Citizen G'kar: Musings on Earth

March 30, 2010

Character Test and Healthcare Reform

The Republican lie machine goes on and on, exploiting short memories, fear, and racism. What is the real opposition to healthcare reform? It's all about their long standing policy against Social Security and any other form of social insurance.

WEST DES MOINES, IA - JANUARY 03:  Republican ...Image by Getty Images via Daylife

One of the side benefits of health reform is that it has acted as a character test. If, for example, you thought of Mitt Romney as a person of character, his desperate attempts to disavow what is essentially his own policy proposal have cured you of that affliction. And as Menzie Chinn points out, Robert Samuelson’s hysterical reaction to what is, when all is said and done, a fairly modest — and paid for! — expansion of social insurance tells what what really lies behind his constant harping on the long-run fiscal issue.

Menzie has a nice chart comparing four policies and their impact on the budget: the two big Bush tax cuts, the Iraq war, and the health reform:

It’s curious, then, that Samuelson and others are driven wild only by the last of these. But Dan Gross explained it all a while back:
it’s about a strain of intellectual Toryism bedeviled by the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be getting social insurance.
All that high-minded talk about fiscal responsibility is just a cover for this deeper-seated concern.

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March 25, 2010

A Grassroots Effort for Clean ElectionsTaking Money Out of Politics

There is a way to roll back the damage done by the Supreme Court that has opened the flood gates for corporate money in campaigns. Grassroots citizen financial support in limited amounts, leveraging public funds for campaigns. It's working so well there is REAL bipartisan support in Maine for making it national.

While Alison Smith was raising her kids in a rural Connecticut town, a developer arrived one Thanksgiving weekend, when no one was around, and cut a canal to drain the water from a large marsh that adjoined her backyard. “He was slimy and greedy,” she says, “doing things on the sly. He filled in the land and built new houses. Gradually it dawned on me that we had wetland regulations, that he’d broken the rules, and that no one was doing anything about it. So I went to a town meeting of a couple hundred people, and waited for someone to say something. Nobody did. So even though I didn’t know that much about the issues, I voiced my opinions as best I could, red-faced, hesitant, and embarrassed. And I found that all these other people were thinking the same thing. They’d say it to each other, but not in public. It was really hard for me to speak out, but it was also really neat.”

Cover of "Soul of a Citizen: Living With ...Cover via Amazon

Shortly afterward, a neighbor suggested that she join the League of Women Voters. “I told her I wasn’t much of a joiner, but she kept asking me to different meetings and said I could bring my three-year-old daughter.” Gradually Alison got involved, working mostly on wetland problems and recycling programs. “I was hesitant at first. I don’t have a college degree. I’m more of a behind-the-scenes person. But I’ve always felt like someone who cares, even if I didn’t always know what to do about it.”

When Alison moved to Maine, she joined the League’s Portland affiliate, focusing on clean-air issues and transportation alternatives. She helped organize a diverse group of stakeholders to pass a new state law on waste-oil recycling. “The more I did, the more confident I became. The more I felt I had something to contribute.” By the fall of 1995, when she was asked to collect signatures to get a new campaign reform measure on the ballot, Alison jumped at the chance.

“We’ve become so used to being disgusted with elections and politicians,” she said. “We assume that almost anyone who gets in will be corrupt. But the decisions they make in our name matter hugely, often leaving us with even less power. I didn’t know whether the initiative would pass, but I didn’t want cynicism to rule my life. I’d like to see politics bring out the best in us, not the worst. I get tired when people complain all the time but never do anything to change things.”

Maine’s Clean Elections Act offered candidates for state office an alternative to the degrading and often corrupting process of financing their campaigns. Under its provisions, they could choose a Clean Election Option, pledging not to take private funding or spend their own money (apart from modest initial seed funds), and raising a designated number of five-dollar contributions in their district to demonstrate their grassroots support. In return, they would receive enough public money to mount a full-scale campaign; if privately funded opponents or outside political committees out-spent them, they’d get enough additional money to stay competitive. The initiative also included other reforms, including tightened limits on individual and corporate spending.

In a single day, 1,100 volunteers qualified the measure by staffing tables outside polling stations. “I just sat at a table with a sign saying ‘Do you want to take big money out of politics?’” recalls Alison. “Almost everyone who came over responded and signed.”

The campaign worked closely with members of an allied research project that publicized in-state contributions from such sources as the tobacco and trucking industries. It was especially effective to invite the press to film a $100-a-plate event that industry lobbyists held for the chair of the banking and insurance committee in the state legislature. These stories, says Alison, “helped us talk about the issue not only in speculative terms, but in terms of how wealthy interests were buying and selling our government. People felt they didn’t have to accept this as the way things always had to be.”

As she got more deeply involved, Alison met with newspaper editorial boards and spoke wherever anyone would have her. “I felt nervous when the League asked me to do new things like speak at press conferences. ‘Why on earth would they want me to do it,’ I asked, ‘instead of some expert?’ But I also found that as an ordinary person I had more credibility than the political professionals. The more I talked with people, the more I began to understand the issues. When people asked why I was involved, I’d tell them about the cynicism that seems to be destroying the very core of our democracy. I’d repeat over and over how if we could just break the links between money and politics, we’d begin to have a solution.”

The initiative passed with 56 percent of the vote, and it changed Maine’s politics. One Republican legislator said that before the Act’s passage, he always had to listen to his donors first; now he was finally free to vote on his and his constituents’ beliefs. By 2008, three quarters of the candidates in the state were participating. It made it easier for the legislature to pass bills like one that sharply dropped the price of prescription drugs. Although the Clean Elections Act couldn’t legally affect federal races, its popularity helped persuade Maine’s two Republican U.S. senators to buck party leadership and back national campaign finance reform efforts. Citizen efforts have since led to public financing of major state offices in Arizona, Connecticut, and Vermont, as well as public financing of selected offices in New Mexico and North Carolina, and a legislative pilot project in New Jersey. An Arizona state legislator I met had been a high school teacher whose students urged him to run; since he knew no one with money, he said, he wouldn’t have even tried in the absence of the clean election system.

Since the Maine initiative’s success, Alison has chaired the League’s national committee on campaign finance reform and continues to advise other states and national efforts on the value of the Clean Elections model. The impact she helped make also changed Alison personally. “It gave me a sense that I really can do something just by showing up to further a cause — this fundamental cause of democracy that affects everything I care about, so my kids won’t grow up in a cynical world.”

Paul Loeb Taking Money Out of Politics: A Grassroots Effort for Clean ElectionsTaking Money Out of Politics: A Grassroots Effort for Clean Elections

Adapted from the wholly updated new edition of “Soul of a Citizen: Living with Conviction in Challenging Times” by Paul Rogat Loeb (St Martin’s Press, publication date April 5, 2010, $16.99 paperback). With over 100,000 copies in print, Soul has become a classic guide to involvement in social change. Howard Zinn calls it “wonderful…rich with specific experience.” Alice Walker says, “The voices Loeb finds demonstrate that courage can be another name for love.” Bill McKibben calls it “a powerful inspiration to citizens acting for environmental sanity.”

Paul Rogat Loeb

Paul Rogat Loeb is the author of Soul of a Citizen: Living with Conviction in Challenging Times, whose wholly updated new edition will be released March 30, of The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen’s Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, named the #3 political book of 2004 by the History Channel and the American Book Association, and of Generation at the Crossroads: Apathy and Action on the American Campus. See www.soulofacitizen.org To receive his articles directly email sympa@lists.groundwire.org with the subject line: subscribe paulloeb-articles.

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March 24, 2010

Netanyahu Humiliates Obama with another E. Jerusalem Housing Expansion

Netanyahu clearly intends to embarrass Obama for taking a confrontation strategy with Israeli policy. Yet clearly, it is LONG over due that the big bully in the Middle East needs to be slapped down hard.

Informed Comment

Benjamin NetanyahuImage via Wikipedia

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu sets the tone for Israeli policy-- one that is earning him few friends in the West. Three embarrassments broke for him on Tuesday. First, yet another housing expansion in East Jerusalem was announced while he was meeting President Obama. Then, the cover story of Israeli troops accused of firing live ammunition at Palestinian protesters began to unravel. Then British Foreign Minister David Miliband unceremoniously tossed the Mossad London station chief out of the country for counterfeiting British passports, to be used in an Israeli assassination of a Palestinian in Dubai recently. Netanyahu personally ordered that hit, and is responsible for the forging of real peoples' passports and their use to commit a murder. Netanyahu is the one behind these acts of arrogance, and they are emblematic of his mean brand of politics.

The far rightwing government of Binyamin Netanyahu humiliates American officials every time it meets with them. Netanyahu met Obama in Washington on Tuesday, and like clockwork Israel embarrassed Obama by announcing that same day it was going ahead with a building project (funded by an American millionaire) in East Jerusalem that the Obama administration had strictly told the Israelis to halt. What I don't understand is why the Palestinians cannot sue over this issue in American courts. If the administration's stance is that East Jerusalem does not belong to Israel, and the US is signatory to the Fourth Geneva Convention, then why couldn't Palestinians with standing sue in the US when their property is usurped by an American millionaire?

Israel will investigate the shooting deaths of two Palestinian youth who were protesting (not rioting as AP puts it) against Israeli theft of water from the village well. Israeli troops claimed they were using rubber bullets, but Palestinians charge it was actually live ammunition.

Aljazeera English has the scoop, with live video of Israeli troops firing on the Palestinian youths, with what certainly sounds like live ammunition.

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March 19, 2010

New Packaging for Imprisonment Without Trial?

Obama has been little different from Herr Bush, changing his tune after he's been elected.

Spc. Colby Richardson detains a man after he i...Image via Wikipedia


The bill is only 12 pages long, but that is plenty of room to grant the president the power to order the arrest, interrogation, and imprisonment of anyone -- including a U.S. citizen -- indefinitely, on the sole suspicion that he or she is affiliated with terrorism, and on the president's sole authority as commander in chief.

The Act begins with the following (convoluted) requirement:

Whenever within the United States, its territories, and possessions, or outside the territorial limits of the United States, an individual is captured or otherwise comes into the custody or under the effective control of the United States who is suspected of engaging in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners through an act of terrorism, or by other means in violation of the laws of war, or of purposely and materially supporting such hostilities, and who may be an unprivileged enemy belligerent, the individual shall be placed in military custody for purposes of initial interrogation and determination of status in accordance with the provisions of this Act.

...Now, however, as president, Obama has helped pave the way for such radical legislative efforts as the one introduced by McCain and Lieberman, by embracing -- and re-branding -- the military commissions he once opposed.

"Belligerents" are the new "Combatants"

Three years after Obama eloquently opposed the Military Commissions Act, the now-president signed a Military Commissions Act of his own, as part of the 2010 Defense Authorization Bill. The law, which sought to overhaul the discredited Bush-era military commissions for "alien enemy combatants," introduced what is apparently turning out to be an important new term to the counterterror lexicon: Unprivileged Enemy Belligerent, defined as "an individual who: 1) has engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners; or 2) has purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners."

Months before, in March of 2009, the Obama administration announced that it was phasing out the term "alien enemy combatant," even as it held on to the authority to hold terror suspects indefinitely. "Unprivileged Enemy Belligerent," then, was its replacement.

As Human Rights Watch attorney Joanne Mariner wrote last fall, "this is a cosmetic change, not a real improvement, which mirrors the administration's decision to drop the enemy combatant formula in habeas litigation at Guantanamo Bay."


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March 11, 2010

The New Jim Crow

The truth about racism in America is hidden in poverty, drug laws, and behind bars. Yes, Jim Crow is alive and well in America.

The Nation

Frederick Douglass portraitImage via Wikipedia

Ever since Barack Obama lifted his right hand and took his oath of office, pledging to serve the United States as its forty-fourth president, ordinary people and their leaders around the globe have been celebrating our nation's "triumph over race." Obama's election has been touted as the final nail in the coffin of Jim Crow, the bookend placed on the history of racial caste in America.

Obama's mere presence in the Oval Office is offered as proof that "the land of the free" has finally made good on its promise of equality. There's an implicit yet undeniable message embedded in his appearance on the world stage: this is what freedom looks like; this is what democracy can do for you. If you are poor, marginalized, or relegated to an inferior caste, there is hope for you. Trust us. Trust our rules, laws, customs, and wars. You, too, can get to the promised land.

Perhaps greater lies have been told in the past century, but they can be counted on one hand. Racial caste is alive and well in America.

Most people don't like it when I say this. It makes them angry. In the 'era of colorblindness' there's a nearly fanatical desire to cling to the myth that we as a nation have 'moved beyond' race. Here are a few facts that run counter to that triumphant racial narrative:

• There are more African-Americans under correctional control today--in prison or jail, on probation or parole--than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.

• As of 2004, more African-American men were disenfranchised (due to felon disenfranchisement laws) than in 1870, the year the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, prohibiting laws that explicitly deny the right to vote on the basis of race.

• A black child born today is less likely to be raised by both parents than a black child born during slavery. The recent disintegration of the African-American family is due in large part to the mass imprisonment of black fathers.

• If you take into account prisoners, a large majority of African-American men in some urban areas have been labeled felons for life. (In the Chicago area, the figure is nearly 80 percent.) These men are part of a growing undercaste--not class, caste--permanently relegated, by law, to a second-class status. They can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits, much as their grandparents and great-grandparents were during the Jim Crow era."

There is, of course, a colorblind explanation for all this: crime rates. Our prison population has exploded from about 300,000 to more than 2 million in a few short decades, it is said, because of rampant crime. We're told that the reason so many black and brown men find themselves behind bars and ushered into a permanent, second-class status is because they happen to be the bad guys.

The uncomfortable truth, however, is that crime rates do not explain the sudden and dramatic mass incarceration of African-Americans during the past thirty years. Crime rates have fluctuated over the last few decades--they are currently at historical lows--but imprisonment rates have consistently soared. Quintupled, in fact. And the vast majority of that increase is due to the War on Drugs. Drug offenses alone account for about two-thirds of the increase in the federal inmate population, and more than half of the increase in the state prison population.

The drug war has been brutal--complete with SWAT teams, tanks, bazookas, grenade launchers and sweeps of entire neighborhoods--but those who live in white communities have little clue to the devastation wrought. This war has been waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color, even though studies consistently show that people of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates. In fact, some studies indicate that white youth are significantly more likely to engage in illegal drug dealing than black youth. Any notion that drug use among African-Americans is more severe or dangerous is belied by the data. White youth, for example, have about three times the number of drug-related visits to the emergency room as their African-American counterparts.

That is not what you would guess, though, when entering our nation's prisons and jails, overflowing as they are with black and brown drug offenders. In some states, African-Americans comprise 80 percent-90 percent of all drug offenders sent to prison.

This is the point at which I am typically interrupted and reminded that black men have higher rates of violent crime. That's why the drug war is waged in poor communities of color and not middle-class suburbs. Drug warriors are trying to get rid of those drug kingpins and violent offenders who make ghetto communities a living hell. It has nothing to do with race; it's all about violent crime.

Again, not so. President Ronald Reagan officially declared the current drug war in 1982, when drug crime was declining, not rising. From the outset, the war had little to do with drug crime and nearly everything to do with racial politics. The drug war was part of a grand and highly successful Republican Party strategy of using racially coded political appeals on issues of crime and welfare to attract poor and working class white voters who were resentful of, and threatened by, desegregation, busing, and affirmative action. In the words of H.R. Haldeman, President Richard Nixon's White House chief of staff: "[T]he whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to."

A few years after the drug war was announced, crack cocaine hit the streets of inner-city communities. The Reagan administration seized on this development with glee, hiring staff who were to be responsible for publicizing inner-city crack babies, crack mothers, crack whores and drug-related violence. The goal was to make inner-city crack abuse and violence a media sensation, bolstering public support for the drug war which, it was hoped, would lead Congress to devote millions of dollars in additional funding to it.

The plan worked like a charm. For more than a decade, black drug dealers and users would be regulars in newspaper stories and would saturate the evening TV news. Congress and state legislatures nationwide would devote billions of dollars to the drug war and pass harsh mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes--sentences longer than murderers receive in many countries.

Democrats began competing with Republicans to prove that they could be even tougher on the dark-skinned pariahs. In President Bill Clinton's boastful words, "I can be nicked a lot, but no one can say I'm soft on crime." The facts bear him out. Clinton's "tough on crime" policies resulted in the largest increase in federal and state prison inmates of any president in American history. But Clinton was not satisfied with exploding prison populations. He and the "New Democrats" championed legislation banning drug felons from public housing (no matter how minor the offense) and denying them basic public benefits, including food stamps, for life. Discrimination in virtually every aspect of political, economic and social life is now perfectly legal, if you've been labeled a felon.

Facing Facts

But what about all those violent criminals and drug kingpins? Isn't the drug war waged in ghetto communities because that's where the violent offenders can be found? The answer is yes... in made-for-TV movies. In real life, the answer is no.

The drug war has never been focused on rooting out drug kingpins or violent offenders. Federal funding flows to those agencies that increase dramatically the volume of drug arrests, not the agencies most successful in bringing down the bosses. What gets rewarded in this war is sheer numbers of drug arrests. To make matters worse, federal drug forfeiture laws allow state and local law enforcement agencies to keep for their own use 80 percent of the cash, cars and homes seized from drug suspects, thus granting law enforcement a direct monetary interest in the profitability of the drug market.

The results have been predictable: people of color rounded up en masse for relatively minor, nonviolent drug offenses. In 2005, four out of five drug arrests were for possession, only one out of five for sales. Most people in state prison have no history of violence or even of significant selling activity. In fact, during the 1990s--the period of the most dramatic expansion of the drug war--nearly 80 percent of the increase in drug arrests was for marijuana possession, a drug generally considered less harmful than alcohol or tobacco and at least as prevalent in middle-class white communities as in the inner city.

In this way, a new racial undercaste has been created in an astonishingly short period of time--a new Jim Crow system. Millions of people of color are now saddled with criminal records and legally denied the very rights that their parents and grandparents fought for and, in some cases, died for.

Affirmative action, though, has put a happy face on this racial reality. Seeing black people graduate from Harvard and Yale and become CEOs or corporate lawyers--not to mention president of the United States--causes us all to marvel at what a long way we've come.

Recent data shows, though, that much of black progress is a myth. In many respects, African-Americans are doing no better than they were when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and uprisings swept inner cities across America. Nearly a quarter of African-Americans live below the poverty line today, approximately the same percentage as in 1968. The black child poverty rate is actually higher now than it was then. Unemployment rates in black communities rival those in Third World countries. And that's with affirmative action!

When we pull back the curtain and take a look at what our "colorblind" society creates without affirmative action, we see a familiar social, political, and economic structure--the structure of racial caste. The entrance into this new caste system can be found at the prison gate.

This is not Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream. This is not the promised land. The cyclical rebirth of caste in America is a recurring racial nightmare.

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