Why Do We Idolize Wall Street Hustlers but Hold People Who Actually Make Things in Contempt?

Why Do We Idolize Wall Street Hustlers but Hold People Who Actually Make Things in Contempt?

By Les Leopold, Huffington Post. Posted September 30, 2009.

The manufacturing sector accounts for fewer and fewer jobs each year, so why should we give a damn about it?

Despite Wall Street's recklessness, we still seem more comfortable with the financial sector than with manufacturing. After all, manufacturing has a two hundred year history of occupational disease and environmental destruction. It produces poisons we don't want, consumer goods we don't need, and it uses more energy than we can afford to burn. For many, the industrial revolution looks like an unmitigated environmental disaster. So if manufacturing runs away to far off lands, few are likely to shed tears -- unless we work in these industries.

In contrast, financial products are relatively clean. Yes, its offices are too large and they use too much paper. And certainly the sector pays its executives far too much. But it's a lot cleaner than a steel mill and leaves a much smaller carbon footprint. Also, venture capitalists are moving money into renewable energy, green chemistry and a wide variety of green manufacturing that might actually help us develop a more sustainable economy.

A sizable portion of our financial leaders are conservationists. They donate to environmental groups to help preserve our watersheds and streams. They own large tracts of land near national parks and forests that help protect our land, water and wildlife. Many of the wealthiest Wall Street elites would claim to share our deepest concerns about global warming and sustainability.

Industrial workers, however, can get really nasty when environmental regulations threaten their livelihoods. Although they like to hunt and fish, workers who see their jobs threatened seem more than ready to chop down virgin trees, knock off the tops of mountains, and pump CO2 all over the globe.

Sure, we don't like the fact that Wall Street's fantasy finance casino crashed the economy, but even that has a positive environmental angle. The collapse has slowed down the world economy, slowed down production and transportation, and therefore has slowed down the output of carbon.

And besides, the manufacturing sector accounts for fewer and fewer jobs each year, so why should we give a damn about it?

Because no society can endure for long if it fails to create decent jobs for all its people. Right now, more than 29 million Americans are unemployed or forced into part-time work. They need jobs that are at harmony with nature. Creating that kind of work, I believe, will require a monumental commitment, just like the Manhattan Project, the Marshall Plan or the moon shot.

But first we need to understand how we got into this fix. Over the past thirty years we've engaged in a gigantic experiment with three major components -- the deregulation of financial markets, the globalization of production, and "tax reforms" which allowed wealth to accumulate in the top fraction of one percent. This was supposed to unleash entrepreneurial initiative and raise all boats. But it didn't work according to plan. Industry began relocating all over the world. The financial sector grew rapidly, and an enormous pot of wealth accumulated in the hands of a few. Meanwhile average wages (after adjusting for inflation) declined by 18 percent while our industrial core was shipped overseas.

The super-rich actually had so much capital that they ran out of real-world investments. That's when their money flowed into the newly deregulated fantasy finance casino. Bubbles inflated -- from the savings and loan fiasco to the dot.com crash to the housing hurricane. This grand experiment in deregulated capitalism failed miserably. We were moments away from the Great Depression II only one year ago. (For a full description see The Looting of America.)

To stop a full scale depression we poured trillions into Wall Street, but little has changed as our financial powerhouses, pumped up with taxpayer largess, are doing all they can to stop regulations on fantasy derivatives and caps on outrageous salaries. Nothing is preventing Wall Street from doing what it does best: seek out and over-inflate financial bubbles, skimming billions of dollars in fees all along the way. (See One Year After Lehman: Another Crash Coming?)

In short we face both an economic and an environmental crisis. What do we do? Obviously, we have to learn to live within the constraints of our natural environment. But we also must fulfill the most fundamental employment needs of our social environment.

That is why we should embark on a modern day moon shot to lead the world forward in renewable energy and other green technologies. This would require massive public investments in research and development, and in ensuring the adoption of the best technologies -- not because the private system can't, in principle, do those things, but because in reality it can't do them as fast as they need to be done. We're talking several hundred billion a year for at least twenty years. And if we funded it by taxing Wall Street and the super-rich we could tackle two problems at once: make real progress on global warming and prevent the financial sector from wrecking the economy again.

I believe the fairest ways to secure funding is through windfall profits taxes on Wall Street profits, a small transaction tax on large and speculative financial transactions, and a very steep progressive income tax on the super-rich. (I'm an Eisenhower radical. In those days the marginal tax rate on millionaires was 90 percent.) This would move the money from the fantasy finance casino to the real economy and it could lead to a rejuvenated economy based on renewable energy and pollution prevention.

Such a massive commitment also would require border adjustment taxes on carbon to make sure the new green industries don't flee to nations with lower standards. It makes no sense to import windmills from countries whose steel plants put out three times the carbon as ours. It makes no sense to use up fossil fuels to ship green goods all over the globe, when those goods could be made much closer to their point of final use.

I know it's a very tall order to revamp Wall Street and to invent a green economy at the same time. But both the employment and environmental problems pose immanent threats. No free-market magic will make them disappear. It requires our human intervention. Let's hope we have the wisdom and will to get going -- now.

Les Leopold is the author of The Looting of America: How Wall Street's Game of Fantasy Finance destroyed our Jobs, Pensions and Prosperity, and What We Can Do About It, Chelsea Green Publishing, June 2009.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/les-leopold/favoring-bankers-over-boi_b_304032.html

See more stories tagged with: environment, economy, wall street, services, manufacturing, financial services

Les Leopold is the executive director of the Labor Institute and Public Health Institute in New York, and author of The Looting of America: How Wall Street's Game of Fantasy Finance Destroyed Our Jobs, Pensions, and Prosperity—and What We Can Do About It (Chelsea Green, 2009).

The U.S. and Europe Have Propped Up So Many Corrupt "Democracies" That the Word Is Losing Meaning

The U.S. and Europe Have Propped Up So Many Corrupt "Democracies" That the Word Is Losing Meaning

By Arundhati Roy, Tomdispatch.com. Posted September 30, 2009.

What's next in a world where democracy has been so hollowed out?

While we're still arguing about whether there's life after death, can we add another question to the cart? Is there life after democracy? What sort of life will it be? By "democracy" I don't mean democracy as an ideal or an aspiration. I mean the working model: Western liberal democracy, and its variants, such as they are.

So, is there life after democracy?

Attempts to answer this question often turn into a comparison of different systems of governance, and end with a somewhat prickly, combative defense of democracy. It's flawed, we say. It isn't perfect, but it's better than everything else that's on offer. Inevitably, someone in the room will say: "Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia... is that what you would prefer?"

Whether democracy should be the utopia that all "developing" societies aspire to is a separate question altogether. (I think it should. The early, idealistic phase can be quite heady.) The question about life after democracy is addressed to those of us who already live in democracies, or in countries that pretend to be democracies. It isn't meant to suggest that we lapse into older, discredited models of totalitarian or authoritarian governance. It's meant to suggest that the system of representative democracy -- too much representation, too little democracy -- needs some structural adjustment.

The question here, really, is what have we done to democracy? What have we turned it into? What happens once democracy has been used up? When it has been hollowed out and emptied of meaning? What happens when each of its institutions has metastasized into something dangerous? What happens now that democracy and the free market have fused into a single predatory organism with a thin, constricted imagination that revolves almost entirely around the idea of maximizing profit?

Is it possible to reverse this process? Can something that has mutated go back to being what it used to be? What we need today, for the sake of the survival of this planet, is long-term vision. Can governments whose very survival depends on immediate, extractive, short-term gain provide this? Could it be that democracy, the sacred answer to our short-term hopes and prayers, the protector of our individual freedoms and nurturer of our avaricious dreams, will turn out to be the endgame for the human race? Could it be that democracy is such a hit with modern humans precisely because it mirrors our greatest folly -- our nearsightedness?

Our inability to live entirely in the present (like most animals do), combined with our inability to see very far into the future, makes us strange in-between creatures, neither beast nor prophet. Our amazing intelligence seems to have outstripped our instinct for survival. We plunder the earth hoping that accumulating material surplus will make up for the profound, unfathomable thing that we have lost. It would be conceit to pretend I have the answers to any of these questions. But it does look as if the beacon could be failing and democracy can perhaps no longer be relied upon to deliver the justice and stability we once dreamed it would.

A Clerk of Resistance

As a writer, a fiction writer, I have often wondered whether the attempt to always be precise, to try and get it all factually right somehow reduces the epic scale of what is really going on. Does it eventually mask a larger truth? I worry that I am allowing myself to be railroaded into offering prosaic, factual precision when maybe what we need is a feral howl, or the transformative power and real precision of poetry.

Something about the cunning, Brahmanical, intricate, bureaucratic, file-bound, "apply-through-proper-channels" nature of governance and subjugation in India seems to have made a clerk out of me. My only excuse is to say that it takes odd tools to uncover the maze of subterfuge and hypocrisy that cloaks the callousness and the cold, calculated violence of the world's favorite new superpower. Repression "through proper channels" sometimes engenders resistance "through proper channels." As resistance goes this isn't enough, I know. But for now, it's all I have. Perhaps someday it will become the underpinning for poetry and for the feral howl.

Today, words like "progress" and "development" have become interchangeable with economic "reforms," "deregulation," and "privatization." Freedom has come to mean choice. It has less to do with the human spirit than with different brands of deodorant. Market no longer means a place where you buy provisions. The "market" is a de-territorialized space where faceless corporations do business, including buying and selling "futures." Justice has come to mean human rights (and of those, as they say, "a few will do").

This theft of language, this technique of usurping words and deploying them like weapons, of using them to mask intent and to mean exactly the opposite of what they have traditionally meant, has been one of the most brilliant strategic victories of the tsars of the new dispensation. It has allowed them to marginalize their detractors, deprive them of a language to voice their critique and dismiss them as being "anti-progress," "anti-development," "anti-reform," and of course "anti-national" -- negativists of the worst sort.

Talk about saving a river or protecting a forest and they say, "Don't you believe in progress?" To people whose land is being submerged by dam reservoirs, and whose homes are being bulldozed, they say, "Do you have an alternative development model?" To those who believe that a government is duty bound to provide people with basic education, health care, and social security, they say, "You're against the market." And who except a cretin could be against markets?

To reclaim these stolen words requires explanations that are too tedious for a world with a short attention span, and too expensive in an era when Free Speech has become unaffordable for the poor. This language heist may prove to be the keystone of our undoing.

Two decades of "Progress" in India has created a vast middle class punch-drunk on sudden wealth and the sudden respect that comes with it -- and a much, much vaster, desperate underclass. Tens of millions of people have been dispossessed and displaced from their land by floods, droughts, and desertification caused by indiscriminate environmental engineering and massive infrastructural projects, dams, mines, and Special Economic Zones. All developed in the name of the poor, but really meant to service the rising demands of the new aristocracy.

The hoary institutions of Indian democracy -- the judiciary, the police, the "free" press, and, of course, elections -- far from working as a system of checks and balances, quite often do the opposite. They provide each other cover to promote the larger interests of Union and Progress. In the process, they generate such confusion, such a cacophony, that voices raised in warning just become part of the noise. And that only helps to enhance the image of the tolerant, lumbering, colorful, somewhat chaotic democracy. The chaos is real. But so is the consensus.

A New Cold War in Kashmir

Speaking of consensus, there's the small and ever-present matter of Kashmir. When it comes to Kashmir the consensus in India is hard core. It cuts across every section of the establishment -- including the media, the bureaucracy, the intelligentsia, and even Bollywood.

The war in the Kashmir valley is almost 20 years old now, and has claimed about 70,000 lives. Tens of thousands have been tortured, several thousand have "disappeared," women have been raped, tens of thousands widowed. Half a million Indian troops patrol the Kashmir valley, making it the most militarized zone in the world. (The United States had about 165,000 active-duty troops in Iraq at the height of its occupation.) The Indian Army now claims that it has, for the most part, crushed militancy in Kashmir. Perhaps that's true. But does military domination mean victory?

How does a government that claims to be a democracy justify a military occupation? By holding regular elections, of course. Elections in Kashmir have had a long and fascinating past. The blatantly rigged state election of 1987 was the immediate provocation for the armed uprising that began in 1990. Since then elections have become a finely honed instrument of the military occupation, a sinister playground for India's deep state. Intelligence agencies have created political parties and decoy politicians, they have constructed and destroyed political careers at will. It is they more than anyone else who decide what the outcome of each election will be. After every election, the Indian establishment declares that India has won a popular mandate from the people of Kashmir.

In the summer of 2008, a dispute over land being allotted to the Amarnath Shrine Board coalesced into a massive, nonviolent uprising. Day after day, hundreds of thousands of people defied soldiers and policemen -- who fired straight into the crowds, killing scores of people -- and thronged the streets. From early morning to late in the night, the city reverberated to chants of "Azadi! Azadi!" (Freedom! Freedom!). Fruit sellers weighed fruit chanting "Azadi! Azadi!" Shopkeepers, doctors, houseboat owners, guides, weavers, carpet sellers -- everybody was out with placards, everybody shouted "Azadi! Azadi!" The protests went on for several days.

The protests were massive. They were democratic, and they were nonviolent. For the first time in decades fissures appeared in mainstream public opinion in India. The Indian state panicked. Unsure of how to deal with this mass civil disobedience, it ordered a crackdown. It enforced the harshest curfew in recent memory with shoot-on-sight orders. In effect, for days on end, it virtually caged millions of people. The major pro-freedom leaders were placed under house arrest, several others were jailed. House-to-house searches culminated in the arrests of hundreds of people.

Once the rebellion was brought under control, the government did something extraordinary -- it announced elections in the state. Pro-independence leaders called for a boycott. They were rearrested. Almost everybody believed the elections would become a huge embarrassment for the Indian government. The security establishment was convulsed with paranoia. Its elaborate network of spies, renegades, and embedded journalists began to buzz with renewed energy. No chances were taken. (Even I, who had nothing to do with any of what was going on, was put under house arrest in Srinagar for two days.)

Calling for elections was a huge risk. But the gamble paid off. People turned out to vote in droves. It was the biggest voter turnout since the armed struggle began. It helped that the polls were scheduled so that the first districts to vote were the most militarized districts even within the Kashmir valley.

None of India's analysts, journalists, and psephologists cared to ask why people who had only weeks ago risked everything, including bullets and shoot-on-sight orders, should have suddenly changed their minds. None of the high-profile scholars of the great festival of democracy -- who practically live in TV studios when there are elections in mainland India, picking apart every forecast and exit poll and every minor percentile swing in the vote count -- talked about what elections mean in the presence of such a massive, year-round troop deployment (an armed soldier for every 20 civilians).

No one speculated about the mystery of hundreds of unknown candidates who materialized out of nowhere to represent political parties that had no previous presence in the Kashmir valley. Where had they come from? Who was financing them? No one was curious. No one spoke about the curfew, the mass arrests, the lockdown of constituencies that were going to the polls.

Not many talked about the fact that campaigning politicians went out of their way to de-link Azadi and the Kashmir dispute from elections, which they insisted were only about municipal issues -- roads, water, electricity. No one talked about why people who have lived under a military occupation for decades -- where soldiers could barge into homes and whisk away people at any time of the day or night -- might need someone to listen to them, to take up their cases, to represent them.

The minute elections were over, the establishment and the mainstream press declared victory (for India) once again. The most worrying fallout was that in Kashmir, people began to parrot their colonizers' view of themselves as a somewhat pathetic people who deserved what they got. "Never trust a Kashmiri," several Kashmiris said to me. "We're fickle and unreliable." Psychological warfare, technically known as psy-ops, has been an instrument of official policy in Kashmir. Its depredations over decades -- its attempt to destroy people's self-esteem -- are arguably the worst aspect of the occupation. It's enough to make you wonder whether there is any connection at all between elections and democracy.

The trouble is that Kashmir sits on the fault lines of a region that is awash in weapons and sliding into chaos. The Kashmiri freedom struggle, with its crystal clear sentiment but fuzzy outlines, is caught in the vortex of several dangerous and conflicting ideologies -- Indian nationalism (corporate as well as "Hindu," shading into imperialism), Pakistani nationalism (breaking down under the burden of its own contradictions), U.S. imperialism (made impatient by a tanking economy), and a resurgent medieval-Islamist Taliban (fast gaining legitimacy, despite its insane brutality, because it is seen to be resisting an occupation). Each of these ideologies is capable of a ruthlessness that can range from genocide to nuclear war. Add Chinese imperial ambitions, an aggressive, reincarnated Russia, and the huge reserves of natural gas in the Caspian region and persistent whispers about natural gas, oil, and uranium reserves in Kashmir and Ladakh, and you have the recipe for a new Cold War (which, like the last one, is cold for some and hot for others).

In the midst of all this, Kashmir is set to become the conduit through which the mayhem unfolding in Afghanistan and Pakistan spills into India, where it will find purchase in the anger of the young among India's 150 million Muslims who have been brutalized, humiliated, and marginalized. Notice has been given by the series of terrorist strikes that culminated in the Mumbai attacks of 2008.

There is no doubt that the Kashmir dispute ranks right up there, along with Palestine, as one of the oldest, most intractable disputes in the world. That does not mean that it cannot be resolved. Only that the solution will not be completely to the satisfaction of any one party, one country, or one ideology. Negotiators will have to be prepared to deviate from the "party line."

Of course, we haven't yet reached the stage where the government of India is even prepared to admit that there's a problem, let alone negotiate a solution. Right now it has no reason to. Internationally, its stocks are soaring. And while its neighbors deal with bloodshed, civil war, concentration camps, refugees, and army mutinies, India has just concluded a beautiful election. However, "demon-crazy" can't fool all the people all the time. India's temporary, shotgun solutions to the unrest in Kashmir (pardon the pun), have magnified the problem and driven it deep into a place where it is poisoning the aquifers.

Is Democracy Melting?

Perhaps the story of the Siachen Glacier, the highest battlefield in the world, is the most appropriate metaphor for the insanity of our times. Thousands of Indian and Pakistani soldiers have been deployed there, enduring chill winds and temperatures that dip to minus 40 degrees Celsius. Of the hundreds who have died there, many have died just from the elements.

The glacier has become a garbage dump now, littered with the detritus of war -- thousands of empty artillery shells, empty fuel drums, ice axes, old boots, tents, and every other kind of waste that thousands of warring human beings generate. The garbage remains intact, perfectly preserved at those icy temperatures, a pristine monument to human folly.

While the Indian and Pakistani governments spend billions of dollars on weapons and the logistics of high-altitude warfare, the battlefield has begun to melt. Right now, it has shrunk to about half its size. The melting has less to do with the military standoff than with people far away, on the other side of the world, living the good life. They're good people who believe in peace, free speech, and in human rights. They live in thriving democracies whose governments sit on the U.N. Security Council and whose economies depend heavily on the export of war and the sale of weapons to countries like India and Pakistan. (And Rwanda, Sudan, Somalia, the Republic of Congo, Iraq, Afghanistan… it's a long list.)

The glacial melt will cause severe floods on the subcontinent, and eventually severe drought that will affect the lives of millions of people. That will give us even more reasons to fight. We'll need more weapons. Who knows? That sort of consumer confidence may be just what the world needs to get over the current recession. Then everyone in the thriving democracies will have an even better life -- and the glaciers will melt even faster.

See more stories tagged with: democracy, afghanistan, saudi arabia, pakistan

Arundhati Roy was born in 1959 in Shillong, India. She studied architecture in New Delhi, where she now lives. She has worked as a film designer and screenplay writer in India. Roy is the author of the novel The God of Small Things, for which she received the 1997 Booker Prize. Her new book, just published by Haymarket Books, is Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers. This post is adapted from the introduction to that book.

Right-Wing Media Send Their Mobs of Crazy Fans to Go After Private Citizens -- Including Kids

Right-Wing Media Send Their Mobs of Crazy Fans to Go After Private Citizens -- Including Kids

By Eric Boehlert, Media Matters for America. Posted September 30, 2009.

The right-wing is igniting the crazies by pushing them to snoop on everyday people.

Last week, a Washington Times blogger posted a call to arms, beseeching readers to help the newspaper dig up more information regarding a long list of arts organization representatives who took part in a conference call with the White House on August 10. The call was part of a National Endowment for the Arts initiative, and it's a conference call that was secretly taped and has been wildly overhyped in conservative media circles as some sort of linchpin in a larger criminal enterprise being run out of the White House to politicize the arts. (There's no evidence the August 10 conference call broke any laws.)

Still, the Times was asking for help. It wanted readers to search through a spreadsheet it posted that included names of the arts representatives who participated in the NEA conference call. The Times wanted readers to snoop around online -- doing some crowdsourcing -- and find out everything they could about the arts reps.

In theory, of course, online dirt-digging and sleuthing makes perfect sense and represents a new era of participatory journalism embraced by the Internet. Josh Marshall and his reporting team at Talking Points Memo, for instance, famously used crowdsourcing to track policy positions of members of Congress during the debate over Social Security in 2005. Readers also chipped in and helped rifle through thousands of pages of memos that the Bush White House dumped at a time when the U.S. attorney scandal was widening. Thanks to Marshall's readers, TPM was able to tease out all sorts of interesting news leads.

Note, however, who the targets of TPM's crowdsourcing were: members of Congress and other major players in the federal government. Marshall urged his readers to monitor politicians and to read through government documents while focusing on people in power who are expected to be held publicly accountable.

But The Washington Times' disturbing call to arms? The paper wanted its readers to find out all they could about private citizens who work at little-known arts organizations and whose only connection to the spotlight was that they were invited to dial in to a conference call.

Times blogger Kerry Picket assured readers, "The people on the call didn't necessarily do anything controversial or wrong." Yet look at the kind of dirt Times readers were urged to dig up about the arts reps. Had they:

• Been active in Democratic politics?

• Made any campaign donations recently?

• Blogged for The Huffington Post?

• Believed in the 9-11 "Truther" conspiracy theory?

The obvious odor of Red Scare-era snitching that hung over the Times' wrongheaded project was too much to take even for some loyal conservative readers. Wrote one Times reader in the comments section:

As a Republican, this story makes me sick to my stomach. What is this? A witch hunt? McCarthy is back? As someone who lived through that, I am saddened to see the Washington Times engage in this type of behavior. STOP ACTING LIKE THIS. They are private citizens. I am a VERY proud Republican, but this is not who we are.

But increasingly, this is who conservatives have become. They've become a mindless mob, and the right-wing media, more and more often, are sending their overeager foot soldiers out on seek-and-destroy missions involving private citizens. They're even targeting innocent schoolchildren, like the group of second-graders in New Jersey that became a right-wing (mob) object of disgust last week after an old YouTube clip surfaced that showed the students singing a song in honor of the president of the United States. (You're supposed to recoil in horror at the mere suggestion of such a thing happening in America.)

The reason the Times' crowdsourcing bulletin was so misguided, and possibly even dangerous, was that the people the newspaper was urging to go digging for dirt were, by and large, the same type of people who are packing pistols at anti-Obama rallies, parading around with Hitler posters, and claiming the POTUS wasn't born in America. Meaning the right-wing mob, which suddenly decided last week that the NEA represented all that is evil in the world, is not all that stable and should not be setting its crooked sights on private citizens.

Again, original research and citizen journalism are both laudable pursuits. But in the hands of right-wing radicals who exhibit very little common sense and even less common decency, the witch hunts of peripheral players, including now-regular attempts to target children, no longer represent journalism in any recognizable sense. Instead, they're just unsettling -- and dangerous -- attempts at mob rule. They're a way to send a signal that anybody who is even marginally involved in public discourse can suddenly become a target of the mob. And then, all bets are off.

This trend of targeting private citizens is not new. But it has become more pronounced in recent weeks and months, as collective Obama hatred has pushed the GOP Noise Machine to ignore the boundaries of fair play. (Like posting the possibly stolen contents of somebody's Rolodex.)

The growing obsession with singling out children for mob ridicule is especially troubling. Recall in early August, it was an 11-year-old girl who became the object of right-wing taunts after she had the audacity to stand up at an Obama town hall and ask the president a question. Busted! The kid wasn't participating in public democracy. Instead, the mob called her out as a shifty, "in-the-tank questioner."

Fox News quickly channeled the blog attacks and posted this headline [emphasis added]:

White House Says Girl with Campaign Ties Chosen at 'Random' to Speak at Obama Town Hall

Campaign ties? The girl was in elementary school! How could she have had "campaign ties"? The only "tie" was that her mom was an Obama donor and supporter in 2008, a fact quickly discovered when right-wing bloggers began scouring Facebook photos and friends lists, as well as FEC filings, in search of info about the girl's mother, a "political hack." Why? To unmask the girl's "campaign ties," of course.

In other words, her mom did what a few million other Americans did last fall, yet in the eyes of Fox News, Michelle Malkin, and the mob leaders, that suddenly meant the woman's daughter had "campaign ties"? And for right-wing bloggers, that meant the kid was fair game for ridicule? That meant that, of course, she deserved to be mocked as a "leftist plant." (The caped crusaders online never unearthed a single fact suggesting that the young girl was coached on her question or that Obama knew what it would be before he called on her. By "plant," the mob simply meant the schoolgirl was the daughter of a Democrat, as if that were news or even relevant.)

The right wing's latest attack on children was even more astonishing. Fresh off her humiliating claim that 2 million people showed up at the September 12 anti-Obama rally in Washington, D.C., (she was only off by 1.9 million), Malkin urged readers to wallow in disgust over the fact that 18 New Jersey 7-year-olds sang a song in honor of the new president.

Directly and indirectly, the second-graders were attacked as being "creepy," "Obama-worshipping drones" and cultish members of the "Hitler Youth." Why? Because they sang a song during Black History Month that honored the accomplishments of America's first black president. The whole thing was "sick," the hate mob announced.

Why so sick? Because it was just like what Hitler did! (Again with the Hitler fetish from the far-right fever swamp?)

[W]hen those of us who study history see videos like the one below, it chills us to the bone. It is decidedly reminiscent of the indoctrination techniques that took place in 1930s Germany.

That's right: A massive, mandatory, state-run indoctrination initiative implemented by a fascist German dictator was just like when a single school teacher in New Jersey independently, without the slightest involvement from the government, decided to teach second-graders a song about Obama. The comparison is almost too dumb for words. And am I the only one who thought the story would have worked as a pseudo-scandal only if the kids were videotaped singing the praise of another country's president? But in the loopy world of right-wing media, it's disgusting and disgraceful and cultish when kids today sing the praises of the president of the United States.

Welcome to Bizarro World, where patriotic schoolkids are now the enemy.

The whole senseless attack was painfully dumb and misdirected and represented a shocking invasion of the schoolchildren's privacy. But the mob had selected its target, which meant that the conservative media had to play along and hype the tale as incredibly important and potentially dangerous. In a desperate attempt to attach some drama to the story about kids who sang nice things about the president, FoxNews.com posted this ominous headline and subhead:

Elementary School Students Reportedly Taught Songs Praising President Obama: Nearly 20 young children are captured in an online video as they sing songs that overflow with campaign slogans and praise for "Barack Hussein Obama," as they repeatedly chant the president's name and celebrate his accomplishments. [The original headline can be seen in the page's URL.]

"Captured." Like, the little elementary schoolkids were trying to pull a fast one, but the news hounds at Fox busted them good! The comedy was that by "captured," Fox meant some parent or teacher taped the kids and put it on YouTube, like four months ago. But in the hands of Fox, the kids had been captured.

Mob rules, indeed.

But whenever the right wing ignites the crazies, it's no laughing matter. And in the case of the "sick," "creepy" second-graders signing up for duty in the "Hitler Youth," predictably, after much breathless snooping, the name of the offending elementary school was indentified and its phone number was posted online. And just as predictably, threats of violence began to pour in.

According to a Fox News online report:

The tension at B. Bernice Young Elementary School escalated to such a degree Thursday that the school was placed temporarily on lockdown after its principal received death threats over a YouTube video that showed nearly 20 children being taught songs lauding the president, though back-to-school night events continuing as planned Thursday night at the school.

Ironically, the Fox report was quickly scrubbed, and any mention of looming right-wing mob violence was edited out of the news story. Editors at Fox News can erase all the unseemly mentions of death threats they want, but when right-wing mobs online are whipped into a frenzy and sent out to attack private citizens, they always leave a mark.

See more stories tagged with: violence, obama, fox news, right-wing, kids, right-wing media

Why Are We Lying to Ourselves About Our Catastrophic Economic Meltdown?

Why Are We Lying to Ourselves About Our Catastrophic Economic Meltdown?

Posted by Arun Gupta, AlterNet at 2:00 PM on September 29, 2009.

Sorry, it's not over yet. This downturn will be severe and long-lasting, and profoundly re-shape our lives, culture, society and the world.

Over the last year, the world has received a crash course in real-world capitalism as the follies of Wall Street nearly torpedoed the global economy, which had to be rescued by a trillion-dollar government handout.

Economics, the study of systems of production, distribution and consumption of goods and services, touches virtually facet of our lives from work, recreation and home life to entertainment, culture and social relations.

While there is a wealth of information and some excellent reporters in the business press, the mainstream media has botched virtually every major economic story over the last decade. It helped inflate the Internet bubble. It worshiped at the shrine of the free market and Alan Greenspan. It ignored the evidence of the housing bubble. It was missing in action on the commodities bubble. It celebrated billionaires and speculators even as they manufactured financial weapons of mass destruction. It only sporadically reports on the myriad ways Wall Street games the financial system.

Even now, the corporate media downplay the scope of the disastrous U.S. economy. The current economic downturn, the longest since the Great Depression more than 70 years ago, has been dubbed by many the “Great Recession.”

It's a useful way for journalists to acknowledge the pain of tens of millions of Americans who have lost homes, livelihoods, health care and more, while distinguishing the current misfortune from the Great Depression. But the term also makes the situation seem rosier than it is.

Despite the financial industry’s self-induced catastrophe in 2008, most corporate media reporting still assumes “What’s good for Wall Street is good for America.”

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has already said this recession is “very likely over.” The S&P 500 index, from its low point in March 2009, has rocketed upward by nearly 60 percent in barely six months. And Wall Street banks are reporting record profits, less than a year after taxpayers threw them a trillion-dollar lifeline.

But for the average household, the reality is grim. The number of unemployed and underemployed is nearly 17 percent of the U.S. workforce, or around 25 million people. Residential mortgage foreclosure filings have exceeded 300,000 a month for six months in a row, starting in March 2009. Tent cities are sprouting across the country. Personal incomes continues to shrink, and it’s projected that medical bankruptcies, people who file for personal bankruptcy because of medical bills, will reach 900,000 cases this year.

There is also little hope for a sustained recovery. Even if the recession technically ends in 2009, it’s only because of the (flawed) stimulus plan passed by Washington earlier this year.

One way to measure the gross domestic product is to divide it up in four segments: consumer spending, which is negative year over year; business investment, which is still in a recession; trade, or the value of exports minus import, which has been running a massive gap for years; and government spending, which has increased dramatically at the federal level while dropping precipitously at the local and state level. These factors are represented by the formula GDP = C+I+G+(X-M).

In simple language, there is no sector that appears capable of pulling the economy out of its deep funk: manufacturing has virtually disappeared in this country; most service sector jobs pay dismally; the tech sector and “creative industries” can’t employ tens of millions; those hopes of green jobs appear to vanished with Van Jones; and there are no more bubbles that can be pulled out of the Federal Reserves’ bag of tricks, at least ones that trickle down to Main Street.

It’s a distinct possibility that we may even see a double-dip recession, while the unemployment rate stays in the double digits for years.

The United States may be headed for a lost decade, like Japan experienced during the 1990s. It seems more fitting, then, to call this current downturn Depression 2.0.

This decline is not a re-run of the 1930s. After all, it’s the extreme right that is organizing around this downturn, not the left or labor as in the Roosevelt years. But it does appear like it will be severe and long-lasting, and profoundly re-shape our lives, culture, society and the world.

It’s going to be a rough ride, but information is the key to organizing for a better world.

Tagged as: economy, wall street, global meltdown

Arun Gupta is an editor of the Indypendent. He's writing a book about the decline of American Empire to be published by Haymarket Books.

Published on Tuesday, September 29, 2009 by The New York Times

Exelon to Quit Chamber Over Climate Bill

by Clifford Krauss and Kate Galbraith

Exelon, one of the country's largest utilities, said Monday that it would quit the United States Chamber of Commerce because of that group's stance on climate change. It was the latest in a string of companies to do so, perhaps a harbinger of how intense the fight over global warming legislation could become.

"The carbon-based free lunch is over," said John W. Rowe, Exelon's chief executive. "Breakthroughs on climate change and improving our society's energy efficiency are within reach."

A wave of departures from the chamber has been building for weeks. It was heralded Monday by some Congressional Democrats and environmentalists as a sign that the business community's opposition to global warming legislation is weakening. In their view, that improves the chances that a global warming bill that narrowly passed the House in June might also pass the Senate.

But others said the resignations were just a sign that businesses will have varied positions depending on whether they will be winners or losers from the legislation. Exelon, a Chicago company that sells electricity and gas in four states, is also the country's largest operator of nuclear power plants. That type of electrical generation emits no greenhouse gases and would gain a financial advantage under the pending bills.

"There will be significant vibrations from this," said Representative Jay Inslee, a Democrat of Washington State on the Energy and Commerce Committee. "It's a bit of an earthquake."

Pacific Gas & Electric, the dominant utility in Northern California, and PNM Resources, a holding company that includes the largest utility in New Mexico, said recently that they would withdraw from the national chamber. Mr. Rowe said Exelon would not renew its membership because of the chamber's "stridency against carbon legislation."

The United States Chamber of Commerce is one of the main business lobbies in Washington, with more than three million members. It says it not opposed in principle to tackling global warming, but is worried about any approach that would raise costs for businesses.

The chamber has been especially vocal recently in opposing a proposal by the Environmental Protection Agency to use an existing law, the Clean Air Act, to set limits on greenhouse gases. The proposal would most likely take effect only if Congress failed to pass climate legislation.

The utilities and other companies that are supporting climate change legislation tend to be those based in more liberal parts of the country and believe that being viewed as environmentally responsible is a good marketing strategy, energy and business analysts said. The utilities tend to be dependent on sources like nuclear power that emit fewer greenhouse gas emissions than their competitors.

Before, "voicing their good fortune among higher-carbon colleagues was seen as impolite," said Paul Bledsoe, director of communications and strategy at the National Commission on Energy Policy, a bipartisan research organization. "Now that legislation seems imminent, these companies are stepping up to support legislation because it helps their bottom lines."

What appears to have touched off the utilities' withdrawals from the chamber was a recent article in The Los Angeles Times that cited chamber officials who called for a "Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century" about the science of climate change. The Scopes trial was a clash of creationists and evolutionists in the 1920s.

Both PG&E and PNM cited the possibility of such a trial as a major concern.

Don Brown, a PNM spokesman, said in a statement that his company felt compelled to "particularly reject" the chamber's "recent theatrics calling for a ‘Scopes monkey trial' to put the science of climate change on trial."

However, David C. Chavern, the chamber's chief operating officer, said there had been a misunderstanding. Chamber officials do not question the overall science of climate change, but rather, the group questions whether that science is enough to support the E.P.A.'s rulemaking under the specific legal requirements of the Clean Air Act.

"We're not looking at the next Scopes monkey trial," he said. "We just think the E.P.A. is the wrong venue to be dealing with climate change issues that will impact the whole country and whole world."

He said another chamber official's reference to the Scopes trial "was wrong, inaccurate and obscured what the chamber is really doing."

Other companies have also expressed differences with the chamber recently. Nike has said in a statement that it "fundamentally disagrees with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's position on climate change and is concerned and deeply disappointed with the U.S. Chamber's recently filed petition challenging the E.P.A.'s administrative authority and action on this critically important issue."

Johnson & Johnson, the big consumer products company, urged in a letter this spring that the chamber's statements on climate change "reflect the full range of views, especially those of chamber members advocating for Congressional action" on global warming.

Duke Energy, a large Southern utility that supports action against global warming, has so far stayed in the national chamber, but it withdrew from of the National Association of Manufacturers in December, citing climate as a partial factor. The manufacturers' group has also been wary of action by the E.P.A.

In August, Duke Energy also left the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, citing climate policy. "It was clear that many influential members would never support climate legislation in 2009 or 2010 no matter how it was written," Tom Williams, a Duke Energy spokesman, said in an e-mail message. Alcoa, the aluminum company, also pulled out of the coal coalition this summer, with climate policy being one factor, a spokesman said.

"This is an issue that will cleave a lot of companies more than other business policy issues because there are sharper differences in strategies," said Matthew J. Slaughter, associate dean of the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. He noted that a utility that primarily used coal would logically have a different view from one dependent on nuclear power.

Climate change legislation still faces a tough battle in the Senate, where legislators from coal states will seek to protect the coal industry, and where many Republicans are opposed to any action they believe would put American businesses at a disadvantage.

Senator Jeff Bingaman, a New Mexico Democrat and chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said he did not know what impact the recent corporate policy announcements would have on individual senators. "But I do think it's a sign at least some in the business community are anxious to see us provide some leadership on climate change," he added.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Generals Say Dick Cheney, Liz Cheney Are Scaremongering

Published on Tuesday, September 29, 2009 by Politico.com

Generals: Dick Cheney, Liz Cheney Are Scaremongering

by Josh Gerstein

About a dozen retired generals and admirals, trying to add momentum to President Barack Obama’s effort to close the Guantanamo Bay military prison, are accusing former Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz of scaremongering about the dangers of closing it.

“It’s up to all of us to say these arguments advanced by Cheney and his acolytes are nonsense and that really what they’re doing is undermining our national security by delaying the date at which Guantanamo is closed,” retired Brig. Gen. James Cullen, a former chief judge of the Army’s Court of Criminal Appeals, told POLITICO Tuesday.

Former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney in this file image from May 21, 2009. (REUTERS/Joshua Roberts/Files)

“Some of the fear issues that are being raised in this are really unfortunate. It gets people excited about things they shouldn’t be excited about and impedes doing what is critical to this country. Get that damn symbol off the table,” said retired Gen. David Maddox, a former Army commander-in-chief for Europe. “We take a setback every time somebody, whether it’s the vice president or his daughter comes out and says the things that they say….We have to get out there again and just keep pounding.”

The former vice president and his daughter declined comment on the criticism.

The former military officers, whose Washington visit was organized by Human Rights First, argued rather bitterly that the Cheneys have exaggerated the risks of bringing Guantanamo prisoners from Cuba to the United States.

“Can you imagine getting a terrorist from Guantanamo convicted and put in a federal penitentiary in your town?” Maddox asked. “Have you ever checked who the hell’s in there already? Have any of them gotten out? The person who we’re putting in is probably a heck of lot less dangerous than most of them who are already in there.”

Administration officials recently acknowledged that Guantanamo may not be closed by Obama’s deadline of Jan. 22. But retired Army Maj. Gen. Tony Taguba, who investigated the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq, said the president was smart to set a mark.

“It forces us to have an end state,” Taguba said. “It cannot be open in perpetuity because we’re having this so called long war against terrorism.”

The retired officers met Monday with Attorney General Eric Holder and planned to confer later with Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair and Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn.

Holder gave no indication of when the administration might settle on a U.S. site to relocate Guantanamo prisoners, the former military leaders said.

Obama announced the one-year-closure plan on his second full day in office. But the administration lost control of the legislative process in April when the Senate voted 90-6 against funding for the closure. Democrats joined Republicans, who argued that it was a foolish risk to bring suspected terrorists into the United States.

“Closing Guantanamo is of a strategic value,” Taguba said. “Seeing people in orange jumpsuits and whatever have you creates such an excitement for people to be jihadists and terrorists…It’s not helping us.”

© 2009 Capitol News Company LLC

Expert: US is 'Climate Illiterate,' Ignorance Could Ruin Global Deal

Published on Tuesday, September 29, 2009 by The Guardian/UK

US Inertia Could Scupper World Climate Deal in Copenhagen, Says Expert

Leading climate scientist criticises Bush administration and points to general ignorance of global warming in US public polls

by David Adam

US ignorance about the risks and reality of global warming could sink hopes of a new global deal to control greenhouse gas emissions at December's climate talks in Copenhagen, an advisor to the German government has said.

Professor John Schellnhuber, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, said the US was "climate illiterate" and that the rest of the world may be forced to agree a new deal without it.

"Nobody should dream of the possibility that numbers and targets for countries will be sealed in Copenhagen," said Schellnhuber, one of the world's foremost climate scientists. "If the US doesn't move then nothing will happen."

He added: "The US in a sense is climate illiterate. It is a deeper problem in the US, if you look at global polls about what the public knows about climate change. Even in Brazil and China, you have more people who know the problem, who think that deep cuts in emissions are needed."

He predicted that it could be several years before the US would be willing to take on carbon cuts that were ambitious enough to persuade countries such as China to set targets of their own. At UN talks last week, China and India made small steps forward on this issue, but Obama was unable to do the same.

"The political chances seem very slim that something will happen in Copenhagen and even in the years after," he said. "Maybe in the conferences following Copenhagen some countries – including China and the EU – whatever the US does, will say: we go ahead now. Why can't we save the world without the US? Why should that not happen?"

The US has some of the highest carbon emissions per capita in the world, and any deal without it would be significantly less effective at curbing global temperature rise.

Speaking on the fringes of a climate science conference at Oxford University today, Schellnhuber said the former US president, George Bush, was to blame for a decade of inaction on climate change, and that many in the Republican party and the wider US population still did not understand the need to act. European nations and others have been waiting for President Obama to engage with the issue in a way that Bush refused to.

Schellnhuber said: "Obama is aware of the problem and he personally wants to do something. The problem is: can he provide the leadership to overcome the system? Every top politician gets to do two or three unpopular things, and the right politicians choose the right things."

To convert a global deal on climate change into US law would require a two-thirds majority vote in the US Senate, something that many in Europe believe is unrealistic given Obama's ongoing troubles with healthcare reform. "It just may not be possible to overcome the American inertia," Scellnhuber said.

Kevin Anderson, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, said: "It's vital for the climate that we get the Americans on board, but if we can't, then we can't just do nothing – we still need to make the biggest emission cuts that we can. If that means China and Europe and others going on without the Americans, then that may be the price we need to pay."

Schellnhuber's comments come as UN talks on a possible Copenhagen deal continue in Bangkok. Negotiators from 190 countries are wrestling with a draft treaty text, which runs to 200 pages and is riddled with alternate options and provisional text in square brackets.

His words reflect growing suspicion in Europe that the talks are crawling towards a unsatisfactory outcome, and that little progress is being made in the US. Earlier this month, the Guardian revealed a growing rift between Europe and the US over the latter's approach to how carbon targets could be set and met.

The Oxford conference is centred around the implications of a 4C rise in global average temperature, which scientists believe could be a possibility if serious carbon cuts are not agreed in Copenhagen.

Richard Betts, head of climate impacts at the Met Office Hadley Centre, presented a study demonstrating that the world could see a 4C rise as soon as 2060-2070 – within the lifetime of many people alive today.

Nigel Arnell, a climate expert at the University of Reading, said a temperature rise on this scale would bring about colossal changes in weather conditions, affecting billions of people. Some 15% of land worldwide that is currently suitable for agriculture would become useless, he said. Available land would shift north, to regions such as Siberia, which is currently covered in forest.

• This article was amended on Tuesday 29 September 2009. In the article above we said that the US has by some distance the largest carbon emissions per capita in the world, what we should have said is the US has some of the highest carbon emissions per capita in the world. This has been changed.

© Guardian News and Media Limited 2009W