Northern Valley Beacon

Corporate patriotism: the unAmerican way

2012-01-25T08:49:00.000-08:00

{Or, when Chinese communism beats American capitalism} Click here for update.


Election or American Spring?

It is not that sometimes the mainstream media shows a preference for liberal policies in its editorial stances that bothers conservative America. It's when it digs up and reports facts that ties the knots in the regressive panties that gall so much. To the GOP, God came to earth and revealed himself as a person in the form of a corporation. And "Thou shalt have no other god before me" means total obeisance to the corporation that supplies your livelihood, monitors your life, and decides whether and how you shall live. The worship of business is how you are expected to show your god-fearing patriotism. Even if it means betraying your country.

Before we go on discussing the nature of God, we should acknowledge his omnipotence.

Our corporate father which art in heaven,
Hallowed be thy brand.
Thy dividends come,
Thy bonuses granted on earth,
As it is in the CEO mind.
Give us this day our daily wage,
Reduced and without healthcare benefits,
And forgive our presumptions of equality,
As we forgive them who fire us,
And lead us not into equity,
For thine capital is the kingdom,
The power that grants us life
And the glory of your perks
For ever, or whatever you decree.

Now., we hope we will not be struck dead for bringing up a New York Times--the text of Satan--piece on Apple and how the corporate god loves all the children of the world, especially those in China whose government in effect subsidizes Apple. It is unthinkable for the U.S. government to regulate corporations, but it is just fine to reap profits from the subsidies of the Chinese government and the labor of the people over whom it exercises authority, in the name of the corporate godhead.

Apple is a company that many of us admire. It has produced superior and innovative products. It seems to embody the idea of free enterprise, a company started by a couple of guys working out ideas in a garage. At one time it proudly boasted that its products were made in America, and Steve Jobs at one time said he was as proud of one its factories as he was of the products in produced.

But things change. The products change. And so does the way of doing business. Apple just announced one of the most lucrative quarters in its history with profits of $13.06 billion which earned stockholders $13.87 a share. The story in the New York Times tells how the Chinese people with the collaboration of the Chinese government contributed to that success. In this country such a collaboration would be called socialism. It begins with summarizing the current attitude of Apple executives:

It isn’t just that workers are cheaper abroad. Rather, Apple’s executives believe the vast scale of overseas factories as well as the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their American counterparts that “Made in the U.S.A.” is no longer a viable option for most Apple products.

Then the story goes into details of why the Chinese workforce is so superior and how it got that way. It uses as the case in point the year 2007 a month before the company was to release its new iPhone in stores. Steve Jobs was not happy with the phone. It had a plastic screen which he thought would scratch and be a big detraction from the product. Instead, he announced that he wanted a hardened glass screen that would not scratch and he wanted it in a month when the iPhone was scheduled to go on sale in the stores.

One executive explained the situation:

A '"critical advantage for Apple was that China provided engineers at a scale the United States could not match. Apple’s executives had estimated that about 8,700 industrial engineers were needed to oversee and guide the 200,000 assembly-line workers eventually involved in manufacturing iPhones. The company’s analysts had forecast it would take as long as nine months to find that many qualified engineers in the United States.”

Apple executives say that going overseas, at this point, is their only option. One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul.

In mid-2007, after a month of experimentation, Apple’s engineers finally perfected a method for cutting strengthened glass so it could be used in the iPhone’s screen. The first truckloads of cut glass arrived at Foxconn City in the dead of night, according to the former Apple executive. That’s when managers woke thousands of workers, who crawled into their uniforms — white and black shirts for men, red for women — and quickly lined up to assemble, by hand, the phones. Within three months, Apple had sold one million iPhones. Since then, Foxconn has assembled over 200 million more.

A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.

It was Steve Jobs who set in motion the actions that illustrate the motive forces in American industry:

“I won’t sell a product that gets scratched,” he said tensely. The only solution was using unscratchable glass instead. “I want a glass screen, and I want it perfect in six weeks.”

After one executive left that meeting, he booked a flight to Shenzhen, China. If Mr. Jobs wanted perfect, there was nowhere else to go.

But while Apple is far from alone, it offers a window into why the success of some prominent companies has not translated into large numbers of domestic jobs. What’s more, the company’s decisions pose broader questions about what corporate America owes Americans as the global and national economies are increasingly intertwined.

“Companies once felt an obligation to support American workers, even when it wasn’t the best financial choice,” said Betsey Stevenson, the chief economist at the Labor Department until last September. “That’s disappeared. Profits and efficiency have trumped generosity.”

Though components differ between versions, all iPhones contain hundreds of parts, an estimated 90 percent of which are manufactured abroad. Advanced semiconductors have come from Germany and Taiwan, memory from Korea and Japan, display panels and circuitry from Korea and Taiwan, chipsets from Europe and rare metals from Africa and Asia. And all of it is put together in China.

For technology companies, the cost of labor is minimal compared with the expense of buying parts and managing supply chains that bring together components and services from hundreds of companies.

The Chinese government had agreed to underwrite costs for numerous industries, and those subsidies had trickled down to the glass-cutting factory. It had a warehouse filled with glass samples available to Apple, free of charge. The owners made engineers available at almost no cost. They had built on-site dormitories so employees would be available 24 hours a day.

The article says:

What U.S. plant can find 3,000 people overnight and convince them to live in dorms?”

Today’s new jobs are disproportionately in service occupations — at restaurants or call centers, or as hospital attendants or temporary workers — that offer fewer opportunities for reaching the middle class.

“We shouldn’t be criticized for using Chinese workers,” a current Apple executive said. “The U.S. has stopped producing people with the skills we need.”

Mr. Jobs even suggested it might be possible, someday, to locate some of Apple’s skilled manufacturing in the United States if the government helped train more American engineers.

The recounting of the iPhone story provides a stark glimpse into why American workers are under attack by corporate interests and why the reduction, possibly the elimination, of a middle class has become such an important part of corporate strategy. The Chinese workers live in dormitories and work 12-hour shifts. They, in effect, live in a labor camp. And this is the model of a workforce that American corporations see as the key to their success and profits.

The dismantling and weakening of the American workforce began with the anti-union and trickle-down economics of the much-vaunted Ronald Reagan. From today's vantage point, the vision of a labor force working in prison-like conditions is the model that corporate America thinks working people must submit to or be expended as impediments to corporate prosperity. A signal as to the corporate dedication to that policy is the fact that corporations are operating at huge profits while the workforce in America is being pushed into poverty.

A scarcely noted fact about life at the Foxconn work camp is that last year 14 workers committed suicide and earlier this month 150 workers gathered on the roof of the plant and threatened mass suicide over the working conditions.

Free enterprise has been redefined in the corporate world to mean the freedom to exploit people held in thralldom and the freedom to fuck over a majority of the population.

The current political campaign does not involve disagreements on how to get the economy to improve for the benefit of all Americans. It devolves into a basic conflict between those who are against equality and those who strive to achieve it. America has divided itself along philosophical premises in which the very concepts of equality, liberty, and justice are being challenged and disparaged by the right wing. It defines the political divisions within the nation. The Displaced Plainsman cites an article from the Wall Street Journal which claims that inequality has spread from economic circumstances to a national system of cultural belief and preference.

The GOP derides discussion of inequality as class warfare. But it is the corporations and their policies that have declared war on the working class and are forcing a worldwide movement.

In America, there is growing pessimism that the 2012 election will have any relevance in resolving the issue of inequality. America is poised to join people throughout the world who resist the tyrannical and demeaning rule by and of corporations and those who support them.

Before we ever get to an election in November, America is poised to have an American Spring and join the disaffected people throughout the world. The issues are well defined by the campaigns of the political parties, and the democratic process of elections seems impotent and irrelevant to resolving the fundamental issues raised by the corporatocracy of liberty, equality, and justice.

[Keith Bradsher, Hong Kong bureau chief, covering Asian business, economic, political and science news,Charles Duhigg , based in New York. are the writers of the New York Times story. David Barboza, Peter Lattman and Catherine Rampell contributed reporting.]

That old black racism has us in its spell

2012-01-21T20:10:00.000-08:00

That old black racism that we know so well

The second Republican debate in South Carolina was a historic re-enactment that took us back to the time George Wallace stood in a doorway at the University of Alabama and proclaimed segregation forever. Newt Gingrich was the principle performer in reviving a languishing racism that brought the audience to its feet in raucous applause. Rick Perry took the re-enactment back even further when he declared that South Carolina was at war with the federal government.

The reinstatement of race as a political issue was all the more poignant because it was done on Martin Luther King Day.

The provocateur who inspired Newt Gingrich was the African American journalist Juan Williams, recently deposed from NPR and given refuge by Fox News, who asked: "Speaker Gingrich, you recently said black Americans should demand jobs, not food stamps. You also say poor kids lack a strong work ethic and proposed having them work as janitors in their schools. Can’t you see that this is viewed as at a minimum as insulting to all Americans but particularly to black Americans?"

Newt Gingrich: " No, I don’t see that."   And the audience responded with loud cheers and applause.   Juan Williams received boos and jeers.

The South is rising again.

Only the most dissembling supporters of Romney and Gingrich who want to preserve some sense that they are not supporting racist politics refuse to admit that racial politics is fully in play.
And with Gingrich's unabashed performance in South Carolina and his win of its Republican primary, he has taken the lead in recognizing what Charles M.Blow sees as a way to exploit old racial animosities: "Gingrich seems to understand the historical weight of the view among some southern whites, many of whom have migrated to the Republican party, that blacks are lazy and addicted to handouts. He is able to give voice to those feelings without using those words. He is able to make people believe that a fundamentally flawed and prejudicial argument that demeans minorities is actually for their uplift. It is Gingrich’s gift: He is able to make ill will sound like good will."

The Republican campaign as practiced by Gingrich and Romney is propelled by good, old-fashioned hate propaganda. While Romney has not used the N-word against Obama, he has methodically used all the stereotypes and images that define the word to denigrate Barack Obama.   Gingrich goes after African America on a group basis. He calls Obama the "food stamp president" in contending that Obama is serving a culture of dependency and unearned entitlement. When he says that Obama put more people on food stamps than other president, he promoting a racist image of black folks who never work lining up for their handouts. He studiously fails to mention that more people are out of work because of the nefarious machinations of the financial corporations that the GOP worships so devoutly, and that many of the people on food stamps are working at jobs that do not pay enough to feed a family. It is not a culture of dependency; it is a culture of planned impoverishment in an attempt widen the gap between the self-appointed over class and a massive, weakened underclass. Class warfare? Of course, it's class war fare. It's those who are being impoverished who have not begun the real fight.

The tactic of racial politics has its risks, as detailed in a New York Times article. It may appeal to voters who harbor old racial hatreds, but to other voters it makes clear that those old racial hatreds are a platform the GOP wishes to stand on. A group of Catholics sent letters to Gingrich and Santorum warning them to stop the race baiting in their campaigns.

This campaign seems to be boiling down to simple choices between rich and poor, black and white.

Jesus returns, joins lobby firm as hack for corporatocracy

2012-01-21T10:17:00.000-08:00

Don't hassle me with your Christianity.
I say, don't lay none of that jive on me.
What it did to you is plain to see.
Ain't no fool gonna jive that way with me.
Ol' Massa's church

It's making the rounds on Facebook. It's a series of cartoon panels called "Coffee with Jesus." Some otherwise liberal-leaning people are liking it. It says some things that Christ would clearly approve of like caring for others, as in this panel:

Jesus is portrayed, as you will note, as a bearded, coiffed dude in a suit. If you read all the panels, you will find that he is also a bit of a snarky asshole. And the people on whom he vents his snarks are portrayed as whining, back-biting malcontents who hate their bosses and are dissatisfied with everything as they crave and envy luxury and status. Well, Jesus puts them in their place. He not only tells them to stop bitching and be happy with what they have, but damned well be glad for a lot less. He sounds like Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, He portrayed his state's working people as greedy thugs, and he damned well did something about it. He took away their collective bargaining rights.

Jesus in this setting gets right down to cases regarding the right and privilege to work. Carl who is featured in these panels, it seems, lost his job as a time shares salesman. He is now operating a lawn care service at half the money. Jesus, as you will read in this panel, tells him to be happy in his work and to be even happier by cutting his prices so he's competitive with the Mexican lawn laborers.

It is from Carl's wife, Lisa, that we learn Carl is so much happier in his new work. She is so distressed at her new, lower status that she implores Jesus to come back and redeem the earth right now. He tells her 7-Eleven is hiring.

And so, Jesus rebukes Carl and Lisa for that entity we call the American Dream.

He does not advise them simply to face and work out of their reduced circumstances. He castigates them for desiring a better life and yo have somewhat equal status with others in the economic scheme of things. He does make a snarky implication about what comprises the corporate world--lying, cheating, and swindling. But it is presented as kind of a moral condemnation of Carl's ambitions, not that there may inequality and injustice in the circumstances Carl finds himself in.

These panels resurrect a theology that was preached to the slaves. In a speech Frederick Douglass, a former slave, made to a group of Irish abolitionists, he recounts that form of Christian theology:

The Ministers of religion actually quoted scripture in support of the most cruel and bloody outrages on the slaves. My own master was a Methodist class leader (Laughter, and "Oh"), and he bared the neck of a young woman, in my presence, and he cut her with a cow skin. He then went away, and when he returned to complete the castigation, he quoted the passage, "He that knoweth his master's will and doeth it not, shall be beaten with many stripes." (Laughter.) The preachers say to the slaves they should obey their masters, because God commands it, and because their happiness depended on it. (A laugh.) Here the Speaker assumed the attitude and drawling manner so characteristic of the American preachers, amid the laughter of all present, and continued—Thus do these hypocrites cant. They also tell the slaves there is no happiness but in obedience, and wherever you see poverty and misery, be sure it results from disobedience. (Laughter.) In order to illustrate this they tell a story of a slave having been sent to work, and when his master came up, he found poor Sambo asleep. Picture the feelings, they say, of that pious master, his authority thrown off, and his work not done. The master then goes to the law and the testimony, and he there read the passage I have already quoted, and Sambo is lashed so that he cannot work for a week after. "You servants," continued the preacher, "To what was this whipping traceable, to disobedience, and if you would not be whipped, and if you would bask in the sunshine of your master's favour, let me exhort you to obedience. You should also be grateful that God in his mercy brought you from Africa to this Christian land." (Great laughter.) They also tell the wretched slaves that God made them to do the working, and the white men the thinking. And such is the ignorance in which the slaves are held that some of them go home and say, "Me hear a good sermon to day, de Minister make ebery thing so clear, white man above a Nigger any day."

Here we are living in the era of what Newt Gingrich calls the Food Stamp President, and Jesus comes back in a cartoon to set us straight. In response to being read scripture and preached to about being obedient and content with their lot, the slaves formed their own worship groups at which they sang "sorrow songs," sometimes called negro spirituals, which offered messages of equality, cause for hope, and some specific directions for boarding the underground railroad to escape out of slavery. This version of Jesus which condemns working people for greed and class envy is not the Jesus of The New Testament which records what Jesus actually said. This is a descendant of the old plantation Jesus as portrayed in the slave owner's manual. But we have texts which can lift us out of the insulting and disparaging castigation of working people and give us a view of the real American dream that can redeem the nation.

One of the texts is Langston Hughes' "Let America Be America Again," as excerpted here:

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed--
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek--
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one's own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean--
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today--O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That's made America the land it has become.
O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home--
For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore,
And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa's strand I came
To build a "homeland of the free."

The free?

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we've dreamed
And all the songs we've sung
And all the hopes we've held
And all the flags we've hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay--
Except the dream that's almost dead today.

O, let America be America again--
The land that never has been yet--

And yet must be--

Romney did not win the Iowa caucuses

2012-01-19T06:10:00.000-08:00

For some days, information has been circulating that a recount of the Iowa caucus votes put Rick Santorum in the lead. The Des Moines Register reported that Santorum came out 34 votes ahead of Romney. However, the tallies from some precincts cannot be found, so the Republican party is declaring a draw.

Truth in photography

2012-01-16T22:11:00.000-08:00

As those who read my cranky posts know, I think the Internet has done as much to destroy language as to develop its communicative traits. But it has also revived still photography by providing a medium in which one can explore the world through images, like I did as a child perusing the pages of Life magazine. On the regional level, I love it when Bob Newland posts photographs on his blog Decorum Forum.

Here is a gallery for photography lovers. Last week Eve Arnold, a consummate photographer, died at the age of 99. Here is a gallery of her portrait of America from The New Yorker.

Wisconsin Farmer

Land of the resentful and home of the petulant

2012-01-16T10:50:00.000-08:00

It was common intelligence among Democrats that the Republican candidate who could most effectively challenge Barack Obama on his own ground was Jon Huntsman. It was not surprising that Huntsman garnered such tepid support from the Republican party because it has adopted anti-intellectualism and anti-accomplishment as primary values for determining what is a real conservative. Accomplishment is revered, of course, when it means the practice of predatory capitalism and the aggressive diminishing of the middle class into a new mass of the poor. (The GOP hollers about class warfare, but elates over the pogrom against working people, probably because they think their groveling before the rich will earn them a place in the one percent.) The militant and near-violent assaults on anything deemed liberal comes from people who can conceive of success only in terms of who possesses the most toys, the most wealth. The nation has, indeed, strained to become, in Oscar Wilde's words, a people who know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.

Jon Huntsman possessed some traits which are anathemas to the GOP ideals. He showed evidence of some talents beside money grubbing and some experience that required intelligence and education in the discharge of duties. He spoke Mandarin, played the piano rather well, and got off of the conservative message on topics such as global warming. Mitt Romney accused him of a treason-like betrayal for accepting an appointment as ambassador to China from President Obama. And although he repeated some of party-line anti-Obama slogans, he did not do it sufficiently enough like Joseph Goebbels castigating the Jews and blaming them for all the ills of the world. His Republican opponents, such as Rick Santorum, used the nasty m-word on him: moderate. His experience as governor of Utah earned him little respect in the GOP (Gangstas of Petulance).

The depth of resentment Huntsman could inspire came out in the Washington Post following his suspension of his campaign. Two columnists, Alexandra Petri and Jennifer Rubin, wrote pieces that were supposed to be couched in humor but came off as bitter and bitchy.

The pieces seethed with jealousy and resentment of that kind the small-minded exhibit when some one does something that surpasses and outclasses them. They both descended into a juvenile, witless derision:

Petri: "Each of the Huntsman voters had a different reason for supporting him. One liked his hair. Three more were confused and thought this was the Democratic primary. Another one just thought he looked the “most Mad Men” of the Republican field. The last turned out to be Jon Huntsman in disguise."

Rubin: "The most amusing thing about the campaign — and there wasn’t much to amuse — was the foolish attention it extracted from the mainstream media. Sometimes the coverage was laughably fawning. His spread in Vogue magazine induced cackles on the right. (“His left eyebrow is pitched slightly lower than the other, and the eye below it has a slight squint. This gives him a perpetual expression of thoughtful engagement, the look of someone listening intently to what others are saying.”)"

Some South Dakota bloggers who show that great penchant for pettiness might take lessons here in how it is done in the big leagues.

The demise of the Huntsman campaign is a great comfort to those who fear and loathe anything resembling an intellectual challenge. And so, Jon Huntsman throws his support behind Mitt Romney, and we will get to hear paeans of praise to a free enterprise system that has brought the country to its knees and condemnations of those unpatriotic and treasonous souls who endanger America by having an occasional original thought or an actual accomplishment.

They will take America back. Right to the primal soup.

Do not try a colonoscopy at home. You might lose what little freedom you have left.

2012-01-15T20:34:00.000-08:00

The prohibitive cost of health care may be the explanation. Colonoscopies are a highly recommended part of preventive medicine. But they cost so much, and one has to fool around purging fecal matter that might obstruct the view. So people must be practicing self-examinations.

Why else would so many American people have their heads stuck so firmly in their lower colons?

There seems to be a large movement to Occupy the Lower Reaches of the Alimentary Canal because hardly anyone seems to have noticed that America is no longer the land of the free.

One of the people who has noticed is Jonathan Turley, Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University. He has detailed the purging of freedoms in an article in the Washington Post. Professor Turley states:

In the decade since Sept. 11, 2001, this country has comprehensively reduced civil liberties in the name of an expanded security state.

He explains:

Americans often proclaim our nation as a symbol of freedom to the world while dismissing nations such as Cuba and China as categorically unfree. Yet, objectively, we may be only half right. Those countries do lack basic individual rights such as due process, placing them outside any reasonable definition of “free,” but the United States now has much more in common with such regimes than anyone may like to admit.

The ten ways we have lost our freedoms are:

Assassination of U.S. citizen
Indefinite detention
Arbitrary justice
Warrantless searches
Secret evidence
War crimes
Secret court
Immunity from judicial review
Continual monitoring of citizens
Extraordinary renditions

Another reason so many heads are lodged in so many rectums may be that those who shout racial and personal attacks against President Obama finds that the resonance gives their inane charges and denials a ring of authority because no facts or reason penetrate those teeming colonic walls.

They can even use the N-word down there and no one hears. Up in the free air that claim that their charges that Obama is not a U.S. citizen, or even a Christian, has forged a birth certificate, and should go back to Kenya are not racist, but that particular device does not escape the semiotic test of what is being said. Semiotics is the science of what words designate and how they do it. The stereotypical definition of the N-word is a person of black or brown color; a person who is inferior; a person who steals and cheats and is untrustworthy; and a person incapable of civilized thought and action. We break down the designations:

Black or brown: the color speaks for itself among those who use it as a denigration.
Kenyan=black and brown ancestry; inferior African class.
Unchristian=inferior, uncultured unciviled.
Forged birth certificate=dishonest, untrustworthy person.

N=black person from Kenya with forged birth certificate and is unChristian.

You don't have to say the word if you use all the synonyms. We all get the point.

And that goes for those who say that Obama's policies are inferior and his personal conduct is inferior because he is a black person from Kenya whose Christian credential are dubious.

The point here is that people don't have to try the racist tack to attack Obama. They could challenge his support of policies that have cost us freedoms in ten ways.

But they sound more authoritative when their shouts resonate in their colons.
Passers by can't hear the N-word or its synonyms. It all just sounds like passing gas. Has that odor, too.

But for those who have their heads out in the sunlight and air, we aren't free like we used to be anymore. And that is a policy issue worth debating in the open.

An encroachment on freedom that Prof. Turley does not mention is the loss of individual liberties and equality to corporatism. The supporters of Mitt Romney say any attack of predatory, destructive venture capital organizations is an attack on free enterprise. Those free enterprises want the freedom to raid, pillage, and plunder corporations in ways the return exorbitant rewards for the venture capitalists, but leave the majority of Americans without any voice in the market and a huge middle class that is drifting into poverty.

Those venture capitalists insist, like the birthers, that their efforts held build the country and the economy. Oh, really? The last I looked ten percent controlled 80 percent of the wealth and earnings, and the poverty roles are growing exponentially.

Making the world safe for stupidity

2012-01-14T08:37:00.000-08:00

If there is one place that one might expect a bright ray of intelligence to break through the benighting smog that covers America, one would expect it in a discussion of education. Actually, the subject of education seems to turn the fog into an impenetrable darkness that a laser can't penetrate.

Governor Daugaard's proposals to reform and improve education in South Dakota are evidence of what is wrong in education, not what can improve it, but they incited a storm of ignorance driven by the winds out of the stupid.

Cory Heidelberger at Madville Times posted that the Governor's proposal on merit pay seemed to receive some reserve from the head of the educational bureaucracy in Pierre. What ensues is a long series of comments which suggest that what South Dakota--and by implication the rest of the country--needs is a total revision of the education system so that what we now call special education becomes the norm and what is now mainstream education is limited to those students who show a glimmer of intelligence. Some of the commenters, who happen to be involved in education, try to bring elements of fact and empirical-based reasoning into the discussion, but they are drowned out by those with differing illusions and delusions and the discussion turns into a cacophony of name-calling and insults. A sign of those in need of special education and custodial care is that they cannot engage with other people in ways that focus on objects that they can see in common. Instead, they conjure up their favorite phantasies and excitedly engage in masturbatory frenzies during which the objective world is lost in the excitement of getting off. The current wisdom is that such outbreaks cannot be prevented, so those who are engaged in the stimulation of their erectile little egos are advised to go their rooms and stimulate themselves in private where no one else has to witness the obscene sessions of self-absorption.

Mr. Heidelberger's blog contains a supreme irony. In the post just preceding the one on Governor Daugaard's plan and the apparent reception of it by the Secretary of Education, Cory has a post lauding politicians using blogs to address issues and clarify their stances. Cory, who is currently teaching high school French, L.K another teacher in communications and language arts, believe, as I do, that discussion is worthy and essential part of democracy and sharing opinions and information is a requisite. But then, my work as an editor and teacher of writing kicks in and I note, as I have about the comments at Madville Times, that freedom of speech does not make all speech valuable. There is some speech that is pernicious and destructive of any positive impulses. Good discussion that is based upon actual facts and competent reasoning is like a good wine or single malt Scotch. But it takes only a few drops of piss to turn the nectar into a lethal, contaminated potion. Freedom of speech is necessarily accompanied by a free exercise of knowledge and reason, if it is to be of any value. Some commenters who turn blogs into stupid exchanges of ejaculatory spatter protest that they are being censored and their freedom of expression is being denied them if their efforts are deleted. Blog editors have the right, constitutionally, and the obligation, professionally, to keep the focus of their lenses free from spatter and let the light of well-informed and well-chosen language shine on the foggy areas of human endeavor. One cannot discuss facts with those who dwell in their phantasies or reason with those incapable of it. Where engagement is impossible it is wrong to engage. It is appropriate for the health of the language and the democracy to tell those who produce only spatter to go to their rooms when they feel that urge.

At some point, the misinformation and intellectual failures on which Governor Daugaard's recommendations on education are based will have to be discussed where the substance of the discussion is kept free from those who think they are contributing to the world by relieving themselves on it.

America, the corporatocracy

2012-01-12T08:27:00.000-08:00

So some peons lose their livelihoods and their lives. Who cares?

That is the attitude that is revealed in the discussion of what venture capitalist organizations contribute to the country. The argument in favor of them is that they raise money to buy out companies and engage in "creative destruction":   they buy up companies, break them up, and sell off their parts. They make money by selling off the good parts for more than they paid for them; and they eliminate the bad parts. Mitt Romney made millions doing this with Bain Capital, and he is said to be the richest man running for president. The apologists say that with venture capital the money for failing companies comes from the private sector and does not, at least, involve taxpayer money.

The argument against such capital ventures is posed by people like Rick Perry, who sees the companies as vultures which consume all the good from the companies they buy, then leave worthless carcasses behind for the rest of the world to deal with. Newt Gingrich says that Mitt Romney “is gonna have to explain why would Bain have taken $180 million out of a company and then have it go bankrupt, and to what extent did they have some obligation to the workers?” Even some Republicans see venture capital companies as parasites and scavengers. The money they make goes to a few of the carcass-feeders and does little to contribute to the economy.

The defenders of creative destruction insists it creates value, but it creates value only for those few in the companies who receive the benefits; it creates poverty and disaster for those who lose their jobs and for the communities where the destroyed companies once operated. It is clear that in the minds of people like Mitt Romney that their concern is only that the privileged get exorbitant wealth and power. The people who are damaged by the acquisition of wealth and power are expendable and count for nothing. To criticize the destructive excesses of venture capitalism, says Mitt Romney, is an attack on free enterprise and unAmerican.

This is one of the factors that defines the one percent that the Occupy Wall Street movement identifies. In talking of the poor, Hitler had his useless eaters. We now have useless feeders off the weak, the dying, and vulnerable. The GOP has become totally subservient to the useless feeders.

Another factor is that the profits gained by venture capitalist enterprises gets a huge tax break.

One must think of those workers in China who threatened a mass suicide after a company they worked for in jobs largely outsourced from America reneged on a wage improvement. In 2010, fourteen workers in the plant committed suicide because of complaints about wages and working conditions. One would hope that in America, the workers would take out the corporations before they would take themselves out.

Aside from venture capital companies, there is a matter of consolidation--mergers and acquisitions--in general that affects business and how it gets done. These matters affect local communities and individuals. The question is whether these consolidated business produce good or better products and services or whether their cost cutting also cuts quality.

John Huntsman has announced that he is for breaking up the huge oil companies so that they do not monopolize so much of the economy and to break up the financial companies that are too big to fail. In his view, these gigantic companies operate on their own whims and jeopardize the economy.

The oil companies and their products and services are an example of where their hugeness affects local consumers. As one who traveled extensively for my work, I found that petroleum companies were an essential part of my ability to function. Both as a customer and one who oversaw other people's travel arrangements, oil companies were a large consideration in they way we operated.

One of the factors was credit cards. They made it much easier to pay for, track, and reimburse travel costs. But there were other conveniences and essential services involved, too. A card that I used often was Union 76. They had truck stops and convenience stores located along the major travel routes and some of their outlets had communications provisions. Before the age of the Internet and cell phone, Union 76 truck stops operated communication centers where one could stop, pick up, and leave messages as you traveled across the land. The message service was a way to avoid delays in trying reach people by telephone and lose time and patience by playing phone tag.

At that time, I had a number of credit cards from oil companies that stations in Aberdeen and could be used across the land, so that I was always near fuel and maintenance services when needed. Those cards included Mobil, Amoco, Texaco, Phillips 66, Conoco, and Union 76. The Mobil station in Aberdeen closed many years ago; it is now the site for Blockbusters. After the station closed, my card lapsed because I did not use it. That was an inconvenience because the oases on the interstates around Chicago feature Mobil service products.

Then one year as I traveled to Michigan, a trip I made a couple times a year, I found that the Union 76 stations were gone. There was one just west of the Twin Cities where I stopped regularly. It changed brands to something I did not have a card for. When I got near Madison, Wisconsin, a Union 76 station where once I checked for and left messages was gone. When I got to Indiana, the Union 76 station where I regularly fueled up was gone. And when I got to Lansing, Michigan, the station I patronized there was gone.

The disappearance of Union 76 foreshadowed what was to happen to the places I patronized in Aberdeen. The Amoco stations were changed to BP, and then BP decided not to do business in this part of the country. Most of those stations are Sinclair, who turned down a request for their credit card to replace the useless BP cards. So now I do not patronize those former BP stations. There are still BP stations in Brookings and Sioux Falls, so the card is useful for instate travel.

Then Texaco was merged into Shell, who automatically issued new credit cards after the merger. Phillips 66 and Conoco also disappeared completely from Aberdeen, which leaves Shell the only major brand in Aberdeen where I use a credit card. However, I stopped using the Phillips and Conoco cards anyway because an organization for which I traveled took them off their list of places for which it would reimburse expenses. They had some dispute with credit policies and products and put those two companies on the "avoid" list.

Most of the gas I buy locally now is from a convenience store down the street that gives a discount to regular customers who pay cash.

But the point is that, as with venture capital ventures, mergers and acquisitions among big corporations may pad the bottom line for the companies, but they often represent a reduction in the quality of products and services. They benefit the stockholders, but ignore the customers. These corporations affect the lives of people by the power and influence they exert on government, but more noticeably by the nature of the presence in local communities.

The simple fact is that these companies are making huge amounts of money off the people, but are not doing much to earn that money in terms of quality of products and services. And certainly not in terms of providing jobs.

Mitt Romney says it is unAmerican to criticize these corporations.   If individual citizens operated like the corporations they would be regarded as very bad citizens, even criminals. But that is the corporatocracy that America is becoming.

No idiot left behind

2012-01-10T09:11:00.000-08:00

Chris Hedges addresses my conscience. He was on C-Span for three hours Saturday morning where I saw him sporadically as I, in my role of treasurer, tried to fulfill the financial needs of the Snow Queen Festival being held in Aberdeen this weekend and next. The young people participating in the festival break my calloused, old heart. Chris Hedges reminds me of why. Unless the liberal, progressive movement throws off the tar-and-feather besmirching by the entrenched fascisti who have paralyzed the democratic impulse of America, the dreams and expectations of these bright and talented young people will wither and die as they face the realities of the char-duties to which the presiding over class consigns the middle and lower economic classes. Of course, prostitution--or at least the arts that make it profitable--always appeals to an over class that offers special dispensations to those who fawn and grovel and massage the egos and other erectile organs of those who presume themselves the rulers. And, after all, No Child Left Behind, the enforced indoctrination which rules our children's lives, is about nothing but fawning and groveling.

Chris Hedges

In his recent book, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, Hedges confronts the reasons why we are a generation of dupes. The title sets forth the thesis. America has undergone a conditioning which has purged a large segment of the population of the ability to make literate discernment and is well on the way to becoming a nation of slavering dupes whose mentalities are devoted to the spectacles of celebrity, a pants-drooping sense of fashion which is virulently anti-intellectual and anti-cultural. It shows in the kind of candidates the GOP is considering for president. The minions who comprise the GOP have made a concerted attack on intelligence and have expressed a bitter disdain for anyone who might possess some. Among there own, they have disparaged Jon Huntsman because he can speak Mandarin Chinese and, as ambassador to China, has served the country in ways that require intelligence and knowledge. In the current GOP mind, those qualities are fatal demerits.

Chris Hedges explores the subversion and suppression of the thought processes needed to create this class of surly, menacing anti-intellectuals who will do the bidding of their handlers anytime their anger buttons are hit. In Empire of Illusion, he details the conditioning that shapes the generation of dolts:

Life is about the personal humiliation of those who oppose us. Those who win are the best. Those who lose deserve to be erased. Compassion, competence, intelligence, and solidarity with others are forms of weakness. And those who do not achieve celebrity status, who do not win the prize money or make millions in Wall Street firms, deserve to lose. Those who are denigrated and ridiculed on reality television, often as they sob in front of the camera, are branded as failures. They are responsible for their rejection. They are deficient.

Chris Hedges examines the conditioning processes defined by George Orwell. The use of popular media as the instruments of operant conditioning have come to pass, and Hedges examines them in detailed specifics.

In The Death of the Liberal Class, Hedges summarizes the role of the media in this conditioning process:

The media, the church, the university, the Democratic Party, the arts, and labor unions—the pillars of the liberal class—have been bought off with corporate money and promises of scraps tossed to them by the narrow circles of power. Journalists, who prize access to the powerful more than they prize truth, report lies and propaganda to propel us into a war in Iraq. Many of these same journalists assured us it was prudent to entrust our life savings to a financial system run by speculators and thieves. Those life savings were gutted. The media, catering to corporate advertisers and sponsors, at the same time renders invisible whole sections of the population whose misery, poverty, and grievances should be the principal focus of journalism.

The GOP mission to make America a corporatocracy adheres closely to the way Mussolini envisioned fascism:

Fascism combats the whole complex system of democratic ideology, and repudiates it, whether in its theoretical premises or in its practical application. Fascism denies that the majority, by the simple fact that it is a majority, can direct human society; it denies that numbers alone can govern by means of a periodical consultation, and it affirms the immutable, beneficial, and fruitful inequality of mankind, which can never be permanently leveled through the mere operation of a mechanical process such as universal suffrage....
...Fascism denies, in democracy, the absur[d] conventional untruth of political equality dressed out in the garb of collective irresponsibility, and the myth of "happiness" and indefinite progress....

...For Fascism, the growth of empire, that is to say the expansion of the nation, is an essential manifestation of vitality, and its opposite a sign of decadence. Peoples which are rising, or rising again after a period of decadence, are always imperialist; and renunciation is a sign of decay and of death. Fascism is the doctrine best adapted to represent the tendencies and the aspirations of a people, like the people of Italy, who are rising again after many centuries of abasement and foreign servitude. But empire demands discipline, the coordination of all forces and a deeply felt sense of duty and sacrifice: this fact explains many aspects of the practical working of the regime, the character of many forces in the State, and the necessarily severe measures which must be taken against those who would oppose this spontaneous and inevitable movement ...

This is not to suggest that Obama represents an alternative to the incipient fascist direction of the GOP. In his 2008 campaign, he promised change and that change included a pledge to deal with the partisan paralysis and bitterness. He tried to do this by attempting to utilize the old traditions of discourse that leads to acceptable compromise. However, from the outset, the GOP indicated that it would not consider any compromises and that its single concern was defeating Obama and removing him from office. It made clear that Obama would be treated with some amiability only if he shuffled, shucked, and muttered "yes, massa" in obsequious subservience. The signal moment came when during the attempts to come to an agreement on the debt ceiling, Speaker John Boehner walked out and refused to acknowledge or return telephone calls. Only those GOP loyalists who are dedicated to foolery and self-delusion cannot see the overt racism in this tactic and many other instances in which GOP leaders have demanded deference and have heaped on denigrations about Obama's personal worth.

Liberals became restive when Obama did not call a spade a spade by objecting to his, in effect, being called a spade. By trying to stay above the partisan fray, which resonates so strongly of Mussolini's vision of fascism, Obama allowed the GOP to designate him "a loser" and to appeal to that callow winner-loser mentality upon which the GOP is dependent for its support. The little playground bullies were able to cower behind their leaders and call names of denigration and chant the slogans of insult and abuse that they have been taught is political discourse.

The process that Hedges describes of de-mentalizing the populace eliminates any possibility of thought and discussion. The only possibility for expression is, as in Orwell's daily five minutes of hate, for the obedient minions to stand before their leaders and repeat the chants and slogans in which they are led. There is no possibility of arguing with minds that have been sealed and can be reached only through those behavioral triggers to which they have been conditioned to respond. This eliminates liberals from any part in what passes for the political dialogue. The objective is to condition a majority of the populace to this mindless state. The mindless will become the voting majority.

That majority is being carefully constructed by the GOP agenda. The No Child Left Behind law was implemented in a way to purge the education curriculum of the literate arts and sciences, and transform it into a process of conditioning and rote memory which is what is assessed by the standardized tests. Those schools which do not score sufficiently on teaching-to-the-test subservience will be punished, and those teachers who show insufficiency in conditioning their students away from literacy will be fired. No Child Left Behind defines educational success in terms of mindless subservience.

Then other sources of political diversity are purged. Collective bargaining is taken away from labor unions, funds are denied from Planned Parenthood, and religious freedom is granted only to those denominations that speak and act against diversity that does not conform to social and behavioral norms dictated by the GOP.

Liberals who try to accommodate what passes for conservatism in their considerations are doomed. Nowhere is that fact more apparent than in the lose of Rep. Herseth Sandlin to Kristi Noem. Nancy Pelosi became the object of the GOP five minutes of hate and because Noem could identify them as being in the same party, the gullible minions voted against Herseth Sandlin to register their hatred for Pelosi. In trying to address what she thought were the conservative concerns of her constituency, Herseth Sandlin lost the confidence of the more liberal segments of her own party. The result is Kristi Noem, who like her colleague John Thune in the Senate, is a puppet who gives voice to whoever is pulling her strings at the moment and can only produce sham legislation against the regulation of farm dust, which never was an issue to be regulated, just as Thune's signal legislation was against the regulation of cow farts. But with those conditioned to the GOP agenda, these are issues of passion, which divert attention from matters like health care, poverty, and the fact that the lack of jobs stems from corporate policies that the U.S. government is to weakened to change.

Chris Hedges is among those who find refuge from the idiocracy in the Occupy movement. On one hand, he identifies the massive ills that the one percent is responsible for in the country and the world. On the other hand, he addresses how the traditional institutions of liberalism have failed to counter the corporatocracy and the disease it spreads to shrivel the collective brain pans.

The greatest hope for an informed, intelligent and free and equal society that once comprised the American dream is enough people refusing to participate in a political system that can only defeat those who cling to that dream. Perhaps, we can do nothing but say no, and refuse, at least, to be conditioned into idiots.

What's wrong with Mitt Romney?

2012-01-06T07:38:00.000-08:00

Aside from his demonstrated talent for assholery, the prime qualification for those little deities we call CEOs, Mitt Romney seems to be following a precedent for ruthlessness established in the history of his creed. He operates with the menace of a faction within the Latter Day Saints called the Danite band, which terrorized people in Missouri and whose offenses were a large part of the motive of people in Carthage, Illinois, for killing Joseph Smith, the founder of the sect.

A native of western Illinois, I was aware of Nauvoo, Illinois, the city-state the Mormons established and abandoned along the Mississippi River in the 1840s. However, not until I reached college age and became involved in matters dealing with the history and culture of Illinois regarding the American Indians, the African Americans, the settlers, and the geographical features of the region did I learn of a continuing controversy regarding the Mormons at Nauvoo. While an undergraduate at Augustana College in Rock Island, a sister Lutheran College was Carthage College in the town where Joseph Smith met his end. Carthage College did not come to the town until after its episodes with the Mormons, but the history of those episodes pervaded academic aspects of the college. I visited Carthage College for athletic events and some academic exchanges, and found that faculty and students seemed vaguely troubled by the history of the town as it involved the one-time residents of Nauvoo.

It is very difficult to find a definitive history of how the Mormons came to Nauvoo and why they left. That is because the Mormons have a massive and effective propaganda program that controls all information about the church and its history. Pursuant to a violent conflict between the Mormons and the rest of the population in Missouri in 1838, the Governor issued an edict banning Mormons from the state. They moved east to Illinois to create the city-state of Nauvoo for which they received a special charter that exempted it and its residents from laws of the state and allowed it to operate under its own laws, which were determined by the church leader, Joseph Smith. An aspect of history for which the Mormons were driven out of Missouri was replayed in Illinois, and was part of the motive for the uprising of citizens against Mormons, which led to the death of Joseph Smith. While in Missouri, the Mormons comprised a block of voters who voted as instructed by church leaders to obtain and maintain influence over the state government in its dealings with the Mormons. In Illinois, Nauvoo became the largest settlement in the state during the 1840s and exerted a dominant influence on state politics. That is one of the reasons that it obtained the status of a city-state, and operated under its own laws. The citizens of Illinois resented the fact that the power and influence emanating from Nauvoo overruled their own interests and concerns.

The Danite band was a group of militia organized to maintain discipline among the Mormons and to deal with the growing animosities and threats coming from the citizens of Missouri. However, among state law enforcement agencies in Missouri and the surrounding states, the Danite band gained a reputation for engaging in criminal activities, including murder for hire.

The history of the uprising against Mormons in Illinois seldom reflects the full reasons for the distrust and actions of the citizens against the Mormons. The story of Joseph Smith's death, however, is one of ambiguous and complicated motives. Some Mormon dissenters in Nauvoo started a newspaper which opposed Smith and charged him with corruption. Smith, who was the mayor of Nauvoo, ordered his militia to destroy the press, which was done. This led to charges against Smith who was tried and acquitted three times by Mormon juries in Nauvoo, but the Mormon dissenters and the people around Nauvoo filed complaints against him in state courts. He was charged with riot and treason for the destruction of the printing press, and at the urging of the Governor he came to Carthage to turn himself in and await trial before a circuit court. The Carthage jail was attacked by a mob of men who had painted their faces black and opened fire on the jail and its occupants. Smith and his brother were killed. Five men were charged with the murders, but were all acquitted.

The part of the story seldom told about why there was hatred directed toward Smith and the Mormons involves the role Nauvoo played in the region. During this time, a loose but very large band of criminals operated in the region and held the people in terror. They were called the Banditti of the Prairies. They openly robbed and killed citizens. One of their ploys was to have a confederate act as a traveler and approach a farm home asking for food and lodging for the night, which was the custom of the time for people wending their ways across the prairies. The confederate would "case" the household for money and valuables, then report what he found to the banditti, who would later burglarize or rob the household. This violation of hospitality so angered the settlers that the region became an armed camp and the settlers took to shooting anyone they suspected as being part of the Banditti operation and asking questions later. Among the victims of the Banditti was Col. George Davenport, a trader and early business man for whom Davenport, Iowa, is named. He was killed when banditti came to his home on Rock Island in the Mississippi River to rob him during a Fourth of July celebration.

When law enforcement officers got on the trail of banditti, the trail often led to Nauvoo where the bandits came to hide and liquidate their loot. As Nauvoo operated as a city-state, law enforcement officers had no authority inside the the town and the Mormon militia protected those who sought refuge there and prevented law enforcement officers from pursuing them or recovering stolen goods. The citizens assumed, whether it was the case or not, that the feared and detested Danite Band ran the protection and fencing operation. The citizens, including the Governor and state officials, wanted the Mormons out of Illinois because they were at the center of so much trouble. The mob that attacked Joseph Smith and his Mormon cohorts believed they were ridding the state of a criminal element that had terrified and pillaged the settlers. After the death of Joseph Smith, the Mormons began their migration to Utah, but it took about two years before Nauvoo was completely evacuated.

George Romney's ancestors were among those Nauvoo residents who made the trek to Utah. The account can be found on a website maintained by the Mormons in support of Romney.

The significance of this history has two main aspects. For one, it explains the source of distrust and resentment that many have toward the Mormon church, including evangelicals, and it explains in part why Rick Santorum dismissed Mormonism as a cult.

A second aspect is that tactics of the Romney campaign can be seen as borrowing heavily from the lessons learned by the Mormon church to manage public perceptions and appeal to the vulnerabilities of the citizenry to combat negative attitudes and build support. One tactic is to keep the question of whether Mormonism can be called a Christian denomination away from high-powered intellectual theological discussion and keep it in the arena of popular, manipulable chatter. Roman Catholic and protestant theologians from the largest denominations question whether some Mormon doctrines fit those defined as Christian. There has been some discussion of how the Mormon and Muslim scriptures incorporate some elements of Christianity but deviate on matters that define the essential premises of Christianity. Both the Muslim and Mormon religions have provisions that allow, sometimes encourage, hostile and violent actions against those they regard as infidels or apostates. Only recently has the Mormon Church allowed African-Americans to be given equal status with sanctioned, Mormon white men within the church. It still does not give women that status. Although recent changes in racial doctrine have been made to conflict less with the American premise of equality, there is still a racial undercurrent in the Mormon church that flows from its history.

That undercurrent is heavily utilized in Romney's campaign strategy. There is a very audible undertone of racism in American politics since Obama became president. From the outset, his opposition has spent very little effort criticizing his policies and his agenda in specific terms, but has focused directly on the person in announcing that its major objective is to ride the White House of Obama, the black interloper. Romney has directed his invective primarily at Obama the person in a way to revive and excite anti-black racial attitudes as a motive force in his campaign.

Everything Romney says about Obama conforms to anti-black stereotypes.

Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson notes the peculiar obsession of the Republican Party with maligning the person of Barack Obama, the form of attack it takes, and how Romney leads the anti-Obama campaign:

Romney’s assertions are the centerpiece of his, and his party’s, critique not just of Obama but of American liberalism generally. But they fail to explain how and why the American economy has declined the past few decades — in good part because they betray no awareness that Europe’s social democracies now fit the description of “merit-based opportunity societies” much more than ours does.

It is legitimate for voters to ask if a candidate will impose tenets of his/her religion, such as Islam or Mormon, that contradict the fundamental premises of our democracy onto the running of the country, but in today's bigoted intellectual climate it is hard to differentiate deliberate, enacted doctrine from accusations of prejudice. The First Amendment and the freedom to practice a religion of one's choosing does not give license to any religion to deny the very document that gives that religion the right to exist and to undermine liberty, equality, and justice for all Americans. The imposition of church doctrine on American law, whether relating to sexual orientation or race, is an issue in the current campaign among Republican candidates, and voters have the right and responsibility to examine candidates for tendencies to subvert the rights to liberty, equality, and justice.

In in his constant denigration of Barack Obama in terms of old racial stereotypes--accusations of incompetence, deviousness, perfidy, lazy dependency and expectancy of welfare--Romney echoes the past and disturbing values of what his church has practiced. Romney's embrace of hate-inspiring denigration contrasts sharply with the approach of his fellow Mormon, Jon Huntsman.

Racism is a part of the current campaign and, as a New York Times columnist points out, no one wants to talk about it, but it is there. Mitt Romney's leadership in economic and social issues may be obscured by his posturing and the conflict between his claims and his actions, but his leadership in chanting the chorus of old racial stereotypes is emphatically clear.

The respectable facade Romney presents does not disguise the fact that he is not a very nice man. His motives are rightfully suspect. Mitt Romney has a lot of explaining to do. So does the American press.

Taking back the White House for Mitt Romney: getting rid of the black and making it white again.

Somber Christmas

2011-12-27T22:04:00.000-08:00

In the Scandinavian Protestant church in which I was raised, there were sanctions against smoking, drinking, dancing, card playing, movies, and anything sexual. The result in my generation was people who with a certain relish smoked, drank, danced, played cards, went to movies, and fucked if the opportunity presented itself. And there was not a little effort expended in presenting opportunities.

However, those restrictive sanctions, while preached with some persistence, did not define the primary mission of the church. That mission became apparent as the Christmas season approached. Reformation Sunday in the last week of October marked the beginning of a massive drive to collect food, clothing, and other essentials of life for the needy. November, December, and January were times of intense activity, presided over by the women’s missionary societies, but involved all members of the church in the collection and distribution of food, clothes, and essentials such as blankets to those in need. Churches in general were in engaged in an enterprise now largely the province of the Salvation Army. This mission was ecumenical in nature. It is the one area of Christian principle in which the fundamentalist protestant churches participated with the Roman Catholic church.

The mandate of Christ to feed the hungry, shelter the poor, and heal the sick was pursued without equivocation. In those later days of the Great Depression and the early years of World War II, there was no absence of hunger, poverty, and illness to address. Once a week during the wintery season, my mother drove my dad, a letter carrier, to work at 5:30 in the morning so that she could have the family car to deliver boxes of food and clothing items to people for the church. The women’s societies had a roster of people who gathered, packed, and delivered boxes of goods to people on a list it compiled and maintained. This was an ongoing activity throughout the week.

Whenever people worshiped or engaged in the Lord’s work back then, they wore their Sunday best as a sign of respect for the calling. My mother dressed up, dressed me up to ride along, and went to the church and loaded the trunk and back seat of the car up with boxes and bags of food and clothing and spent the day delivering them. I have vivid memories of delivering food to people who lived in shacks with swept-dirt floors, of elderly people huddled in blankets waiting for death or whatever deliverance from poverty they expected, of children in rags eying the winter mackinaw my mother had put me in.

This work was not considered charity. It was considered duty. Although the cold months around the holiday season were when the church was most active in ministering to the needy, the principle extended to family life throughout the rest of the year, also. During that time, it was common for the steps to our back porch to be occupied by men who were willing to perform some work in exchange for food. My mother fixed them scrambled eggs and toast and coffee as a matter of hospitality for a wayfarer, not as charity or with the expectation of any work to be performed. In her broken English, my Swedish grandmother explained the premise of that hospitality. What if Jesus came to your door in hunger, she said, and you turned him away? The idea was not that Christ stalked the land as a hobo checking to see who followed his mandate to feed the hungry, but to remind one that feeding the hungry, sheltering the poor, and healing the sick defined what it was to profess Christianity.

A Lutheran pastor friend of mine said that the old Swedes regarded themselves as the instruments through which Christ fed a multitude with a few fishes and slices of bread. They spread the gospel with slabs of lutfisk, barrels of pickled herring, and loaves of limpa bread, the Scandinavian sacraments.

Praise the lord and pass the lutfisk.

The Christmases of my childhood had a somber aspect, because while we celebrated with our families, the poor were a presence of which we were mindful.

One did not go around wishing everyone a merry Christmas, especially people who were thralls to poverty and need. Instead, one did things to increase the possibility that those people might find some spark of hope, respect, and dignity in the Christmas season.

My wife recently had a series of jobs in which she traveled extensively in northeast South Dakota. I often helped drive her to her appointments and meetings and took an interest in the many Scandinavian churches I found throughout the countryside. Few of them are still operating with congregations; most are maintained as historic landmarks in the settlement and development of the Dakotas by immigrants.

That interest in those churches actually began some years previous when another professor and I were asked to be consultants for a group that wanted to write a history of one of those churches. There was historical information contained in the church’s documents, most of which are on file in the library of the Lutheran college where I taught for 8 years, but it was cursory and incomplete. The people who initiated the project planned to interview the families of church members and clergy who had served the parish. That is where the project began to stall. We had a complete list of members over the years, but found that extremely few of the families had members left in South Dakota. The project then involved a strenuous effort to find people whose families were members with the expectation that we could get some accounts of the church from family memories and records. We found many of the people scattered from New York to Los Angeles and Seattle, but were surprised by a diffidence. Their common explanation was that as young people their driving ambition was to go to college and find lives elsewhere. The other professor and I did get some accounts about the vital role the church played in the rural community. And we did find that the churches were the center of community life and that those Scandinavian churches on the plains also practiced what Christ preached in feeding the hungry and sheltering the poor. We got accounts of young people much involved in that activity, just as my mother involved me as a child.

One of the things we young descendants also learned from the experience is that the people who formed those early congregations came to America to find the promise of equality and opportunity that had been made to them through their churches. And they were determined not to repeat the social and economic strictures of the Old World in America.

Most of us who went to these churches remember sitting through sermons and being drilled on them in Sunday school on the scripture:

Matt 26:11: The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me.

The Swedish tradition never let that verse hang out there, as it often does now, to suggest that the poor will always be around and there is not much we can do about it. The sermons always emphasized that Christ was making the point that there will be poverty, but he would not always be present to instruct us to take action. We’d have to act on our own initiative. That verse was always followed by those quotations from the scripture that got very specific about how we were to treat the poor.

Lk. 11:41: But now as for what is inside you—be generous to the poor, and everything will be clean for you.

Lk. 14:13-14: But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed. Although they cannot repay you, you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”

There are those who are content to the let the poor be among us as a state of the economy. I read a perspective on the matter in South Dakota Magazine in a column by Ken Blanchard. Dr. Blanchard purported to be giving a meditation on Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" as a literary work that has shaped the way we celebrate Christmas. As one reads the column, one finds that Prof. Blanchard is talking about some versions of "A Christmas Carol" that have been made for films, not the work as it is actually written. When Dickens wrote the story, he said he intended to "strike a sledge hammer blow" for the poor. But Dickens guarded carefully against letting his portrayals of the poor and the causes of their condition take on a political aspect. His concern was that his literary art portray people, not flack for any particular political viewpoint. Prof. Blanchard, however, cannot resist bringing a bit of flack into his appraisal of "A Christmas Carol." Although the story involves the transformational redemption of Scrooge as a human being, Prof. Blanchard finds that in his role as a businessman, Scrooge did not need redeeming: for Scrooge "was about as efficiently productive as it is possible for a human being to be, as least when it comes to cold, hard, cash. Cruel as he was, he had money to lend and a job for poor Bob Cratchit."

This contention is extended to the capitalist class altogether: "Say what you want about the evils of capitalism, it has done more to supply the hearths of the poor than dropping alms into collection plates ever did. More Tiny Tims of the developed world have been saved by the power and prosperity of modern civilization than ever were by a ghost sprinkling Christmas cheer."

Literarily and historically that statement misses the entire point of the story. (And the suggestion that capitalism lifted the poor out of poverty does not seem to align with the facts of history.) The ghost of Marley bemoans that he lived his life in a mindless, capitalist pursuit:

Why did I walk through crowds of fellow-beings with my eyes turned down, and never raise them to that blessed Star which led the Wise
Men to a poor abode! Were there no poor homes to which its light would have conducted me!

As Scrooge is taken by the second spirit of Christmas to look in on the home of his employee, Bob Cratchit, he looks at an empty chair with Tiny Tim's crutch leaning on it and asks if the child is destined to die. The spirit answers in Scrooge's own words:

'If he be like to die, he had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.'

Scrooge hung his head to hear his own words quoted by the Spirit, and was overcome with penitence and grief. `Man,' said the Ghost, `if man you be in heart, not adamant, forbear that wicked cant until you have discovered What the surplus is, and Where it is. Will you decide what
men shall live, what men shall die? It may be, that in the sight of Heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man's child. Oh God, to hear the Insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life among his hungry brothers in the dust.'

Scrooge is rebuked for pursuing business with no concern or awareness of the effect that his mindless pursuit has for others. That is the lesson that the three spirits all show him.

Dickens was a contemporary of Karl Marx. His work was seen by the Marxists as a classic portrayal of the struggle of the working class to survive against the negligence and malevolence of those who regard workers as disposable pawns in their capital schemes. But Dickens did not write to elucidate political theory; he wrote to explore the value of all humanity. George Bernard Shaw points out that "The difference between Marx and Dickens was that Marx knew he was a revolutionist whilst Dickens had not the faintest suspicion of that part of his calling."

In "A Christmas Carol," Dickens did not invent the contemporary celebration of Christmas. He recalled its celebration as it was observed by the lower classes, and he defined it as recognizing the call to duty that those Scandinavian churches tried to live by.

Those people of my generation and later who have renounced their faith still tend to adhere to those principles laid down by Christ. In many cases, it is the failure of the church to practice those principles that causes the loss of faith.

For me, Christmas will be a somber time. Living in South Dakota where nine reservations were created and are maintained by exactly the attitude and mindset that Scrooge repudiated makes Christmas exceedingly somber.

I hope you had a somber Christmas and have the honesty and courage to see that somberness all year through.

Like it or not, Congress is a reflection of America

2011-12-23T21:27:00.000-08:00

According to a gallery in the Washington Post, Congress is currently more unpopular than public caning, polygamy, and Hugo Chavez. When one gets specific about the cause of the gridlock and foolery that makes Congress so unpopular, I suppose one can spread the blame across bipartisan lines, but one party, the GOP, does hog the deserved credit for intransigence, petulance, and all those characteristics that result in the juvenile snit fits that dominate the news.

When the public blames Congress and holds it in such contempt, it is really blaming itself and revealing the attitudes and thinking that elected the representatives and senators to the offices they hold. Those elected officials are carrying out what they think is the mandates that put them in office. The politics in the halls of Congress is the politics of the people. And only those in the throes of grand mal denial can say that it is not their wishes and political preferences that is, in fact, on display on the floors of the Capitol chambers.

The evidence is overwhelming. Begin with the campaigns of Republican candidates for president and the so-called debates they engaged in. Those strange gatherings had little argumentation of policies involved, but more resembled group therapy sessions in the dementia ward. At times the palaver that was to pass for debate reached the intellectual level of a name-calling session at an elementary school playground--dominated by the special needs class. But that may be because the participants were trying to reach a television audience that is most entertained and engrossed by reality television shows in which people compete in contests to debase each other.

The campaigns and attitudes and postures have brought republican government to the point that its general running is a slow grinding away like a care with sand packed in its crankcase and often a complete failure. It is the result of an election process in which the big money that politicians grovel for comes from the smallest minds. Cable television and the Internet have taken the lowest, meanest, and most debasing aspects of our culture and inflated it into the general standards of human thought and behavior.

A good friend of mine, a highly honored professor emeritus from Michigan State, died last week. He asked me once how I could possibly spend any time writing and reading blogs. A colleague of ours intervened on our behalf and said that blogs and other Internet sources needed to have the influence of higher education present. Both of those professors, however, came to the point where they encouraged students to use the search engines of the Internet to locate sources, but they would not accept Internet citations. They required that all sources had to be verified as published by reputable organizations and that the Internet versions were precisely what the hard copy versions printed. When it came to the notion that the comment sections of news publications and blogs showed a stimulation of thought and productive discussion, both men laughed and scoffed. Nothing is gained, they insisted, by the exchange of petty malice and ignorance.

Those men pointed to blog comments as the expression of our culture that the politicians hope to ingratiated themselves to. And in seeking the approval of those vocal factions that dominate blogs, our government has been brought to the brink of failure.

I agree with their point. Some blogs are thoughtful, useful, and valuable, because they acquaint one with significant sources and ideas and do, indeed, try to stimulate awareness and discussion. But then, they allow comments which inspire nothing but a despair and sense of hopelessness about the mental capacity of the people to do more than choose up sides to cast insult and abuse and repeat the ignorant cant they prefer to any legitimate form of discussion.

Shortly after losing an election, a very seasoned politician and I had a discussion about how the kind of stuff printed in blogs represented a mindset that voted him out of office. He had often spoke about personal attack and unconscionable propaganda threatening the democratic process. This politician said that he was convinced that if the political climate was to be saved from total disaster, the changes would have to occur at the local level of the political parties. The parties would have to reform themselves at the municipal and county levels to have any hope of changing the general political culture.

Like it or not, the legislators in Washington, D.C., represent what the folks back home want from them. It is simply not true that otherwise good-purposed people are transformed into partisan monsters once they reach the belt way.

We may despise Congress, but we have created it and made it what it is. We are the ones who have shaped all of politics, which we claim to disapprove of. As my late colleague put, people hate Congress because it does not perfectly mirror what individuals want, and what most people want from politics is to create and vanquish enemies, those people who hold different viewpoints and aspirations.

As the trite old expression goes: You don't like Congress? Look in the fucking mirror.

Thune's petards hoist him to power

2011-12-20T08:39:00.000-08:00

John Thune selects a coat-tail to ride on.

John Thune is a sock puppet extraordinaire. He has the intellectual endowments and the moral compass of a night crawler, but, by God, he catches fish. You know, suckers, those bottom-dwellers who bite on anything.

Obviously, I do not have much regard for John Thune as a person. But I guess if John Thune lays a claim for personhood, so can any corporation. Like Enron. Lehman Brothers. Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC. Etc.

My disrespect for John Thune stems from his campaign against Tom Daschle. It was totally an exercise in ad hominem attacks which were either misrepresentations through distortion or outright fabrications. People who make up defamation solely for the purpose of damaging another person don't reach those standards of personhood that qualify for more than a studied revulsion and avoidance. Actually, his first indications of douchebuggery were evident when he was a Congressman, and accomplished absolutely nothing but had his staff slink around with video cameras at public appearances made by the state's two Democratic senators of the time. He had to be forced into opening a service office in Aberdeen, opposed all the infrastructure projects--U.S. 281 and 12, had no clue about the Lewis-Clark water development project, and did not belong to any of the agricultural caucuses, until party members thought it might be a good idea to at least know something about those projects. His mantra was "spend no money; funding projects ain't patriotic."

Like his understudy in fecklessness, Kristi Noemskull, he likes to sponsor legislation against things that don't exist, except in the superstitions of the paranoid. He sponsored legislation to prevent the EPA from regulating bovine flatulence, although the EPA said repeatedly it had no interest or intention in such regulation. Thune understands that if there is a number of people who believe that a tooth decay fairy prowls in the night destroying teeth, he will sponsor anti-tooth-decay-fairy legislation, get lots of votes, and distract people from the things that really threaten their well-being. Like John Thune. Kristi the Noemskull followed his precedent and sponsored legislation against the EPA regulating farm dust, which it never intended to do. Tooth fairies and pixie dust have a compelling attraction for their adherents.

His one strength is that he can recite scripts prepared for him by someone back in the GOP hackshop. He doesn't read them for coherence or care whether the scripts contradict themselves; he just blindly repeats those words and phrases that push the bigot buttons of his fawning constituency, which admires his Bible-college education in which he specialized in what became the gospel of St. Limbaugh. His recitations embrace the paranoid delusions of those whose mental lives are filled with malevolent tooth fairies and fart-suppressors and they peddle the commodity of defamatory hatred, which is the big point of the gospel on which his recitations are based.

An example of a performance early this week was occasioned by the scandal-laden failure of MF Global, an international investment company. Thune's performance received coverage by the state's media, and here is one such report in its entirety:

In a telephone press conference with South Dakota reporters, Thune said Congress must make sure nothing like that happens again. He says those responsible should be prosecuted if they broke the law.

Thune says South Dakota’s farmers, ranchers and grain elevators use futures contracts to protect themselves against losses. He says the MF Global bankruptcy has shaken their confidence in the safety of futures contracts.

Here John Thune advocates that stern measures be taken against an outfit that shakes the confidence of farmers, ranchers, and grain dealers. However, he feels quite differently about the confidence of the general population in financial companies. He opposes the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and his votes demonstrate that opposition, as reported on a web site that tracks campaign finances:

Submitted by Adam Smith on Mon, 12/05/2011 - 19:26
The Senate is expected to vote Thursday on the nomination of Richard Cordray to lead the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the office created as part of the Wall Street reform legislation passed in 2010.

The next day, Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.)—who has threatened to filibuster any nominee unless the agency is significantly weakened—will be holding a fundraiser for his leadership PAC, Heartland Values PAC, in New York City.

This “Kickoff to the Holiday Season” is a full-weekend event, according to the invite obtained by the Sunlight Foundation’s PoliticalPartyTime website.

Two guesses on what kind of donors he’ll be raising money from in New York City. Ok, one guess: Wall Street.
Already in 2011, Wall Street has been handing over plenty of cash to the South Dakota senator.
So far this year, Thune has received $128,000 from the finance, insurance, and real estate (FIRE) sector, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
His PAC received $1,000 in June from Stephen Clark, a lobbyist and the author of a recent memo sent to the American Bankers Association about ways the Occupy Wall Street movement can be discredited.
This sort of arrangement might be beneficial to Thune, but I doubt the South Dakotans still struggling through the economic collapse brought on by Wall Street see it that way.

Thune voted as he promised:

Just a day after voting with Wall Street in blocking the nomination of Richard Cordray to lead the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), an agency created as part of the Wall Street reform legislation passed by Congress in 2010, Sens. Pat Roberts (R-Kansas) and John Thune (R-S.D.) jetted off to New York for big money fundraisers.Will they be getting their rewards from the Wall Street types who don’t want to see a functional and strong CFPB? Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.) got into the act too

John Thune can't keep track of the contradictions in the scripts he recites, but he is creating new standards and new definitions for douchebaggery, more accurately douchebuggery.

Douchebugs, however, catch a lot of fish.

When an entire country can't pass a basic proficiency test

2011-12-13T09:14:00.000-08:00

Schools need improving. But striving to meet the needs of students is a continuous process in education. Times and circumstances change, and real educators are always engaged in defining and finding ways to meet those needs. But what educators determine as needs are often ignored and the public goes off in a fury of raucous, uninformed notions of the moment.

While the country obsesses about assessment tests required by No Child Left Behind and engages in mass disparagement of the schools and teachers, rather than make accurate assessments of where the problems in education lie, it puts on a massive display of its capacity for being dupes, ignorant, and willfully stupid. It has great help from the media, whose operating principle is to build audiences by giving the people what they want. And a huge segment of the population wants to be dupes fed an intellectual diet of ignorance and stupidity and to live in the delusion that the exercise of meanness against their fellow humans generated by ignorance and stupidity has something to do with liberty and free speech. Nothing sells like dumb and mean. And so, the media serves the interest of its advertisers, who find that dumb and mean is easy to dupe.

Promoting retardation as a patriotic virtue.

The so-called Republican-candidate debates have given Americans great opportunity to indulge their penchant for displaying their refusals to become educated. The first and most glaring symptom of public retardation is that it accepts the tedious ritual of reciting petty ad hominem snark as debate. Over the weekend the most frequent news clip shown over cable television and remarked on by bloggers was when Newt Gingrich quipped that the reason Mitt Romney could not become a career politician was because he lost a Senate race to Ted Kennedy in 1994. It is entertaining to watch a bunch of white guys try to play the dozens, but it has nothing to do with the issues that confront Americans or with the concept of debate, which is to examine those issues.

Americans are so ill-educated in what reading and writing are supposed to teach them that they are distracted and totally absorbed in the exchange of petty, irrelevant insults and regard them as the business of politics. Nothing is more damning about our education system than the fact that the media gets by with calling mean, little entertainments a debate of issues affecting the lives of the people. The people fail in the most basic test of education and intelligence: they are deluded into accepting petty insult and abuse as political discussion, and then wonder why Congress acts like a bunch of dolts carousing around on spring break.

While cable news and the Internet is pacifying an over-tranquilized public with the sound and fury from idiots, a few real issues do receive publication from the more out-of-it members of the media. One of them that should be the focus of any debate that presumes to address any significant issues is the fact that the real unemployment rate in America is 11 percent of the population. As Ezra Klein of the Washington Post points out:

Remember that the unemployment rate is not "how many people don't have jobs?", but "how many people don't have jobs and are actively looking for them?" Let's say you've been looking fruitlessly for five months and realize you've exhausted every job listing in your area. Discouraged, you stop looking, at least for the moment. According to the government, you're no longer unemployed.

Financial Times' Ed Luce, writes, "According to government statistics, if the same number of people were seeking work today as in 2007, the jobless rate would be 11 percent."

The snark recitations do not analyze facts or propose any solutions for the problems they reveal. Rather, they are merely the pretext for ill-informed blame-placing by the participants against each other and the opposing party. No options are offered other than invitations to join in on the inane castigation. The real concerns facing the American people are ignored, and the American people for the most part have become to ignorant to know they are being ignored.

These are the people who presume to reform education.


Poster boy portraying goals of educational reform.

The enigma of the Occupation Forces

2011-12-12T14:01:00.000-08:00

For a century and a half, people have thought about occupying Wall Street. The first that I know is the protagonist, sort of, of a short story by Herman Melville that I taught often and that many students found irritatingly undefinable: "Bartleby the Scrivener, A Tale of Wall Street."

In short, Bartleby is hired by a law firm on Wall Street that is successful enough to have three scriveners, that is people who write out and copy legal documents by pen. A scrivener is a writer in the sense that he is secretary and xerox machine all rolled into one. At first, he does very able work, but soon takes to declining the tasks assigned to him with the phrase "I prefer not to." After a time, he refuses to do anything, including leave the premises. The lawyer, who is the narrator of the story, feels both pity and revulsion at Bartleby, and ends up moving from the office himself. Bartleby still refuses to move from the premises. The new occupants enlist the lawyer's help, but to no avail. Bartleby is finally forcibly removed and confined to jail. The lawyer gives money to the guards to insure that Bartleby at least gets good food, but Bartleby prefers not to eat, also, and ends up starving himself to death.

Students were frustrated by the story and irritatedly asked, "What's the point?" Still, they found the story unsettling, some demanding that I provide them with an interpretation that made a point for them. I suggested that they consider that a point of the story is that life as it is conventionally lived has no point to some people, and they prefer not to participate. And also to consider how helpless the narrator felt in trying to help Bartleby who rejected all his efforts. One very astute student likened the feeling she got from the story to how she felt when her brother committed suicide, and there is no way to make intelligible those forces that are unintelligible to others.

The Occupy Wall Street movement has incited the most disparaging and generally false characterizations of the people who participate in it. The responses in the media have been very much like the irritated incomprehension that students expressed about "Bartleby the Scrivener." And there are obvious parallels to the movement and the narrative of the story. They occupied and would not leave, until they were forcibly removed. Most of the country has breathed a sigh of relief along with speculations that the Occupy movement has been broken and has gone away. But like the story, the Occupy movement is still disturbing and rankles people because they cannot assign any easy condemnation to it, and have raised up old hatreds of dirty hippies whining for entitlements.

Part of the reaction is that the Occupy movement has confronted capitalism which has reached a state of perversion. It has based itself upon the fact that a very tiny segment of the population owns the country's power and wealth and that democracy is not possible under that circumstance.

The origins of the movement and how it came to be organized is given a clear and coherent treatment in a current article in The New Yorker.

In essence, the movement has spoken for the 99 percent of Americans who find themselves struggling to live while 1 percent lives in conspicuous, mindless opulence. No kind of life, let along democracy, can survive that condition, and when it comes to submitting to it, the Occupy movement has said "I prefer not to."

The movement has been removed from the places it chose to occupy for the most part, but it still occupies the mind in unsettling ways, much like Melvilles' 1853 story, which has the capacity to rankle and irritate.

The Occupy movement has not been vanquished. It is finding new ways and places to occupy.

There is hope in that. When it comes to living under the neo-feudal state that America has become, I prefer not to.

How to get fired. And deserve it.

2011-12-11T22:38:00.000-08:00

U.S. Rep.Rick Larsen (D-WA) learned at noon Thursday that three of his Washington, D.C. staff members had tweeted comments which revealed that they were behaving badly in major ways and were insulting the congressman with some of their twitters. By 1:10 p.m., he had fired them.

In chatting with some former Congressional staff members, I found that they shared my incredulity that these people were ever hired as staff members. Most staff members are people who are diligent in their support of their employers and if they do not respect their boss, they quit rather than utter any disparaging and insulting comments.

My spouse worked for both a U.S senator and a U.S. representative. My blogging upset her at times. I was critical of some of the votes and rationales offered by her representative at times, and this caused some of her staff colleagues to suggest that my "disloyalty" put her job in jeopardy. Her colleagues were so conscientious about displaying their loyalties, that they interpreted any disagreement as disloyalty. The problem was that I, and other solid party members, saw that the representative was alienating some of the strongest supporters in trying to appease some conservatives about matters that touched on fundamental issues of equality, liberty, and human rights. A number of liberal bloggers showed diffidence about the election of 2010, and many people did not bother to vote, but the diffidence also has an effect on those do vote but are uncertain about the candidates. That diffidence may well influence decisions to vote for the other candidate.

My spouse is no longer a staff member, as both of her bosses lost elections. And while I disagree with the staff members that my blogging should be of any concern to them regarding my wife's job, I admire and am hugely impressed about the way those Congressional staff members did their jobs and what they did for people in the state. They were efficient and effective far beyond mere competence, and they possessed the integrity and benevolent decency that can't be questioned.

That is why I find it incredulous that the three staffers in Rep. Larsen's office had managed to land Congressional jobs. Rep. Larsen was absolutely right in getting them off the Congressional premises as soon as possible. Their identities and what they said and, apparently, did are known, and I would be dismayed if they ever found themselves working for Congress again.

The Congressional staffs I am acquainted with have been and are meticulous about the way they conduct themselves while working or meeting the public in any capacity. As treasurer for the county party, I once came to my wife's office to count some money and write a deposit slip before going to the bank across the hall. I was summarily told that any kind of partisan activity was forbidden in a Congressional office and I must do my party business elsewhere.
Which I did, and with appreciation of the standards of conduct being maintained.

An incident involving some interns illustrates the concern of the staffs for fulfilling the nonpolitical obligations of the serving the constituents. After a late winter blizzard and subsequent flooding devastated the ranching and livestock business in South Dakota, the state's senators had organized a very fast and effective disaster relief effort. This was before the hurricane Katrina, and FEMA in the area was administered by a former Congressional staff member. The senators wanted a full report on how fairly and effectively the disaster aid was delivered, and a number of people with expertise in making such reports were employed in gathering the information and writing the report. That effort resulted in a very large and detailed document, and when it came time to send the finished product out to the pertinent people, the combined staffs of the Congressional offices got together to do the photo-copying, collating, and envelope stuffing. This included some staff interns.

The interns were sitting around a conference table applying address labels to envelopes, inserting the finished report, and, as young people are wont to do, were chatting about their colleges while doing so. The banter turned into a kind of ridicule contest about some of their professors. However, constituents were coming in and out of the office on business, and the banter was the kind of talk that was discouraged during the conduct of official Congressional business on premises governed by the rules for Congressional facilities. A senior staff member from Washington heard the disparaging banter and told the interns to leave and said the regular staff members and some volunteers would finish the mailing work. The interns were later released from their internships with a letter of explanation on how they had violated the rules of conduct in a way that compromised the non-political requirements of a Congressional service office. The matters was especially sensitive because people of the opposing political party were coming in and out of the office to personally pick up a copy of the report, and the derisive chatter could be surmised by them to be the attitude of the office. The senior staff member thought that immediate disciplinary action was required under the circumstances.

Faculty served as supervisors of student internships, and the dismissal of the interns was discussed at a meeting. I explained the situation, and one of the faculty immediately raised the matter of freedom of speech being squelched in a Congressional office of all places. Ironically, he was one of the professors about whom comments had been made. But that freedom of speech issue had been explained to the interns.

First of all, anyone in a Congressional office has a right to register an opinion and ask for information. The staff members may provide information as to their boss's stance and votes on an issue, but they are never to engage in political arguments. The purpose of the offices is to serve the constituents, not operate as a campaign site for the legislator. That is why campaign materials will never be found in an incumbent's office. Operating a service office is part of the nonpartisan work that a representative or senator undertakes in representing a district or a state. The rules that limit any kind of partisan activity are set by the sergeants at arms of the respective bodies.

A problem in politics is that the non-political work and the effectiveness with which it is done cannot be a campaign issue because much of that work is done on a confidential basis. Some legislators strive to emphasize the competence and effectiveness of their staffs. What should be a major criterion in assessing the value of a legislator in representing and serving constituents is hardly ever alluded to.

South Dakota has had Congressional staffs working for it that have been cited as models. Other legislators who have wanted to establish the highest levels of service for their offices have sent their staffs to the state to observe and learn. However, the voters have little idea of what can be lost when a legislator who has placed priority on serving the constituents is voted out of office.

When Rep. Larsen fired three staff members for the kind of behavior they indulged in, he was serving Congress and his constituents in his home district. But his constituents probably have no conception of why it should matter to them.

Workers, the GOP is just not into you. Except when it wants to screw you.

2011-12-08T17:34:00.000-08:00

The November job report indicated that the U.S. had gained 120,00 jobs for the month, but it downplayed the fact that 315,000 dropped out of the labor force because they could not find jobs. In all the chatter about jobs, hardly anyone has confronted the fact that the jobs which were lost in the crash of 2008 are not coming back. The economy has changed. It can no longer utilize the American work force, largely because the corporate world has no interest in labor outside of finding the cheapest source.
Outsourcing has been the largest force in diminishing the job market in the U.S., but other factors have contributed, such as automation, down-sizing, industrial failure as occurred with the automobile industry, and the massive grab of wealth and earnings by a corporate system that concentrates the wealth and power of the country in a very small upper economic class.    There has been a huge reversal of democracy from a government of, by, and for the people to a government that operates like the feudal royalties of the Old World. The Occupy Wall Street protests have defined the problem with their 99 percent slogan, but the real forces needed to restore democratic liberty, equality, and justice have not been martialed.

Jobs can return in abundance only when the primary producers are put to work, and that means in large part a restoration of the manufacturing sector of our economy. That restoration is not possible without dismantling the current economic and governmental structure. The shifting of the work economy from production to service was an official policy announced by Ronald Reagan, and it is the policy the corporate world has adhered to ever since. There is acknowledgment of the forces that have changed the economy by the Occupy movement, but it has been peaceful and nonviolent on the part of the protestors so far. It seems like nothing short of the indiscriminate and vicious guillotining of the French Revolution will produce the kind of change needed for a true realignment of the economic forces within the country. The Occupiers realize that the ballot box does not provide any means for change, and that the country will be deadlocked as long as the current level of partisan bickering distracts the leadership from addressing the real circumstance our country finds itself in.

The November job report produced just the reaction that shows why America has become incompetent and impotent in regard to bolstering the economy. While the Democrats took up bragging rights about dropping the unemployment rate below 9 percent, the Republicans crowed and chortled with glee about the numbers of those who have given up on finding work. The fact is that on the political front, the jobless rate is just another pretext for the idiotic partisan prattling. No one really gives a shit about people who are out of work because they can't find any or those who work multiple jobs and still can't make enough money to afford basic needs like healthcare. They just provide occasion for the inane and insane rancor that has descended from the puerile malevolence of a grade-school playground to the raging fury of the asylum.

But the Republicans do take first place in the disparagement and defamation of the working class. The OWS confuses many people, but it shrewdly recognizes that the only chance for young people to accede to something like the middle class expectations of the past is to dismantle the government AND the social structure it reflects and to start over.

America is still the strongest economy in the world, with China and India coming up quickly, but those who control the resources, the wealth, and the power are interested only in denying working people equality and reducing them to a mob that grovels and snarls for any economic morsels that power and wealth deigns to throw them. America is hell bent on diminishing its workers back into an expendable serfdom, and it is pushing them toward the angry excesses of the French Revolution--which is not pleasant or constructive to think about. The anti-union, anti-labor measures in Wisconsin and other states are the most obvious measures in the pogrom to subjugate the working middle class, but the constant blaming of unions and teachers for the deficiencies of public education, the creation and protection of special privileges for the extremely wealthy and the corporations through which the wealth is laundered and distributed, and the anti-labor propaganda gushing from the right wing are all indicators of the anti-worker mindset that has caused the American economy to seize up. The discourse repeats the stances of the French Revolution ("let them eat cake") and what emanated from the fascist and republican factions during the Spanish civil war. GOP candidates are unequivocal about their attitudes toward American workers. Mitt Romney said at the Huckabee forum last Saturday that he would reduce the role of, or even eliminate, the National Labor Relations Board. He also said the federal government does have a role: attacking teachers' unions.

The circumstances of jobs in America is laid out by David Bornstein in The New York Times:

Today, some 42 million people — about a third of the United States work force — do not have jobs in the traditional sense. They fall into a catchall category the government calls “contingent” workers. These people — independent contractors, freelancers, temp workers, part-timers, people between jobs — typically work on a project-to-project basis for a variety of clients, and most are outcasts from the traditional system of benefits that provide economic security to Americans. Even as the economy has changed, employment benefits are still based on an outdated industrial-era model in which workers are expected to stay with a single company for years, if not their whole careers.

He writes about a new union movement that addresses the changing circumstance of jobs in America. Some new ideas and new forms of leadership in the union movement might be an alternative to the wholesale deconstruction of the American system.

Some matters of full disclosure:

I grew up in an industrial town where strikes were common and the image of union members was projected by the media of the time as unruly goons. When I was released from active duty from the Army, I quickly took a job with International Harvester Co., which operated as a closed shop under the labor laws of Illinois. That meant that after a 90-day probation period with the company, one automatically became a dues-paying union member. My ideas of what the union actually did began to change. Seven men in the department I worked in had been company production executives during World War II. When production shifted from wartime armaments to the production of peacetime farm equipment, the men were all laid off. Over time they were hired back in much lower positions, but they were the ones who made the company work. They were constantly under pressure from the company to accept promotions back into executive positions, but they refused to leave their jobs which were covered by the collective bargaining contract. The reasoning they explained to me was that they preferred to be in positions where they could do honest, productive work rather than be bound up in the charades of the corporate culture. The department I worked in was called Materials Control and was responsible for all the production planning, scheduling, purchasing, and product distribution (marketing) for the plant. These men were the key employees who determined the success and future of the plant, and the company fully acknowledged that, and created a working relationship that made full use of their experience and expertise. That, and some experiences I had on grievance panels, changed my perception of what unions actually did.

As a professor, I quickly joined the faculty union when I came to South Dakota. NSU was under a sanction for violating principles of due process in firing a professor. (Eventually, the system paid some compensation to the professor to get itself removed from the sanction list.) Over time, I served many offices--secretary, treasurer, president, and grievance officer of the local, contract negotiator, and president of the statewide faculty union. After serving one term as state president, I declined to run for that office again and shortly after dropped my membership in the faculty union. I did so because I realized that the union was not effectively representing the college faculty. I did not suspend my union activities, but quit the NEA affiliated union while retaining my membership in the Association of American University Professors, which represents the interests of college faculty on a more professional level. After I gave up my membership in the local union, I was still consulted and asked to advise faculty on grievances and personnel actions, which pissed off everybody except the faculty members with whom I consulted.

Unions have earned and deserved harsh criticism. In education, they simply did not know how to represent a profession and function as collective bargainers for it. The largest teachers union, the National Education Association, was a professional organization that worked primarily in promoting and advancing the professional developments of education. When teachers were allowed to organize and collectively bargain, the NEA became a collective bargaining agent, but had no idea of how to fulfill its new role. So, it borrowed the tactics and policies of industrial labor unions. The second largest teachers union, the AFT, was part of a large industrial union, the AFL-CIO, and simply embraced its established ways of doing labor union business.

Many states, such as South Dakota, prohibit teachers from striking, which leaves the collective bargaining agencies without any power at the bargaining table. In South Dakota, the custom is for school boards to dismiss union proposals, and then to impose the contract the school board has proposed. Without the ability to strike, the teachers have no way to require a fair and honest consideration of their proposals. However, teacher strikes are horrendously bad public relations, as the teachers are accused of ignoring the welfare of children in their self-interest.   Strikes do conflict with a basic premise of care and nurture for students, but there are alternatives to strikes that the unions, except for the American Association of University Professors, have not developed or utilized. Sanctions against administrations and boards with records of incompetence and perfidy are matters that can be solved either at the bargaining table or made matters for the public to address. There is a constant stream of complaints about under-performing teachers, but the public is kept unaware of administrators and board members who accrue records of incompetence, negligence, and dishonesty in the discharge of their duties.

At one point, the South Dakota faculty organization undertook to evaluate administrators and officials in regard to their performance of their assigned duties. We used the same instrument that the Board of Regents and administrations used to assess the performance of officials and administrators with one big difference:   we required that the judgments made about individuals be supported with factual evidence and accounts of performance, and the individual evaluation forms had to be signed by the faculty members. The results were released to the faculty and the lead administrators on each campus, and they caused some consternation that rose to the level of panic. A number of administrators objected to being under such scrutiny and said it interfered with their ability to do their jobs. The end result was that the criteria used in faculty evaluations were refined to require factually-based assessments and to limit personal judgments that could not be supported by factual evidence.   The administrators were alarmed and disturbed at how they were perceived from the professional viewpoint of the faculty. The administrative evaluations were valuable assessments, but they involved so much effort and work that few qualified faculty thought they had time to work on them.

Nevertheless, unions have not taken the opportunity to let the public know where some of the real problems in education exist. Many of the problems in education developed as school boards changed their role from being the conduit and mediator of information between the public and professional staffs and assumed the role of corporate boards of directors that dictated the standards and the rules. In assuming that role, the voices of the teachers, the people who work the front lines of education on a daily basis, were eliminated from education decision-making. The many studies which have raised problems about education include hardly any information from the classroom workers. Rather than using their professional judgments and creative resources, teachers are expected to just do what they are told, and what they are told comes from people who have little knowledge and experience about the tasks that teachers undertake. The dominant ploy is to blame the teachers and their unions for the short-comings of education. That placing of blame has all but eliminated any consideration of the social and bureaucratic factors that have eliminated professional standards in teaching and reduced it to a servile nannyism.

Teachers represent just one segment of a workforce in America that is being misused and abused as a despised lower class of workers.   The anti-union, anti-worker movement does more than force a status of inequality on the workforce and reduce the middle class; it excludes the creativity and energy of people who are willing and know how to work from participation in building and sustaining the nation. In Wisconsin, Ohio, and Indiana, that reductive humiliation of workers has become the governing policy in the level of regard those states have for their own employees.

When the issue of economic inequality is raised, the conservatives in the U.S go into paroxysms of incensed offense and shout class warfare. It is a gross perversion of language to call that label disingenuous. It is a revival of the medieval class system that ruled society in the Dark Ages. As Whitman said, the business of democracy is to surmount the gorgeous history of feudalism. Mark Twain satirized that old fascination with a society that operated by designating the privileged and unprivileged in each of his works. That fascination has been revived in the 21st century by the right wing in America.

Workers have to understand that the inequality that possesses the American economy is driven by people who want to feel that they are better than everyone else and want to concentrate wealth and power in an increasing smaller power-elite. The observation that came from civil rights battle is strongly operative today: the worth and sense of accomplishment of this social segment is measured by how many people they fuck over.

One thing that might head off the seemingly inevitable excesses of the French Revolution is that resurgence of the union movement along the lines of the Freelancers Union, which operates closely to how the guild halls did in moving western society toward democracy. America is coming to a time when it decides whether it will resolve its social and economic inequities through a weapon-wielding fury in the streets or through a return to rational and measured negotiation at bargaining tables. But first, the American working class has to come to a full realization of who it includes and what ill and ignominious plans the self-designated ruling class has for it.

Rational and respectful discussion and resolution, however, are not looming on the horizon as having much possibility. The deadlock in Congress indicates the choice the country seems to be making.

Tour the asylum

2011-12-05T06:34:00.000-08:00

Today's Bonus Episode of Too Many Idiots, Too Little Space..

American exceptionalism at work

2011-12-01T20:20:00.000-08:00

Gingrich condemns poor children

The former speaker says children in poverty aren’t used to work unless it’s illegal.

The Official GOP Newspeak manual for Occupy Wall Street

2011-12-01T08:03:00.000-08:00

From Talking Points Memo

Yahoo News’ Chris Moody knocks it out of the ball park with his latest report from Orlando, Florida, where the Republican Governors Association met with top GOP message-man-turned-Yoda Frank Luntz. The crux of their meeting? Learning how to wiggle out of uncomfortable moments whenever questioned about the politically inconvenient Occupy Wall Street movement.

Staring down a crazed youth angry about inequality? Don’t panic, says Luntz. Instead, follow this handy-dandy guide guaranteed to help pacify your subject, explain that things actually aren’t all that bad, and that Republican policies can make it better.

Check out the top 10:

    1. Don’t say ‘capitalism.’

    “I’m trying to get that word removed and we’re replacing it with either ‘economic freedom’ or ‘free market,’ ” Luntz said. “The public … still prefers capitalism to socialism, but they think capitalism is immoral. And if we’re seen as defenders of quote, Wall Street, end quote, we’ve got a problem.”

    2. Don’t say that the government ‘taxes the rich.’ Instead, tell them that the government ‘takes from the rich.’

    “If you talk about raising taxes on the rich,” the public responds favorably, Luntz cautioned. But “if you talk about government taking the money from hardworking Americans, the public says no. Taxing, the public will say yes.”

    3. Republicans should forget about winning the battle over the ‘middle class.’ Call them ‘hardworking taxpayers.’

    “They cannot win if the fight is on hardworking taxpayers. We can say we defend the ‘middle class’ and the public will say, I’m not sure about that. But defending ‘hardworking taxpayers’ and Republicans have the advantage.”

    4. Don’t talk about ‘jobs.’ Talk about ‘careers.’

    “Everyone in this room talks about ‘jobs,’” Luntz said. “Watch this.”
    He then asked everyone to raise their hand if they want a “job.” Few hands went up. Then he asked who wants a “career.” Almost every hand was raised.
    “So why are we talking about jobs?”

    5. Don’t say ‘government spending.’ Call it ‘waste.’

    “It’s not about ‘government spending.’ It’s about ‘waste.’ That’s what makes people angry.”

    6. Don’t ever say you’re willing to ‘compromise.’

    “If you talk about ‘compromise,’ they’ll say you’re selling out. Your side doesn’t want you to ‘compromise.’ What you use in that to replace it with is ‘cooperation.’ It means the same thing. But cooperation means you stick to your principles but still get the job done. Compromise says that you’re selling out those principles.”

    7. The three most important words you can say to an Occupier: ‘I get it.’

    “First off, here are three words for you all: ‘I get it.’ … ‘I get that you’re. I get that you’ve seen inequality. I get that you want to fix the system.”
    Then, he instructed, offer Republican solutions to the problem.

    8. Out: ‘Entrepreneur.’ In: ‘Job creator.’

    Use the phrases “small business owners” and “job creators” instead of “entrepreneurs” and “innovators.”

    9. Don’t ever ask anyone you want them to ‘sacrifice.’

    “There isn’t an America today in November of 2011 who doesn’t think they’ve already sacrificed. If you tell them you want them to ‘sacrifice,’ they’re going to be be pretty angry at you. You talk about how ‘we’re all in this together.’ We either succeed together or we fail together.”

    10. Always blame Washington.

    Tell them, “You shouldn’t be occupying Wall Street, you should be occupying Washington. You should occupy the White House because it’s the policies over the past few years that have created this problem.”

    BONUS: Don’t say ‘bonus!’

    Luntz advised that if they give their employees an income boost during the holiday season, they should never refer to it as a “bonus.”
    “If you give out a bonus at a time of financial hardship, you’re going to make people angry. It’s ‘pay for performance.’”:

The faces of Occupy Wall Street

2011-11-28T19:59:00.000-08:00

Right wing politicians and commentators are trying to portray the protestors of the Occupy Wall Street movement as dirty hippies who have never worked for anything, don't want to work, and are trying to get a perpetual free lunch. The fact is that the majority of the people in the movement are college students who are facing the reality that there are no jobs for them, and they are protesting the regression of the American economy into corporate feudalism with a few extremely privileged at the top--the 1 percent--with the rest of the people regarded as serfs. The New Yorker has their photo gallery of the participants who are anything but what the right wing is trying to portray them as being. Take a look.

The Black Hills Are Not For Sale

2011-11-26T19:12:00.000-08:00

This mural was installed today in Los Angeles.

Northern Beef Packers hopes to ride the sustainable farming, local foods wave

2011-11-26T14:50:00.000-08:00

Construction workers are putting the finishing touches on the Northern Beef Packers plant in Aberdeen for an opening in early 2012.

Journalists on food and agriculture are watching developments which trend away from corporate-based, industrialized agriculture. The market for locally grown food coming from smaller-sized farming operations has become significant. The USDA reports that food which is locally produced and sold through farmers markets and specialty stores was a $4.8 billion business in 2008 and is projected to reach $7 billion this year. Driven by reports on the health problems of obesity, diabetes, food-borne illnesses, reactions to chemicals and anti-biotics, some prominent food distributors are beginning to promote healthier, locally-raised food to their customers. New York Times food columnist Mark Bittman recently reported on a letter a beef distributor wrote to his customer-chefs that advocated the better flavor contained in what is called non-commercial beef. A distinction is made between industrial-produced beef and that coming from smaller, controlled operations where the beef is not fed with chemicals and anti-biotics in confinement feeding operations. The Times also reports on a number of meat markets opening in New York City which handle the locally produced, non-industrialized beef, and the emergence of sustainable farm operations as a force in the marketplace.

Commercial farming has been profitable of late largely because of the diversion of corn from livestock feed into the production of ethanol. Consumers are experiencing very significant rises in food prices and are becoming much more aware and concerned about the quality of food available to them. Industrial-raised meat is dependent on hormones to stimulate the fast and cheap growth of meat and on antibiotics to control disease in confinement-raised animals.

Evidence is mounting that practices associated with industrial agriculture are dangerous and endangered. Monsanto's Roundup weed killer is spurring nature to develop strains of weeds which are immune to the herbicide and are unusually aggressive when they establish themselves in crop fields. In response to questions raised about health dangers in the genetic-modified crops designed to be grown in Roundup-applied fields, scientists say they frankly don't know, but there are some indicators of health and nutrition concerns that need to be investigated. Many foreign countries have banned genetically-modified crops from importation.

A trend away from industrial-produced meat and poultry is spear-headed by quest for more flavorful and healthy food among gourmands. They have created a market for heritage plants and animals. Burpee's seed company now features seeds from old-line tomato plants, which chefs and food-crafters say are much more flavorful, nutritious, and satisfying. This Thanksgiving, Huffington Post published a feature on old breeds of turkeys that retain a flavor that has been bred out of the commercial Broad Breasted Whites, which were created for production in confinement cages inside buildings. The heritage breeds are raised outside, are much slower growing, and are not fed hormones, anti-biotics, or chemically-processed feed. Food bloggers wrote about where the heritage breeds were available, and reported on how accessible they were. One story pointed out that orders for a heritage turkey for Thanksgiving had to be placed by August and cost $125 to $150 per bird. In some cases, they were delivered live.

I've read other stories by my farm-writer colleagues that tell of people who sell chickens and eggs produced by "kitchen flocks. The birds are old-line breeds that, in addition to being fed grains, are allowed to roam and scratch for food outside. These, too, are pricey, but capture the tastes and flavors that have been bred out of the commercial versions of the birds.

Pork produced by animals kept outside is also becoming available.

I would be the first to caution that not everything that claims to be raised organically and naturally is necessarily good. As a living history re-enactor (my period was the Civil War), I was involved in an event at which we were serving a banquet of food raised and cooked as it would have been in the 1860s. A woman in our group found some chickens she said were "organically" raised outside. My job was to cook them in Dutch ovens on wood coals, a method of cooking that is generally flavorful and interesting. Those chickens were dreadful. They were tough and stringy and made one of the re-enactors comment that they made one realize what kind of shit our ancestors had to ingest, at times, to survive. The person who saved the day was E.W. from up in Jamestown who had brined a deer he shot and roasted a haunch of venison over wood coals, basted with a sauce of currants picked along the James River. That was elegant.

Heritage, naturally produced foods have to be raised with an objective of quality, and quality takes a lot more attention and work to achieve in more natural settings than in confinement operations. A good farmer can produce products that are, indeed, more flavorful, nutritious, and tender than their industrial counterparts, and the sustainable trend is part of a revival of agriculture as opposed to agribusiness, for which the bottom line is the controlling criteria.

That leads to the prospects for Northern Beef Packers, the new packing plant in Aberdeen which is preparing to go into operation early in 2012. The Brown County Democrats hosted a company representative, Richard Benda, recently at one of its Dollar-A-Month Club lunches. Many of the Democrats active in northern East River politics are in the beef business and are interested in the prospects that a local packer could provide for them. The Northern Beef Packers is of great interest because it would offer a local, convenient market for their beef, make them less dependent on the corporate whims of the big three beef packers in the U.S., Tyson, Cargill and JBS SA (headquartered in Brazil) which control almost 90 percent of the beef production in the U.S. In addition to the economic advantages NBP could provide for regional producers, cattle growers see advantages for them of using the land and local feed supplies toward raising a higher-quality product.

The development of NBP has a shaky history. The idea for a regional plant often got bogged down by competing schemes and schemers who had little moxy in how to get a beef business going and made promises they were unable to keep. However, people in the cattle business were optimistic because NBP had hooked up with a distributor of high quality beef, Premium Angus Gold, and had a market for its product once the firm was up and running, which is the biggest factor in a proposed packing plant. A place to sell the beef produced is, obviously, essential to the prospects of success.

One afternoon at a Democratic fund-raiser, a man who operates a prominent cattle auction in our region told me he just heard that Premium Angus Gold had backed out its arrangement with NBP. Apparently the organization grew frustrated at the many delays and the legal and business snarls that the plant kept encountering. Since that time the plant has been taken over by investors from Korea, and its bills from contractors and its county taxes have all been paid. And Mr. Benda said that the plant is reconnected with Premium Angus Gold and is aiming to take advantage of the premium beef market.

When NBP buys a load of cattle, the purchase will include detailed breeding and feeding records for each head. In other words the entire life history of each head brought in for slaughter can be tracked. This information is part of the quality control, and the company can identify the origins of the best quality beef. That information will also be used to help producers in striving to produce consistent and dependable quality.

The firm lists the following USDA Certified Beef Programs and Brands in what it will offer to consumers:

South Dakota Certified Beef

South Dakota Certified Natural Beef

Northern Beef Packers Premium Black Angus Beef

Northern Beef Packers Premium Beef

Northern Beef Packers Grass-fed and Pasture-fed beef (with enough customer interest)

Involvement in these high-grade programs will extend its ability to produced boxed beef of superior, dependable quality, also. The business plan is aiming high. This is, in part, because Japan and Korea are among the biggest importers of premium quality beef and the Korean backers of the plant know that potential.

If all goes as planned, South Dakotans will have a value-added enterprise in their state and beef consumers will have options that is emerging from the sustainable, local production movement. And its success will provide significant economic growth for Aberdeen and Brown County.

You will know the plant is a success when Tyson, Cargill, or JBS SA think it is offering significant competition and offer to buy it out. However, consumers of good beef and advocates of a healthy agriculture wish NBP success in making its plans work.

Happy Black Friday

2011-11-24T12:19:00.000-08:00

When a day of the week is designated as "black," it usually is to commemorate some huge failure that occurred on that day, such as a stock market crash. I wonder if the people who termed the Friday after Thanksgiving "Black Friday" did so for what American culture has become. Something to drape in black.

For some employees, Black Friday begins at the stroke of midnight on Thanksgiving night. Some Target employees have signed petitions to the company headquarters over the matter. Last year, Target opened its stores at 5 a.m. for Black Friday. This year, the employees must report to work for a midnight opening, which means employees must use most of Thanksgiving for sleep if they wish to be properly rested to be ready for work at midnight. Macy's, by the way, is among the stores who are going for the midnight opening. Never to be outdone, Wal-Mart is beginning its Black Friday sales at 10 p.m. Thursday.

These early openings have a huge effect on the population in general. Those who participate in America's version of the running of the bulls, a stampede to be the first in the doors of the stores to stay ahead of that rampaging mob running amuck to acquire a bunch of shit they have been told are bargains, now don't have to get up early or wait out in the cold for the crack of dawn to hoist a holiday petard or two. Instead, they can just stay up late and they can wait for the grand openings in the evening hours. They may have to give up Thanksgiving dinner and football to wait in line, but they could make Thanksgiving a tailgate event with turkeys being transformed into globs of saturated fat in deep fryers in the parking lots. Fun.

The new hours are better for the news media, too. Now the reporters don't have to get out of bed early to stand around with their video cameras to catch footage of the idiots trampling themselves to death as they burst through the store doors. They can just stay up late and have their exciting footage ready to go for the Friday morning shows. Now, that will be good television.

Some perpetual grumpers have noted that Black Friday is starting so early that it's displacing Thanksgiving. They say we are getting so worked up for Black Friday that we are neglecting to observe the purpose of Thanksgiving to give thanks. For those of us in Indian Country, Black Friday is actually a more fitting expression of the values for which we are supposed to observe some reverence. Indians have always had festivals of thanksgiving to acknowledge the beneficence and bounty of the natural world in which they lived. When the honkeys gathered at Plymouth to celebrate a harvest that wasn't a total failure, the Wapanoags came with some game that they had gathered to augment the festivities. Their generosity was repaid a few years later with a massacre of their people at Mystic River. And the great tradition of genocide and oppression was launched, which is why our national holiday of Thanksgiving, which was devised be elementary teachers, not historians, is resented by the Indian people.

Many times over my years teaching in colleges, I was the faculty adviser for the student newspapers. I've always had a respect for student journalism, because the young observers and reporters had not yet lost the ability to see the contrived myths about America and its culture for what they are--exercises in self-delusion. A columnist at the University of Nebraska student newspaper issues a take on Thanksgiving that puts it in a more accurate and realistic perspective without giving up the fact that there are, indeed, things for which we can be thankful. For young minds like his, I am thankful.

Bourbon Red: a turkey of my youth.

Admittedly, I prefer to think of the Thanksgivings of my youth on what were truly family farms operated by some of my mothers seven brothers, their spouses, and their children. They were true times of celebration and thankfulness, and even Uncle LeRoy's interminable prayers of thanksgiving seemed appropriate and significant. My mother and her brothers have long since passed, and so have the family farms, having been absorbed into larger corporate enterprises. The turkeys weren't Butterballs, but were Bourbon Reds or Narragansetts raised on neighboring farms. They descended from those original wild birds that were said to be part of the original Thanksgiving, and their flavor was not that of those birds bred to make big breast meat as quickly as possible in cages and then over-processed to make them somewhat edible. I am thankful for that generation with its authentic values and the fruits of its honest labor and the legacy which is still available for those who wish to understand it.

Like my Indian compatriots and the young columnist at the University of Nebraska, I'll take Thanksgiving for what it can mean over Black Friday. And I am thankful for people who understand why.

The desecration of George Orwell

2011-11-21T14:26:00.000-08:00

While the nation obsesses over public education and pushes to elevate student knowledge in mathematics and science, the driving forces behind the technology, the promotion of illiteracy is ramped up quite a few notches.    It is not insignificant that a major political party is fielding an array of candidates who are virulently anti-intellectual and take great pride in displaying ignorance and contempt for knowledge. Using language precisely and well is no longer a value. In fact, for conservatives, it has become regarded as a defect of character.

George Orwell used language carefully and effectively. Although he is best known for his satirical novels, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, the preponderance of his work was journalism--reporting and analytic commentary.

Two of his essays which are widely anthologized in college composition texts, drawn from Orwell's experience as a colonial official in Burma, stand out as stunning, incisive observations on human proclivities: "Shooting an Elephant" and "A Hanging." His experiences in the Spanish Civil War, as recorded in Homage to Catalonia, provide some deep and detailed insights into what shaped his political thinking. It also provides the interpretative context for his satiric novels. In addition, Orwell was a critical linguist. His "Politics and the English Language" is one of his significant studies in how language is the transactional currency of the intellect and its role in human behavior.

A fundamental premise of Orwell's work is that the meaning of words is determined by their accrued history, Accumulated human experience is stored in the language. An emphasis in Orwell's work is that language used honestly, accurately, and skillfully is requisite to a healthy political climate. He writes:

Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.

A symptom of the deleterious effects of slovenly language is in the use of the word "Orwellian." Advocates in both political parties charge the opposing party with "Orwellian" language when they take offense at a linguistic ploy of their opponents. The tactics they cite are what Orwell satirized and criticized, not what he advocated or practiced in his own use of language. To label misused and ill-used language as "Orwellian" is to miss the point. When many commentators on blogs and cable TV liken their political opposition to what is portrayed in 1984, they reveal that they have never read the book or had much comprehension of it if they did. When conservatives cite the book as evidence of the wrongness of liberalism, they misrepresent the book and Orwell. The novel is inspired by Orwell's exposure of Stalinism as the most pernicious of political cancers. He says of himself that he was "AGAINST totalitarianism and FOR democratic Socialism." He sees the evils in both Capitalism and Communism, as he writes in a book review:

Capitalism leads to dole queues, the scramble for markets, and war. Collectivism leads to concentration camps, leader worship, and war. There is no way out of this unless a planned economy can somehow be combined with the freedom of the intellect, which can only happen if the concept of right and wrong is restored to politics. Capitalism and Communism: Two Paths to Slavery.

With a sense of irony and despair at the intellectual morass in which contemporary American politics is mired, I see Orwell enlisted into the partisan causes, when in fact he explicitly disassociated himself from the kind of petty and baseless bickering that makes up much of popular political discourse. The GOP bears a particularly heavy burden because its members make accusations of Orwellianism while it adopts as its propaganda playbook the very distortions and misuses of language that Orwell satirized and criticized. He saw that the electronic media could be used to monitor and condition humans by subjecting them to repeated "messaging." Even if the words of the messages had no basis in reality but were used as conditioning devices to purge minds of original observations and thoughts and supplant them with constantly repeated words, a vulnerable mentality could be shaped around the message that the political party wanted it to believe and act upon. And in the concerted attack on liberalism and the relentless repetition of contrived, accusatory messages, the GOP adopts precisely the messages and their constant drumming through the media that Orwell portrayed as destructive of competent mentality. No processes of cognition and ratiocination are engaged.

The GOP has simply employed the techniques of media-delivered advertising, and in a public undereducated in letters and literature, those techniques are effective. That is what is behind the harping in education against the "liberal" arts in favor of technical matter, which can be instilled by rote, not by utilizing the critical processes of mind that language and thought employ. That is also why the kind of testing and evaluation of education through the tests devised by the No Child Left Behind program are such inadequate measures of learning.

Orwell is often invoked as support for the right wing attacks on anything liberal. A recent headline on a blog aggregator is typical: To Understand America’s Growing Nanny State, Read Brave New World and 1984. On its face, the headline was inane. Orwell criticized totalitarianism and the use of language to administer operant conditioning to a weak-minded public. He favored a democratic socialism that organized itself to provide basic needs required to achieve and sustain freedom, equality, and justice,

I find that much of the commentary on blogs is the symptom of minds purged of the basic tenets of democracy and, yes, Christianity, and can repeat only mindless sound bites and slogans they receive from the heroes they worship through the media.

It is time for those who read, think, and write from the literary traditions of Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, Lincoln, and their fellows to assert a little unabashed elitism and call for the restoration of the liberal arts as the most fitting and effective tool of democracy.

We cannot survive under the rule of the pridefully ignorant,

As goes Penn State, so goes the nation

2011-11-14T07:57:00.000-08:00

The scandal at Penn. State, which alleges that a former assistant football coach sexually abused young boys on the campus, has had the effect of exposing something that has happened to the nation at large. It also has demonstrated to the public a reality about the kind of thinking that rules higher education.

Much of the press coverage has taken the form of accusations and speculations against the Penn. State administration, and the public has responded in lynch mob fashion. The charges against Jerry Sandusky are for horrendous acts, to be sure, but the public response has been to make speculations about who knew what and then to demand action on the basis of the speculations, not on facts that an investigation should probe. Consequently, legendary football coach Joe Paterno and the University's president were summarily fired, in an action by the board of trustees that reveals how boards of regents and trustees operate.

The Washington Post Ombudsman has written that the coverage of his newspaper on the matter was left to opinion columnists, not to on-the-ground reporters who would be going after the facts. Under the pretense of indignation and outrage at the plight of what is alleged to happen to children, the columnists and the commenting public have furiously demanded vengeance on the coaches, the college administration, and anyone else who can be associated with the charges.   One columnist even castigated Jerry Sandusky's wife. Not one of them proposed any positive actions to be taken for the alleged victims.

And only a few stories brought in the complicating fact that Sandusky and his wife raised six adopted children, in addition to starting the Second Mile facility for young boys in need, through which Sandusky is alleged to have made contact with victims.    I don't know the significance of the facts of Sandusky's family and social life, but at this point, neither does anyone else. There are many aspects of the situation for which a full assemblage of facts is needed, but the journalists and public have shown that they are not capable or willing to deal with complicating facts. Rather than insist upon and support a full investigation leading to a trial, they are insisting on vengeance against anyone in power and authority that they can think of. It's the lynch mob mentality at work.

I think of a scene from the movie "Powwow Highway," which has some sharply penetrating moments in it. In one the protagonist, Buddy Red Bow, gets into a scrape at powwow at Pine Ridge and is saved by the intervention of a fellow Viet Nam veteran. The veteran, played by Graham Greene, a native American actor who has done some brilliant work, is highly decorated for his valor in combat, but is afflicted with an incapacitating stutter. He cannot articulate what he wants to say to Red Bow. He finally gets out the phrase, "You got mean." As one browses through all the commentary on the Penn State scandal, one cannot escape the fact that America got mean. That meanness does nothing to create a rehabilitative circumstance for any possible victims. It merely serves what has become the great American indulgence: the need to feel superior by condemning other people. And when the condemned is a famous football coach and the president of a big university, people luxuriate in their feeling of superiority. America got mean.

I make no case for Joe Paterno or President Graham Spanier. They were fired and may well deserve it. But I do know the reason they got fired, and it has nothing to do with the lives involved in the scandal. It has everything to do with the fact that they could be accused of allowing a scandal, and their sacrifice to public anger elevates the trustees to a position of superiority, where they hope to evade their moral responsibility as the officials who set the policies and procedures and the lines of authority to be followed.

Universities are populated by very young adults who sometimes do unthinking foolish things. And by professors who are sometimes overcome by professional rivalries, jealousy, or disappointment, and sometimes lechery. They, too, do destructive and foolish things.   What drives universities is the quest for money, much more than the quest for talented students. The money comes from alumni and benefactors from the business world, and the first and most stringently followed rule is to never cause scandal. And to never reveal scandal. Those who expose a scandal are much more despised in the administrative mind than are those who actually cause a scandal. The first actions taken by governing boards are to cover the flabby asses by sacrificing some well-known figures.   That takes the attention away from the board as the people indulge a morass of speculations and accusations about the important figures. The termination of Graham Spanier is a big sacrifice, because he brought $3 billion in philanthropic donations to Penn State.

I know two former prize-winning reporters who now make their livings writing crime novels. Both have made comments that the public does not understand what a grand jury indictment actually is. The public assumes that a grand jury report is a final finding of guilt, not a finding of possible cause on which a suspect may be arrested and made the subject of a thorough investigation. The two writers both commented that the grand jury report on Jerry Sandusky contains inconsistencies and improbabilities which need a thorough examination of evidence and analysis to clarify and strengthen the charges brought against him for trial. The fact that he was released on $100,000 bond indicates how tenuous those charges are at this point.***

Children who are in fact abused are owed a thorough and honest investigation. Responsible action in child abuse cases is compromised by the hysteria and speculative frenzy with which people respond to the charges. On one hand there are cases like those brought against the McMartin Preschool in Los Angeles, which after the longest criminal trial in U.S. history resulted in acquittal and dismissal of charges, and in Jordan, Minnesota, where testimony from children was found to be coached and did not stand up under cross examination. On the other hand are cases involving U.S. Army day care centers at the Presidio in San Francisco and West Point in Maryland, where physical and forensic evidence was amassed from children, but was weakened by upper echelon dismissals and inadequate preparation for trial.

Child abuse is too serious and has too many deleterious implications for those on whom it is inflicted to be examined by those possessed by hysteria and twisted agendas. It isn't just children who are endangered; it is the possibility of any real justice for anyone.

***Another complicating update: The judge who released Sandusky on bail is a volunteer for the Second Mile organization.

And, David Brooks makes a shrewd assessment.

Assassinating Lincoln--again

2011-11-13T12:57:00.000-08:00

Banned at Ford's Theater

The Ford Theater National Historic Site, the place where Abraham Lincoln was shot, has banned a recent book on Abraham Lincoln co-written by Bill O'Reilly because of the number of factual errors it contains. The book is titled Killing Lincoln. To qualify to be carried in the site's bookstore, the book must be historically accurate, have relevant citations and use primary resources with documentation, according to the site's standards for selecting books on Lincoln to further knowledge about him. The book by Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard meets none of those qualifications.

Columbia University historian Edward Steers, Jr., who has written an acclaimed book on Lincoln says, "The authors have chosen to write a story based . . . [on] a few dozen secondary books that range from excellent to positively dreadful . . . [with] no vetting . . . treating them as equal," reported the Washington Post.

A Christian Science Monitor review says:

Rather than offering lessons in leadership or solutions for a politically divided nation, the book unwittingly exemplifies some of the greatest failings of our current mass mediated political discourse. There is the oversimplification of complex realities, the appeal of crass sensationalism, the stereotypical pigeon-holing of public figures, the innuendo based on hearsay and scant evidence. Throughout the book, in fact, O'Reilly strongly implies that Lincoln's Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, was a party to the assassination, a conspiracy that he hints may have included members of Congress, Army and Navy officers, bankers, industrialists, journalists, and a sitting governor. Of course, he is careful to cloak these allegations in the kind of accusatory rhetorical questions that are now so commonly employed by the punditocracy.

Lincoln was a figure who was so revered in Illinois, where I grew up, that my mother had a bust of him on a living room table. In the laboring community where we lived, Lincoln was revered for an aspect that is not often emphasized. He resented that his father put him to work cutting fence rails and other arduous tasks and then collected the money Abe earned. Many biographers of Lincoln have noted that this resentment formed a part of Lincoln's attitude toward slavery based on the conviction that every person should have the rewards of their labor. Lincoln biographies were required reading in Illinois schools and his philosophy about work and fair earnings was one of the inspirations behind the labor movement.

I developed a fascination for Lincoln from home and school which increased as I became older. After reading Carl Sandburg's Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years, I wanted to read every good book about Lincoln that I could. Because of the heavy reading involved in my work as a professor, I had to postpone that endeavor until my retirement. There are more than 16,000 books and articles on Lincoln, and many, many aren't so good. I limited my reading to those which had received critical acclaim and were regarded as worthy by scholars, but that still leaves a lot of good material that will remain unread.

The great interest in Lincoln is that he faced such tremendous adversity and faced it with an intellect and a character that has been possessed by very few men or women throughout history. One reads not just for inspiration, but to find that source of mind and spirit that made Lincoln such a transforming leader. There are enough excellent books that conduct that search so that one does not have to bother with pot-boiling trash like O'Reilly's book. Bad history is the basis for desperate futures.

The great GOP gaffe exchange

2011-11-11T08:49:00.000-08:00

Wednesday night two revealing moments in the talking points recitation that is being called a Republican debate were published on the front page reports. One was Rick Perry's comedic moment when he said there are three cabinet departments he'd eliminate from the federal government, but could only think of two. The other was when Mitt Romney said, "President Barack Obama gave GM to UAW, he gave Chrysler to Fiat.”

The story on Perry's gaffe was still prominently featured on the Internet pages of the media Thursday morning. But the story on what they called Romney's "clunker" had disappeared and was replaced by accounts of how Romney's steady performance would put him in the lead for the nomination. Of the two gaffes, Romney's was by far the most serious. Where Perry made a fool of himself that can really harm no one but himself, Romney stated a falsehood that does damage to the integrity of the country. What he said is not true and gives voters misinformation upon which they can base further bad decisions of the kind that created the Great Recession.

Of the major news sources which published the story about Romney's "clunker" on Wednesday night and dropped it on Thursday morning were The Washington Post, the Associated Press, The Chicago Tribune, and The Rapid City Journal. Here is the Post version of why Romney is wrong:

THE FACTS: That’s not what happened in the bailout.

A trust owned by the United Auto Workers received a 17.5 percent ownership stake in GM to help that trust pay for its retirees’ health care. That stake has declined since then, after the company went public in November 2010. The trust now owns about 10 percent of General Motors. That’s much smaller than the government’s stake of about 30 percent, and it doesn’t support the notion that the government “gave” the company to the union.
Moreover, the union did not get free rein in return for its share. It was barred from going on strike over wage issues during recent contract talks with GM and Chrysler, as a condition of the bailouts.

Nor did Obama give Chrysler to Fiat.

The Italian automaker Fiat received an initial 20 percent stake in Chrysler as Chrysler emerged from bankruptcy in 2009 in exchange for only management expertise and technology. Since then, Fiat has paid $1.8 billion to boost its stake to 53.3 percent, including a $500 million payment to the U.S. Treasury to purchase the government’s 6 percent share of the company.

Whether Romney said what he said because he has not bothered to apprise himself of the facts or whether he is simply lying as part of his campaign to discredit Obama makes little difference. He made a false accusation, and the last thing we need is a perfidious weasel leading the country. That's what got us into Iraq, cost the lives of four thousand soldiers, pissed a trillion dollars down a rat hole, and left another 30,000 troops wounded.

The press and commentators have missed the telling aspect of Romney's attack on Obama. In claiming that Obama's policies are wrong, he does not analyze what he thinks are flaws in the policies. He instead takes the ad hominem track of saying they are wrong because the person who implements is inferior.

The press is not savvy enough to see how Romney's attacks are received by African Americans. Some that I know see this as the old racist argument that blacks are inherently inferior and may be okay to perform menial service to the master class, but should never be put in charge of a household to run it. They are not capable.

In pursuing his ad hominem denunciation of Obama, Romney is reviving an old Mormon premise that the church officially abandoned in 1978. Up until that time, blacks were denied the priesthood in the Latter Day Saints church. All male heads of households are regarded as priests and have priestly duties and privileges in the Mormon church, Blacks could ally themselves with the LDS church, but they could not exercise any of the privileges, such as be married according to laws of the church. The rule stemmed from Brigham Young's pronouncement that "The Lord had cursed Cain's seed with blackness and prohibited them the Priesthood."

Romney's persistent attack on Obama's competence and qualifications as a person equal to the task he has assumed follows that old racist rule.

But Romney is by no means the only Republican who is using the technique exposed by George Orwell for conditioning the unwary and gullible by constantly repeating a lie. The entire GOP field of candidates likes to harp on the notion that government regulation is the big obstacle to economic advancement in the U.S. They are trying to condition the electorate into thinking that regulation is an evil so that the restraints that keep the corporate world from bilking, fleecing, and cheating the consumer can be removed. The GOP wants to restore the very practices that produced the Great Recession.

Here is the Fact Check on the contention the regulation is the basis for our economic problems:

THE FACTS: It has become an article of faith in the GOP field that regulations are a leading drag on jobs, but Labor Department data show that few companies where large layoffs occur say government regulation was the reason. Just two-tenths of 1 percent of layoffs since Obama took office have been due to government regulation, the data show.

Moreover, there is little evidence that the regulatory burden is any worse now than in the past or that it is costing significant numbers of jobs. Most economists believe there is a simpler explanation: Companies aren’t hiring because there isn’t enough consumer demand. And economists believe high levels of economic uncertainty are a leading complication for business, arising more from struggles over taxes and spending in Washington than from regulations — an unwelcome quantity, for sure, but a known one.

The technique of repeating the Big Lie until people accept it is being used by the perpetrators of the Great Recession to escape responsibility for their practices and the mess they create. The Big Lie seems all that GOP has to run on at this time.

The matter of obituaries for the living

2011-11-09T14:43:00.000-08:00

Bill Janklow's announcement of his impending death from brain cancer is a test of journalistic integrity. He was undeniably a political force and his announcement recalls incidents and episodes in his career that are overcast with deep, dark shadows. Which incidents and episodes prevail in the mind is probably dependent on one's partisan alliances, but for journalists they pose a problem in how to summarize his life. The fact that he is alive and sentient to read the accounts will make journalists shape their stories according to their beliefs in how the dead and dying should be treated. And in some cases to maintain the obsequious posture that they always displayed toward Janklow. Their decisions will give historians plenty to ponder and evaluate as they grapple with making an assessment of Janklow's legacy.

Most obituaries these days are written by or for the family of the deceased, full of cloying sweetness and smarmy assessments of the deceased's life, often totally fabricated. Their objective is not so much to memorialize the deceased as to avoid anything that might embarrass the family. In years past, obituaries were written by reporters and were carefully confined to the facts of a person's biography. If the family wanted smarm and professions of sweetness, that is what the memorial bulletins handed out at the funerals were for. Major papers like The New York Times assigned accomplished writers to write biographies of public figures so that the newspaper had the obituary material on file and could pull it out for publication within minutes of the person's death. I think the increase in diabetes in the country could well be related to reading too many of those sugary paeans of praise that pass for obituaries today. I was once sitting next to a college dean at a funeral service for a college president when, for his wife's benefit, he crossed out the first sentence in the obituary on the church bulletin and penned in, "This man was a supreme asshole." His wife took it from him, crumpled it up, and stuck it in her purse so that nobody else would see it. But not before she had scribbled an "amen" in the margin.

The idea of a wake and a funeral is to celebrate a person's life by concentrating on the positive achievements and ignoring those minor detractions from perfection that everyone possesses. A worthy life must be acknowledged for its worthiness. But in some lives the detractions cast too dense a shadow to ignore, and they define a major aspect of the persona. In some cases predatory and heedless menace are the persona. In Bill Janklow's case, there is no question that he accomplished things and worked hard for the state, but in some quarters he is regarded primarily as a destructive and damaging force. The problem for the press is how to handle the conflicting aspects of his career. For the most part, the press accounts on the occasion of Janklow's announcement were either personal anecdotes that avoided a larger look at his life or were collections of quotations from other public figures

One of the comments regarding Janklow from another politician was that people should not allow his manslaughter conviction for running a stop sign and killing a motorcyclist be their most prominent memory of Bill Janklow. For a number of people, that incident is one in a long string of incidents that recall the shadowy side of Janklow. While the legacy media came up with fond memories, which did hint at the darker perceptions of him, Internet sources, particularly those based on Indian reservations and those dealing with civil rights, recalled the menace and the damage Janklow represents to them.

Those recollections are not based upon mere political disagreements. They are based on basic moral issues of a more personal nature. One of the laudatory memoirs tries to make the case for Janklow as a kindly friend and parent and asserts that what Janklow did was intensely personal. There is some truth to that: Janklow defined himself to some as a particularly vicious enemy with an agenda of personal destruction.

There are things that Janklow did that can be criticized as politically questionable. His support of the ETSI coal slurry pipeline, a scheme eventually abandoned, seemed a bit ignorant and silly. On the other hand, the state purchase of the old Milwaukee rail line was a government intrusion that preserved an important piece of infrastructure. His pushing for the repeal of usury laws to give South Dakota a large niche in the credit card industry certainly brought growth to the state, but also some exploitative and destructive credit practices. Janklow did form alliances with Democratic politicians, such as Tom Daschle, to get things done for the state, and he did accomplish things.

But some of those accomplishments had destructive effects. His idea for turning juvenile detention facilities into boot camps resulted in the death of 14-year-old Gina Score and the revelation of practices that eventually led to their abandonment. He purged the Board of Regents of any professional educators and established it as a body of lawyers and political loyalists who served the governor, not the people. But the Janklow Indian wars were an episode that for many will represent the Janklow legacy.

Larry Kurtz of the interested party blog calls attention to a very instructive piece by Lakota journalist Tim Giago, which gives an outline of Janklow's war on Indians. The shadowy past of William Janklow is cast on the Indian reservations. He began his law career as a Legal Aid lawyer on the Rosebud Reservation. That is where one of the most troubling accusations against Janklow originated, which Tim Giago summarizes. He was eventually barred from practicing law on the Rosebud by a tribal judge on the basis of a rape accusation by Jancita Eagle Deer, for whom Janklow acted as a guardian. She testified that while driving her back to her lodging after baby-sitting for the Janklows, he raped her. When those allegations were covered in Peter Matthiessen's book In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, Janklow sued the author, the publisher Viking Press, and Newsweek, which included the allegation in a review, for libel. He also threatened and temporarily closed book stores which sold the book. His suits were dismissed on the First Amendment basis that the author and publications were reporting on the legal actions surrounding the allegation, not originating or making the allegation themselves. It is an allegation that lingers and was intensified by the events surrounding Jancita Eagle Deer's life and death. She was involved in AIM activities and was urged by the organization to make her charges against Janklow. She offered her testimony in the hearing which led to Jankow's disbarment by the tribal court in October 1974. In April 1975, she was killed in a hit-and-run on a highway in Nebraska, an incident that was never fully investigated or explained. Her mother, Delphine Eagle Deer, pursued the rape allegations after her death and was found beaten to death on the Rosebud reservation nine months later. The unexplained, violent deaths are part of the murky shadows that create suspicion and distrust.

There is also a tribal police report from the Lower Brule Reservation that states that Janklow was chased down by tribal police at Fort Thompson in 1973 for drunken driving. When he was stopped, he wasn't wearing any pants, according to the report.

In 1974, Janklow was elected attorney general of South Dakota and succeeded in a number of prosecutions of American Indian Movement members. He was elected as a conservative law-and-order attorney, but many native Americans wryly question what law and what order?

As one who has been involved with organizations and activities that work on wrongful convictions, I am acutely aware of the unreliability that exists in accusations that are not carefully documented. The failure to investigate murky incidents and to document the findings contributes to the conspiracy theories that surround the perception of Janklow. They are fed by people who have experienced Janklow's bullying and vindictiveness.

Janklow is a reason why I switched political parties when I moved to South Dakota. I was what is called a Lincoln Republican in Illinois, although I was alarmed when the party in that state became dominated by corporately-allied conservatives who refuted almost everything that Lincoln represented. But on my way to South Dakota to find a house after taking a job here, I heard Janklow, recently elected governor, give a speech over the car radio that convinced me he did not represent any of the values I held. I knew about him, as I was active in a group called the Intertribal League, a group of native Americans in the Quad-Cities of Iowa and Illinois. Some of the young people associated with that group were getting active in the American Indian Movement, and Janklow was prominently named as a concern of theirs.

My only personal confrontation with Janklow was one I invited. As a congressman, he was invited to Aberdeen to make a speech at the dedication of a huge flag which flies in Wylie Park. I was part of that dedication as the honor guard from a Civil War re-enactment group. Janklow gave a speech devoted to militarism; he said it was not the poet, the reporter, the lawyer, or the organizer who have us or freedoms; it was the soldier. In a snarky newspaper column, I took exception to his statements because they are, first, a distorted falsification of who and how our freedoms were established and are maintained, and, secondly, because he seemed to be justifying the police state he sometimes commanded. He responded through a piece probably written by a staff member. He belittled the fact that I attended the event as a re-enactment soldier, a play soldier, as he termed it. The response did not even consider that I am, in fact, a veteran, and my participation in re-enactments stemmed in part from my knowledge of the manual of arms from being a drill instructor. Nor did it occur to him that I could be proud of my own service. I did not diminish the role of the soldier, but took exception to his excluding every endeavor but soldiering as the source of our freedoms.

In the course of trying to figure out why he would make such a contention, I discovered that he had plagiarized that portion of his speech from a poem that circulates on the Internet. (You can see it below.)
The whole incident is consistent with a reckless negligence of the sort that in courts is regarded as the product of malice. For many, when they think of his manslaughter conviction, they will also recall numerous other incidents, particularly those related to his war on the Indians.

I often thought that the jail sentence he served for the manslaughter conviction pointed up the weaknesses of our criminal justice system. I wished there would have been some way to make him do community service of the nature that earned him a good reputation as a Legal Aid lawyer on the Rosebud. Janklow has talents that could be used in a redemptive manner.

Still, I, like many, am saddened by his cancer. It does make one thing about the positive things he accomplished and was capable of doing, and I wish he could be alive quite a bit longer to extend the good things he did and erase that dark legacy that will shadow him for many people.

*The plagiarized Internet poem for whom the author has not been established.

It is the Soldier, not the reporter
Who has given us freedom of the press.

It is the Soldier, not the poet,
Who has given us freedom of speech.

It is the Soldier, not the campus organizer,
Who has given us the freedom to demonstrate.

It is the Soldier, not the lawyer,
Who has given us the right to a fair trial.

It is the Soldier, who salutes the flag,
Who serves beneath the flag,
And whose coffin is draped by the flag,
Who allows the protestor to burn the flag.

The theory and practice of Caining

2011-11-06T10:39:00.000-08:00

The Republican primary campaign is getting as nuts as the people in it. The only candidate who has demonstrated any intellectual competence is Jon Huntsman, who obviously cannot compete in the GOP idiocy test with the likes of Palin, Bachmann, Perry, etc. Mitt Romney who has a more sedate history is out there flopping around like a beheaded chicken. Voters ultimately determine the outcomes of our elections, but the question is, who determines the mentality of the voters? As we know from the history of Germany in the 1930s, Joe McCarthy's inquisition, and other deviant episodes in human history, whole cultures can go bonkers. But this episode is driven by the voters who have the politicians groveling to be one of them, not led by politicians trying to persuade voters with ideas and plans, however nutty. It is a time of the pettiest, meanest, and lowest kind of ad hominem frenzy, like the inmates of a loony bin having a gossip fest.

The accusations that Herman Cain engaged in sexual harassment occurs in a context in which all allegations are suspect. I must admit to a jaded attitude about sexual harassment charges. As a local and state officer in a college faculty organization that dealt with matters of grievances and due process, I ended up on a list of faculty from which outside review panels were formed when a professor requested an independent study panel to review personnel actions taken against him or her. Sexual harassment charges dominated the actions reviewed by panels on which I served. I hated those panels. They involved a degree of work that intruded upon professional and family life, and they exposed one to sides of humanity that one would like to think are rarities in the higher education profession. The reviews indicated an even, 50/50 split on sexual harassment charges. About half of the actions taken against professors were fully warranted. Some professors did use their power and authority to force sexual situations. Some people were justifiably fired. However, about half were matters of vindictive retaliations or the ruthless pursuit of ambitions or perverse states of mind. Students or colleagues would conflate innocuous banter with examples of sexual aggression, sometimes in cases when they were unhappy with grades or felt slighted somehow in the course of academic business. Some cases were downright fabrications. Most of the dubious accusations were overburdened with a malicious intent.

A big problem in sexual harassment cases is that to save legitimate complainants from undue stress and embarrassment, organizations adopted procedures for dealing with the complaints that circumvent Constitutionally-derived due process. The charges and proceedings were kept confidential, and were not available for critical examination. In many cases, the procedures assumed the guilt of the accused, and some organizations even went so far as to suspend the person charged until some kind of administrative decision was made. And that administrative decision was based upon a presumption of guilt, and the accused had to prove innocence. Most organizations wanted to dispose of any such charges as fast as possible in the most expeditious manner possible. Often they would buy off the complainers to get around any prolonged investigations, with little concern about whether the accusations were true. The review panels did not get cases where there was irrefutable evidence that sexual harassment had occurred. Guilty individuals in those instances did not ask for reviews. The panels got the cases in which there were serious questions. They generally fell into the contention of he-said-she-said, and the review panels had to grapple with conflicting accusations, twisted interpretations, and sometimes downright lies, which the panels generally could detect. But the real depressing aspect of such cases is the damage they do. The people involved never get over it, and the institutions are damaged. That is why many administrators just want the people involved to leave and take the issue with them. When the credibility of the accused and/or the accuser is in question, it is like implanting cancer cells in all the people around them. The tear in the social fabric is irreparable.

Sexual harassment is a very serious business. When it occurs, it needs to be eliminated. But due process is also a very serious business. It is often eliminated, and needs somehow to be restored.

The Herman Cain business illustrates all the defects in the procedures for dealing with sexual harassment. There is evidence that harassment complaints were filed, but the facts are hidden to fester and ooze. However, one huge fact stands out even if the details that led to a settlement are not known. Because Herman Cain held the status of CEO, he was not the one asked to go. The apparent object of the harassment was paid off to leave. The procedures were not designed to eliminate sexual harassment in the workplace and make it possible for people to concentrate on their work; they were designed to defer to and protect the status of the CEO and get rid of the person who filed the complaint. The offender in a case like this is the person against whom the offenses were committed. Such a settlement does nothing to eliminate sexual harassment from the workplace; it defines instead who is bestowed the privileges of harassing and who must submit or get out. Justice and the due process that delivers it is not a consideration.

The media plays a difficult role in matters of sexual harassment when a public figure enters the political arena and becomes a contender for an office which has a significant influence on how justice is delivered. The political magazine Politico received a tip on the Herman Cain matter, and decided to publish the story referring to anonymous sources. During my time as a full-time journalist, that would not have happened, except in the tabloids. The rule back then was to aggressively and thoroughly investigate any such information, but not to publish it until the reporters had a person or a document they could cite to back up the allegations. Anonymous sources used in a story only when a situation seemed so urgent that the story needed to be told even if sources could not be identified. Recall the accounts of Watergate and the strenuous efforts of Woodward and Bernstein to verify their story.

At that time in the not-too-distant past, journalistic credibility and careful attribution were the primary considerations in handling such stories. News media went to great lengths to give its audience substantiated facts. The criteria today shows how the success of tabloid journalism has eroded the standards of reliability. The major concern today is to be first with the story, which is why so many stories are based upon anonymous sources. And a semi-literate public does not really care about authenticity and accuracy as long as it gets its does of titillation. The media is a huge determiner of the public mentality, and it has created a simple-minded audience.

The fact that politicians such as Palin, Bachmann, Perry, and Cain make unabashedly ignorant statements and brandish them as badges of conservative merit is a measure of why the media has had more influence on the minds of the people than have the schools. Herman Cain's display of ignorance about China and its nuclear status is a case in point.

A symptom of the new literacy and what is purported to be a standard of journalism is South Dakota Politic's assailing of the Politico story as irresponsible journalism. Politico decided to abide by legal agreements made with the National Restaurant Association with the complainant not to disclose any details of the incidents. South Dakota Politics contends that the fact that a legal agreement prevented disclosure made no facts available and therefore rendered the Politico story worthless, except as a hit piece on Herman Cain. The fact that such an agreement exists is strong authority for a story, even though the details of it are guarded. Politico decided it was important to know something about the history of a man who is in contention for the presidency, and published what it had.

The huge irony is that no blog worships at the altar of ad hominem sacrifice with the devout fervor of South Dakota Politics. It is a priestly order of defamation, and has turned it into a denomination of political science, which is among the most pseudo of the pseudo-sciences to start with. Its efforts to present President Obama as a shambling houseboy who suddenly found himself in charge of the house is a classic scenario from the priestly order's liturgy. Irony abounds for those who recognize it. The tabloid mentality prevails.

The harassment accusations against Herman Cain have seemed to increase donations to his campaign. Actually that is somewhat intriguing. I never thought I'd live to see a black man become presidency. Now, we have the prospect of two black men running for that office. We seem to have made some kind of progress, but then one looks at the matter of what is presented to us through the sexual harassment story. We see a concept of justice in which a CEO gets a pass and an alleged victim loses a job (although she reportedly now works for the government, which the Conservatives would like to get rid of).

Politico did its job as a member of the Fourth Estate. And for that, it must be castigated. If America is to be the big serfdom for the rule of CEOs and we are bonkers enough to let it happen.

How to screw the reservations and feel good about it

2011-10-31T10:09:00.000-07:00

Much has been written on the blogs about NPR's report concerning native American children taken away from their families and put into foster homes. Among others, Cory Heidelberger, Denise Ross, and Bob Mercer have noted and commented on the story. The story includes the suggestion that Gov. Dennis Daugaard was caught in a conflict of interest because he headed the Children's Home Society at the time he was lieutenant governor and could be seen as using his political clout with the state to increase the Society's fortunes by making it the prime contractor for placing children taken away from their parents into foster homes. Daugaard went so far as to send out a press release prior to the airing of the NPR program which explained his role and the reasons that the Children's Home Society became the prime contractor. Unfortunately, the Governor's role in all this became the focus of the story for many people, although Heidelberger and Ross tried to emphasize that the real issue was the placements of native American children into white foster homes. The 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act, authored by former South Dakota U.S. Senator James Abourezk, specifies that every effort should be made to put native children taken away from their homes into native homes, and that a first priority should be to keep families together. The story points out that 32 states appear to flout that law and South Dakota is the biggest flouter. It removes children from their homes at a higher rate other states.

The big question is whether this rate of removals is necessary and justified and if the state authorities make an earnest attempt to place the removals in native homes. The story cites native homes that are approved for foster care but never receive a call. The state receives federal money for the placements and appears to channel that money into white organizations and homes, as is the tradition in dealing with the indigenous people.

That is not new. From the outset, reservations were designed to serve the purposes of maintaining the Indian population in concentration camps and setting up those camps to be objects of exploitation by traders, contractors, and agents. The justification for this treatment of the Indian people was established in the Declaration of Independence, which refers to them as "the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions." Old Tom Jefferson really nailed those babies.

That attitude persists today when people recall the Sioux uprising of 1862 during which 38 Dakota warriors were hanged for their role in it. The good people in their outrage over the massacre of white settlers ignore the fact, as presented on a University of Minnesota-Duluth web page, that the "government was extremely dishonest in [its] treatment of the Sioux (or Dakota) Indians" and that "The Sioux were being taken for fools by the government and they didn't want to take it anymore." However, this rather glib condemnation of treatment of the Dakotas does not indicate the fact that the Dakota people realized that they were the subjects of a genocide campaign in which their lands were taken away and then they were crowded onto reservations where essential food and supplies were denied them. There was a desperation at realizing they were being subjected to a process of extermination.

The Sioux Uprising led to the western great plains Indian wars, the Ft. Laramie Treaty of 1868 and the establishment of all of West River South Dakota as a Great Sioux Reservation, and the eventual stealing and bilking away of most of that land. The reservation system is part of a genocidal scheme, in which the first premise is to kill off the food supply and take away the habitat of the Indian nations. Then force the people into concentration camps located on the most unproductive landscapes and keep them subdued by parceling out food and supplies in a way that is a constant reminder of their subjugation. Those reservations at once keep the Indian people in a state of need, but at the same time are invested with the history of vital nations. The Indians of North America are living reminders of the perfidy and horrific violence with which the white culture appropriated their lands and their livelihoods. They are living refutations of the white culture's pretenses to a superior morality and decency, In an editorial in the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer, L. Frank Baum, author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, at once acknowledged the genocide against the Indian people and expressed the need for it to continue:

our only safety depends upon the total extirmination [sic] of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth. In this lies future safety for our settlers and the soldiers who are under incompetent commands. Otherwise, we may expect future years to be as full of trouble with the redskins as those have been in the past.

He may well have realized he was speaking more for the realities faced by the white psyche than for the physical safety of the settlers. Of course, his concern is for the discomfort that the Indians cause for the white psyche, not what the greed and perfidy of the white psyche causes for the Indians.

The white culture has never come to terms with the fact that Indian culture is rooted in values and ethical premises opposite to those practiced by whites. In most Indian nations, one ascends to leadership through effective application of those values. They include bravery, but emphasize diligence, generosity, and a hospitable regard for life. That regard is carried out in the code of the warrior to defend and act against any forces that threaten the well-being of the tribe. In most plains tribes, becoming a chief meant becoming poor. A chief's first obligation was to see that the needs of his people were attended to, which may mean giving of one's personal fortunes. The Indian culture was formed around those very precepts advanced by Jesus Christ, those precepts so thoroughly dismissed by many who call themselves Christians. The concepts of working for the common good and well-being are portrayed by the American right as pernicious socialism, communism, and Marxism, and the practice of avarice is held up as a virtue upon which the free market operates.

As a sign of its humane pity, white society likes to adopt and indoctrinate Indian children into its ways. The removal and cultural modification of Indian children at once demonstrates a professed humanity, but also hopes to purge knowledge of their own culture from the children. This was the objective of the Indian boarding schools, which tried to destroy knowledge of the Indian languages. It is still the motive behind removing children from their culture and placing them in white homes. Communist lore has its Manchurian candidate; Indian history has its candidates for boarding schools and white foster homes. Onondaga Chief Canassatego noted this behavioral modification process back in 1744.

There are undeniably domestic problems on our reservations, problems caused by the attempt to deny the legitimacy of native American culture and supplant with the official avarice and perfidy of our vaunted form of capitalism. The Occupy movement is protesting those same qualities that native American leaders have decried over the centuries. White America may wish to expiate its transgressions against the Indian people, but taking away and indoctrinating their children in a culture that denies and distorts their heritage is devious and self-deluding.

While white organizations and people have benefited and grown prosperous from the money being pumped into the agencies that oversee the removal of Indian children is a long-established tradition in our treatment of the reservations, it perpetuates and renews the attempts to kill off a culture. Once again, there is talk of reconciliation between whites and tribes, but the tribes are overlooked in dealing with the domestic problems that lead to the removal of children. And there is the huge question of how many of those removals are necessary and if the children could not be placed with family members and people of their own nation.

As Corey Heidelberger said, the question of whether Gov. Daugaard had a conflict of interest becomes a trivial distraction to confronting the real issue. And that issue concerns giving the Indian people the right to their own culture, settling the issue of the lands stolen from them, and recognizing the malignancy of the promotion of avarice that some tout as a basic America value.

There are those who attribute the facing of our history and the strain of values that runs through it as a hatred of America. There is a hatred of the debasing greed and racist and class hatreds that seem to possess America, particularly in its economic sector. The Occupy Movement seems to perceive the realities of what America is becoming. The Indian people have seen it for centuries.

Some may feel honorable and generous in taking Indian children out of their culture and trying to give them the "advantages" of white culture. But it is all just more screwing the people on the reservations.

What the Occupy movement signifies

2011-10-26T07:47:00.000-07:00

The national press makes a fatuous comparison between the Occupy movement and the Tea Party movement, suggesting they are similar demonstrations by opposing groups. They are confounded by the fact that the Occupy movement does not have a set agenda that it coheres around. That should lead the interpreters of the movements to explore the differences and to a recognition that the Occupy movement is about something quite different than an attempt to exercise influence and power within the existing political structure.

Occupy gets ugly in Oakland

As occupy camps are being moved out by police, the protests are beginning to change from passive to active. The Occupy demonstrations contain people and factions with divergent, often opposing, viewpoints, and they have also been beset by some elements who see the passive demeanor as opportunity for thievery and other predations. The press cannot relinquish its easy and irrelevant comparisons with the Tea Party. The Occupy movement is spontaneous, driven, like the Arab Spring, by cell phone and laptop social applications. The Tea Party was highly staged and coordinated with corporate dollars aimed at a single message of shrinking the federal government by limiting spending. The significance of the Occupy movement is in its dissimilarity to the Tea Party. It has gained momentum from a totally different driving force.

If there is a single factor involved in the Occupy movement it is the recognition that America has become a plutocracy in which the resources of the country have come under the control of one percent of the population which is systematically eliminating the other 99 percent from any equity or opportunity in the economy. Some in the movement vaguely hope that the spreading protests will translate into political action which restores opportunity for the middle class. More radical elements think that American democracy has been broken by a corporate-driven agenda and has, in fact, failed. That faction contends that under the guise of globalization, America has abandoned restraints on corporations and, therefore, allowed a massive selling out of American working people. There is no chance, they say, to compete with China when the managing class has abandoned its American workers for the cheap labor of China and other Pacific Rim countries. And, they contend, there is no way that American workers can be restored to affluence. Under the global system, they are headed for poverty and the conditions of compliance with the managing class that will allow them any subsistence at all. Only a revolution and total dismantling of the the system can provide opportunity to the occupiers of the middle working class.

A government study ordered by the U.S. Senate Finance Committee shows that the Occupy protesters are right. Data and charts from the Congressional Budget Office portray the conversion of the U.S. into a plutocracy. Here are a couple of the charts that show the shift of money and power away from the people into small concentration of the managing class.

See all the charts at Talking Point Memo.

Read The Washington Post story on the report here.

And in The New York Times.

Hanging America's brain-laundry out to dry

2011-10-16T09:41:00.000-07:00


Washing brains, sort of.

Cory Heidelberger at Madville Times hung a couple pairs of thongs out on his blog line for all to see, hoping, I trust, to expose what really was behind the scanty panties. One set was displayed by Rep. Kristi Noem; the other by Sen. John Thune.

What you think is promised

They were verbal thongs in the sense that they attract attention and divert it away from reality. In this case thongs are used like a bull-fighter's cape, to attract attention away from the fighter so the bull can't gore him and to set it up for the kill. Thongs seem to promise something that does not, in fact, exist.

is not what is there.

The deceptions also operate as boogey-men, straw figures created to scare children. One tells children that there are boogey-men lurking about, scheming to snatch their little asses in the night. But you promise to protect the children, and when no boogey-man performs an ass-snatch, the children feel protected and trusting.

Kristi Noem's thong is a piece of legislation that promises to protect farmers from being snatched by the Environmental Protection Agency for raising too much dust on their farms. The EPA keeps tabs on whether dust in the country can harm people, but says it has no regulation for snatching farmers in the night who raise dust and does not plan on creating one. But Noem promises to keep dusty rascals safe from the EPA.

Thune's thong is almost identical, except he he fashions his thong around bovine flatulence. His legislation is to prevent the EPA from coming in the night and snatching farmers for the farts their cattle emit into the air. The EPA says it has no such regulation and has never planned to make one. But John says he is protecting farmers from fart-based-snatching and is keeping those flatulence-coddling rascals safe from the EPA.

One might think that Noem and Thune are playing their constituents for fools. Or one might think that Noem and Thune actually believe, or choose to believe, that the EPA is prowling around sniffing the air for dust and farts so that it may persecute poor farmers. Or one may look at the proposed laws outlawing the EPA from doing something it never considered doing as part of a brain-washing enterprise to control and manipulate that part of the electorate which is vulnerable to such tactics.

Actually, brain-washing is a much misused term. It was first applied to the tactics of North Korea to employ fear and coercion on prisoners of war to induce them to renounce their previous beliefs and adopt the North Korean communistic dogma. Since that time, brain-washing has been used pejoratively to include any form of persuasion, including advertising, political messaging, and religious conversion. There is an element of accuracy in these applications where the persuasive objective is to purge the brain of independent knowledge and replace it with a set of dogma determined by the so-called brain-washer.

When I was in the Army in the mid-fifties, some vacant barracks on our isolated post were used to compile a study on brain-washing ordered by President Eisenhower. We were occasionally asked to help with some clerical work like collating, but we got to know the personnel conducting the study and something about what they were finding. What they found is that G.I. prisoners of war who defected to the North Koreans often had personal histories of being oppressed and discriminated against. The conclusion was that the Korean brain-washing was not what made them believe that the communistic regime might give them more freedom and equality than they found in the U.S. They had experienced oppression and discrimination. The study was a motive for accelerating the desegregation of the armed forces. Most of the turncoats found that what the North Koreans promised was not what they received, and they repatriated. They saw past the propaganda thongs that once enticed them.

However, persuasive techniques are matters for the study of rhetoric and mass communications and are thoroughly studied and analyzed in those fields. You begin with the fact that human beings are herd and pack animals. They like to be part of a society and will conform to the conventions of a society in order to feel a part of it. To become part of a given society, members are required to pledge and display an allegiance. So, they are willing to relinquish individuality to be full-fledged members of a society.

Part of the herd and pack instinct is to band together to protect against dangers. The reptilian cortex of the brain perceives anything or anyone that is not part of the chosen society as a danger. The reptilian impulse is to destroy anything it perceives as a threat. In communications, the reptilian cortex can be manipulated to regard other people and differing ideas as threats to be destroyed. People in advertising and propaganda communications appeal to the reptilian part of the brain. In politics it is a common tactic to tell people of the dangers that the opposing political party poses for them and to contend that their candidates in their roles as leaders will fend off those dangers and protect them. That is why the legislation proposed by John Thune and Krisit Noem is purely a political ploy that has little relevance to real circumstances.   The legislation is conceived as thongs to divert attention away from the facts and to instill fear into the vulnerable constituency.

Noem and Thune play to the anti-intellectual streak in American society. The founders, including those self-educated like Benjamin Franklin saw education as the force that could create and sustain democracy.   Education and knowledge, they insisted, developed the cognitive portions of the brain so that the repilian cortex was not in control. Even the writers at Aljazeera understand the ant-intellectual strain in American life the founders interest in countering it:

America has always had a critical thinking deficit, in that it has a long tradition of anti-intellectualism. This is particularly perverse, maddening and contradictory, since America's Founders were the most intellectual group that ever founded any nation we know of, and the desire to foster free and critical thinking, both in government and in the society at large, was one of their notable goals, as a direct consequence of the Enlightenment heritage on which America's Founders depended.

To students of rhetoric and communications, America's decline of literacy--the understanding of rhetorical principles and communicative devices--has much to do with the political morass into which it is mired. While those who claim they want to improve education focus on math and science, they ignore the verbal skills and knowledge that form the cognitive process, the development of that part of the brain which surmounts those primitive reptilian impulses. One can find examples of the reptilian impulse as it has developed into a malignant pathology on the Internet. They display all the intellectual merit of rattle snakes striking at warm-air balloons. Or dupes slavering at a display of thongs.

The dust-and-fart legislation proposed by Thune and Noem appeals strongly to that segment of society that defines social cohesion by the threats it imagines pose dangers to it. It is aware of the deep social and political tensions that it creates and must have scapegoats to blame for them. The study of rhetoric and communication is informed by the fields of sociology, social psychology, cognitive development, and clinical psychology which have identified the tendency to invest beliefs in manufactured circumstance as opposed to what exists in actuality as Shared Paranoid Disorder, or Folie a Deux (French for a "madness shared by two").

The big question facing America today is how many people are not cognitively developed enough to see past John Thune's and Kristi Noem's thongs? When they are in the voting booth, will vote like rattle snakes striking at balloons or dupes breathing heavily out of a lust for thongs and a fear of boogey-men? Are their brains shaped by operant-conditioning, brain-washing if you will, or can they muster some of the cognitive skills that Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson envisioned?

You will know if we end up living in a nation of laws composed of shared paranoia about dust and bovine farts.

Occupy Scenic, SD

2011-10-12T11:27:00.000-07:00

Herman Cain made one of those blunders that reveals the intellectual and moral depth of the political party he is a part of. Among the many things he has said which has received a wtf-are-you-talking-about? response was his contention on Face The Nation that the Occupiers on Wall Street and elsewhere are motivated by jealousy and envy of the rich. He claims people like Cornel West of Princeton are out-of-touch with the real world when they criticize his dismissal of racism as a factor affecting people's lives. And his prescription for the Occupiers is to work hard enough to be able to afford a Cadillac rather than protest banks and their executives.

The first question Cain needs to answer, but won't be asked in the staged debates, is, "Work hard enough at what, when no jobs are available?'' The second question is whether the pizza ovens at Godfather's are the real world he is referring to. A colleague of mine, a black physicist who was in graduate school at the height of the civil rights movement, says Herman Cain thinks the solution to America's economic troubles is to make every American an Uncle Tom. Working hard means shucking, and shuffling, and saying "yes, massa" to the Wall Street bankers who plunged American into the recession it is in. That is Cain's version of trickle down economics.

But Cain's representations of the Occupy Wall Street protesters is consistent with the general GOP-conservative response. It is not based upon any kind of knowledge or evidence of what the motives of the protesters are and who they are. The GOP strategy is to dismiss the Occupiers as the offal of American society, the unwashed and mentally impaired. This tactic can be illustrated in the South Dakota Wart Collage, which has not deviated far from the obsessively malicious, petty, and stupid slanders established by Pat Powers as its modus operandi. It begins its slander against the the Occupiers in Sioux Falls with: "Do you smell that? Sniff, sniff. What is it? Nope, not John Morrell. It’s occupy Sioux Falls. Those insightful protesters who have forgotten to bathe and bring porta potties to Wall Street have decided to bring a similar movement to South Dakota!" We are reminded that John Morrell was recently fined and upbraided for polluting the air and water, but there is no penalty, except the the derision of the informed and educated, over polluting the language and the digital media which transmits it.

However, the local yokels get their inspiration from national-level purveyors of infantile malevolence like Red States' Erick Erickson who wrote, “Suck it up you whiners. I am the 53 percent subsidizing you so you can hang out on Wall Street and complain.”

Although the right wing is quick to heap all manner of scurrility on Obama for not more effectively dealing with the recession, it cannot bring itself to acknowledge the cause of it--the greed, class presumptions, and foolery of the Wall Street compatriots. Nor can it acknowledge its effects on the millions of people who have been thrown onto the path toward poverty. The GOP abhors coherence. The Democrats keep trying to argue with and reason with the opposition and are led into incoherence.

The Occupiers focus those who are attacking democracy and its opportunities through an economy that militates against the middle and lower economic classes.   What the Ocuppiers are protesting is apparent to anyone whose head is not welded into their lower colon. And as a supporter of the Occupiers put it, "We tried voting and were shown that it doesn't work." What makes the protest so disconcerting to many is that the Occupiers recognize that the political system is too broken to be useful for any honest democratic endeavor and must be circumvented if any portion of liberty and justice can be salvaged for ordinary Americans. The steadfast conservatives fear that the protests are a rejection of the political tradition that is so broken and excludes the working classes as worthless and inconsequential. They fear that such rejection may means that the protestors will regard the right-wing as the same kind of enemy that the right-wing regards workers. They fear the rejection of the privileges that their notion of class bestows on the plutocracy. And so, they resort to the inane scurrility that the upper economic classes reserved for the lower in the undemocratic past.

Obama's attempt to maintain reasoning cordiality with the Republican Party is the real reason behind his slumping poll numbers with progressives. Among blacks, his approval rating has slipped from 83 percent to 58 percent. However, the media does not delve into what disapproval means and what the polls are actually registering. Patrick Davis Consulting provides insight into what the polls mean through a discussion with a Democratic pollster. And the information revealed in that discussion sheds a great deal of light on what is motivating the Occupiers.

Black voters have said they are "disappointed" in President Obama. Davis quotes his conversation with the pollster:

“However, we discovered that they were not disappointed in the job he was doing, but rather the job he was unable to do. Like all of us, they wanted hope and change and thought Obama was the person who could finally give it to us. After a year and half, they had determined that they probably would not be getting change – not because Obama wasn't trying, but because the system was set up for him and anyone else to fail. They were disappointed because they felt that if Obama couldn't change the system to make it work for people, then no one would ever be able to.”

And like many, Davis sees this as setting up a potential loss for Obama:

Black America climbed the mountaintop only to find a sheer cliff on the other side. Barack Obama might be their man, but if he can’t do it, no one can. And if Obama can’t convince black voters that progress is possible, then he can’t convince them to turn out in 2012 like they did in 2008. And if that’s true, then Obama can’t win reelection. Game over.

Many of the young people who supported and voted for Obama feel the same sense of hopelessness. They are not disappointed in Obama or his agenda. They are disappointed that the Republicans have been able to erect such obstacles and impediments to accomplishing what Obama promised. And they think that if he cannot do it, it can't be done. So, if anything is to be done for American workers, whether laborers or professionals, it is time to examine the efficacy of our political system and martial the force of the masses affected by it. It may well mean the end of American democracy as we have come to define it.

And that end might be accomplished by occupying Scenic, SD.

A Native American Day Colloquy

2011-10-10T22:13:00.000-07:00

From Facebook:

Comment to posting of picture:

Bill Onesty If anybody REALLY feels this way, you should leave the US now, give all you own to a native, and find someplace that will give you permission to live there and that hopefully did not take its land from some other indigenous people. Otherwise I am tired of hearing this crap, jokingly or not.

A posting from Jessica Tebben:

Do you suppose the Polish have an Adolf Hitler Day?

Steve Jobs isn't the one who made us stupid

2011-10-06T20:18:00.000-07:00

As someone who toiled for many years in classrooms where competent reading and writing were the controlling objectives, I note that truly stupid people are actually quite rare. Reaching those objectives was done by pointing out to students where slovenly habits contributed to poor reading comprehension or to fatuous statements that were less than credible to alert and astute readers. Seldom did I encounter a student who made the choice to defend a stupid interpretation or statement. In nearly all cases, students made efforts to correct and amend errors of reading or writing. Computer systems were a great boon to this process, because they provided a way for all students to actively participate in class discussions, and they did not want their responses to reading or assertions they made in writing to appear stupid to their peers.

My colleagues claimed that my observation that truly stupid people are a rarity was based on a self-selected group of people and did not describe the human population as it occurs in the larger world. Students, they pointed out, came to college for the purpose of becoming informed and to avoid the morass of stupidity that thrives on bad information and thinking. They, for the most part, made a conscious choice not to be stupid and concerned themselves more with the processes of disciplined thought and expression. The opinions they ended up with were less important to them than the rigors of arriving at them.

When Steve Jobs made the Apple IIe available for use in schools, he helped establish a technology that greatly facilitated education. Professors in prestigious universities used it. Elementary teachers used it. I used it. My first computer was an Apple IIe that I still miss for some of the things that it could do.   Desk top computing has advanced far since then, particularly with multi-media and printers, but the Apple IIe changed the way we thought about and delivered instruction.

In those early times, some college faculty belittled those who used Apple's user-friendly systems as being too mentally slow to grasp the basics of computing. I used both: IBM-based at work; Apple at home. Apple's user friendly system made it possible to focus on the work to be done; the IBM system then required much fiddling around to achieve the results one wanted. Apple users were more interested in computers as tools that could greatly facilitate work. IBM users were often more interested in them as toys that could confer some kind of technological status. The disputes among faculty regarding the systems were silly.

With my own Apple, I was able to take advantage of the first mustering of the Internet. I joined a database through which one could exchange documents and post messages. That early system was very expensive and full of bugs. Each connection made to the data base was by a long-distance telephone call. And if you had call-waiting, an incoming call would disconnect the modem on the computer. But it was useful. One time I rushed off to deliver a paper at a meeting and when I got there, I found I had taken an early draft of the paper, not the finished one. The draft I wanted was on a disk at home, and I was able to retrieve the finished draft from my computer at home at the computer lab of university a thousand miles away.

There are some detractors of Steve Jobs who blame him for the unleashing digital gadgets on the world that distract people from more useful and constructive pursuits. The New York Times asked people which Steve Jobs invention mattered most to them. The huge majority of the people commented positively on the ways Apple products enabled and enhanced their pursuits. But there are a few detractors. One person commented that "he made people think they needed increasingly expensive gadgets to do unnecessary things and added to the economic mess and greedy world." Another said, "there is a portion of society that cannot afford Mr. Jobs products.I have never seen one of his products produce a grain of rice or clothe..."

Those comments are incredibly obtuse and stupid. They have no conception of how Apple products have contributed to the productivity and efficiencies of the people who use them as tools. Those, comments, however, are illustrative of the down-side of technology. They enable small-minded people to register their ill-informed and ill-formed opinions and lower the level of discussion with their clutter.

When one looks at the messages posted on discussion boards and the social media, one finds that my colleagues who give humanity so much credit for stupidity are apparently right. The rule of freedom of speech disillusions many people into thinking that anything they utter is born from applied knowledge and intelligence, and there are times when Internet threads give good evidence of a huge mass of people who have chosen stupidity as a way of life.

Steve Jobs did not make them stupid. Nor did he create those people who careen around town in their cars with their cell phones plastered to their ears, or text while driving, or constantly spew out twitters and posts that are incomprehensible probably even to them. Their use of technology gives us definitive insights into their intelligence and character. And such glimpses are depressing.

Our conservative compatriots like to harp about people taking responsibility for their own lives.   People are free to choose ignorance, stupidity, and meanness as the ruling standards of their lives. What Steve Jobs provided us is a way to tell who they are.

When democracy fails

2011-10-04T14:55:00.000-07:00

A Don Burnet photo circulating on Face Book

One of the failures of the Democratic Party is explaining what has, in fact, happened to the American economy and what it means in terms of a political future. A significant message has been obscured by the rattle and prattle of the "interactive" media and cable television, which embraces the rattle and prattle. As a scholar of American literature and culture, I find that the message that is lost is one that explains the formation of America and is indelibly recorded in its literature.

A historian, Edmundo O'Gorman, stated that America had to be invented before it was discovered. He examined the motives behind the immigration to America and what forces shaped it. In looking at England, for example, an essential factor cited is that five percent of the people owned about 90 percent of the nation's wealth. The people came to a realization that any kind of acceptable life not defined by oppressive servitude would have to be constructed in a different place where the rules of feudalism did not apply and the wealth and political power was distributed among the people.

The rule by aristocracy (plutocracy, actually) obviates any notions of equality, freedom, or justice. So, the idea of an America had to be invented and then a place had to be found to give it a try. From the beginning, applying the concepts of American democracy was a struggle, but the founders understood the concepts and put them in the articles of incorporation. The struggle to achieve those concepts listed in the Declaration and enabled by the Constitution was a bloody and arduous one. The vestige of feudalism implanted in America was the plantation system manned by slaves. The Civil War was in actual a battle over whether the racial divides and the class discrimination and oppression of the feudal system would be allowed to exist in the United States. Then it had to set about giving equality, freedom, and justice to those originally excluded: women, racial minorities, differing cultural and sexual orientations. And it had to build a wall between the secular democracy and those who think freedom of religion means the right to bring their sects into the governing system. America was a force in the liberation and equalization of people. It never has fully come to terms with the transgressions against the Native Americans.

The current resurgence of conservatism in America is a regression to those times of a privileged elite and a massive underclass that exists under its feudal terms. We are back to a time when 5 percent of the people own 80 percent of the wealth and garner for themselves a similar ratio in the earning power. The main reason we can't come out of the recession is that the forces holding the wealth do not want a recovery. Instead it attacks those institutions which have elevated people in the struggle for equality and freedom and consequence: public education, labor unions, and the liberal movement in general, which has led the struggle for democratic equity.

Bob Schwartz has posted a George Carlin piece, complete with transcript, and correctly relates it to the protests growing throughout the nation. The Washington Post has a piece on the whys of the exorbitant executive pay in America, an elaborate justification for the return to feudalism.

George Carlin's quick and incisive commentary can be viewed below:

The death of American science in quick stages

2011-10-02T15:05:00.000-07:00

One science journal carried this headline last week:

Tevatron closes Friday, big American science dies a little inside

The Tevatron is shut down and American science takes a back seat.

The occasion was the shutting-down last Friday of the Tevatron particle-collider at the Fermilab, a machine that put America in the forefront of physics research and science. Many scientists see the closing as relinquishing America's leadership in science to Europe. The research done with the Tevatron will be done by the Hadron super-collider near Cern, Switzerland.

NPR described the occasion: "For about a quarter of a century, the Tevatron was the most powerful machine of its kind in the world, but scientists gathered Friday to shut it down in a brief and bittersweet ceremony."

Many reports noted this year America has taken a couple of giant steps backward as it ended its space shuttle flights, relinquishing transportation to the space station to Russia, and putting Europe in the lead role in physics research with the closure of the Tevatron.

In South Dakota, the downgrading of the Homestake proposal from a national Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory to the much smaller Sanford Underground Laboratory is consistent with America's faltering leadership in science. Some of the experiments envisioned for the DUSEL have already gone to a mine in Canada.

The journal Dvice lists the factors that are forcing America to the back of the science bus: "The floundering economy and the politicization of science has meant that there's increasing reluctance to fund major research that doesn't have immediate and tangible benefits, and the SSC and the space shuttle program are both victims of this harsh climate."

The downgrading of science in America is a deliberate choice. The ballot box won over science. And over American preeminence in the field.

Class warfare? I should hope.

2011-10-02T09:17:00.000-07:00

The old Moline High School

As a student at Moline High School, which sat on the crown of a bluff that looked over the Mississippi River into Iowa, my goal, along with most of my fellow students, was not to end up as shoppie down on Third Avenue. Third Avenue extended from the Farmall Plant on the border in Rock Island to the International Harvester East Moline Works on the border of that town. The avenue ran between the river and the railroad tracks, dominated by the factories of Deere and Co. and Minneapolis-Moline and a multitude of foundries and other smaller factories that served the farm equipment industry. It was a grimy, and squalid street, hazy and soot-stained from the smoke pouring out of the stacks.

Third Avenue ran along the railroad tracks.

Another prominent business interspersed among the factories was the taverns, commonly called gin mills. Men often ran to a tavern during their lunch hour or break to knock back a boiler-maker or two or more. A boiler maker is a shot of cheap whiskey or other kind of booze and a glass of beer. It was common when workers returned to work to be impaired enough so that their hands got caught in factory machinery and their fingers were severed.

A case of shoppie's hand.

Students, in a parody of shop workers, would hold up a hand with only four fingers showing say, "Can I borrow five cents?" it was a reminder of what we did not want to be when we grew up.

Factory work was dirty and arduous, and the repetition of piece work was mind-killing. In my lifetime, factory work was still a very seasonal business. It was especially busy during the summer months. When we graduated from high school, many of us took summer jobs in factories to earn money for college. Ironically, the work we despised provided some of the money that would help us prepare ourselves for better lives. While a few shop-working parents felt betrayed by their children's disdain of factory work, most parents encouraged their children to aspire to something better. They saw factory work as a transition to better prospects.

John Deere plow factory in Moline.

Industry provided a way for people to leave their fealties to the land-based aristocracy of the Old World and forge new lives out their labors. When John Deere moved his plow factory to Moline, immigrants flocked there to find work. Other factories also were built there to take advantage of the growing demand for agricultural equipment as other immigrants filed homesteads throughout the U.S.


A giant replica of the wagons my grandfather built.

My grandfather, a carpenter, packed his trunk of saws and woodworking tools in Sweden and took a boat to the U.S where he headed straight for Moline. He went to work building wagons at the Moline Wagon Co. Like many immigrants who were looking for a stable center for their families, he invested some of his earnings in land and also took up farming.

The story of immigration to America is largely told in terms of pioneering and the hardships of clearing the land and establishing communities. A part that is seldom addressed is what drove the immigrants to America to seek opportunity and what they expected. They were leaving the Old World to escape the lingering feudalism that predestined them to a life of poverty and servitude on land owned by the aristocracy. Their motive was not to submit to another set of masters who controlled their lives in America, but to forge a system that would, in fact, produce the freedom, equality, and justice that America promised. Work in American factories was oppressive, drudged, and depressing. But it did provide opportunities for workers to obtain some benefits for their labor. But they were still squalid and oppressive places to work. The dominating goal of the workers was to create lives that transcended servile drudgery.

Then came labor unions. They improved matters for both the companies and the workers. For workers, collective bargaining put contracts, not arbitrary and often disdainful bosses, as the controlling factor of working conditions, worker treatment, and wage equity. For companies, it helped make workplaces safer and more efficient, help create a stable and reliable workforce, and established a system for dealing with problems that effected those in management as well as those on the assembly lines. Together, unions and management changed the nature of the jobs from dogged drudgery to jobs that gave people satisfaction, respect, and stability. For those of my generation, we began to think that one could do worse than factory work. The jobs that were created elevated the workers out of poverty into a middle class.

Globalization has been used as the mechanism to dismantle the gains of the American middle class. The Republicans constantly howl about class warfare when one brings up the growing inequalities between the rich and the lower economic classes. The conservative mindset has blocked out the fact that the invention and building of America has, from the outset, been a process of divorcing the workers, whether manual or technical or intellectual, from the rule of an upper class whose dream of America is to restore wealth and power to an upper class that could not care less about the well-being of the working class.

That trend began a reversal in the 1980s with trickle-down economics that was based on the notion that all productive work is created by a managing class and had to be created on their terms. Led by the GOP, the business community relinquished manufacturing jobs to low-wage, sometimes prison labor countries in the Pacific Rim and told Americans that the disappearing jobs would be replaced in the service industry. That shift of manufacturing off shore happened, but the service industry did not replace them with equivalent work. Instead, it systematically returned the workforce into a dependent class with few opportunities.

Since the 1980s and the application of trickle-down and class-centered economic measures, the working people have been displaced from their middle class status with a relentless and deliberate shove into a status of dependent servitude. The trend is well-defined and well-documented. This is the reversion to a feudal system that the Republicans want, and the Democrats have been more than a little feckless in telling the working class what is happening to it. As soon as someone calls for equity in the marketplace and provisions for workers to earn some benefits from their labors, the Republicans start yelling class warfare.

From its inception through its building, America has been a struggle between the classes. People who work have sought equal status with those who work them in order to achieve identities not based upon definitions of inferiority and servitude. Democracy is by definition a process of equalization in asserting that equality means that no person is to be considered any more or less valuable than any other. The conservative movement seeks to refute that notion.

It has attacked and is trying to dismantle all those things that have contributed to the freeing of the working class: public education, accessible health care, labor unions, livable wages and benefits.

Democrats, like Obama, prefer to believe in the possibility that the political parties can compromise. But more and more workers realize that their freedom, their equality, and political justice are being compromised away. The struggle in America to overthrow slavery, race and sex based denials of franchise, and to attain economic equity through a fair wage for ones labors is currently represented by the GOP as an unpatriotic drift toward socialism and communism.

Some Democrats have pointed out that this is a reversal of the very premise of American, but the belief that the two parties can come together for the good of the country has weakened the message and reduced it to the level of the partisan bickering that obscures what is happening to the middle class.

A few people have begun a movement with Occupy Wall Street that has spread throughout the country and confounded the press. The press is confounded because the movement has no leaders, no statements of doctrine, no stated objectives, other than to dismantle a system that threatens to enslave people. The movement is the tacit recognition that the two-party system in America has failed, that the forces in which the wealth and power of the nation is concentrated are working toward a neo-feudal estate as the future of America.

Messaging, the movement realizes, is just another form of advertising that tries to dupe people. It is time to ignore the messaging and look at hard facts and revolt.

The real message is contained in these charts:

INCOME LEVEL	NUMBER OF PEOPLE	AVERAGE INCOME	OVERALL CHANGE 1970-2008
Top 0.1%	152,000	$5.6 million	+385%
Top 0.1-0.5%	610,000	$878,139	+141%
Top 0.5-1%	762,000	$443,102	+90%
Top 1-5%	6.0 million	$211,476	+59%
Top 5-10%	7.6 million	$127,184	+38%
Bottom 90%	137.2 million	$31,244	-1%

SOURCES:   The World Top Incomes Database and reports by Jon Bakija, Williams   College; Adam Cole, U.S. Department of Treasury; Bradley T. Heim,   Indiana University; Carola Frydman, MIT Sloan School of Management and   NBER; Raven E. Molloy, Federal Reserve Board of Governors; Thomas   Piketty, Ehess, Paris; Emmanuel Saez, UC Berkeley and NBER. GRAPHIC:   Alicia Parlapiano - The Washington Post. Published June 18, 2011.

And from Mother Jones:

How Rich Are the Superrich?

A huge share of the nation's economic growth over the past 30 years has gone to the top one-hundredth of one percent, who now make an average of $27 million per household. The average income for the bottom 90 percent of us? $31,244.

Advertise on MotherJones.com

Note: The 2007 data (the most current) doesn't reflect the impact of the housing market crash. In 2007, the bottom 60% of Americans had 65% of their net worth tied up in their homes. The top 1%, in contrast, had just 10%. The housing crisis has no doubt further swelled the share of total net worth held by the superrich.

Winners Take All

The superrich have grabbed the bulk of the past three decades' gains.

If the middle class wants to save itself from debilitating poverty, it will need to understand that war has been declared upon by a caste that covets all the power and wealth of America for itself. It needs to understand the portent of Occupy Wall Street, as an effort to reclaim the progress toward democratic equity made by our parents. The political messaging is irrelevant to the harsh facts.

Protestors occupy the Brooklyn Bridge to reclaim their American birthright from the neo-feudal classes.

Update on the Black Hills shootings. Both "suicides by cop."

2011-09-23T20:37:00.000-07:00

The South Dakota Attorney General released the report today on the shooting death of Cory Engen who was killed by a state trooper during a shootout in Custer. One thing these reports do not address, largely because it is far out of the scope, is the effects of such deaths on families and friends. But this report did reveal something that we surmised, but drew no conclusions about. Cory had been diagnosed with post traumatic stress syndrome, apparently from experiences he had during four years in the Marines, serving in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

[The report by the Division of Criminal Investigation may be pulled up in PDF format from this link at The Rapid City Journal.]

The most important details in the report are that Cory forced the officers to shoot him, his own weapon was empty when he was shot, and his rampage was directed at law enforcement officers.

Something we have known for years about the after effects of being involved in war is that extreme behavior is caused as much by the society which soldiers return to as the incidents during their service which disturbed them. In both the cases involving death by law enforcement officers, the young shooters directed their rage at law enforcement officers, who are seen as part of the law and order in a society in which law seems arbitrary and disordered.

There is much to learn and understand about PTSD gone violent.

The first comment on the original version of this was left. Usually such comments are deleted because they contribute to the raging disorder that casts such a malignancy over political and social life. It is left in place as an example to be examined, especially in the context it was made.

Cody Engen in a photo supplied by his family

Daniel Tiger in a police mug shot

They were both 22. They were both killed by law enforcement officers during shoot-outs. One was a native American with a deeply troubled past. The other was a recently discharged U.S. Marine.

They were both young, very young, at a stage when most people are building their lives with hope and expectations. These young men did not seem to have much hope and expectation.

Daniel Tiger had a court record of 14 misdemeanors and one felony. He was, according to news accounts, being considered for new charges.

On Tuesday, August 2, about 4:30 in the afternoon, Daniel Tiger was walking with some companions in a neighborhood in north Rapid City. They apparently were carrying liquor and were drinking. They were stopped by three police officers who talked with them in what was reported as a non-confrontational manner for about 2o minutes. The officers did not know they were dealing with a man with a record of assault on a police officer, for which he had served time. He would not provide them his correct identity, however. Suddenly Tiger pulled out a .357 magnum handgun and opened fire on the police officers. He put all three of them down, but one got off some shots from which Tiger would later die. He killed two of the officers, and wounded the third, who is now back on duty.

Friends of Tiger say he talked about committing suicide by cop. That is, forcing a confrontation during which police would be forced to shoot him down. He contemplated this, according to friends, because he did not want to go back to jail, and apparently he knew more charges were being considered against him. And up to this time, he had not lived a life which offered much hope or better expectations.

Cody Engen had quite a different background. From childhood, he was enamored about becoming a Marine. The day after he graduated from Custer High School in 2007, he joined the Marines. He finished a 4-year enlistment this past May and was honorably discharged.

During the early morning hours of Tuesday, Sept. 6, a man on the streets of Custer while the bars were closing was yelling "Custer County Sheriffs: Come out, come out!" It was Cody Engen. His dad is a Custer County deputy sheriff. Cody went on a rampage in downtown Custer, driving over things with his pickup and firing shots from a handgun. He crashed his pick-up into the sheriff's office, then went inside and vandalized the place. When law enforcement came to put an end to his rampage, there was a stand-off and a state trooper shot him. The shot ended the brief insurrection and Cody's life.


Cody, a scout-sniper, served in both Iraq and Afghanistan while in the Marines.

At this writing, the official report has not been issued on the incident which resulted in his death. The 22-year-old ex-Marine may well have suffered trauma during his service. No information has been provided about the direction his life took after discharge. He may have been one of those many veterans who returned to the country he served to find it had no place for him. However provocative such conjecture is, it is pointless. The fact is that two 22-year-olds engaged in aggressive, deadly behavior and were cut down by deadly force.

At the current time, this is not unusual. During a recent trip to the Quad-Cities of Illinois and Iowa, I read of two incidents involving shootings by police officers. In Davenport a man who threatened to detonate what he claimed was a homemade bomb was killed by police. In Rock Island County, a man who had run a barber shop for many years and was president of the East Moline downtown business association pulled a gun on a sheriff's deputy during a traffic stop. He was wounded and hospitalized when the deputy opened fire. The man in Davenport had a life-long battle with alcohol. The man shot in Rock Island County may have financial problems.

But for the young men killed in the Black Hills, there is the fact of the confrontations they forced. They both targeted law enforcement. Law enforcement represents the authority of our government and culture. It is required to enforce the rules established by our government, sanctioned by our culture. The badges and uniforms law enforcement wears represent the state of the nation.

The officers shot in Rapid City were not that much older than the man who opened fire on them. They had hopes and expectations and were building their lives. They were in engaged in the act of community policing when they were shot. Community policing means going into neighborhoods, becoming acquainted with the people who live there, and addressing problems before they become law enforcement issues. Community police is another term for peace officer, the well-established role of keeping the peace. The young officers killed in Rapid City had their weapons holstered and were trying to keep the peace when Daniel Tiger drew a weapon and fired on them.

Across the nation, the killing of police officers is on the rise. So far this year, there have been 132 fatalities of police officers in the U.S. Fifty-three of them were from gun fire. Statistics on how many people were killed by police or how many times police drew and fired their weapons is a different matter. No agencies appear to keep a tally on those incidents. But it is clear that the situations in which police are fired upon and in which they use their weapons is on the rise.

Identifying the causes of such confrontations is the issue. Daniel Tiger and Cody Engen had widely different life histories, but they shared a social and political environment that is causing unrest in many parts of the world, and is showing unrest in America.

People who are trained to deal with confrontations cite the rule that the way to head off deadly confrontations is to never put a person in a situation where the person is convinced he has nothing to lose. What did Daniel Tiger and Cody Engen have to lose? Did they have anything to gain? Or were they caught in a state of hopelessness with no expectations
The unemployment rate is cause for despair, not only among those who have not found jobs, but among those who have taken jobs far below their education and skills and who qualify for better paying more engaging jobs. The jobs just are not there to be had. They have been eliminated through a process of outsourcing. There is not much hope or expectation for members of the working middle class. And certainly none for the economic lower class, which is growing exponentially.

The poverty level in the US. has grown to 15 percent of the population; one person in every six is in that category. There is no hope and expectation for this class. And what do they have to lose if they revolt?   Whether they submit meekly to the destiny of their designated class or engage in flaming revolt, their prospect is ignominious death. What do people of this class have to lose?

During the debate among Republican candidates early this week, there was a moment from the audience that has been avoided by most of the legacy media. It came when the moderator raised a hypothetical question, which for many among that 46 million living in poverty is not hypothetical, about whether a person who needed healthcare but did not have insurance should be allowed to die. The audience intruded with a resounding "Yeah." What the media ignores is the message that "yeah" conveys to the growing class of poor in this country. It is the same message being sent in regard to jobs and the flagging economy. Class warfare and the propaganda that fuels is not a war declared by the poor against the wealthy or the Democrats. It is a war being conducted by the wealthy and the political party which has taken up its cause.

Congress is caught up in a gridlock because it is more consumed by engaging in a political fight in which the defeat of the current administration has towering priority over the welfare of the country. But Congress is a reflection of the values and attitudes of the country, and while the misanthropic who have announced they are quite ready to disenfranchise the poor and struggling from any of the promise that once defined America may not be the majority, they have managed to control the national dialogue. The fixation of the media on the petty pissing duels among the petty pissers in Washington provides a surface gauging of the thought processes of the populace. Reading blogs and comment sections of the news media show a population that is dominated by those who education has failed and who have failed education. They cling to misinformation, defamatory allegations, and a belief that their hatred of the poor class that they have helped to create and enlarge is somehow an expression of Americanism.   They revere the ministers of malice and misinformation such as Palin, Bachman, Perry, and Romney, who see serving them as the road to power. The message to the poor is no matter what those struggling in the current economy do, they have nothing to lose. They have been designated as the post and expendable to the plutocracy that has emerged as the ruling force of America.

There are problems to be defined and faced. But those who conduct the campaign of misanthropy and oppression under the banner of conservatism deny the problems and refuse to engage in defining discussion and the formulation of real solutions. Their solution is to further the advantages and privileges of the rich, who have sucked up the nation's wealth, and to cling to the belief that the notional beneficence of the wealthy is the salvation of the poor and middle classes.

There appears to be no desire or ability to confront the problems that underlie our faltering economy. A few economic historians say that the days of economic growth and power are over for America, as it becomes more thoroughly tied to the global economy. They point out that American growth was fueled by abundant, cheap energy and abundant, cheap minerals. Those resources have been depleted and can be extracted and made usable only by expensive and complex processes. The twentieth century, they say, was an anomaly in terms of economic expansion. The world is returning to a "more normal" pattern of economic growth and distribution.   There are ways of confronting and dealing with the forces that are moving the world back to feudal times, but those who are unable and unwilling to consider the implications have co-opted the dialogue. They are happy that they are contributing to the burgeoning growth of a class of serfs, who they despise.

Their message is a denial of any cause for hope and expectation and what is promised in the American pledge to liberty, equality, and justice. They are interested only in a concept of liberty that permits them to dismiss and deny those who have not claimed any part of America's wealth.

Those who wear the badges and uniforms of American authority do not realize that they no longer signal messages or hope and expectations of opportunity, equality, liberty, and justice. Rather they signal a dismissal and a rejection of those qualities for anyone who does not identify with the privileged class, with those who come to realize that hope and expectation are systematically being denied them. Daniel Tiger and Cody Engen were recruits in the army of the hopeless. They attacked the emblems of what America is becoming and has largely become.

What did they have to lose? And how many will follow their lead? What does the vast majority of Americans have to lose at this point? No one in the political leadership at this time has the sentience or the desire to assess the situation. The only vote they cast that gets attention comes out of the barrel of a gun.

Any messages of hope and expectation are dismissed as liberal fatuity. And so, America goes. Suicide by cop.

The DUSEL is dead. Long live the neutrino.

2011-09-21T15:39:00.000-07:00

The Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory (DUSEL) project at the Homestake Goldmine has been canceled. Its demise has not been announced officially. A much smaller part of its life work will be carried on by an offspring, one that may be part of the cause of its end, the Sanford Underground Laboratory.

Officials and the media have not acknowledged that the project so widely and extravagantly touted to turn the Homestake Goldmine into a major national scientific research center--proclaimed as Gov. Mike Rounds' signal achievement-- has come to an end. The National Science Foundation has indicated that the conversion of the mine into a laboratory is beyond the scope of its mission and has eliminated it from any of its funding priorities. However, the NSF has other problems with the Homestake conversion which are alluded to, but not specified, in a number of reports from committees which have been involved in working on the project. State officials have been loathe to admit the failure of the project. Under the Sanford Underground Research Facility, development of the lab will be limited to one facility at the 4,850-foot level with only a few experiments scheduled to be conducted there.

The death blow, which became fatal during intervening months, was delivered last December, when the National Science Board, which sets the policy and programs for the National Science Foundation, announced that it would not provide a $23 million bridge grant which was to carry forward the work on design and development of the Homestake Goldmine into a national underground laboratory.

The National Science Board has not been clear or forthcoming about its decision to end its support of the DUSEL. That fact is puzzling to everyone involved in the project because its parent organization, the National Science Foundation, took a leadership role in declaring the Homestake site as the location for a national DUSEL and was integrally involved in the planning and development. The NSF had solicited competitive nominations for the location of the DUSEL and awarded that designation to the Homestake Mine.

The NSF was the main sponsoring organization of the DUSEL project with the Department of Energy, The South Dakota Science and Technology Authority, the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory at the University of Southern California, and the Sanford Lab as cooperating partners. The NSF was the major source of development funds and support. Now the Department of Energy is the main financial sponsor with the South Dakota Authority as the main overseer. The plan as announced with the appointment of a director of the lab last week is limited to the Sanford Lab at the 4,850 level. The SDSTA had been scrambling for funds to pump water out of the mine at its lower levels. The water filled the mine shaft when Barrick Gold, which corporation owned the mine, shut off the water pumps when it got into a dispute with the state over liabilities from the mining operation it had conducted. In the announcement of recent developments, no mention has been made of plans concerning what water level will be maintained in the mine shaft.

When the National Science Board announced its decision to withdraw funding for further development, its officers made some comments about being unhappy with the management arrangement, indicating that it thought the DUSEL had become an infrastructure project while the NSF's mission is to sponsor scientific experiments. The Board seemed to have some resentment about the role of the Department of Energy, which now is the agency that determines what future the lab has as a vehicle for a scientific advancement.

The closest to an official announcement was a story in mid-July by Wendy Pitlick of the Black Hills Pioneer, who has supplied the most consistent and intensive news coverage of the developments at the Homestake Goldmine. Her story bore the headline "Dusel no more."

The media made a more specific announcement on the change in plans for converting the Homestake Mine with the announcement last week of a new director for the Sanford Underground Research Facility (now bearing the acronym SURF):

The SDSTA, which is reopening Homestake as the Sanford Underground Laboratory, will work with the Department of Energy, or DOE, to further develop the lab. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a DOE facility, will work directly with the SDSTA, which also continues to work with the University of California at Berkeley and with the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology in Rapid City.

The degree to which the scientific community anticipated the development of the DUSEL is expressed by the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory website which proclaims: "Someday DUSEL will be the deepest, biggest underground laboratory in the world."

That statement, still on the website as of today, indicates the unexpected and abrupt decision by the National Science Foundation not to pursue the DUSEL any further at this time. The Lawrence Berkeley site also stresses the important role the lab could have for neutrino research: "Neutrino science is the keystone of the Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory (DUSEL), a multidisciplinary lab proposed for the former Homestake Gold Mine in South Dakota, where thousands of feet of rock will shield experiments from cosmic rays and background radiation."

The original DUSEL plans placed major underground facilities at the 800 foot level, the 4850 foot level, and the 7400 foot level, with provisions to place additional small experiments at various other levels. Plans also included a large surface campus. The plan was to accommodate experiments in particle physics, biological sciences, geological sciences, and engineering. Now it will host only experiments in dark matter, double beta decay, and long baseline neutrino research. However, plans include room to grow in the future, developing more science at the facility if funds are available.

The National Science Foundation has not supplied specific or detailed reasons for its withdrawal from the project. The only near-definitive explanation is supplied by an articled in Science Magazine which summarizes the considerations that confronted the Foundation in making a decision:

Particle physicists want to convert the Homestake mine in the Black Hills of South Dakota into the Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory (DUSEL), the largest underground lab in the world. In it they would seek the elusive "dark matter" whose gravity binds the galaxies, a type of radioactivity that would blur the line between matter and antimatter, and protons falling apart as predicted by some particle theories. Advocates say the $875 million project is too good an opportunity to pass up. But DUSEL is not a typical project for the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), which historically builds scientific instruments such as telescopes. Instead, DUSEL is mostly an infrastructure project to provide lab space for a host of experiments in a variety of disciplines. Moreover, the biggest experiment in it would be a gargantuan particle detector funded primarily by the Department of Energy (DOE), not NSF. The project must win approval from the National Science Board, which sets policy for NSF, and observers say that board members will want good answers to three important questions before they sign off on the project. How would DUSEL stack up against other underground labs around the world? How will NSF and DOE coordinate efforts to ensure the project stays on track? And will DUSEL yield enough science to justify the investment?

While the decision was in process, a sub-committee of the National Science Foundation charged with assessing the project for its importance to the geological sciences (the Advisory Committee on Geosciences) was informed of the National Science Board decision when it gathered to meet. Its report states: "On Feb. 16, the first day of the subcommittee's meeting, NSF personnel informed the subcommittee of significant findings by the National Science Board's Committee on Programs and Plans." Those "significant findings" are not explicitly mentioned, however.

The advisory committee noted the NSF withdrawal of funds at the outset of its report and suggests some of the reasons for the withdrawal as well as the fact that the NSF might put its funds for particle research into some other enterprise:

"Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory (DUSEL): NSF eliminates funding for DUSEL, which had been pursued in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Office of Science. This termination is based on National Science Board reviews that concluded the cost and scope of DUSEL were inconsistent with the agency?s role in advancing fundamental research and education across many fields and disciplines. NSF will continue to solicit proposals for future particle physics research."

The report contains other suggestions of problems that the NSF had with the DUSEL at Homestake:

The panel identified some experimental facilities that require significantly more
analysis and development of safety protocols.
In general, a number of physics experiments at DUSEL may collect data that have geological implications but are not of interest in particle physics.
...the scientific opportunities should be evaluated in the context that future changes in funding or redistribution of facilities and research costs between NSF and DOE may correct the problems identified by the National Science Board. Evaluations are made in this report, assuming that the DUSEL facility re-emerges as a scientific priority.

Prior to the total withdrawal of the NSF from the DUSEL project, the Foundation and the Department of Energy had commissioned an evaluation of the project from the National Research Council, which is an independent advisory organization of the country's leading scientists. In the minutes for the NSF's Committee on Planning and Programs (CPP) from a meeting late last spring, it was noted that Dr. Andy Lankford, who chaired the NRC committee writing the report on the DUSEL, briefed the NSF committee on NRC findings. The NRC has published a preliminary version of its report which seems to strongly support the development of the DUSEL. Among its conclusions are:

In response to this charge, the committee concludes that three of the proposed physics experiments (1) a direct detection dark matter experiment on a scale of one to tens of tons, (2) a long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiment, and (3) a ton-scale, neutrinoless double-beta decay experiment are of paramount and comparable scientific importance.
Among the proposed experiments are regulated studies of the influence of fracture systems on rock response to applied loads and of the interdependence of the thermo-hydro-mechanical-chemical-biologic aspects of subsurface systems, and efforts to make rock more "transparent" by developing imaging techniques that would allow the exploration of subsurface material at a distance despite its visible opaqueness. Enabling the geoscience and subsurface engineering fields to conduct such studies would be a huge step forward for these fields.

The conclusion of the NRC report suggests that, as with any scientific investigation in progress, some modifications and design changes are to be expected, but that the overall plan for the DUSEL would be a huge contribution to science and American's place in leading scientific research:

Conclusion: Development of an underground research facility in the United States would supplement and complement underground laboratories around the world. A U.S. facility could build upon the unique position of the United States that would allow it to develop a long-baseline neutrino experiment using intense beams from Fermilab. It could accommodate one of the large direct detection dark matter experiments and one of the large neutrinoless double-beta decay experiments that are needed by the international effort to resolve these critical scientific issues, while sharing infrastructure among these three experiments that are of comparable import. It could also host and share infrastructure with other underground physics experiments, such as an accelerator to study nuclear astrophysics, and with underground experiments in other fields. An underground research facility would benefit the U.S. research communities, and would guarantee the United States a leadership role in the expanding global field of underground science.

Despite the drastic down-scaling of the DUSEL into the Sanford Underground Surface Facility, the appointment of Michael Headley as director of the lab anticipates a possible re-emergence of the old goldmine as a major scientific resource for the U.S. Headley was the project director for the DUSEL before NSF abandoned the project. He has a long relationship in dealing with the Department of Energy, the Lawrence Berkeley Lab, and the Fermilab in Illinois. Headley was with the EROS Data Center north of Sioux Falls for a number of years and has successful experience in dealing with the scientific community.

Many people in the scientific community who were early supporters of the DUSEL project at Homestake have said that the issues raised by Barrick Gold's flooding of the mine and the state's attempt to promote the project as an economic development scheme were seen by scientists as evidence that the science was not given serious consideration and precedence. Some are convinced that this lies behind the NSF abandonment of the project.

The Sanford Underground Laboratory, if it demonstrates scientific credibility and success, could be used to develop further experiments along the scale proposed in the DUSEL plans. The National Research Council compared the Homestake DUSEL project to other facilities throughout the world. There are many other facilities in the U.S. and throughout the world, including China, who are ready to host some of the experiments the DUSEL was designed to accommodate. The competition will be tough.

Here is a schematic of the current plan for the Sanford Underground Laboratory at the 4,850-foot level as scaled down from the DUSEL proposal that the National Science Foundation no longer supports.

The corporate life captured

2011-09-13T22:11:00.000-07:00

From The New Yorker

GOP stance on health care finally gets defined

2011-09-13T08:40:00.000-07:00

The most significant moment in the CNN-Tea Party debate by GOP candidates for president came when moderator Wolf Blitzer asked a hypothetical question.

Since President Obama introduced the health care plan, opponents have been asked if they prefer that those without health care simply be allowed to die. Last night Wolf Blitzer posed the hypothetical question to Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas): "What do you tell a guy who is sick, goes into a coma and doesn't have health insurance? Who pays for his coverage? "Are you saying society should just let him die?"

Members of the audience yelled out a resounding "Yeah!" They provided an answer for those reluctant, probably for reasons of courage, to answer the question.

The moral divide between the political parties is becoming much clearer. The differences are not minor ones over how a generally set value set should be applied. The differences are a huge difference in values with which reconciliation is neither possible nor desired. Despite the insistence of many in the GOP that America is founded on Christian principles, they have real trouble with the cure the sick and feed the poor part.

The current divide among Americans is more pronounced and fundamental than the slavery issue that resulted in the Civil War. The difference is one of basic morality.

View the defining moment of the debate here:

And then, this: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/09/13/1016557/-That-was-my-brothers-death-you-were-cheering,-you-a$$holes

Since when is a lying contest a debate?

2011-09-08T07:27:00.000-07:00

I have never been a debate coach, but since my freshmen year in college, I have been involved in it. The college recruited students who had courses in rhetoric to get involved in the debate contests on campus. They started you out as a time-keeper and then assigned you to judge as you became familiar with the criteria used to evaluate the debaters.

I have since judged many debates and mostly have enjoyed watching young people get involved. At NSU we had big tournaments during which faculty were moved out of their assigned classrooms so the young debaters could use the rooms for their contests. I enjoyed seeing the young people with their stacks of note cards reviewing the facts and the arguments they planned to shape around them. I did not judge in those tournaments but enjoyed seeing the energy and intelligence put to work.

That exposure to actual debate and the practice of actual rhetoric has made me cynical and skeptical about any actual value that the televised political debates may have. While the pundits and commentators go into a frenzy of declaring winners and losers, I can't help but think that the country in general comes up as the big loser. The so-called debaters posture and proclaim, but their exchanges seldom involve real debate. Making negative and often false characterizations and accusations of opponents is not debating facts. In fact, that practice makes facts irrelevant. They become contests of who can get away with the biggest misrepresentations of the opponents and the facts.

So it was with the Republican candidates' jabber-fest last night. However, some journalists have finally gotten back to doing their job of trying to state the facts and get them right.

The New York Times within minutes of the debate had put up a story addressing the misrepresentations of the facts cited. The Washington Post's resident fact-checker, Glenn Kessler, had his coverage of the false facts up by this morning.

However, with politics having deteriorated into the idiotic noise of personal attack and making up defamatory facts, I wonder if anyone but a few such as I, who live in the nostalgia of times when humankind strove for a higher intelligence and integrity, really gives a shit.

In scanning the blog posts referring to the lie-fest, I doubt it. Most commenters are more interested in disenfranchising and terminating those who do not share their political affections. I think the Republicans are dedicated to throwing more and more people out of work and taking away any voice that those who do work have in their endeavors and then going ballistic about the lack of job creation.

The current politics is leading us back into a new dark age of would-be lords and serfs. I for one will resist going back there. And so I will track who is lying and who is trying to deal with actual facts.

Who that boy think he is? The President?

2011-09-07T19:42:00.000-07:00

Back in Illinois over Labor Weekend to visit my brother, I had two things happen that brought back some times in life when things were moving in a different direction than they are at the present time.

The morning paper, one that I worked for, carried the obituary of my boss on that paper. Jack Sundine, co-owner and editor, died on Friday. He was a complicated man, and we had our ins-and-outs, but I was not singular among his editors in that respect. Jack made the Moline Dispatch one of the most powerful newspapers in Illinois outside of Chicago. An ostensible Republican, he was often invited on a television talk show with the Democratic state's attorney (who later became a state supreme court justice) to analyze issues of the day. Jack was in many respects to the left of the Democratic state's attorney. He opposed the death penalty for reasons that became manifest 40 years later when 13 men on Illinois death row were released from prison when DNA evidence proved their innocence. He was a staunch supporter of civil rights, and he backed up his verbal stance with action. He worked behind the scenes to see talented African-Americans put into positions they deserved, find housing commensurate with their positions in previously all-white neighborhoods, and he supported his editors and reporters when they ran across stories that were not necessarily complementary to business and political leaders. However, he detested tabloid journalism, and any stories published in his paper had to have airtight documentation.

I have often said, much to the consternation of university colleagues, that my job on the Dispatch was the best one I ever had. The reason was mostly that any rivalries among the talent on that paper were subordinated to turning out a good newspaper. When it came to the journalism, we worked together. That is why the newspaper was a downstate force in Illinois. It held to a standard of journalism and thorough and fair coverage that I have not witnessed since.

Toward the end of my time at the newspaper, six of us editors advertised in Editor and Publisher that we were available for hire elsewhere. The reason was that word got out that Jack and his co-owners were getting ready to sell the newspaper, and we didn't think that any new owners would let the newspaper continue as a strong, independent voice. It turns out we were right.

But something else was going on in the Quad-Cities over Labor Day. I do not recall seeing a Labor Day parade since I was a child. But the Quad-Cities, once the place where most of the farm equipment was manufactured, was gearing up for parades in the various communities. In fact, as I drove out Monday morning, I had to take detours around blocked-off streets to find my way to the Interstate. Labor is on the move again, in a very political way.

Among the other things revealed over the weekend was that the approval rating for Obama and the direction of the country is plummeting. The flagging job market is causing many people to lost confidence in the way he is handling things, but that disaffection reflected in the polls has quite a different aspect for some people. An African-American community and union organizer explained this when asked if he was anxious to see Obama's speech on jobs. He said he wasn't going to watch it: "I don't need to see that man niggered one more time," he said. For those who are not familiar with the definitions of that term, he was using it to mean someone being treated with the disrespect and discourtesy that segregated America once treated black America. He said that John Boehner flaunted this kind of treatment against Obama: one time during the debt talks when he did not give Obama the courtesy of a telephone call to tell him he was walking out on the talks; and the next time when he rejected Obama's request for a joint session of Congress for the presentation of his proposals on jobs. Boehner made sure that his rebuff of the President got full public play.

The man said that Obama has worked on the premise of eliminating partisan gridlock and trying to work with the opposition, but that effort has gone past any reasonable courtesies. Now Obama's efforts look like he, in the man's words, "is Uncle Tomming Congress." "All he is going to do with the speech," said the man, "is create an opportunity for the plantation owners to put that nigger in his place one more time. They can't disagree or deal with him with any respect. And Obama thinks he is rising above it all by not calling them out." Race problems have always been with us in subtle ways, but they have surged with public demonstrations of niggering, the man commented.

The polls that show declining support for Obama show a great contempt for Congress, with an approval rating of 12 percent. That contempt is apparent among the working people and those who would like to be working, One union man pointed more directly at the Republicans, as he extended the remarks of the community and union organizer. The one thing Republicans have done is make disrespect and contempt for others something that crosses the color line. If you are in the working middle class, you are an offense to the Republicans. He said the insults and accusations of greed and avarice that Gov. Walker of Wisconsin directed toward union members was sheer hate propaganda.

The community-union organizer was asked who he would vote for if he was not nappy with Obama. 'The last election was fool's play," he said," and there are no choices. There are other things to do beside vote. Remember what a general strike is? We can bring this sorry government to its knees like we did with corporations years ago. This is a fight between workers and plantation owners, and it's time to get rid of the plantation system."

Then the Labor Day parade started to move through the streets.

A commandment for bloggers

2011-08-31T14:29:00.000-07:00

"Everyone thinks their opinion matters. Don't argue with a nobody. A farmer doesn't bother telling a pig his breath smells like shit."

From Shit My Dad Says