THE STAR TREK CALENDAR PICTURE OF THE MONTH IS...






















...Lt. Uhura!

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Obama's collaboration with Big Pharma exposed

From AlterNet:

In order to secure his sweeping 2010 health care reforms, US President Barack Obama's staff oversaw an unusually close collaboration with the pharmaceutical industry, documents show.

Republicans in the House of Representatives have uncovered a trove of emails and other memos showing how the Obama administration coordinated its $150 million advertising campaign with major pharmaceutical companies.

Nearly $70 million was spent through two Super PACs -- political action committees -- organized in part by White House officials, including Jim Messina, Obama's former deputy chief of staff who is now managing his 2012 reelection campaign.

And

The email was among materials compiled by the House Energy and Commerce Committee as part of a probe to determine how the White House interacted with the drug industry as the health reform legislation took shape.

The panel said the emails confirmed that a decision by PhRMA to fund advertisements was "linked to policy agreements backed by the administration."

The White House, meanwhile, underscored that Obama was clear from the start that he would talk to all stakeholders, including the pharmaceutical industry, in order to pass the reform.

More here.

Obama was, indeed, "clear from the start" that the whole shebang was going to be a massive industry-friendly giveaway, which, of course, is what it all ended up being. Other than the devil in the details, which are now apparently coming to the light of day, this is no surprise. Of course, Obama coordinated with PhRMA. He also coordinated with the HMOs and health insurance companies. The Affordable Care Act is their law, not ours. That's why it sucks so bad.

What is surprising is that the Republicans would call bullshit on this. I mean, sucking corporate dick is much more their thing than it is the Democrats'. But that just goes to show you how utterly fucked up politics have become these days. Both parties suck corporate dick--both swallow, too, for that matter. So that essentially leaves the field open for meaningless anti-corporate rhetoric: Republicans can castigate the President for working too closely with wealthy corporate interests because those interests fully understand that the Republicans don't really mean it. Sort of a Nixon going to China thing.

Of course, the GOP isn't really doing the equivalent of Nixon going to China. That is, it's not that they're so pro-corporate that they can be anti-corporate if they want. Rather, it's that they're totally full of shit when they blast Obama's cozy corporatism. That is, as usual, they're big fucking liars. Democrats, too.

Maybe I just won't vote at all this November. It wouldn't matter either way.

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Terry Jones, Quran-Burning Pastor, Hangs Barack Obama Effigy Outside Florida Church

From the Huffington Post:

The Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Fla., has hanged an effigy of President Barack Obama from a gallows on its front lawn, a move DWOC pastor Terry Jones said was in response to Obama's recent endorsement of same-sex marriage, as well as his stance on abortion and what Jones called his "appeasing of radical Islam."

According to the Broward-Palm Beach New Times, the U.S. Secret Service is currently investigating Jones in response to the display.

And

The DWOC came under intense scrutiny in 2011 after Jones burned a copy of the Quran, a move which sparked three days of violent rioting in Afghanistan that resulted in the deaths of at least 21 people, including seven U.N. workers.

More here, with pictures.

I don't even know what to say about such people anymore.

No, they're obviously not Christians because their actions do not in any way emulate their Lord and Savior. No, they're not really being effective at persuading anybody to come around to their side because, you know, if you already like Obama, this is just going to piss you off. Yes, they're definitely crazy, and, yes, they're definitely assholes. I suppose I should be happy that they're not actually lynching real live black people, but the whole Koran burning thing did result in twenty one deaths, so I'm not too terribly happy that it's just an effigy. But this kind of thing does pass for what's left of the public discourse these days, so I suppose I ought to take it seriously.

Really, the problem here is that discussion with the right wing these days isn't too terribly far from listening to the crazed rantings of a bath salt addled street person. We are so fucked.

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FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Sammy






















Be sure to check out Modulator's Friday Ark for more cat blogging pics!

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School Closures and Accusations of Segregation in Louisiana

From The Nation:

Teachers in Louisiana have found themselves on the frontlines of austerity.

First, in an unprecedented vote, the Jefferson Parish School Board voted 8–1 to close seven campuses, four of them traditional elementary schools and the rest alternative programs for students struggling academically.

The board issued more bad news when it announced it was dropping plans to add an art instruction wing at Lincoln Elementary School for the Arts due to cost concerns.

Construction of the wing is a hot-button issue in the area because the proposal to convert Lincoln into a magnet school that would draw students from across the parish was a result of the deliberations leading up to the system’s settling a forty-seven-year-old desegregation lawsuit last year.

And

The Southern Poverty Law Center filed not one, but two, civil rights complaints against the board.

In the first complaint, SPLC alleged that the school system discriminates against black and disabled students. Part of the evidence presented by SPLC was comments made on Twitter by Mark Traina, a school psychologist in Louisiana.

“Young black thugs” need to be “put down like the dogs they are,” Traina tweeted.

SPLC also claims African-American students are being unfairly subjected to arrests and seizures. The complaint outlined what the center calls a widespread and disproportionate number of arrests of black students for minor school disciplinary matters.

SPLC cited the fact that African-American youth comprise 46 percent of the student population yet 76 percent of all school-based arrests.

More here.

Actually, this article isn't simply about Louisiana schools. Rather, it's about the public schools in Jefferson Parish, which is where I live. Nice to know, I guess, that my reading about political, cultural, and economic doings overall in the US has a payoff for me locally. That is, the second excerpt above reflects the rise in overt racism this nation has seen since Obama, our first black President, was elected, combined with the standard other-bashing that historically comes with hard economic times--it's also worth noting that Metairie, which easily comprises the biggest chunk of the parish, is definitely the most racist community in which I've ever lived, so racist, in fact, that it sent a former KKK leader to the state legislature back in the late 80s; that probably has something to do with it, too, latent racism waiting for the right circumstances to once again raise its ugly head.

The first excerpt may also have something to do with the return of overt racism, in terms of how the school board is deciding what to cut, but the fact that they have to cut at all has nothing to do with racism: it's about the shitty fucking economy and the fact that the federal government, which is also facing severe budget shortfalls, but could easily and very cheaply borrow enough to bail out every school system in the country, absolutely refuses to do so. I mean, Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman has been asserting a lot recently that if the feds bailed out the states, which would put tens of thousands of cops, fire fighters, teachers, and other workers back on the job, we would be well on the road to recovery. And, oh yeah, a nice little bonus is that we don't have to close down schools and fire teachers. Or eradicate arts programs, which, according to now numerous studies, gets students to perform better in all academic areas.

I'm pretty sure that the theater arts teaching position I had back in Texas no longer exists.

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Getting Dazed and Confused With Paul Krugman

From CounterPunch:

Mr. Krugman’s confusion lies in the term ‘investment.’ Companies ‘invest’ by borrowing money to increase production enough to repay the loan and earn a profit. Students take student loans to, with apologies for the terminology, ‘increase their human capital.’ And workers take mortgages to buy houses so that they have a place to live while they work. And workers take out auto loans to buy cars so that they have a way to get to work and back. In an economic sense, borrowed money must be part of the productive process for the system to function.

Because most loans take years to repay, they in a sense draw against future production. If too much money is borrowed against future production, the risk increases that if it fails to materialize, a financial and economic calamity will result. Add outright lender fraud on an industrial scale and this is what happened in the 2000s.

And

Second, prior to the 2000s the American economy was structurally set up for stable, if cyclical, labor markets as evidenced by the types of loans offered (30-year fixed rate). By setting into motion a long-term decline in wages and by increasing employment insecurity, the capitalist reformers (neo-liberals) set the household debt crisis into motion at least a decade before it became evident in the financial crisis. With existing mortgage payments taking an increasing share of household income, household debts became more burdensome even without the amount of debt increasing.

More here.

So, of course, anybody who stops by here regularly knows that I post a lot of Paul Krugman. That's because what he writes generally fits in very well with my admittedly limited understanding of macroeconomics. I also like that he's a well established economist in the top ranks of his field: reading his stuff and commenting on it puts me right in the middle of things, as it were, in terms of establishment economics, that is, the mainstream public discourse on the economy.

But Krugman isn't the only guy I read on economics. Indeed, most of the economics reading I do comes from pretty far out in left field, you know, guys working in more of a Marxist tradition, and the vast majority of that is a pretty harsh systemic criticism of capitalism itself. Krugman, as much as he infuriates the Tea Party crowd, Libertarians, and free market fundamentalists, you know, moronic folk who think he's a socialist, is himself pro-capitalist, and everything he writes is intended to make capitalism a functional, efficient, albeit socially kind, system for allocating goods and resources throughout society. That is, you'll never find Krugman writing the same kind of systemic critique of capitalism that guys like Richard Wolff do.

So how do I reconcile my affection for Krugman with my affection for the Marxists who like to blast him from time to time? Well, I don't; such a reconciliation is beyond my intellectual abilities at this time. I mean, really, capitalism and Marxist analysis of capitalism just come from entirely different universes as far as the underlying philosophy is concerned. A reconciliation between the two points of view may very well not be possible. But Krugman makes some very good observations from within his view of how the world works, just as the Marxists I read do from within their world. I feel intellectually richer for trying to understand both points of view, even though they're both ultimately incompatible. Well, probably incompatible.

The good news, for me anyway, is that I don't have to reconcile these points of view. I mean, I'm not an economist, just a guy with a blog trying to understand the world and bring along anybody who wants to come. So I'm working both an inside and an outside game on economics, and I think that's just fine.

I will say this, though: when I'm recycling Krugman's views in facebook debates and elsewhere, I don't tend to get the same kind of shock and disbelief I get when I'm recycling Marxist views. I mean, asserting that labor is just as integral to any sort of business enterprise as capital and management, and therefore deserves a bigger slice of the pie, recently made a few of my friends think I have absolutely no idea what I'm talking about.

But we know better, don't we?

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America's Rank Hypocrisy -- Why Is it Only an "Atrocity" When Other Countries Do It?

From AlterNet, Noam Chomsky's latest syndicated column:

In his penetrating study “Ideal Illusions: How the U.S. Government Co-Opted Human Rights,” international affairs scholar James Peck observes, “In the history of human rights, the worst atrocities are always committed by somebody else, never us” – whoever “us” is.

And

Thus in the “Cambridge History of the Cold War,” John Coatsworth recalls that from 1960 to “the Soviet collapse in 1990, the numbers of political prisoners, torture victims, and executions of nonviolent political dissenters in Latin America vastly exceeded those in the Soviet Union and its East European satellites.” But being nonatrocities, these crimes, substantially traceable to U.S. intervention, didn’t inspire a human-rights crusade.

Also inspired by the Chen rescue, New York Times columnist Bill Keller writes that “Dissidents are heroic,” but they can be “irritants to American diplomats who have important business to transact with countries that don’t share our values.” Keller criticizes Washington for sometimes failing to live up to our values with prompt action when others commit crimes.

More here.

And Chomsky offers a few more examples of America's rank hypocrisy on the issue of human rights, not even scratching the surface, but, hey, it's a short essay. Indeed, this has been a theme running through much of the Chomsky stuff I've read over the years: the US has committed unspeakable atrocities in pursuit of its "national interest," again and again, but never, ever, ever admits it, even while it excoriates other nations for doing the same thing--a minor corollary to this is that you get the same deal if you're an ally; that is, the US always looks the other way when an American client states tortures and murders.

And it's not just the government, either. The American people, by and large, not to mention the press, schools and universities, and other major institutions, are all in on the game. Even when they clearly know about it and acknowledge such atrocities. So, for instance, everybody knows that the US essentially wiped out, that is, committed genocide against, its native population in order to possess their lands. But this isn't really ever compared to the Nazi Holocaust, or the the bloody Khmer Rouge regime of Cambodia, or the Spanish Inquisition. It is almost as though everybody agrees that it's okay for us to do it, but not for anybody else.

This is the essence of "American exceptionalism." It's severe psychological denial of our true nature, and it happens, every day, on a massive scale. We maintain our self-image as the good guy simply by denying that we are, in fact, bad guys.

I mean, of course, the US has done a lot of good throughout its history. Nothing is black and white. But until we can come to terms with our national sins, our culture, what it literally means to be an American, is based on an enormous lie. And that enormous lie enables us as sinners, again and again. This will not end until we're honest with ourselves, and Obama's ever increasing drone strikes which inspire hardly any domestic protest at all indicate that we're nowhere near achieving such honesty.

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No Religion? 7 Types of Non-Believers

From AlterNet:

For those who have lost their religion or never had one, finding a label can feel important. It can be part of a healing process or, alternately, a way of declaring resistance to a dominant and oppressive paradigm. Finding the right combination of words can be a challenge though. For a label to fit it needs to resonate personally and also communicate what you want to say to the world. Words have definitions, connotations and history, and how people respond to your label will be affected by all three. What does it mean? What emotions does it evoke? Who are you identifying as your intellectual and spiritual forebears and your community? The differences may be subtle but they are important.

More here.

A couple of days ago, I got an email from my Southern Baptist Dad telling me that he was going to be spending about ten days in South Africa on a short mission trip working with families affected by AIDS. Actually, he's been going on these kinds of trips off and on for a couple of decades or so, and it's always good work, dealing with orphans and whatnot, but this one kind of excites me, given that it's in Africa and dealing with AIDS, a couple of pet issues for the politically liberal community with which I affiliate.

So I posted this on facebook:

For all my friends who are believers, and even the agnostic among you who lapse from time to time, my Dad is leaving on the ninth for South Africa to do some mission work for about ten days with some families affected by AIDS. Keep him in your prayers.

If you're an atheist, just do some reading about how AIDS in Africa still totally sucks, and maybe bring it up in a few conversations.

The post got nearly fifty "likes," with tons of comments offering support and prayer. But the catch here is that I'm not a believer. Indeed, I self-identify as agnostic. So what the hell was I doing issuing a call for prayers, in which I do not believe? The short answer is that I wanted to bring some attention to the good work my father is doing, and the prayer request is very much in keeping with the religious nature of the so-called "mission trip."

The long answer is somewhat more complicated.

As an agnostic, I really don't believe in God. I don't call myself an atheist because I just don't have enough evidence to rule out the possibility of God in the same way I don't have enough evidence to rule out the possibility of, say, breaking the light speed barrier, or time travel. But for all intents and purposes, I just don't believe. On the other hand, I grew up Southern Baptist, and I honestly like the religious fellowship and ritual that come with the denomination. I like people telling me that they're praying for me, even if I don't think there's going to be some kind of supernatural payoff for it. I like how just talking about Jesus makes believers faces light up, how it changes the mood of the room.

And it just seems to me that there's got to be a way for me to enjoy all that without blessing it as absolute truth. I mean, apart from the God question, religion is an important cultural institution that has been with mankind since before recorded history. I think there's something very deeply human about it all, whether you believe in God or not. And it makes me feel good to tap into all that energy from time to time.

At any rate, if you click through and read the essay, I think I can be classified as a mashup of agnostic, humanistic, and pantheistic. But generally I just say "agnostic." The point is that, even among non-believers, there's a whole lot of room for discussion and thought.

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This Republican Economy

No, this is not becoming the all-Krugman, all-the-time blog. But sometimes the Nobel Prize winning economist is on a roll, like right now. From the New York Times:

What should be done about the economy? Republicans claim to have the answer: slash spending and cut taxes. What they hope voters won’t notice is that that’s precisely the policy we’ve been following the past couple of years. Never mind the Democrat in the White House; for all practical purposes, this is already the economic policy of Republican dreams.

So the Republican electoral strategy is, in effect, a gigantic con game: it depends on convincing voters that the bad economy is the result of big-spending policies that President Obama hasn’t followed (in large part because the G.O.P. wouldn’t let him), and that our woes can be cured by pursuing more of the same policies that have already failed.

For some reason, however, neither the press nor Mr. Obama’s political team has done a very good job of exposing the con.

More here.

Krugman is a big Democrat, so I'll allow this lapse on facts, but the reality is that it hasn't been simply during the last couple of years that we've been following Republican economic dogma. Rather, it's been for the last twenty years or so. Cut spending/cut taxes/cut spending/cut taxes and on and on and on. This all began during the Reagan era, but it didn't really start to speed up until Clinton was in office, when the White House had to start dealing with GOP dominated Congresses. Sure, there was a lapse when W was in office, but even though his mad spending was sort of the exception proving the rule, this was Republican spending on Republican wish list items, and, therefore, still a Republican economy.

That is, the old GOP concept that all we need are massive tax and spending cuts to fix the economy is, and has been for many years, the conventional wisdom in Washington, regardless of your party affiliation. Indeed, Democrats have long been falling all over themselves to prove that they're serious about economics, and the way they've done that is by embracing Republican attitudes. We really are in a Republican economy, just as it has been since the early 90s.

So here's the punchline.

One would imagine that because we've been doing exactly what the Republicans say we need to do with the economy for two decades, that we would start to see some payoff, if they know what they're talking about. We've been cutting spending--remember, welfare is, for the most part, not much more than a memory now. We've been cutting taxes--they're now lower than they have been since the 40s. If the GOP is right, the economy ought to be positively booming these days. But it's not. And I'm not just talking the financial meltdown and the accompanying recession, either: wages have been literally stagnating or falling for the vast vast majority of Americans for those couple of Republican decades; the middle class is just a hollow name now, and that's been the case for a long time.

In short, we've essentially seen, in real life, what tax and spending cuts actually do. Turns out that the Republicans were and are totally wrong. Strangely, nobody in power seems to understand this.

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IF YOU SUPPORT SPENDING CUTS DURING
A RECESSION, YOU'RE A FUCKING IDIOT

From the New York Times, Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman:

The Austerity Agenda

The bad metaphor — which you’ve surely heard many times — equates the debt problems of a national economy with the debt problems of an individual family. A family that has run up too much debt, the story goes, must tighten its belt. So if Britain, as a whole, has run up too much debt — which it has, although it’s mostly private rather than public debt — shouldn’t it do the same? What’s wrong with this comparison?

The answer is that an economy is not like an indebted family. Our debt is mostly money we owe to each other; even more important, our income mostly comes from selling things to each other. Your spending is my income, and my spending is your income.

So what happens if everyone simultaneously slashes spending in an attempt to pay down debt? The answer is that everyone’s income falls — my income falls because you’re spending less, and your income falls because I’m spending less. And, as our incomes plunge, our debt problem gets worse, not better.

And

For when you push “austerians” on the badness of their metaphor, they almost always retreat to assertions along the lines of: “But it’s essential that we shrink the size of the state.”

Now, these assertions often go along with claims that the economic crisis itself demonstrates the need to shrink government. But that’s manifestly not true. Look at the countries in Europe that have weathered the storm best, and near the top of the list you’ll find big-government nations like Sweden and Austria.

More here.

Certainly, many, many among the austerity crowd are just straight up lying: I mean, Obama essentially called their bluff during the debt ceiling negotiations last summer when he offered several liberal sacred cows in return for tax hikes on the rich; the GOP, of course, refused the deal of a lifetime because they don't really care about the deficit--they want to cut liberal programs simply because they want to fuck the poor, not because they're worried about the debt.

That's outrageous enough, but what really worries me are the average ordinary Americans who buy this bullshit. And I'm not talking about the majority of Americans who are largely apolitical and do not vote. Rather, I'm talking about intelligent people who honestly care about the fate of the nation, people who vote in every election they can, people who read the paper every day and try to stay informed. As far as I can tell Krugman is essentially the only voice in the MSM supporting the Keynesian point of view: pretty much everyone else is all about fixing the deficit as soon as possible because "there is no alternative." And that's the kind of crap the people I'm talking about are spoon-fed all the time.

I got into a conversation about all this with a coworker who fits precisely the description I give in the paragraph above. He was lamenting how in order to fix all the financial mess that we have to cut way back, to "reset" the economy, he said. I told him how that was all bullshit and started trying to talk Keynes, but a bar is just not a good place for such a discussion, and I had difficulty getting him to conceptualize outside of the conventional wisdom. At the very least, I managed to get across, to an extent, that the CW might be wrong when I asked him to explain how a "reset" would actually work--he didn't get very far before he gave up, admitting that he didn't really know what he was talking about.

So that's the reality for these people who are genuinely trying to understand what's best for our economy: they don't really know economics that well, and necessarily defer to the "experts" they read in the papers. Of course, all these "experts" are just so much cattle in how they push the austerity line, not really knowing what they're talking about themselves, but push they do, much to the detriment of the body politic.

No, they're not really idiots, not the conscientious citizens I'm talking about. Just radically misinformed. And that makes me sad if I think about it too much.

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FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Frankie





















Be sure to check out Modulator's Friday Ark for more cat blogging pics!

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Atheist Valedictorian in Texas Forces High School to Remove Graduation Prayers

From Patheos, courtesy of yet another facebook friend:

Mark Reyes is the valedictorian at Poteet High School in Texas and his graduation ceremony is Friday night.

He’s also an atheist. And thanks to his activism, the school will be getting rid of a nearly-100-year-old tradition of reciting invocations and benedictions at the ceremony:

Poteet Independent School District Superintendent Andy Castillo announced Tuesday that due to legal problems the words “Invocation” and “Benediction” will be removed from the commencement program of their Friday night graduation ceremony. The words “Opening Remarks” and “Closing Remarks” will replace “Invocation” and “Benediction”.

The substitution comes after the school district received a complaint from a person representing Americans United for Separation of Church and State. “After receiving this information last week, we have been working with our attorneys to avoid legal problems,” said Poteet Superintendent Andy Castillo.

More here.

You know, this stuff isn't really difficult, nor is it even offensive to religious sensibilities if you think about it for, like, two seconds. In the 1960s, the US Supreme Court ruled, twice, that public schools, being an arm of the government, cannot mandate or lead students in prayer. The Court did not ban prayer; rather, it simply brought educational practice in line with the Constitution--remember, the first amendment plainly states that the government shall not establish an official religion; therefore, government entities cannot require people to pray. Simple.

But schools have been fucking it up ever since. When they're not overcompensating in more liberal states by banning all prayer, including the Constitutionally protected actual voluntary variety, they're trying to sneak around the Constitution in conservative states by calling mandated prayers "voluntary."

That's exactly what happened with my high school graduation back in the day in Texas. As Senior Class President, I was privy to the planning. The "voluntary" prayer was introduced to those of us participating in the ceremony with a statement along these lines: "And after Ron has finished speaking, that's when you'll be giving the invocation. Okay? Good." So there was no "volunteering." None of the students were like, "Hey, wouldn't it be cool if we had an opening prayer?" It was just a teacher telling us that the prayer would be at such and such a point during the ceremony. Sure, nobody objected, but that's just not the same thing as "voluntary." Indeed, when you have just spent the last thirteen years of your life deferring to school authority, and then that authority is telling you this is what is going to happen during the last hour you are under such authority, disobedience is the last thing on your mind.

So they call it "voluntary," but it's really state mandated prayer, even though everybody pretends it's not.

And it's not easy speaking out against this kind of thing, especially if you're a teenager, especially if you live in a heavily religious state like Texas. It wasn't much of a problem for me, personally, because I still considered myself to be a Christian back in those days, so, even though I fully understood the whole wink and nod thing going on, I went with the flow. But this guy at Poteet High School is something else: he's got balls, big huge fucking balls. He did the right thing.

Because, really, this isn't just for people who aren't Christians--indeed, it's laughable to even entertain for a microsecond the notion that atheists and Muslims and Jews have their own Constitutional amendment, the first fucking one, in fact. No, this is about keeping religion out of government, and that benefits all of us, whatever our religious views are.

Think about it this way: imagine Romney becoming President and then forcing Mormon views and values on us. Yeah, that's when fundamentalists suddenly decide that school prayer sucks.

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Romney vs. teachers unions: The inconvenient truth

From the Washington Post opinion section:

That reality is this: The top performing school systems in the world have strong teachers unions at the heart of their education establishment. This fact is rarely discussed (or even noted) in reform circles. Yet anyone who’s intellectually honest and cares about improving our schools has to acknowledge it. The United States is an outlier in having such deeply adversarial, dysfunctional labor-management relations in schooling.

Why is this?

My hypothesis runs as follows: The chief educational strategy of top-performing nations such as Finland, Singapore and South Korea is to recruit talent from the top third of the academic cohort into the teaching profession and to train them in selective, prestigious institutions to succeed on the job. In the United States, by contrast, we recruit teachers mostly from the middle and (especially for poor schools) bottom third and train them mostly in open-enrollment institutions that by all accounts do shoddy work.

As a result, American reformers and superintendents have developed a fetish for evaluating teachers and dismissing poor performers, because there are, in fact, too many. Unions dig in to protect their members because . . . that’s what unions do.

More here.

While this essay is somewhat annoying in that it comes from an establishment pundit guy, which means he has to subject us to his establishment conventional wisdom about why he hates teachers' unions, too, he makes a very good overall point: here in the US, we just don't take education seriously.

I mean, he's definitely right about the kind of people in the profession. I wouldn't generalize American teachers as being bad, but I certainly do believe that most of them are mediocre intellects, at best--of course, there are some notable exceptions to this, but, on the whole, teachers aren't very bright people, don't question the way things are, don't ponder the universe. Most of them aren't much more than bored classroom managers, lifelessly working their way through whatever state mandated curriculum happens to be in vogue at the moment, punching a clock, yadda yadda.

And this guy's definitely right about teacher training, too. I got my secondary certification at one of those open enrollment schools, and the whole thing was a piece of cake. Sure, there was some interesting stuff, and I had at least one really good professor, but for the most part, the education faculty wasn't much better than the mediocre intellects they send into the field.

All of this leads inevitably to the conclusion that we, as a nation, just don't give a shit about education. The whole enterprise really isn't much more than lip-service to the notion. Pay and social status, as the essay later observes, are, indeed, huge issues when it comes to attracting top flight thinkers to the field, but complicating things greatly is that, given the way the system is currently constructed, intellectuals don't really last because, you know, what intellectual in his right mind can abide what Noam Chomsky has called "a system of imposed ignorance"?

That's the real problem: "education" in the US is essentially the exact opposite of the notion of creating keen minds. Change that, and we'll have better teachers. Of course, this would drive the oligarchy insane, which means it will never happen.

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Did the White House Direct the Police Crackdown on Occupy?

From CounterPunch:

A new trove of heavily redacted documents provided by the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) on behalf of filmmaker Michael Moore and the National Lawyers Guild makes it increasingly evident that there was and is a nationally coordinated campaign to disrupt and crush the Occupy Movement.

The new documents, which PCJF National Director Mara Verheyden-Hilliard insists “are likely only a subset of responsive materials,” in the possession of federal law enforcement agencies, only “scratch the surface of a mass intelligence network including Fusion Centers, saturated with ‘anti-terrorism’ funding, that mobilizes thousands of local and federal officers and agents to investigate and monitor the social justice movement.”

And

Tellingly, the documents also include a Dec. 5 copy of the “Weekly Informant, ” an intelligence report published by the DHS’s Office for State and Local Law Enforcement. The issue includes an update from the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) concerning the activities of the Occupy Movement. PERF, Verheyden-Hilliard notes, is the group that the federal government claims organized a series of multi-city law enforcement calls to coordinate the police response to Occupy, which led immediately to the wave of violent crackdowns. It was at those meetings that police were advised among other things to act at night, to use aggressive tactics and weapons like tasers and pepper spray, and to take steps to remove journalists and cameras from the scene of crackdowns.

The overall sense from these latest documents is that Washington and the DHS, along with the FBI, was the nexus of the crackdown, orchestrating it, encouraging it, and attempting to cover its tracks.

More here.

And the anti-terrorist crowd assured us all the new laws and agencies that seemingly turned civil liberties into so much excrement would never be used on US citizens! Not that it matters one way or another. This is very old school, going back, way back, to at least the 1930s: you see, the US political establishment has a very long history of violating US laws in order to silence anti-capitalist movements. Occupy Wall Street, the latest version of an American anti-capitalist movement, is no different.

So I'm not surprised. I am a bit sickened, however, by the Obama administration's Republican-levels of hypocrisy on this. I mean, that shouldn't surprise me, either. After all, I've known all along that Obama is Wall Street's guy, shepherded into the White House for the express purpose of cleaning up the mess Bush made of American capitalism, stabilizing the very system that nearly brought America to its economic knees. But, as the above linked essay finally observes, our "liberal" President and his "liberal" party have been using OWS rhetoric in what may turn out to be a successful appeal to the Democratic base, all the while trying to destroy the movement and further empower the masters of finance.

No fucking way I'm voting for Obama after this.

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REPUBLICANS REALLY DO STEAL ELECTIONS,
AND THEY'RE DAMNED GOOD AT IT, TOO

From Think Progress:

Florida Supervisor of Elections: Gov. Scott’s Voter
Purge Will Remove Eligible Voters From Rolls

According to the Broward County Supervisor of Elections, eligible voters will be removed from the voting rolls as a result of the massive voter purge ordered by Governor Rick Scott. “It will happen,” Mary Cooney, a spokeswoman for the Broward County Supervisor of Elections, told ThinkProgress.

Late last year, Governor Scott ordered his Secretary of State, Kurt Browning to “to identify and remove non-U.S. citizens from the voter rolls.” Browning could not get access to reliable citizenship data. So Scott urged election officials to identify non-U.S. citizens by comparing data from the state motor vehicle administration with the voting file.

That process produced a massive list of 182,000 names, which Browning considered unreliable. The Fair Elections Legal Network, which is challenging the purge, noted that database matching is “notoriously unreliable” and “data entry errors, similar-sounding names, and changing information can all produce false matches.” Further, some voters may have naturalized since their driver’s license information was collected.

Browning resigned in February. But Scott has pressed forward with his efforts to purge voters from the rolls based on the dubious list.

More here.

It's deja vu all over again.

This is the same scheme they employed to steal Florida back in 2000, except instead of using felons as an excuse to cast as wide a net as possible, this time they're using immigration status. Same difference. Get the brown people off the voter rolls so only angry white people get to vote.

What, you don't remember the racist scam that illegally installed George W. Bush in the White House twelve years ago? No doubt, that's because the US press, for reasons unknown, totally ignored the story. But the long and short of it is that the foreign press was all over it, which is how the NAACP knew that they should sue the state of Florida for illegally disenfranchising tens of thousands of innocent black voters who very likely would have voted for Gore. The punchline, of course, was that the state of Florida, rather than having all the GOP's filthy laundry exposed in court for all to see, settled out of court. The US press ignored that, too, but, trust me, it definitely happened.

Now they're trying to do it again. And who can blame them? They more or less got away with it the first time scot-free. The Republican Party was probably in too much disarray back in 2008 to try something like this with McCain, but the Tea Party movement has apparently given them back their balls, and our current President's black skin is probably providing some motivation, too. After all, this new scam, like the one from 2000, is aimed at stripping voting rights away from people of color. Kill two birds with one stone: fuck over the black President; fuck over those nasty filthy brown foreigners who don't speak English.

As longtime Real Art readers know, I have for years believed our democracy to be a total sham. Corporations and other wealthy interests have bought the political class in full. But there are other ways to destroy democracy, and the GOP has gotten really good at it. I mean, just add this Florida scam to all these voter ID laws coming out of Republican dominated state legislatures around the country, and you have a full court press on citizens' ability to vote. Call me old fashioned, but, even in spite of corporate interference in the political process, I still think the right to vote has some pretty deep meaning and significance to Americans. Suppressing the vote is, consequently, just about as anti-American as you can get.

And that's where the modern Republican Party is today, totally anti-American.

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FACEBOOK WARS
RESPECTING OUR FALLEN SERVICE MEN AND WOMEN

A right-wing buddy of mine from high school posted this on facebook:

Seriously? On Memorial Day weekend no less.

Chris Hayes: I'm 'Uncomfortable' Calling Fallen Military 'Heroes'

"Effete: affected, overrefined, and ineffectual; see "Chris Hayes." OK, I appended the name of the MSNBC host to the dictionary definition. But if ever you wanted to see the human embodiment of the adjective in action, have a look at the video from his MSNBC show this morning of the too-refined-by-..."

Here's the link, with video.

And here's the response I left:

I'm probably going to watch the entire show online later tonight, but without the overall context, I think Hayes has a point, albeit very awkwardly stated. That is, for several years after 9/11 a real culture of military fetishism took hold in this country, one that politicians used to hit over the head anybody who in any way criticized our dual Middle East wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. So criticizing the mission became tantamount to criticizing the effort and sacrifice of of our soldiers, sailors, and marines. It turned out, of course, that criticism was exactly what this country needed, and if critics hadn't been so silenced we might very well have avoided the intense bloodshed that happened in Iraq during the botched occupation--indeed, one of those critics was the prophetic Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki, who knew that we simply didn't have the troop strength to really pull off an occupation, but he was summarily put out to pasture by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, and American service personnel, lots of them, died in IED attacks again and again as a result.

And all that "you must love the military or you're anti-American" BS was totally hollow at the Washington level: the rhetoric was there, but Bush's VA was routinely screwing over guys coming back home, and the Republican Congress didn't seem to care about it one bit. One wonders what it really means to support the military. Is it all about flag waving and getting in the face of people who want peace, or is it about truly treating veterans with respect and affording them the dignity they deserve for their service? Of course, I prefer the latter, but this continues to be something of an open question for the American culture and political class.

Adding insult to injury was the rise of the neoconservative in American political life: it's not widely known, but neocons really do want us to be at war all the time, simply because they believe that war gives America purpose and unity. And to this day, the neocon voice continues to carry weight, simply because they are the most organized in as much as foreign policy rhetoric goes.

This brings us back to Hayes. I, personally, as a far left liberal, believe that it is not the fault of individual service men when their civilian leaders are totally insane and send them on crackpot adventures that make the world far more dangerous than it was to begin with. Our service men and women do their jobs, and do them extraordinarily well, at great risk, often losing everything, just because they're patriotic citizens. We, as a nation, owe them whatever they want. But we also have this military fetish cultural strain that politicians use for their own cynical purposes. Of course, Hayes is uncomfortable with all this, as we all ought to be. It is very easy to have one's praise for the military twisted in sick and awful directions.

I'm cutting him a lot of slack on this one, and you should, too.

Not much debate yet because I just posted my response, and I'm really wondering what my old friend might have to say with his response, but I just had to get this out there. One of the things I think the left has learned since the Vietnam era is that people in the military are just trying to live their lives like you and me, and that they join up for both patriotic and practical reasons. That is, their motivations are noble and reasonable; they are not bad people, not imperialists, not oppressors, even though their collective action under direction from Washington may amount to imperialism and oppression. Indeed, they, too, are oppressed, when the civilian leadership misuses their service, warping their love of country into something that is ultimately sinister.

But it's hard to talk about this without the military fetishists dog-piling with chants of "America hater" and whatnot. So Hayes left an opening and the right wing jumped in. Typical.

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On Memorial Day Weekend, America Reckons with Torture

A Bill Moyers essay from Common Dreams courtesy of a facebook friend:

Facing the truth is hard to do, especially the truth about ourselves. So Americans have been sorely pressed to come to terms with the fact that after 9/11 our government began to torture people, and did so in defiance of domestic and international law. Most of us haven’t come to terms with what that meant, or means today, but we must reckon with torture, the torture done in our name, allegedly for our safety.

It’s no secret such cruelty occurred; it’s just the truth we’d rather not think about. But Memorial Day is a good time to make the effort. Because if we really want to honor the Americans in uniform who gave their lives fighting for their country, we’ll redouble our efforts to make sure we’re worthy of their sacrifice; we’ll renew our commitment to the rule of law, for the rule of law is essential to any civilization worth dying for.

More here.

Such a period of national introspection isn't likely to happen soon. Indeed, virtually no one actually thinks about this stuff in any lasting or meaningful way. I mean, of course, some people think about this, myself included, but even among those of us who do, it's really easy to avoid dwelling on it, really easy to just go about our lives in our torture-practicing nation while ignoring the awful moral baggage it carries.

What does the fact that our nation has a massive torture-regime under its belt mean? It means we're like Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Red China, the Spanish Inquisition, Imperial Japan, Cambodia, North Korea, Chile under Pinochet, Iran under the ayatollahs, or under the Shah, and on and on. Yes yes, we can quibble over such comparisons. We don't send millions of Jews to the gas chambers, for instance. We're capitalist and Christian. Sure, there are necessarily differences because we're one nation and those are other nations. But you can cite differences all day long, and none of them removes the major similarity: the US is like all other evil nations in that we will inflict pain and suffering on captives who have been rendered harmless.

And we did it for the express purpose of inflicting cruelty as revenge: it has long been known that torture is an imprecise and faulty method for intelligence gathering, but we did it anyway, happily, just because we were pissed off and wanted to hurt some brown Muslims.

It's all very depressing. Redressing this horrible stain on our national conscience is nowhere on the horizon. I've written so many posts here at Real Art on this topic that I'm starting to get bored with it, and that's just awful; I'm getting bored with trying to remind people that we have this scarlet "T" on our chests. That's the most frightening thing of all: moral lapse due to lack of interest.

Of course, I shouldn't kick myself so hard. This is very American. We have also never come to terms with our near-genocide of the Native American population from whom we stole our land. We have never come to terms with the African slave trade, and the economic foundation it laid for our luxury today, or how African-Americans were and are still oppressed. Or how we took nearly half of what is now the Western US from Mexico in an unprovoked war of aggression. And on and on and on. Committing unspeakable acts of evil and then pretending it never happened is as American as apple pie. Swimming against the stream on this is beyond difficult.

But what moral choice do we have? The only thing people can do who are deeply concerned with our national sin is to continue talking about it, continue reminding their fellow citizens that we have a great deal of unfinished business, vital business that concerns our souls, concerns our future choices as a people.

We should never stop discussing this.

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FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Sammy





















Be sure to check out Modulator's Friday Ark for more cat blogging pics!

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What the Bible Says about Abortion

From Daily Mull, courtesy of a friend on facebook:

God tells Moses what procedure to follow if a husband suspects that his wife is pregnant by another man.

There's an elaborate ritual involved, which the curious can puruse at length without finding any loopholes. (It might be a worthwhile spiritual experience nonetheless. At some point during the purusal, it might just occur to you that all you're doing is looking for loopholes, and is that any way to read a book which you've taken as your life guide?)

For the rest of you, I'll cut to the chase. God has the woman go to a priest, who performs a sacrifice and then concocts a specific drink for her to drink.

God then tells Moses that if the baby does not belong to the husband, she will abort the baby.

As an unbeliever, I doubt very much that the chemical properties of the drink would produce these wonderfully discriminating results—if it ever worked, it was probably due to the stress put on the woman's body as her guilt was magnified by this elaborate and public ceremony.

But it doesn't matter how, or even whether, it worked.

What matters is that if you are a serious Bible-believer, you have here, in inspired black and white, God not only approving of an abortion, but giving instructions on how to perform it.

More here.

Of course, the fundamentalists have always been on shaky ground, theologically speaking, as far as the Bible and abortion go, with Scriptural support such as the kind you find in Jeremiah 1:5, asserting that "Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee." You know, stuff that doesn't really say anything at all about abortion, but, depending on how you squint your eyes, might imply that God doesn't like abortion. That is, there are no money shots about this in the Bible, no specific verses that make abortion a sin in the way that coveting your neighbor's wife is a sin.

And that's just a wee bit weird because, you know, the ancients knew about abortion just as surely as they knew about homosexuality. But, apparently, there is, in fact, an abortion money shot in the Bible. It's just that it is a few verses that seemingly approve of abortion, indeed, mandating it when a man's wife has been impregnated by another man.

Of course, I was skeptical, so I checked it out. The King James Version, my favorite, of the passage from Numbers cited in the excerpt above wasn't entirely clear, talking about making "thy thigh to rot," something that could mean anything for all I know. But the New International Version is completely clear: "...may the Lord cause you to become a curse among your people when he makes your womb miscarry and your abdomen swell." Crystal clear. The intention of the above described ritual is to cause a miscarriage, or, more simply, an abortion.

I just love it when everything I thought I knew is wrong. I wonder if such a passage would even matter to the pro-life faithful. Probably not. I mean, even though fundamentalists supposedly never interpret the Bible, they, in fact, always interpret the Bible, picking and choosing which sections to emphasize and which sections to ignore, you know, like all that shit about menstruation.

One thing's for sure: next time I'm in a dog fight on abortion with a looney fundamentalist, I fully plan to drop this passage from Numbers like the A-bomb on Nagasaki. What fun it will be.

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Paul Krugman: We Could End This Depression Right Now

An interview about the Nobel Prize winning economist's new book, from AlterNet:

JH: I want to encourage people to read the book, but can you just give readers a sense of what you think is the most important thing policy makers should be thinking about doing right now?

PK: The moral of the book is: this doesn’t have to be happening. This is essentially a technical process; it’s a small thing. It’s like having a dead battery in a car, and while there may be a lot wrong with the car, you can get the car going remarkably easily, if you’re willing to accept that’s what the problem really is.

First and foremost, what we have is an economy that just doesn’t have enough spending. Consumers are hobbled by debt, corporations don’t want to spend if they don’t see consumer demand. Somebody has to step in and spend, and that somebody is the government. The government could – and by all means let’s talk about forward-looking, big projects -- right away get a big boost in the economy just by reversing the big cutbacks that have taken place in state and local governments these past three years. Get the schoolteachers rehired and get the policemen and firefighters back on the beat. Fill those potholes that have been developing in New Jersey and I believe all over America. We’d then be most of the way back to a decent economy again.

More here.

And then, as Krugman has explained at length in his New York Times columns and elsewhere, once the economy is growing again, the tax base necessarily grows as well, which puts the deficit in a much more manageable position, one that can be fixed without inflicting savage austerity on the most vulnerable in the population. Classic Keynesianism.

Unfortunately, this is a narrative that is either not understood or flat out rejected by the people who have the power to actually do anything about it. Even more unfortunately, the people rejecting it don't ever seem to offer any real reasons why they're rejecting it. And that's one of several reasons I'm so attracted to Krugman's understanding of economics: there are simply no compelling counterarguments out there addressing his assertions. I mean, it would be one thing if establishment figures, on Capitol Hill, Wall Street, and in the press, took on his arguments directly, but I've never seen it. Sure, people dismiss him, say he's wrong, and even, incomprehensibly, proclaim that he doesn't know what he's talking about, despite his Nobel Prize. But they don't take him on. Not really. Such counterarguments may very well exist somewhere out there, but they've never crossed my path. As far as I can tell, Krugman is like Chomsky in that he pisses people off, but nobody really wants to have a real argument with him.

So, for my money, Krugman's economic analysis stands uncontested and makes the most sense. If you're not reading his books and columns, you really have no idea what's going on.

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