets and arming our citizens for the Armageddon that we will face just around the corner. Intelligence cannot be the daughter of fear!

The public is slowly beginning to understand the special role that ALEC has played in formulating templates for state laws and promoting them within Republican-controlled state legislative bodies.  So far, I haven’t seen any evidence of an ALEC-promoted law that did anything other than starkly serve corporate interests by further privatizing our public functions (they are a big supporter of privatizing prisons) and dividing our culture. The Center for Media and Democracy is an excellent source of material on ALEC, including coverage of the tragic killing of Trayvon Martin. They also provide coverage of state activities that are attempting to spread light on the right-wing corporatist nature of ALEC.

RFM

Lou Dubose, writing in The Washington Spectator has reported on how Voter-ID laws got started. The origin of this idea came from Mark “Thor” Hearne, a lawyer who had worked for the Bush-Cheney political campaign. Hearne founded the American Center for Voting Rights. This center produced a 72 page report entitled “Vote Fraud, Intimidation & Suppression in the 2004 Presidential Election.” The document was submitted to a House committee chaired by Ohio Congressman Bob Ney (who later went to prison over the Jack Abramoff scandal). The report did not include any documented examples of voter fraud, yet it recommended that states should adopt government issued photo-ID at the polls and for any voter seeking to vote by mail or through an absentee ballot. The Center soon closed its doors and Hearne returned to private practice. Hearne’s report had a much longer shelf live than that of his American Center for Voting Rights. Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund and Heritage Foundation Fellow Hans von Spakovsky began promoting photo-ID as an essential state protection against the undocumented cases of voter fraud. Republican state party officers began promoting photo-ID laws to defend against voter fraud, without providing evidence that this was a problem.  In 2009 ALEC drafted a model legislative bill that would serve as a template for Republican legislators to bring such bills into legislative reality. By 2011, Republicans in 38 states introduced legislation that would make state-approved photo-ID cards a requirement to vote. Seven states signed such bills into law, including Alabama, Florida, Kansas, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas and Wisconsin. These laws were assembled on the fast track–no state required photo-ID had existed before 2006. In the election of 2012, the states which have implemented photo-ID laws for voting will provide 171 electoral votes, 63 percent of what is needed to win the Presidency. How pervasive is voter fraud? A Loyola Law School professor (Justin Levitt) who works with the Brennan Center for Justice has gathered evidence on polling place voter fraud. As he says “I keep an open door” “I think I’m up to 11 or 12 possible attempts that people have pointed to across the country since 2000. During that time about 400 million ballots have been caste in the general elections. It does not sound like voter fraud at the polls is a major problem, but note that the historic origins of this issue were created by fiction working inside a bubble. Evicence-based legislative action has never been the strength of the modern Republican party. As you can imagine, most of these bills were passed in states where Republicans had control of state houses and the governorship–the trifecta for quickly getting conservative bills passed. The one exception to this general rule was Rhode Island who passed their voter-ID law with a Democratic legislature.

There is little doubt who these photo-ID laws are aimed at. As minorities grow in their representation, particularly with the growth of Hispanics, the Republicans feel their voter base is shrinking. The Wisconsin Legislative Fiscal Bureau evaluated the impact of their own law and learned that 20 percent of Wisconsin’s residents do not have the proper ID for voting: that includes 70 percent of African-Americans under the age of 25, 177,000 elderly people, 36 percent of young voters and about 224,000 college students whose ID cards fail to meet the state’s new ID requirement. In summary, voters that are likely to cast their ballot as  Democrats will be disproportionately cut out of the opportunity to vote by these voter-repressive laws. But in some states the situation is even worse: Florida has reduced the number of early voting days, cut in half the number of early voting hours, ended voting on the final Sunday before the election and imposed tough restrictions on civic groups conducting voter-registration campaigns. In Florida, the voting law has been so convoluted that voter-registration drives, one of the main methods used to get African-Americans on the voting rolls, will either be ineffective or impossible to run with any efficiency.

From the Lou Dubose Article in The Washington Spectator:

“Testifying at a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing on January 25, University of Florida political science Professor Daniel A. Smith questioned the color-blind provisions in Florida’s 2011 law:

[E]ven though African Americans comprised only 13 percent of total voters and 22 percent of early voters in Florida in the 2008 General Election, they accounted for 31 percent of early voters on the final Sunday of early voting. Hispanic voters, who comprised 11 percent of total voters and 11 percent of early voters in the 2008 general election, accounted for 22 percent of the early voters on the final Sunday of early voting.

By closing polling places on Sunday, Florida shuts down the nonpartisan, church-based “Souls to the Polls” campaigns in African-American and Hispanic congregations.” Voting registration drives will become virtually impossible to carry out under these new laws.” All these laws are voter-suppression laws, though they come advertised as keeping illegal immigrants from voting and gain in popularity using that threat to scare people into electoral alignment.

But these measures are about to by tested in court. Last December, Attorney General Eric Holder delivered a speech defending the 1965 Voting Rights Act and warned Texas and six other states that passed voter-ID laws: “We will examine the facts and enforce the law.” A week later the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department rejected South Carolina’s voter-ID bill on the grounds that it will result in retrogression of minority voting rights. South Carolina’s governor and state legislature will have to revise the law or challenge the Justice Department in Court. Preemptive law suits against the Justice Department have been initiated by Florida and Texas, and the Texas suit has asked the court to declare Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act unconstitutional. Expect more litigation to follow as the National Conference of State Legislators reports that voter-ID bills are pending in 26 states. Yesterday the voter ID laws in Wisconsin and Texas have been declared in violation of the civil rights voting act. Expect more of this kind of action to come in the near future and ultimately the entire civil rights voting act could be put to the test by the Supreme Court, probably long after the 2012 election. Other legal options for the states who want to protect Voter-ID laws cannot be eliminated however.

Ohio, is an important swing state. Most analysists believe that Obama cannot be re-elected without winning Ohio, a state that he carried by a 4.6 margin in 2008. There remains controversy about whether George W. Bush won Ohio legitimately in 2004, due to fraudulent handling of voter records. Ohio secretary of state officer Kenneth Blackwell, working with Karl Rove, presided over the election of 2004. Later, Blackwell lost the Ohio governor’s race (2006), and went on to become a Republican party official while progressive Democrat Jennifer Brunner succeeded him as secretary of state. She hired a consulting firm to audit the state’s voting system. The firm found “critical security systems failures that could impact the integrity of an election.” Brunner made a mistake by running for the U.S. Senate and lost that election, but turned her focus on fixing the architecture of the Ohio election system.

In the same issue of The Washington Spectator Lou Dubose writes on the voter ID laws in Ohio, one of the most critical states for the 2012 election. Prominent mention of Jennifer Brunner is made in his piece, but Brunner has a more updated report about the Ohio voting fraud law her article in Alternet. She has played a major role in reforming and opposing Ohio Republican attempts to twist the election laws of the state to favor Republican victories in perpetuity. In response to bill H.B. 194, a law that would seriously restrict voting access,  voting rights advocates sprang up from throughout the state and Fair Elections Ohio (FEO) formed a strong coalition of voting rights advocacy Ohioans, consisting of a wide spectrum of farmers, labor, voting rights advocates and religious organizations. The FEO has also interacted with Obama’s campaign “Organizing for America” to effectively block the law from taking effect through a statewide referendum petition that has qualified for a vote in the election this fall.  The organizers collected nearly 500,000 signatures, such that Ohio voters this fall will have a chance to decide if they want the voter-suppression bill H.B. 194 to become law. It is astonishing to see what H.B. 194,  if passed, would create for the voters of Ohio. Here is a sample of its odoriferous components:

• Reduce by mail absentee voting to three weeks from five weeks and reduce in-person absentee voting to two weeks.
• Ban in-person absentee voting on Sundays and Saturday afternoons.
• Ban in-person early voting during the last weekend before the election.
• Make it more difficult for the boards of elections to open extra offices in the community to make it more convenient to vote early.
• Stop local Election Boards from sending absentee ballot applications unsolicited to all voters.
• Stop local Elections Boards from paying postage on return absentee ballot requests or on the return of absentee ballots.
• Impose technical reasons not to count votes.
• Order a minimum voting precinct size in cities and villages only.
• Prohibit someone with no ID from having their ballot counted.
• Eliminate the 10-day period after the election to provide missing ID.
• Strike down disclosure rules for corporations participating in campaigns.

Do you see the words “Preventing Democrats from Voting” written into these rules?

But have the Ohio Republicans over-reached with their odious H.B. 194? The GOP is beginning to realize that public sentiment against H.B. 194 is reaching the level of a huge outcry and their fear now is that H.B. 194 will bring out those voters threatened by this bill in record numbers to the polls for this fall’s election. The current Republican secretary of state who began to recognize this problem has asked for repeal of the bill, to “avoid confusion” about voting rules this fall (2012). Right now the President of the Ohio Senate is offering a “peace pipe” to state Senate Democrats and hopes to adopt a new set of voting rules for the fall. However, it is not clear if the Republicans can effectively repeal H.B. 194. Even if they want to alter the voting laws for this fall, the Republican secretary of state has declared that no more changes can be made before the fall elections. And the referendum that was approved by the voters to have H.B. 194 appear on the ballot this fall will be defended by the FEO and the Obama election campaign–it’s a citizens referendum! The Minnesota legislature, where both houses are controlled by conservative Republicans, is considering a bill that, if passed in the 2012 election, would become part of the state constitution. They are not as far along as Ohio and Democratic governor Mark Dayton has attempted to propose an alternative to this new law without the use of a photo-ID requirement. While the Minnesota bill had 80% approval when first discussed last year, the bill has become much more controversial now that its true target has been identified. Stay tuned on this issue, the nature of our democracy is at stake.

RFM

A priceless book on Thomas Friedman of the New York Times by Belén Fernández

If you are a fan of columnist Thomas Friedman of the New York Times,  then you will want to read this interview with the author of a book on Friedman titled “The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work,” by Belén Fernández, published by Verso this year (2012). An interview with the author appears in Truthout. In this book, one that surprises me simply because it should have been written long ago (but let’s be grateful to Belén Fernández for putting this together), the author masterfully documents the incomprehensible inconsistencies that are a regular feature of Friedman’s column and his life’s work. Friedman’s objective is to make you happy that you are part of a glorious American Empire and that Free Trade is the wave of our future and the golden key to our past. Agonizing as those narratives may be, the most frustrating part of Friedman’s articles are that few people check his facts. But no one has done that better than Fernández. Here I give you just one of the stories about Friedman from the book. If you have read Friedman you know that he likes to summarize the feelings of an entire nation, even though he talks to very few citizens of any country and apparently gets most of his information by talking to cab drivers.

• [Taken from the interview with Belén Fernández in Truthout: link above]

• “People often joke that the only normal human beings Friedman converses with – outside his usual circle of CEOs and national leaders – are cab drivers. In fact Friedman has a certain insistence on speaking on behalf of the world’s inhabitants without actually speaking to them first. Readers are instructed to “just ask any Indian villager” for confirmation that U.S.-directed globalization is desirable, and are informed in 1999 that it is “stupid” to oppose globalization: “The [anti-WTO] Seattle protesters need to understand that. The people of Sri Lanka already do.” The latter insight is gleaned from Friedman’s chat with the owner of a Sri-Lanka based Victoria’s Secret underwear factory, who obviously does not qualify as “the people of Sri Lanka.”"

As a corporatist newspaper, the New York Times and columnist Thomas Friedman fit each other like glove and hand and the fact that politicians, like Barack Obama consult with Friedman, gives him panache, swagger and sufficient celebrity status to keep doing and saying what he has been doing and saying all along. Whether this book by Fernández changes the conversation about Friedman remains to be seen, but it’s a good start.  Friedman is a Minnesota boy. He is very popular in this state, though at least one citizen of this community never reads him because his articles are vacuous, nonsensical and very misleading.  Perhaps his best work is achieved with the titles of his books, but then again “The World is Not Flat.”

RFM

Afghanistan riots over Koran Burning

Just when the war in Afghanistan threatened to become America’s silent war, one destined for the back pages or in the business section of our newspapers, violence erupted spilling the war out onto the front pages again, stimulated by new events; the news of Americans burning the Koran spread like a virulent contagion throughout the country and, at least for now, seems to pose a threat to American safety as well as the future of our war effort. It should bother everyone to see how our relationship with the Afghans can turn on a dime because there is no underlying set of mutual goals–only mutual distrust. Suddenly the horrific accounts of bombings, daring raids, roadside explosions and  effective, deadly attacks by the Taliban, have given way to massive civil demonstrations and violence from Afghans, the very people we thought were on our side. The violent eruptions over the Koran burning demonstrates that our problems in Afghanistan are not just with the Taliban. In reality, they never were just about the Taliban or, for that matter, neither were they at one time just about Al Qaeda.  Raw nerves exist throughout the country and increasingly, we hear about killings of American and NATO soldiers by Afghan soldiers and employees working inside the government. Just yesterday we learned that two American officers were killed in Kabul inside the Interior Ministry building, protected by heavy security. Many feel that it is no longer safe for Americans to be working alongside Afghans because of this danger. The recent officer killings were apparently committed by a worker employed within the Ministry (though he was not captured at the time of this writing) and reflects the growing tension between those we are attempting to bring into the government and military in hopes of entrusting them to sustain a functional civil society, even though it’s an American version of what we think they should have, as we pointedly emphasize why Afghans should raise the rent on properties owned by Al Qaeda and the Taliban. But, no matter how hard we try, how much money we put into the country, we cannot achieve a sufficient level of security such that the country can put itself back together again. In that sense it’s an eery duplication of what we achieved in Iraq. Just call Afghanistan Iraq II. The major difference between the two is the difference between oil in the ground and a pipeline above ground.

The tension between American/NATO forces and Afghans has sharply escalated as a result of the Koran burnings, and the recent image of American soldiers urinating on the dead body of a resistance fighter has added to the outrage demonstrated in the streets.  To Muslims, these acts fit the image they have of Americans and their presence in Afghanistan. Most Americans do not understand how much we are hated in that part of the world and when Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld formulated the word “islamofacism” to describe radicals in the region, it was very clear to Afghans that they were referring to all Muslims, not just a few radicals. We ignore the polls that tell us that we are viewed more as a threat to Afghan society, rather than an ally. Even President Karzi, the leader we installed,  can’t make up his mind about us and we are desperately seeking a solution to this war that involves a negotiated settlement with the Taliban.

In Eric Margolis’ book “American Raj: Liberation or Domination?: Resolving the Conflict Between the West and the Muslim World,” published in 2008,  he attempts to provide the American public with a view of what people in the Middle East think of Americans and why we find conflicts in that region so difficult to resolve. We don’t have a problem starting a war in this region, usually associated with quick military victories and what seems like a triumphant victory. But then the problems begin. Margolis’ message is especially relevant as he has traveled all over the region, reporting and following in the footsteps of his mother who also was a journalist in the Middle East. Afghans understand that they will be there long after we leave and they also clearly understand that our motives are never pure, but always involve a financial benefit that serves our own interests. Our intrusion into Afghanistan and the problems that we are having in that region reflect the poorest public relations effort ever perpetrated from one country onto another. Before Muslims understood what we were really like, at the close of WWII, we were viewed as honest, hard-working Americans who lived up to the demands of their noble constitution. At one time, Muslims viewed us as a model for their own future. It did not take long however for them to understand that what we offered was merely a different form of hegemonic control. Afghans believe for example that the American motivation for invading their country was so that we could be dealing with a more compliant partner than the Taliban to allow the construction of a major pipeline through the region to distribute natural gas from the Caspian Sea and avoid the distribution system of the Russians. This deal was set to go through, but, in 1998 American embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam were bombed by Al Qaeda, operating within Afghanistan, as Osama bin Laden had moved there from Sudan in 1996. The course of history changed that day.

Three years later, when 9/11 hit us, Al Qaeda probably had about 300 members and Afghans did not believe that the United States would declare war on so few people–but there were many Afghans who understood that the U.S. declared war on Afghanistan (an unofficial war of the type we have conducted ever since the close of WW II) to control the country and its future destiny with a pipeline.  If this is a war that’s winding down, it’s winding down for us, not for the Taliban. They’re not going anyplace. If the “Long war” characterizes any side, it is that of the Taliban, not the Americans. We are war-wary and exhausted and no longer certain of our objectives in Afghanistan. Nation building? Counterinsurgency? Pacification? At one time or another these names have all appeared within our lexicon for the Afghan war, but like any buzz word they have all run their course, including the generalmania period of Patraeus and McChrystal. We no longer have a moniker for the war in Afghanistan, but it doesn’t mean our efforts are any less deadly to Afghanistans. The Taliban just have to wait until we leave, after which they know that the puppet government we have established will not offer significant resistance in our absence and Karzi himself would like to conclude a peace treaty with the Taliban before we leave. In the meantime, it’s the Taliban consider it their responsibility to extract as much pain and suffering from the U.S. Army troops as they have suffered underneath the boot of those same soldiers. As for accurate reporting about the war, you cannot trust the mild or even rosy reports of embedded journalists, which includes just about everyone,  because their vision of the situation is that which the military insists they see. As an embedded journalist you see what the military wants you to see, their eyes are your eyes and, at least in Iraq, there were far too many examples of Congressman giving a televised tour of their visit to illustrate how safe it was, dressed in a full body armor suit, surrounded by sharp shooters lined up along the roofs of the aligning buildings. John McCain went to Iraq under such circumstances to announce that it looked like we were finally winning the war because of the “surge.” The far more dangerous non-embedded journalists are the ones we should seek out and, as I have noted previously, reports that come back from journalists like Jeremy Scahill (see below) do not suggest we are making significant progress in the war–quite the opposite. In the meantime we put lots of our efforts into destabilizing Pakistan, a much larger country than Afghanistan and one that comes with its own supply of nukes. In two more years, Obama has promised to end the war in Afghanistan. When General Patraeus was in charge, he promised, like GW Bush, to give us a new version of the “Long War.” Under his leadership, we went from the “shock and awe” policies of the Bush administration, courtesy of Donald Rumsfeld, with a heavy emphasis on technology, to the counter insurgency strategy and the “surge injections” of more troops. It is doubtful that this worked in Iraq when Patraeus tried it in 2006, but there is little question that the Afghanistan surge did not work and Patraeus is no longer running that war, but instead came home to run the CIA. No one is defending the surge in Afghanistan and our own estimate of the war is that it’s a “stalemate.”

In case you haven’t heard, the “Long War” is over–it died of natural causes and shear exhaustion. The Afghan war we are fighting now uses Special Forces and missile firing drones to take out suspected terrorists in an ever-increasing arch of countries in Africa. The new model for conducting the war in Afghanistan is based on the way in which we killed bin Laden last year. Should the Republicans mention the Middle East in this year’s Presidential election, they will mention Iran and avoid talking about Afghanistan, because Obama already killed bin Laden. The Republicans will be far more comfortable blaming the rising cost of gasoline on Obama (despite the fact that during Obama’s three years America’s production of oil has increased, not decreased), numb to the fact that their own rhetoric against Iran may have already contributed to the rising cost of oil.

If you want to read reports on the Afghan war from a non-embedded reporter, you need to seek out journalists such as Jeremy Scahill and Rick Rowley. These two reporters went to Afghanistan last year, arranged their own schedule and visits without military escort or a travel guide. Very few reporters take such risks.  They reported last year that our military actions in Afghanistan were destroying our objective because we were killing too many Afghans and the opposition to our presence was building. We don’t hear about these events because they are carried out by Special Forces that conduct night-time raids and often kill whole families indiscriminately in retaliation for a nearby roadside bomb that went off in the neighborhood.  In the Vietnam war we were outraged by the disaster of My Lai, but the way operations are carried out by Special Forces in Afghanistan, we just don’t hear about them, primarily because they are not written up. You cannot claim access through the Freedom of Information Act if nothing about the raid was written down. And, we don’t hear too much about drone strikes which are also becoming a new component of the way we conduct our wars. Despite our poor history in fighting and winning wars in the Middle East in the last decade, we will hear this year about how the Obama administration should be bombing Iran to prevent them from getting a nuclear capability, despite the fact that there’s no evidence they have one.  This year the Republicans running for the Presidency have added incompetency to the list of their afflictions including the absence of any world view of politics or diplomacy.

It appears that Americans want to forget our war in Afghanistan and we are still in search of what or how a victory in that region of the world will be defined, no matter how it ends for the United States. At the moment, the war in Afghanistan seems like it will end like the war in Iraq: we will find some delusional way to declare a victory and leave the  country in shambles, but perhaps we will have added a pipeline to the landscape of Afghanistan and recruited enough people to guard it. And of course we never mention how we have devastated the culture of Iraq and put some of its archeological sites under asphalt to make room for our war machine. Andrew Bacevich, writing in TomDispatch has recently characterized the history of our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as we prepare to engage terrorists on an expanded map, with new bases for drones without every asking why or what it is we plan to get out of it and whether it can be done that way under our constitution. The new war plan under the Obama administration is one in which the war will become a silent war, made by executive decisions over life and death of not just terrorists, but anyone the President feels is a threat to the United States. If America should suddenly lose her status as a superpower, I am convinced that the American public will be the last to find out about it. Since GW Bush, we have heightened the authority of our President to make life and death decisions over people we refer to as terrorists, including U.S. Citizens. This is too much authority to put into the hands of a single President. Now more than ever, we need to have Congress take back their abandoned authority, the one spelled out in the constitution–that only congress has the right to declare war and congress should review the military budget periodically–we have far to many black budget items in the military budget and far too little authority over defense spending.
RFM