People Before Profit blog

IRS scandal - Deja vu all over again

Fri, 31 May 2013 12:38:00 +0000

Following years during which they did everything possible to attack the president, congressional Republicans launched an attack on the IRS. The media cheerfully picked up on one-sided tales of IRS abuse.

The year was 1998.

Democrat Bill Clinton was in his second term, but the Republicans controlled Congress, and used every opportunity to attack the president. David Cay Johnston, then a New York Times reporter and probably the nation's foremost tax journalist, described what happened: "The taxpayer abuse hearings that Senate Republicans held last week were designed to show that the Internal Revenue Service is out of control. And with tales of tax agents in flak jackets storming houses and forcing teen-age girls to change their clothes at gunpoint not leavened by any testimony from the accused IRS agents, the case seemed overwhelming."

Johnston continued, "But the hearings were just another step in a much larger strategy by Republicans in Congress who have vowed to replace the income tax system with a new tax code" primarily to benefit big corporations and the very rich.

There was another bonus for the Republicans: "Polling has shown the Republicans that attacking the IRS is their most effective tool to win votes in this election year and raise money."

How did it turn out? Congress passed an IRS "reform" that made it harder for the IRS to audit rich people and actually collect the taxes owed by corporations and individuals wealthy enough to hire expensive tax lawyers. While easing up on the rich, the "reform" required more intense auditing of low-income working people who claim the Earned Income Tax Credit.

The result - poor people were more likely to be audited than the rich. In 1999, the year following the "reform," fewer than 1 in 100 wealthy taxpayers were audited - down from 1 in 9 in 1998. Audits of big corporations also fell. But the working poor, who can't afford expensive lawyers, accounted for almost half of all audits.

As an extra bonus, the new law included a retroactive capital gains tax loophole for big investors.

Nobody likes paying taxes. In 1998, the nation's wealthy elite used a few instances, real or imagined, of abuse by the IRS to make it easier for themselves to abuse the system. At the same time, they focused IRS enforcement against ordinary workers. The congressional Republicans also tried to use the IRS "scandal" to their advantage in the 1998 elections by posing as champions of the people against the IRS.

This year's IRS "scandal" is at least as phony as the 1998 version. In both cases, by attacking alleged IRS "abuses," the goal is to prevent the IRS from doing its job.

Since 1998, it has been almost impossible for the IRS to collect much of the taxes owed by wealthy individuals and corporations. This time, the goal is to remove the few existing restrictions on big money buying elections. And of course, there is the political goal of using the phony scandal to distract attention from the real scandal in Congress: the deliberate Republican sabotage of government appointments, economic policy, and health care legislation.

Finally, as in 1998, look for groups and politicians who represent big money to use this "scandal" to cut funds for IRS enforcement and to press for further changes that will shift the tax burden further onto working families.

Photo: Tax Day, April 17, 2012, including the Tax Dodgers and Corporate Loophole cheerleaders, in New York's Garment District. "You pay taxes so we don't have to. We're the Tax Dodgers. We're number 1. And by that we mean we're the 1 percent." Bee Collins CC 2.0

Letter from the heartland: Fried in capitalism's frying pan

Thu, 30 May 2013 15:12:00 +0000

Dear friend,

An early morning ritual around here is to visit the local "meat and three." Men come in three shifts: there's an early early morning crowd that shows up when the door opens at 6 AM. The second shift comes in about 8. The late risers get there about 10.

The faces change but the conversation usually stays the same.

These are mostly retired guys, some former union members, and a sprinkling of Vietnam vets. There is a good bit of bonhomie and a lot of friendly ribbing. You need a pretty thick skin. The largest table there is a round affair and can hold up to 10 people at once.

This is known affectionately as the Liars' Table

The seats here are hard to come by. I've been around here about five years and have only been granted access in the last two. The waitresses take a lot of grief from the habitués. All of it is good-natured fun.

Since most of the guys who come in are older, the talk invariably turns to health issues. And it is over this issue that the group is split. Most really like the president's plan for health care. They see what he's trying to do. And in a town where the union was once robust, they know how important affordable health care can be.

A vocal minority sees Obamacare as just another attempt at government control. They also tend to have much better retirement from jobs worked outside the community. Several of these are transplants.

My heart goes out to the first group. These are guys who were banking on a retirement where they knew health care would be important, but they felt that the union would be able to protect them as they aged. The demise of the factories over a decade ago and the collapse of the union system in the area killed those hopes, however.

They see their wives needing cancer screening, but they can't afford it. They themselves often need oxygen because of COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease), the reward from a life spent smoking, but they can't afford that, either. (Note: We are on the edge of Big Tobacco land here.)

And, so, as they talk of these issues, the frustration and the worry finds expression in their hands as they fiddle with their coffee cups and peer into the black, thick liquid, as if searching for the answer in it.

These men, men who worked hard their whole lives, have been, to paraphrase Frederick Engels, fried in the frying pan of capitalism. Even the lower middle class retirees now see rising health care costs rapidly diminishing their already stretched retirement funds.

Many of these guys faced a political Sophie's Choice in the past two elections. They didn't want to vote for the "black guy." But they also didn't want to vote against their own interests.

It still amazes me, friend, that there are people in the working class who will enter a voting booth and pull a lever for a candidate who doesn't give two hoots about them or their situations.

But I digress.

Concern for one's family still trumps everything else here; who will help if some catastrophic illness arises? The regulars at the Liars' Table argue that the American government stopped being for and by the people years ago, so, while they like Obamacare, they think it will be stopped by corporate greed.

Yet, they cling to the idea that somehow, some way, the collective good and the common weal will overcome. That attitude's perhaps the most attractive feature of this place for me.

Meanwhile, I hope your struggle goes well.

In solidarity,

Charlie M.

Photo: The Liars' Table. (Charles Millson)

Let's give Guantanamo Bay back to Cuba

Thu, 30 May 2013 13:21:00 +0000

When President Obama gave his speech on national security issues on May 23 at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C, one of the topics he focused on was closing the Guantanamo Bay detention center. The interruption of the speech by Medea Benjamin, a co-founder of CODEPINK, brought greater public attention to the issue.

The president recounted a number of problems he faces in order to do so, such as the need for Congressional approval to move the detainees before he could shutter the facility. "As president, I have tried to close Gitmo. I transferred 67 detainees to other countries before Congress imposed restrictions to effectively prevent us from either transferring detainees to other countries or imprisoning them here in the United States. These restrictions make no sense. After all, under President Bush, some 530 detainees were transferred from Gitmo with Congress' support. When I ran for president the first time, John McCain supported closing Gitmo. This was a bipartisan issue."

The president went on to make a vague promise to remove the remaining detainees and close the prison.

Guantanamo will only be closed if there continues to be a broad-based movement that consistently pressures the government to close the prison. This effort is being augmented by the struggle - most notably through their hunger strike - by the detainees to seek justice.

When the detention center is closed it will be a most important step in the worldwide effort to achieve universal human rights. But this closure should be only a first step in a longterm strategy.

What must be done is for the United States to return Guantanamo Bay, with all of its military facilities dismantled, to Cuba, the country from which U.S. imperialists stole it in 1898.

There is no reason for the U.S. to maintain control over territory that belongs to another sovereign nation. Our presence in Guantanamo Bay harks back to the days of "gunboat diplomacy" and running roughshod over the darker-skinned peoples of Latin America, Asia, and Africa.

After the end of the Spanish-American War in 1898 Cuba attained independence from Spain and nominal control over its affairs.

Congress passed the Platt Amendment in 1901 which affirmed the "right" to interfere in Cuba's affairs. One of the pillars of the Amendment was the maintenance of the U.S. Naval Station at Guantanamo Bay. Today it remains the oldest U.S. military installation in a foreign country.

In 1934 the United States and Cuba signed a Treaty of Relations which granted the U.S, government a "perpetual" lease over the area. Over time, officials have claimed that the base ensured the security of the Caribbean basin, served as a calling station for ships, and protected the sea lanes to and from the Panama Canal.

With the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959 the new government has repeatedly demanded that the United States return Guantanamo Bay, which all presidents since Dwight Eisenhower have refused to do.

Some 54 years have passed since Fidel Castro led the Cuban people to victory. The best way to move beyond the aims of the Cold Warriors is for the United States to make a complete revision of its policies toward Cuba.

This can be done in three major steps: 1) Re-establish full diplomatic relations; 2) the U.S. government end the economic blockade and all travel restrictions; and 3) the United States return Guantanamo Bay to its rightful owners.

It was wrong to steal Guantanamo Bay in 1898; it is wrong today. It is time to give Guantanamo Bay back to Cuba.

Photo: CC

Obama's anti-terrorism speech: Making perfect enemy of good

Wed, 29 May 2013 12:38:00 +0000

Pieces like Glenn Greenwald's long-winded dismissal of President Obama's anti-terrorism speech explain to me why a substantial section of the left is not yet fit to govern, or to lead majorities of Americans; why some feet are firmly planted in mid-air.

His recent Guardian article "Obama's terrorism speech: seeing what you want to see" reminds me a bit of my 21-month old granddaughter's disdain of broccoli and love of mac and cheese. Her dislike of broccoli - even seeing it - is so fierce, she won't even touch the mac and cheese until the broccoli is removed from her plate.

Total disarmament is Greenwald's mac and cheese and like my granddaughter, he won't touch anything else: unless Obama removes all else from the plate and in this case an immediate ceasing of all imperial entanglements.

Greenwald couches his dismissal in terms of the gap between the president's words and deeds: "But whatever else is true, what should be beyond dispute at this point is that Obama's speeches have very little to do with Obama's actions, except to the extent that they often signal what he intends not to do."

Thus Obama's speech is just an effort to fool us. There is no mac and cheese, and perhaps only the illusion of broccoli.

Likewise, I have been reading Carl Sandburg's "Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and The War Years" and note the volumes of calumny heaped - by not a few anti-slavery forces - upon that president's tireless attention to dividing the secessionists and grasping the threads that could unravel the powerful Southern combinations of disunion and slavery.

Even so, the price of victory - otherwise highly in doubt had the border states and Northern Democrats not been neutralized from aligning with the Confederacy - was 650,000 American lives.

In hindsight, how do we judge Lincoln's choices of "moderate" forces supporting the Union and opposing the extension of slavery like Montgomery Blair, Edward Bates, etc., who sat in his cabinet, over outright abolitionists Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner? I reckon it was the right decision - but is it the kind of strategic and tactical thinking that modern left forces can embrace?

Perhaps ideological debate, like much else in nature, must also follow some bell-shaped curve.

Maybe, there must always be fringes where the perfect remains the enemy of the good; where an olive-branch on ending the war on terror - a high risk proposition, politically, for Obama - is rejected as an enemy conspiracy rather than seized on and developed for all its worth; where Obamacare - the only doorway to universal coverage in our nation's history - is rejected by some because of its inferiority to Medicare for all.

On the other hand, the tendency "to make the perfect the enemy of the good", while a often a fatal weakness when putting together a sufficiently powerful political coalition to actually make change, may still have some value.

It's true that "the good" must always be open to inspection. Is it really "good"? Can the "good" be made better? Valid questions. Still, the big challenge for the left in the U.S. is to get out of the bleachers and on to the field, out of marginalization and in power, out of the far end of the bell curve of working-class politics.

Photo: President Barack Obama holds a National Security Council meeting in the Situation Room of the White House, April 5. (White House/Pete Souza)

Obama and the right’s “brave new world”

Thu, 23 May 2013 22:38:00 +0000

Political pundits seem to agree that the past couple of weeks haven't been kind to the Obama administration. First, the controversy around the administration's handling of the terrorist attack in Benghazi resurfaced. Then the story broke that the IRS has allegedly been targeting tea party organizations applying for special tax exempt status. And finally an uproar greeted the Justice Department's sweeping subpoena of Associated Press journalists' phone records.

No matter what you think about the merits of these stories, they will evidently dominate the national conversation and business of Washington for a while.

And no one is happier than the right wing in Congress, in the media, and across the country.

Last fall, the right had hoped that a combination of a faltering economy, the tragic deaths of diplomatic personal in Libya at the hands of terrorists, and its bottomless pockets for funding negative attack ads would diminish Obama's standing enough to catapult Mitt Romney into the White House and secure Republican control of Congress. But that didn't happen, leaving the Republican Party leadership divided, its grassroots base dispirited, and its political posture much the same as it had been since 2008 - blocking Obama's initiatives for another four years.

But now, with the breaking stories over the past weeks, its leadership is speaking with a single voice; its grassroots base is energized and itching for a battle; and its political ambitions go well beyond just obstructing the president.

In the weeks to come, expect to hear ad nauseam that an administration that came into Washington touting transparency and good governance is out of control, guilty of overreach, disdainful of constitutional rights and freedoms, and disposed to manipulating and managing the news.

Count on tendentious comparisons of the Obama White House to the Nixon White House by the likes of Bob Woodward, Peggy Noonan, Bill Keller, and other big-name journalists.

Expect congressional subpoenas and calls for impeachment, special prosecutors, and mass resignations.

Expect stiffer opposition to the president's appointments to key Cabinet positions and the Supreme Court if a vacancy opens up.

Plan on hostile opposition to the president's use of executive power to address issues such as climate change.

Anticipate intensified efforts to de-legitimize and overturn Obamacare. The House will repeal it once again and more states will take steps to nullify its provisions.

Prepare for new pressures to roll back taxes on the rich and earned income benefit programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid in the name of getting an intrusive and oversized government out of the economy and off people's backs.

Expect initiatives to control gun violence, mitigate global warming, and rebuild the national infrastructure to be ridiculed as more evidence of an overreaching White House.

The endgame of this unfolding demagogic campaign goes beyond fatally crippling the Obama presidency in its second term. Its overarching aim is to ride an election wave of popular discontent with the Obama administration to regain control of Congress in 2014, win the presidency in 2016, and extend the right-wing Republican grip on state governments and the U.S. Supreme Court.

This would constitute a formidable concentration of anti-democratic authoritarian power.

Keep in mind this power bloc has the support of a deeply reactionary and racist populist constituency that disciplines wavering Republicans and mobilizes mass support for political extremism. While millions welcomed the election of the first African American president, to this constituency it represented a threatening fundamental reordering of society and social relations, and thus recast subsequent political struggles as a life and death battle over "a way of life" that in reality is rooted in racial subordination.

What this concentration of right-wing extremist political power might do if it gains dominance over the institutions of government is no longer a matter of conjecture. Glimpses of this "brave new world" are offered by the governing record of states where Republicans are in control. It isn't pretty if you believe in democracy, equality, fairness, transparency, and broadly shared prosperity.

Union rights have been gutted. Progressive income taxes have been eliminated, while taxes on low-income people have increased. Roe v. Wade has been effectively hollowed out. Emergency managers with dictatorial powers have been appointed to impose a regime of stark austerity on crisis-ridden cities, many of which have an African American majority. Public services have been drastically de-funded and privatized. Voter rights have been restricted. Punitive laws on immigrants have been enacted. Implementation of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) has been resisted, even though the costs will be borne by the federal government. A "regulation-free" environment for corporations has been created. Opposition to marriage equality has been fanned. And on and on!

Thus it is fair to say that right-wing extremism would employ its control over the main levers of power at the national level to recast the structures and role of government, economy, culture, and society in an anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian, anti-working-class, authoritarian direction.

Now I'm not implying that the Obama administration should be given a pass on issues that are currently roiling Washington. (Although, from what I can see - except for the subpoenaing of journalist phone calls, which is not only a problem in itself, but also part of a broader pattern of the executive branch assuming wide-ranging and unprecedented powers in the name of national security - much of the culpability of the Obama administration in these controversies is a right-wing invention.) Nor should it be given a pass on issues, like jobs, immigration, inequality, gun violence, climate change, military spending and foreign policy, constitutional, and democratic liberties, climate change, etc., that are agitating millions of Americans.

But what I am saying is that the broader movement, in its zeal to address the administration's missteps, mistaken positions, and tendency to compromise before the battle is joined, can't lose sight of the larger danger to democracy and democratic institutions presented by a resurgent right at this moment.

Photo: Flickr (CC)

Letter from the heartland: Silent factories, human pain

Thu, 23 May 2013 19:02:00 +0000

Dear friend,

After a week's vacation, I'm back now to rural Tennessee.

Forgive my sarcasm, but nothing's changed here in a week. The high unemployment, the paycheck-to-paycheck population of the area, and the increasing incidence of spousal abuse, teen pregnancy and drug use (prescription and otherwise) still dominate daily life.

We see this far too often in the clientele at the local food bank we operate in our small town.

Up until a decade ago, a mobile home manufacturer ran two large plants here. They operated 24/7, and they provided a decent living for the workers of the area.

But cutbacks and corporate greed won out over taking care of the laborers. Both plants are silent now, yet, even today, they display fading painted aluminum signs that still boast of the worker productivity over the years.

No, the workers did their parts.

It was the greed of the corporation that moved the factory elsewhere, somewhere it didn't have a union and didn't have to pay workers a decent wage.

Now, around here, as unemployment sits around 25 percent, there's nothing much to do except have babies you can't afford to feed or care for, and then do drugs to forget you can't care for your family.

Guys who've been taught by this culture that showing emotion or not taking care of your family are sure signs of weakness often take out their inability to express frustration by battering the closest thing to them - usually a "significant other" or a child.

In a decidedly Red State, you'd think the churches would step in and help.

Nope.

The middle class dresses up on Sundays and fills the pews; the poor, by and large, don't go to church. One local pastor remarked, "We'd like to help them folks, but they gotta help themselves."

He said this to me from the window of his new pickup truck as he "defended" his church's decision to not be a part of our food bank collaboration.

It seems the churches around here only help those who can put something in the collection plate every week ... and completely miss the irony.

My apologies: it's not all doom and gloom, my friend. To be fair, some local religious groups practice the Social Gospel, believing that we should imitate the book of Acts when it describes the early church members "selling what they had and sharing with the poor."

These groups believe that the early church "had all things common," as Acts says, and that we, too, should imitate that early form of socialism and follow the example of Jesus who fed the hungry, helped the sick, comforted the sorrowful.

But I'm preaching. You probably know this already.

I promise my next letter will be more upbeat.

Until then, I hope your struggle goes well.

In solidarity,

Charlie M.

Photo: A shuttered plant in rural Tennessee. Charles Millson

MOOCs heralded as free online education, but how free is free?

Tue, 21 May 2013 01:36:00 +0000

MOOCs have been a heated subject of media attention lately, even attracting controversy in California's educational system. In theory, these large-scale free online courses (often featuring star professors from blue-ribbon universities) sound like an excellent opportunity for any person wishing to study subjects for no cost on their own. With the barriers of tuition and distance to conventional education, alternative, democratic and accessible ways of continuing studies through MOOCs, delivered online via YouTube or other websites, can seem like a dream come true. Meanwhile, the increasing difficulty for degree-seeking students of getting into required classes in many colleges, due to education cutbacks and shortages, likewise makes the choice to take a for-credit class that accepts unlimited students an appealing alternative.

So what is a MOOC? MOOC stands for Massive Open Online Course and is a form of online learning. Online learning is nothing new - free non-credit courses in several subjects have been offered by different instructors and companies on the web for some time now. Also, colleges have offered their own online for-credit courses taught by instructors employed by the college for their own enrolled student body.

What makes the MOOC different is that it is a program created by an outside vendor who licenses its courses to the university, who then offers them as part of their curriculum in a public-private partnership. The courses are taught by a videotaped instructor who is often part of another college, with the coursework and discussion guided by a teaching assistant contracted by the university, at a much cheaper rate than regular faculty. Corporations such as Coursera, Udacity, edX, Udemy and others have already contracted with universities (Duke, MIT, University of Michigan, and San Jose State University among them) to offer courses.

Increasingly the conversation is revolving around whether these courses are rigorous enough to be taken for college credit, how this would displace traditional faculty, and whether this "democratic" method of accessing education would mostly fall on working-class students, with wealthy students still getting personal attention in small classrooms with an instructor.

Five courses from Coursera have been granted for-credit status recently and college faculty have begun sounding the alarm about the effect this will have on students. MOOCs are notorious for a low completion rate (85 percent - 95 percent of students drop out or fail MOOCs), low instructional contact, and requiring fees (up to $90-$99) to enroll in these courses.

The New York Times reports: "Coursera recently announced another route to help students earn credit for its courses - and produce revenue. The company has arranged for the American Council on Education, the umbrella group of higher education, to have subject experts assess whether several courses are worthy of transfer credits. If the experts say they are, students who successfully complete those courses could take an identity-verified proctored exam, pay a fee and get an ACE Credit transcript, a certification that 2,000 universities already accept for credit.

"Under Coursera's contracts, the company gets most of the revenue; the universities keep 6 percent to 15 percent of the revenue, and 20 percent of gross profits. The contracts describe several monetizing possibilities, including charging for extras like manual grading or tutoring."

Faculty at California's San Jose State University recently issued a letter from their union, the California Faculty Association, stating their refusal to use MOOC course material. Included was a ringing criticism that goes to the heart of the discussion of student access to education:

"In an environment where faculty are constantly reminded that fewer resources for public universities are available, CFA is disturbed that President Qayoumi is not actively lobbying Sacramento and Silicon Valley venture capitalists for more public funding of education. The people with whom he associates, members of the Silicon Valley elite, are the very people who have succeeded in privatizing the wealth generated by our society and making the rules that reduce their tax obligations to California. The partnerships with Udacity and edX will put more tax dollars into the pockets of the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and at the expense of the State's taxpayers."

Public college education in California used to be free to students. Universities in California offering accessible education were one of the main reasons Silicon Valley gained prominence as a locus of technological advancement and high profits. Companies that took advantage of this resource are now using loopholes in tax codes to avoid paying taxes to support public university education.

The growing wealth disparity in Silicon Valley points to a divide between the educated class of tech workers and working families seeing their own resources shrink. Dangling a "solution" like MOOCs for low-income students relying on public universities to attain degrees and well-paying jobs is predatory. Educational parity should begin with extracting, via taxes, the wealth of the region to fund accessible public education. MOOCs are corporations offering a bait-and-switch educational rental program in hopes of absorbing even more public money.

Of rhinos and candidates

Thu, 16 May 2013 20:37:00 +0000

People's World's Blake Deppe tells us the sad story of the extinction of the western black rhinoceros at the hands of humans, who erroneously believe that rhino horn is a medical miracle cure. The good news is that the black rhino (not to be confused with the western black rhino, a distinct subspecies) survives in other parts of its range, though, like the other four species of rhinos in existence today (the "white" rhino in Africa, and the Indian, Javan and Sumatran rhinos in Asia), it is highly endangered.

Readers may be interested to know that a female black rhinoceros played an important part in the struggle to clean up corrupt elections in São Paulo, Brazil, in 1958.

The rhino, named Cacareco, had been transferred to the São Paulo zoo from one in Rio de Janeiro the year before, so had been in the news. At only five years of age, she was full grown and said to be friendly and well-behaved, for a rhinoceros. A photo shows children petting her through a fence, a kind of interaction not really recommended with rhinos wild or tame.

They tend to be grumpy creatures; an early childhood experience on my part was that of being soaked from head to toe by the urine of a black rhinoceros in the Pretoria Zoo in South Africa, from a distance of about 10 feet. The urine smelled vile, but I was more upset by the rude laughter from the other people present.

[Zoological-linguistic note: White rhinos (Ceratotherium cimum) and black rhinos (Diceros bicornis) are really about the same color, namely gray. The "white" rhino got its name because it has a "wide" mouth for eating grass, pronounced, in Dutch and Afrikaans, like English "white," while the "black" one has a sort of pointed upper lip for nibbling the shrubbery. In other words, the black rhino is only called such because it is not "white." This makes me suspect that these names were invented by white people in South Africa, where, in the bad old days, such a language mix-up could have had political implications, such as separate wild game reserves for the white and black species.]

But I digress; back to São Paulo in 1958. It happened that there were municipal elections just at that point, and the public was more than usually turned off by the venality and opportunism of the candidates. So someone got the idea of running Cacareco the rhinoceros as a candidate.

Electoral officials refused to recognize the candidacy, perhaps because Cacareco was only five years old at the time. Nevertheless, the gentle beast got more votes than any other candidate, at around 100,000.

This raucous insult to the political establishment so annoyed the latter that they sent Cacareco back to the Rio de Janeiro zoo, where she died only a few years later.

So inspiring was Cacareco's feat that satirical knaves in Canada imitated it with another black rhinoceros, Cornelius the First, who ran in several Canadian elections. I don't know if Cornelius is still alive, but he fathered a son in 2003, an important contribution to the survival of his endangered species.

In U.S. political jargon, a RINO is a "Republican in Name Only" - that is, one who is not absolutely stark raving mad.

Photo: Black rhinos roam in Tanzania's Ngorongoro Crater. (CC)

Science of happiness - and the April jobs report

Wed, 15 May 2013 19:53:00 +0000

According to a recent global report, drawing on the emerging science of happiness, a number of countries, including the UK, most of northern Europe, and Australia, among others, are making the subjective well-being of their citizens a mandatory part of their national statistics.

There are two broad measurements of happiness: first, the ups and downs of daily emotions, and second, an individual's overall evaluation of life. The former is sometimes called "affective happiness," and the latter "evaluative happiness."

If you filled out a form rating your short-range or overall happiness in various contexts, on a scale from 1 to 10, that would be a "subjective well-being" census.

Now, one might object that such a poll could be of questionable value making comparisons from country to country, culture to culture, rich to poor nations, language to language, class to class, etc. However, when these surveys are integrated with objective statistical historical data on income, disease, mortality, education, mental illness, education, crime, work satisfaction, divorce, etc., etc., the well-being surveys reveal a lot of human-wide correlations about where society can make investments, and where it is currently wasting resources that improve overall happiness.

Not surprisingly, the same skeptics who doubt climate change, because they can't imagine everyone is not cooking statistics in the manner they do, are throwing rocks at happiness research. Some are determined to strangle the emergence of a "happiness program" in its cradle. After all, the science of happiness is looking quite pink in its socialistic consequences.

Contrary to many cultures, the pursuit of happiness in the U.S. has been primarily, certainly through much of mass media, viewed as an individual "inalienable right," more than a social one. However, research summarized in the links above show there are strong countervailing cooperative, community, social, and team components to subjective well-being in surveys. The data is treasonable in the views of some since it shows people are happy in systems with robust universal health care, retirement, and education systems.

For example, in the U.S., increments in income above $300,000 a year provide negligible increments in happiness. If you capped money income at that level, you might have to devise some new ways to mobilize the huge sums of capital required for "moving mountain" type projects, but no one, even the rich, even CEOs, would be any less happy.

Further If the minimum income could approach $50,000, our traditional paradigm of unhappiness based on want or poverty would evaporate. It would be a true cultural revolution - since both our collective and individual aspirations and fears would be reset to a new universe of possibilities.

In our current happiness/unhappiness paradigm, research shows every dollar under $50,000 in annual income is a direct increment in misery.

Approaching and beyond $50K in income, household income still counts as important for life satisfaction, but it does so only in an increasingly limited way. Other things matter as much, or more:

community trust, fostering cooperation and service to each other;
mental and physical health;
the quality of governance and rule of law.

Raising incomes can raise happiness, especially in poor societies, but it is no accident that the happiest countries in the world tend to be high-income countries that also have a high degree of social equality, trust, and quality of governance. In recent years, Denmark, with its largely socialized medical system, high levels of education, and socialized retirement tops the list of happy countries in the GNH index. And it's no accident that the U.S., despite its great wealth, has experienced no rise of life satisfaction for half a century, a period in which inequality has soared, social trust has declined, class conflict increased, and the public is losing faith in its corrupted democratic institutions.

Which brings us to the latest jobs report from the Department of Labor and the latest picture of the U.S. economy's recovery. It's not in the direction of happiness, at least not any dimension the new science of happiness can detect. Graphs from the Washington Post tell the following "recovery" story:

Of the sectors of our economy that have exceeded 2008 pre-depression level, the increasing jobs are overwhelmingly concentrated in occupations requiring a college education and occupations at the bottom of the pay scale: health, education and professional services, leisure and hospitality. The one clear "middle class" (near median income) occupation that has recovered is shale gas exploration (fracking).
Most occupations with near median pay and benefits - in manufacturing, information technology, government, and non-durable goods - are either still in the trough of depression, or even declining. The latter is mainly government - the ONE area where public policy could make a big difference!
Workforce participation has not improved at all - currently at 63 percent of the working age population. Early retirements, a swell of SSI disability claims and youth not moving out of home testify that the depression is far from over.
The recovery trends in the April jobs report portend increases, not decreases, in the growth of inequality. That sets the stage for the next crisis, which will come long before recovery from this one.

An ancient Buddhist proverb says: "You've got to go with the grain, you've got to go with the narrative; the storyline. The storyline is written by history, not by your own 'I want.'"

It's partly true. Happiness is only possible within the grain of history - the outlines of the narrative are all around us - but we get to decide the end of the story. And, lo and behold, the grain can change! We all get a decent job - and life for the multitudes is transformed.

Photo: Flickr (CC)

Google Glass: Vision for the future, or the eyes of Big Brother?

Wed, 15 May 2013 18:20:00 +0000

For someone who grew up in the 90's - the era of VHS and dialup Internet - today's tech still takes getting used to. It's worth noting how much new social technologies have changed things; airliners and movie theaters must now warn us to shut our devices off, people who ride the subway are more often buried in their cellphones than a book, and a quick Google search gives us the answers to most questions. Immediate information is at our fingertips, and that's a huge plus. On the down side, the details of anyone's life are up for grabs, and true privacy is hard to come by in a public setting, where iPhone cameras snap pictures left and right. Google Glass is sure to take this even further.

The most apt description that can be given of Google Glass is that it is a wearable computer, with all the capabilities of a cellphone and more. However, it comes without any keyboard, and the screen is essentially the lenses themselves. A small touchpad on the side of the headset allows the wearer to perform basic tasks, but for all intents and purposes, Glass is a technological extension of the human body - or so Google would like us to believe. Indeed, common tasks like sending a text message are done merely by speaking.

Writer Keith Collins explained of the process, "A man sitting alone at his kitchen table pauses after eating breakfast. 'Meet me in front of Strand Books at 2,' he says aloud, then takes a bite out of his sandwich. It is not a condition of the mind that has this man speaking to a person who isn't there. It is a text message. The words the man has spoken now appear before him in the device's lens. As he eats, he sees the message float away to his friend."

Gene Roddenberry couldn't have come up with a more futuristic scenario.

And yet, this is all going to be available within months - and will most likely be commonplace in a few years. The device will snap a photo of anything your eyes can see - just give it the command: "Ok, Glass: take a photo!" Shy about speaking aloud in public? A simple head gesture will also do the trick. There's already an app being developed for Glass that will let you snap a pic with a quick wink. This will fundamentally change the way we live our lives, and for many, it may underscore a need to rewrite the tenets of civil liberties and privacy policies. It will even pose some tough ethical dilemmas.

Developed by Google's X Lab, which has worked on other ambitious projects, such as driverless cars, Glass will have augmented reality capabilites (integrating computer-generated imagery with what you see in the real world), and it may even come in prescription lenses.

Privacy concerns are at an all-time high. Though Glass has not yet been shipped out to stores en masse, it has already been pre-emptively banned at bars, cafes, and casinos. The worry is that others will not be able to enjoy their day in peace when a Glass-wearer could snap a picture of them on a whim, or even film them, and share it on Facebook seconds later. In a Wi-Fi hotspot, Glass could even upload the video immediately to YouTube. The slightly intoxicated man beside you at the bar could unwittingly become the next big Internet sensation, and there's nothing he could do about it.

While Google's chief executive, Eric Schmidt, maintains that "if you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place," others believe that they have the right to say whether or not their faces end up in a social network's news feed.

It's an odd issue. On one hand, the features that Google Glass will have are tempting and even beneficial, and on the other, they can be invasive and distracting.

Glass will let you chat on Skype - without the webcam, or, for that matter, the traditional computer. You'll be able to see and speak with your friend on the heads-up display as you mow the lawn or walk your dog. You can also show them what you're looking at during the conversation. You can trace Google Maps along the street you're actually walking on, allowing it to be your guide as you move. You can translate any language on the spot. And, though Google hasn't announced television capabilites yet, you can be certain that you'll be able to catch that latest episode of Game of Thrones right in your lenses while you have lunch.

The concerns don't end with meltdowns over privacy. Glass could cause countless accidents if you happen to be wearing it while driving. Text messages alone have caused numerous deaths on the road; Glass will take that to the next extreme. The question is, what can be done to enforce driving Glass-free? Will police be pulling over people who wear normal glasses, just to 'make sure?' Or will someone be liking statuses on Facebook while tailgaiting a school bus?

In terms of the progressive movement, Glass might revolutionize the struggle. A civil disobedience act or protest could go live seconds after the fact. A Mitt Romney-type "47 percent" remark will be exposed in a heartbeat. Through responsible usage, working people will be brought even closer together by what Glass has to offer. But the increasing accidents and privacy issues that social networks and smartphones have already presented can serve as a cautionary tale.

There's no easy solution, but the motto we must live by, perhaps, might end up being: "With great glasses, comes great responsibility."

Photo: Antonio Zugaldia/Wikipedia

IRS "scandal" may not be so scandalous after all

Tue, 14 May 2013 23:14:00 +0000

One of the numerous "scandal" stories in the news this week is the revelation that the IRS supposedly "targeted" conservative political groups for special attention and tax audits.

The notion that the IRS would target any political organization for special audits in order to crush opposition to the administration is a scary one indeed.

I was active in the antiwar and then the Nixon impeachment movements when former President Nixon drew up his infamous "enemies list."

Much more recently, we all remember how Karl Rove made a list of U.S. attorneys who would not go along with his fake "voter fraud" schemes, and then proceeded to get the Justice Department to fire them.

From what I can tell so far, and this can always change as new information becomes available, the so-called IRS "scandal" is not at all analogous to the Nixon or Rove enemy lists.

First, we need to remember that for a long time now, groups with the 501( c ) tax status that are social welfare organizations have been tax exempt and haven't had to report the names of their donors. All the IRS has had to do is ensure that such groups really meet the criteria for "social welfare" groups and everything is OK. IRS guidelines permit an organization that helps jobless people find jobs or one that raises money to buy sporting events tickets for poor children, for example, to qualify.

Then came the Supreme Court with its Citizens United decision allowing Karl Rove to set up his political 501( c ) 4 groups that could call themselves "social welfare" groups but, unlike officially political organizations, keep their donors secret and remain tax exempt. So an ad that said the way to keep quality health care in America was to dump Obama was no longer "political" but rather advocacy for social welfare.

The High Court ruling, for the nation, meant corporations could buy elections in secret and pay no taxes. For the IRS, which is legally bound to determine whether groups that claim the tax exemption, and the mantle of secrecy regarding their donors, really deserve that status, the job has become tougher.

An IRS trying to determine whether the Rove groups were true "social welfare" organizations entitled to keep secret their donors and remain tax exempt amounts to a federal agency doing its mandated job. It has nothing in common with the government going after political enemies, as with Nixon or Rove during the Bush years.

One could argue, and I would agree, that if the IRS has looked only at right-wing groups we might have a scandal. This has not yet been determined. There has been no investigation by the Obama administration, Congress or any credible body yet that could allow that determination to be made. Until then, why are we hearing about a "scandal"?

The real scandal is the one behind this "scandal": Since Citizens United, wealthy individuals, groups and corporations have been allowed to manipulate and determine political outcomes in our electoral system without disclosing themselves or their donors.

The only reason the IRS is even involved in any of this is because the law requires it to be involved when the source of donors behind a group is not transparent enough to make it obvious that the group actually deserves the exemptions or special treatment it is getting.

If the Karl Rove groups, the tea party groups or any of the others that have been looked at by the IRS had disclosed the names of their donors and conducted all their other business out in the open, where election business is supposed to be conducted, and if overtly political groups stopped masquerading as "social welfare" groups, the IRS would have no business looking at them at all. There would be no "scandal."

Photo: Union workers and NAACP members at a rally and march from the offices of Koch Industries to United Nations headquarters, Dec. 10, in New York. (Mary Altaffer/AP)

Letter from Puerto Rico: A workers' commune flourishes

Tue, 14 May 2013 20:33:00 +0000

Dear friend,

A quick note to tell you about my recent trip to Puerto Rico. Great weather and an even better experience interacting with some fellow workers on the western coast of the island.

In the sleepy village where we stayed, we heard stories of a "fishing commune" nearby. That description demanded that we investigate.

Sure enough, it was as described. We came upon the long, low block building at the same time the old, wooden, heavy, brightly painted fishing boats came ashore with the day's catch. We spoke at length with one of the men who helped carry the red snapper, shark, and other fish from the boats to the building for processing.

His name was Angel. He was tall and thin, with thick, dark hair and expressive hands. He spoke in halting English, but his simple words carried profound truths and should be held up to others as the Way things should be done.

No slavery, he said first. Then, as he saw our interest grow, his bold words did too. No working for some wealthy and lazy owner's profit, he said. Instead, Angel explained, a person is happy to work because the labor comes from, as he put it, "a free place."

And, as he said this, the tanned worker grinned broadly and pointed to his chest.

We saw what he meant. We saw cheerful workers who take great pride in their labors, who share in the profits and in the work. Maintenance of building and boats, net fishing for bait, cleaning and selling are all parts of the labor that each man and boy does and does happily. To paraphrase Marx, there are no class differences because everybody works.

Amazing, isn't it? Who knew that such a flourishing community could and does exist in a land that flies the Stars and Stripes?

Wanted to share this with you.

Hope your struggle goes well.

In solidarity,

Charlie M.

Photo: A fishing boat on the beach at the fishing commune near Rincon, Puerto Rico. Charles Millson

Chris Hayes’ “Twilight of the Elites” explodes meritocracy myth

Fri, 10 May 2013 22:11:00 +0000

The single greatest myth in what many call "the American Dream" is the notion that, by dint of hard work and the right set of moral principles, anyone can rise to the top of the heap. Worshippers at this shrine of "self-advancement" - unlike folks in Europe, in particular, where social mobility is recognized as a fiction papered over a reality little changed since feudalism - have only to point to tycoons like Andrew Carnegie, a working class immigrant, and politicians like Barack Obama, the African American son of an abandoned mother. They would have us believe that the exception proves the rule. If one can do it, all can do it.

Quite aside from the mathematical impossibility of the social mobility fairy-tale actually coming true for most of us is the saga of what typically happens to the personalities and values of those who rise from humble beginnings to great heights of wealth or power. It is the sociology and psychology of this particular group in society that journalist and MSNBC talk show host Christopher Hayes chooses to examine in "Twilight of the Elites."

"Meritocracy" (or rule by "the best and the brightest") is a central tenet of the classical, liberal democracy which replaced hereditary rule (generations of inbred bleeders and imbeciles) during the last hundred years. The term itself is only about 75 years old, coined in England, where increasing numbers of working class traitors were willing to be made well-paid toadies of the ruling class.

Citing catchy axioms like "Gresham's law" and Robert Michels' "Iron law of oligarchy," Hayes dissects with vivid detail the increasingly dysfunctional role of elites in later-day capitalism.

Elites are roundly despised by the public. Hayes suggests that the tea party and Occupy Wall Street have more in common than might first appear. Both hate the smug righteousness and overweening arrogance of groups of people who for their whole life have been told that they are smarter and better than the rest of us and are now making a mess of everything.

From self-serving management in banks and energy companies to sports figures juiced on performance drugs to politicos beholden to special interests, Hayes' treatment of corruption and its causes and symptoms fills a whole chapter entitled "Moral Hazards."

Hayes closes the book with praise for the Occupy Wall Street movement and its stumbling first steps toward truly democratic, even utopian, self-organization.

Unfortunately, his economic analysis goes little further than the popular but superficial 99 to one percent contradiction that became the Occupy slogan.

The critical mechanism of "exploitation" so central to a meaningful, class-based analysis is completely absent.

A far more succinct critique of "meritocracy" can be found in the Wikipedia entry for "Horatio Alger myth," but for a detailed and engrossing description of what it is like to live inside an "elite" and watch it fail and bring down a whole society around it, "Twilight of the Elites" is the best read to come along in quite a while. Hopefully it will become as popular as the seminal and now classic "The Power Elite" and "White Collar, the American Middle Classes" by C. Wright Mills.

"Twilight of the Elites"

by Christopher Hayes

2012, Random House, hardcover, 304 pages, $26

Fascism defeated 68 years ago; will it return?

Fri, 10 May 2013 18:29:00 +0000

On May 8 and 9, 1945, the world celebrated the end of the Second World War. Since then, VE (Victory in Europe) Day has been celebrated by scores of countries, in Russia on May 9 and in Western Europe on May 8.

On May 7, Germany signed surrender documents. Italy had already switched sides in the war in 1943. Italy and Germany's minor allies had long since gone under. Only Japan fought on, finally surrendering on September 2, 1945.

The May 7 surrender documented was signed in Berlin by Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, Admiral Hans-Georg von Friedeburg and Colonel-General Hans-Jürgen Stumpff for Germany, Soviet Marshal Georgy Zhukov for the USSR, Air Chief Marshal William Tedder for the British, General Carl Spaatz for the United States, and General Jean de Lattre de Tasigny for France.

Of the western allied generals signing, all were major figures with strong military records, but their battlefield achievements were dwarfed by those of Marshal Zhukov and of the Soviet armed forces in general. All serious historians today credit the soldiers, sailors and pilots of the U.S.S.R., as well as its civilian population, of having bourn the greatest suffering and struck the greatest blows by far in the titanic struggle that ended on that day.

Almost as soon as the war was over, however, the ruling classes of the capitalist countries, especially the United States, began a campaign to falsify the history of those events and diminish the role of the Soviet fighters. At the same time, even while various European countries, including both parts of Germany, began "denazification programs", the United States quietly allowed numerous fascists from Germany and its former allies to slip into this country, with some even being brought into highly sensitive scientific and military operations now aimed at our former ally, the U.S.S.R.

With the founding of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1949, a secretive rapprochement between Western military and political officials and European fascism took another form, namely the NATO "stay behind" organizations whose ostensible purpose was to organize resistance against an imaginary future Soviet invasion of Western Europe. These links between NATO structures and local fascists caused serious problems in Italy and elsewhere, and were deeply involved in the overthrow of the government of Greece and the military dictatorship which ruled that country from 1967 to 1974. It is not coincidental that Greece had been a military dictatorship going into World War II and had never undergone thorough "denazification" afterward, nor that the U.K. and the United States had aided a process whereby former collaborators of the Germans were integrated into the government, police and military structures involved in suppressing the Greek communists after World War II.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union and Eastern European socialism in 1987-1991, fascism began to make a comeback in all of Europe. In many cases, fascists posed as the victims of "communist persecution" in order to gain public sympathy and to retrieve confiscated property.

Then came the fiscal and economic crisis of 2008 and the recession and hard times that have followed. In country after country, old or new fascist groups have tried to take advantage of the economic distress, social disruption and ideological

In several European countries, the political parties that have alternated in power in recent decades -conservatives and social democrats - have not been able to come up with solutions either to the crisis or, especially, to the demands for austerity that are being imposed by international monopoly capital through the International Monetary Fund, the European Union and the European Central Bank. So conservative governments in power have been thrown out by the voters and replaced by social democratic ones, who have in turn failed to deal creatively with the crisis and have been tossed out by the voters and replaced by the conservatives.

In this situation, the communist parties and others on the left have made some electoral and other advances by holding fast to an anti-austerity line which calls for the conditions created by the capitalists to be resolved at the expense of capital and not of labor. However, these advances are in most cases not quantitatively sufficient to hold a promise of state power any time soon.

So the danger is obvious, that resurgent fascism may rush into this opening with bogus remedies involving the scapegoating of immigrants, Muslims, Jews, other ethnic or national minorities. They also take advantage of widespread disillusionment with the European Union and the Euro currency, but present no solutions other than inflated rhetoric and thuggish attacks on minorities and immigrants.

This is happening in France with Marine LePen's National Front, in Hungary with Jobbik, in Greece with Golden Dawn, in Spain with España2000, in Italy with the Northern League, in Ukraine with Svoboda, in Belgium with Vlaams Belang, and many others. In some cases, the fascist history behind these movements is toned down for public consumption but in others, it is shouted from the rooftops, as in Latvia and Estonia.

These fascist movements are not quite ready to grab state power, if only because the "respectable" conservative capitalist parties have shown themselves adept at coopting the anti-immigrant and jingoistic-nationalist rhetoric and policies of the fascists. But the move to the right of these so called "responsible" bourgeois politicians feeds the fascist beast also.

What applies to Europe goes double for the United States. Since we were on the winning side in World War II, we never had a "denazification" program here. But if we had, we would have been forced to recognize that both international and native fascist tendencies have struck deep roots in our country also. Racism, anti-immigrant agitation, gay-bashing and such like are the functional equivalents in the United States of the fascist agitation in Europe.

Like the Europeans, we must maintain ourselves vigilant and mobilized so that what was gained in 1945 is not lost to us today.

Photo: An image demonstrating an opposition to Nazism upon the side of a building in Oslo, Norway. Flickr (CC)

Remembering Slayer guitarist Jeff Hanneman

Fri, 10 May 2013 17:54:00 +0000

There's a tradition that even older music fans are familiar with: the rock 'n' roll lifestyle is about living fast and being reckless. It's always been all about the intensity of the music; for many rockers, health concerns have always been put on the back burner. It's just one reason why so many musicians have died before their time - from Elvis Presley, Jimi Hendrix, and Jim Morrison to Kurt Cobain, Layne Staley, and Ronnie James Dio. Heavy metal takes that lifestyle to the next extreme, and unfortunately for grieving fans, one more name has been added to that list of lost legends: Slayer's Jeff Hanneman.

Slayer, at least in the states, is a thrash metal band known even to those outside of the metal scene. Their fame is perhaps second only to Metallica, or Black Sabbath. First formed in Huntington Park, California in 1981, Slayer helped to push aggressive metal into the mainstream and unite people from various walks of life: members of both the metal and punk scenes; working class bargoers and clubgoers; actors and comedians; teens and adults; men and women.

Hanneman was born on January 31, 1964. He died on May 2 of this year. He founded Slayer, along with fellow guitarist Kerry King. He has penned some of the band's most famous songs, like "Angel of Death," "South of Heaven," "War Ensemble," and "Raining Blood." The themes he chose to focus on included war, history, and human tragedy. He, as well as the rest of Slayer, didn't believe in pretending that the worst parts of human history never happened; rather, he saw the aggressive tone of the band as a very appropriate vehicle for tackling uncomfortable truths and exploring the morbid side of life.

His particular focus on war most likely stemmed from his childhood - his family consisted of many war veterans; his father fought in World War II, and his brothers in Vietnam. According to Decibel Magazine, this and his family's appreciation for war films meant that it played a large role in his daily life.

Hanneman's guitarwork was arguably even more important to Slayer than the lyrics and themes. It has been praised by fans and critics time and again. Hanneman is considered to be one of the greatest heavy metal guitarists of all time. Together with King, they "established themselves as thrash metal's premier guitar duo," said one reviewer. "And rightfully so, as the level of twisted genius running through [songs like] "Raining Blood" was something they themselves had trouble topping" later on.

The problems began for Hanneman when a freak accident occurred in early 2011: he contracted necrotizing fasciitis from a poisonous spider bite while sitting in a hot tub. "I didn't even feel it," he said afterward, "but an hour later, I knew that I was ill. By the time I arrived at the hospital emergency room, I was an hour away from death." Hanneman was told that the bite had caused a very serious bacterial infection. His arm, he learned, which had given so many brilliant guitar riffs to the world, might have to be amputated.

But that would only be a last resort. He was placed in a medically-induced coma for a time, while doctors tried several times to remove dead tissue from his arm. Then he went through a period of rehab to try and regain the strength in his arm. It's not yet clear what happened after that point, but what his bandmates have revealed is that he died of liver failure - a result of previous issues with alcohol, not the spider bite - though his prior health problems probably left him vulnerable to necrotizing fasciitis.

Musicians and fans flooded social networks as soon as they read the news of Hanneman's death.

Dave Lombardo, former Slayer drummer and longtime friend of Hanneman, tweeted, "I'm deeply saddened, shocked, and speechless. It's difficult for me to write my feelings at the moment. My heart goes out to [his wife], Kathy."

Robb Flynn of groove metal band Machine Head wrote, "Still can't believe it. Things like this don't happen - thrashers don't die!" He recalled going to one Slayer show where "he invited me back to the dressing room to grab a beer. We sat down and chatted for a while and I went all Slayer-nerd on him. He was a huge influence on my songwriting, growing up."

"Tragic and shocking news about Jeff," said Guns 'n' Roses' Slash. "He is going to be missed by so many. What a sad day for metal. For me, Hanneman was the king of thrash metal guitar. The riffs and chord changes were genius. And that right hand blew my mind. Never heard anything quite like it."

Rocker Andrew W.K. added, "Jeff Hanneman will always be a metal god. A true metal master, he gave energy and excitement to millions, and will continue to."

One fan pondered just why Slayer's music was so powerful and meaningful to him and others. Even though the band's lyrical topics commonly tackled "death, mental illness, disease, the occult, and war" - topics that many musicians are too afraid to explore - "Jeff Hanneman gave the words weight, power, velocity," and - ironically enough - "life. He wrote music as brutal as the topics, but he wrote songs, not noise collages. He literally wrote the best song in a genre that boasts millions of great songs. Few people can claim to have made the best anything. When he passed, heavy metal" got a little less heavy. "It became something less than it was. Jeff Hanneman was - is - irreplaceable. And metal will never be the same without him."

Photo: Slayer, left to right: guitarist Jeff Hanneman, guitarist Kerry King, vocalist/bassist Tom Araya, drummer Dave Lombardo. Robert E. Klein/AP

CLUW co-founding officer Elinor Glenn dies at 98

Thu, 09 May 2013 11:18:00 +0000

WASHINGTON - Elinor Marshall Glenn, a co-founding officer of the Coalition of Labor Union Women and an instrumental organizer of its Los Angeles-based West Coast chapter, died April 24, CLUW announced. Glenn was 98.

"CLUW's legacy is that much richer as a result of Elinor Glenn," organization president Karen See said. "Her leadership, strength and wisdom contributed to CLUW's growth and will inspire young leaders in the future."

Glenn was CLUW's Vice President-West Coast from 1974-1975 and also served on the group's national executive board. She was elected as CLUW's national Corresponding Secretary from 1982-91. L.A. chapter President Maggie Cook called Glenn "a mentor to every woman that knew her." And Glenn was the first woman to become General Manager of a Service Employees local, Local 434 in Los Angeles.

"The beautiful part of CLUW is the sense of sisterhood that it set up while we were fighting for the goals for women," Glenn said.

While attending New York University, Glenn met the author Herman Wouk at a summer camp for theater artists and is supposed to be the model for his character Marjorie Morningstar. She graduated with degrees in economics and drama.

Her activism started with a student protest at NYU and was followed by volunteer work for the Seafarers, and teaching English during the Depression-when she was also Vice President of the Works Progress Administration Teachers Union.

After moving to Los Angeles in 1944, Glenn became more deeply involved in union organizing. She was fired three times - but reinstated - for organizing workers at the World War II-era Office of Price Administration. She then joined, and moved up the ranks in, the National Federation of Federal Employees, before being elected president of the United Public Workers Local 246.

Glenn later became GM at SEIU Local 434, organizing thousands of public hospital workers in L.A. County, lobbying successfully for a collective bargaining ordinance and leading a successful county workers strike to protect wages and seniority rights. She was elected to the SEIU executive board in 1972 and retired in 1979. Survivors include her daughter-in-law and two grandchildren.

Becoming an organizer was not easy for a woman, Glenn once recalled. "Each time I went up the ladder it was a fight to recognize that a woman could do the job. And in each case, I suggested a temporary probation period to see whether I would make it or not," she added.

Photo: California State University, Long Beach, Labor History Archive

Quakers unite, and inspire, on gun violence

Wed, 08 May 2013 12:44:00 +0000

The Religious Society of Friends, known as Quakers, have an expression called "holding in the light," by which is meant either the divine light of God that lives in each living thing, or the light of a community of people who are in both a spiritual and material relationship with each other.

Holding the children of Newtown, Connecticut in the Light, those who were slaughtered, and those who still live, compelled the Shepherdstown Meeting of Friends, of which I am a member, to seek consensus - a "sense of meeting" in Quakerese - on gun violence. One might think this was a no-brainer given the reputation of Quakers as war resisters and advocates of nonviolence, peacemaking, and conflict resolution strategies. But this was not the case.

It began with a "leading" - Quakerese for an inspiration - of Friend Neal Peterson, our former Clerk of Meeting who stayed awake most of a night following the Newtown horror, composing the core of what would later become our statement on gun violence. In the beginning, many felt making the effort was likely useless, and were pessimistic about the possibility of meaningful unity on such a controversial issue. While most were open to reasonable restraints on guns, few were comfortable with only a political statement or a list of legislative demands.

It was felt that there was something lacking in thinking that only legislative steps toward gun control would really meet the challenge: deeper unity about the causes of violence was only to be had at a moral and spiritual level.

A number of obstacles stood in the way of consensus. First, many believe that mental illness and a sense of growing sickness in society is at the root of the problem. Certainly, most if not all of the mass shootings, too many now to enumerate, have involved serious mental illness. And we can assume that the 17,000 suicides by guns also include a lot of victims of depression and other mental illness. No doubt a few of the robberies, murders, accidents that make up the remaining 14,000 gun deaths involved some less than sober and stable behavior, too.

The problem with the mental health analysis is that, while we all know it is important, it leads to vast unanswered questions, which then paralyzes action. What kind of mental health test could certify that a person will not murder, or commit suicide? How many psychiatrists would it take to certify the millions wishing to purchase weapons? How many of them got C's in the course where you supposedly learn to identify killers?

For some, the major "mental illness" is a perceived breakdown of families and community networks. But here too the remedies involve some of the biggest and most complex sociological problems -- about which there is as much division as consensus.

Yet one question arising from these challenges had an easy answer: Will mental illness (or broken family) victims without guns kill fewer children than those with guns?

Another obstacle was "sweating the small stuff". Should legislation mandate a maximum 3-shot or 15-shot or 30-shot magazine? Should gun owners, or manufacturers, buy insurance against (be liable for) the consequences of gun misuse? Will background checks and registration really make a difference?

Rather than become bedeviled with such questions about which we had no expertise, we stuck with what we what we felt sure was true for us:

"We ... oppose permitting guns in public areas where there are children. We oppose access to weapons that are never appropriate for civilized use....Quaker testimony expresses ... that the answer to violence is not more violence. Instead it is a path that turns away from fear, hate, vengeance; that turns instead towards love, hope, forgiveness, compassion, and kindness. We ask that every political and faith leader go on record, now, and lend their voice ... Do not remain silent."

On these moral, right vs wrong, commitments, there was not just a majority - but a sense of the group that was not just an opinion poll, but a testimony that all wished presented to the larger community, and all elected officials. It was now a basis for action. Few sensed beforehand that such unity would be possible. But when it came to pass, the sense of heightened empowerment was palpable.

The details of resolutions are less important than getting people in motion. Once people find a way to cooperate and focus their efforts where there is common ground, real solutions and progress are possible. When multitudes are aroused for the common good, they generate geniuses by the score!

Shepherdstown Quakers set forth to Harpers Ferry, where the town council responded with its own unanimous resolution endorsing background checks, firearm registration and assault weapon restraints. The county council of neighboring Berkeley County, the Martinsburg Town council and the Jefferson County commission all heard appeals and set hearings and public comment on gun violence.

Visits to Senator Rockefeller brought endorsements. The day after visiting Senator Joe Manchin's office, the Senator did an historic turnaround on gun violence, working out the compromise with Republican Senator Toomey for background checks.

The Shepherdstown Ministerial Association has also taken up the question and adopted its own resolution urging "all members of the Shepherdstown Community strive to identify the ways and means of reducing gun violence, and making peace in our community, and providing the maximum feasible safety of our children..."

Once the responsible and conscious forces in a community get in motion, the "do nothing position" -- the essential message of gun control opponents -- becomes a moral embarrassment. Those who "let their Light shine" can speak to each other and their government as they would to the lost children, as if they are still close to us, listening. Mention must be made and acknowledgement given to Shepherdstown Clerks and the peace and social justice committee who weighed in at important moments in this process.

It seems impossible to overstate the importance of reducing gun violence for the future of our society. The deep conflicts driven by inequality and economic depression can nullify the ordinary functioning of public and democratic institutions. They can return us to savagery and barbarism if people start shooting, instead of talking. There lies a chaos that no one who has brought children into this world can bear to witness without forethought of grief.

Photo: Demonstrators march in Washington, D.C. for gun control. Elvert Barnes/Flickr (CC)

Only one place to cut: Pentagon

Wed, 08 May 2013 12:24:00 +0000

Sequestration, across the board cuts, is no way to run the federal government. Some say it is stupid or dumb. Plain and simple, it is a bad idea with no basis in fact.

Now academic research has debunked the idea that cuts and austerity are the way out of the economic crisis.

The Congress acted to fix the sequestration chaos for frequent flyers. They allowed the Federal Aviation Administration to move money from the longer-term infrastructure account to pay the salaries of the air traffic controllers. While flights might fly on time, the sequestration chaos continues everywhere else, in our schools, national parks, and on the unemployment line.

We must tell Congress: Repeal sequestration.

Now local services and jobs are being cut town by town, in all 50 states. Yes, as Tim Murphy documents in Mother Jones, we have become the United States of Sequestration.

Join Peace Action and the Campaign for America's Future and over 500,000 people who have already done so last week to tell Congress to end the sequestration chaos.

There is one place cuts could and should be made, the Pentagon budget.

Why did the economy and the federal budget go off the tracks? Two wars, tax cuts for the rich, corporate tax loopholes and a runaway Pentagon budget that has never been audited.

What is the biggest drain of our tax dollars? It is the explosion of the Pentagon budget since 9/11 on new weapons, military bases around the world, and nuclear weapons that serve no purpose except to generate international tensions.

Write an email to Congress and add this paragraph:

"We need to move the money from wars and ever newer weapons to fund human services and jobs that we need in our communities instead!"

The sequestration chaos will not end without mobilizing the huge outpouring of public pressure on Congress.

Write an email today; Join teachers, first responders, and the unemployed in actions in your community.

There is a smart, good and doable solution. We must move the money from where it is in the Pentagon budget, in the tax free, mega profits of the corporations to invest in programs that will create jobs and turn the economy around.

Photo: Pentagon Press Secretary George Little briefs the media, Jan. 8, on various topics including at that time the impending sequestration (Wikimedia).

New attack on Assata Shakur provokes ire

Tue, 07 May 2013 14:15:00 +0000

If the spirit of J. Edgar Hoover still walks abroad, it is an unquiet ghost. Besides anti-communism, Hoover's great fear was that a "Black messiah" would lead the African American people of the United States into empowerment. Motivated by that fear, Hoover and his FBI agents, working through COINTELPRO (Counterintelligence Program) and in cooperation with state and local police forces as well as private vigilante groups, targeted virtually all branches and leaders of the Black movement for equality and liberation. Hoover's campaign used spying, disruption, creation and planting of false information (even perjured court testimony), agents-provocateurs and the instigation of murder to neutralize especially young African American leaders and activists. The Black Panthers were a target, but so was Dr. Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Coalition, and electoral politicians. Many died and others served decades in prison until the frame-up was discovered.

In 1975, a Senate Committee headed by Idaho Democrat Frank Church surveyed all aspects of abuses by U.S. security agencies, and among other things exposed the abuses of COINTELPRO. The Church Committee also revealed the existence of U.S. government efforts to assassinate foreign leaders, including Cuban President Fidel Castro.

All this was supposed to have ended, and a major part of what Hoover most feared has come to pass: There is an African American in the White House, and another is U.S. Attorney General, in direct control of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

But on May 2, the FBI, along with New Jersey state officials, revived the issue of Assata Shakur, a 66 year old African American woman, making her the first woman to be listed as one of the FBI's list of most wanted terrorists, raising the bounty on her head to $2 million, and putting up billboards in New Jersey (presumably at the taxpayers' expense) with Assata's picture and the number to call if one sees her wandering the streets of Bayonne, Weehawken or Trenton, an improbable eventuality since the FBI knows perfectly well she has been living peacefully in Havana, Cuba for 30 years.

Shakur, whose original name was JoAnne Byron and whose married name was originally Chesimard, was a young college educated activist first with the Black Panther Party and then the Black Revolutionary Army. In 1971, she and two colleagues were stopped on the New Jersey Turnpike, ostensibly because of a defective taillight but probably because of "driving while Black." In the confrontation that followed, Assata was severely wounded by a shot in the back while she had her hands up, while one of her companions and a New Jersey state trooper were killed. Assata and her other companion were accused of murder in both deaths, and found guilty by an all-white jury, based on flimsy and probably perjured testimony. Assata was sentenced to life in prison but escaped in 1979 and was eventually given political asylum by the Cuban government, on the grounds that at that time, there was no justice for African-Americans in the United States. While in Cuba, she has continued to speak out on issues of social justice and international affairs. She has published an autobiography (1999 Assata: An Autobiography, Lawrence Hill Books) and numerous other documents.

In 1998 then New Jersey Governor Christie Todd Whitman upped the reward for the capture of Assata to $100,000, and demanded that before there could be any normalization of the relationship between Cuba and the United States, Cuba must return Assata and some other U.S. citizens who have asylum there. Of course, Cuba did no such thing. Now the FBI and New Jersey have escalated the whole issue.

What are the possible implications? Many who have been commenting on this since the Thursday announcement see it as a new escalation of attacks on African Americans and especially on African-American women. This may well be part of the motivation. But it is probably not the whole story.

The naming of Assata Shakur as the number one wanted terrorist has also caused some to wonder if this the neighborhood in Havana where she lives could not become the target of a drone strike. The $2 million bounty will certainly motivate some people to go and look for her in Cuba, with the idea of bringing her back dead or alive.

But others see the new attack on Assata as being aimed not only at her personally, but at socialist Cuba.

One of the many dimensions of U.S. anti-Cuba policy has been the placing of Cuba on a State Department list of "State Sponsors of Terrorism". This is a propaganda move designed to whip up hostility to Cuba among the U.S. public, but it also has practical implications: For example, it obliges the United States to oppose any Cuban request for financial aid from certain international agencies.

The original reasons for placing Cuba on the list are fraudulent. In fact, the reason Cuba is on the list is a combination of the U.S. government's own hostility to Cuba, and pressure exerted on the Obama administration by the anti-Castro Cuban exile lobby and its allies. Although most people think of the exile anti-Castro forces as being located in Miami, there is another such grouping in New Jersey. Unlike the G.O.P- connected Miami exile politicians, the ones in New Jersey include a number of Democratic Party figures such as U.S. Senator Robert Menendez and Congressman Albio Sires.

Why now? On April 30, Secretary of State John Kerry was supposed to report to Congress on whether Cuba would be removed from the State Sponsors of Terrorism list or not. Kerry could remove Cuba from the list on his own hook, and there was some hope that he might do so. There is a national campaign to remove Cuba from the list, which has gained the support of numerous public figures including some elected officials. The Kerry report has not been issued yet, though there are reports Cuba will stay on the list. It is of crucial importance that the refuge given to Assata in Cuba has been a major reason the government gives for keeping Cuba on the list.

In recent weeks, there have been other government and media announcements that seem to have the purpose of building up fear and hostility against Cuba. For example, the government just unsealed an indictment against a Puerto Rican woman, Marta Rita Velazquez, for having abetted espionage activities for Cuba by Ana Belen Montes, who is doing hard time in the U.S. But the allegations against Velazquez date back to 1984, and she is living in Sweden, so why make such a big media splash about these 29 years later? And everybody knows the U.S. government also spies on other countries. (Interestingly, about the same time as the Shakur announcement came a U.S. judge's decision to allow one of the Cuban Five, Rene Gonzalez, to stay in Cuba after the Justice Department dropped its objections.)

The new attack on Shakur, and on Cuba through her, has caused indignation. The White House, and the Justice and State Departments should be pressured to stop these dangerous games, drop the bounty for Assata, take Cuba off the State Sponsors of Terrorism list, and work toward normalization of U.S.-Cuba relations.

Photo: via assatashakur .org

Austerity-to-prosperity lie based on "bogus math"

Mon, 06 May 2013 17:58:00 +0000

Republicans are committed to the belief that the only way out of the economic crisis is through austerity for the people. Clearly many Democrats as well buy into this profits-before-people policy.

Austerity policies are being rejected in Europe and everywhere working people have the means and will to fight back. In the United States, the majority of the voters rejected the austerity platform of the GOP in 2008 and 2012, but the idea has still not gone away.

Austerity is aimed at the working class not the wealthy who are making record profits.

Let's be clear: it was not the unions, seniors, immigrants, children, black, brown and white workers, or the disabled who brought this country to its knees. It was finance capital, and that's who has the means to pay for the crisis. Forcing them to do so is the challenge all democratic and progressive forces face.

There is currently a new scandal on the extreme right on this question.

In 2010 Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff coauthored a paper entitled, "Growth in a Time of Debt." Right-wing politicians all over the world have used their theories as "proof" that slashing government spending and other austerity measures is the path to prosperity. The Reinhart/Rogoff paper is considered the most politically influential economics paper of the last decade. GOP Congressman Paul Ryan and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner have both cited "Growth in a Time of Debt" to justify the most vicious attacks on public workers and government social spending.

Recently, a graduate student at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Thomas Herndon requested a copy of the data used in the paper and found that some basic figures were left out that disproved the theory that government debt prevents economic growth.

Paul Krugman and other top economists have said that Herndon's findings are proof that the pro austerity movement is based, at least in part, on "bogus math."

Thus the basic arguments used by the Republicans to fire massive numbers of unionized public workers, to deny needed government created jobs, push for privatization and destroy Social Security are based on what has been shown to be bogus math.

Austerity policies, in addition to being wrong headed, have a sharp racist edge. The black and brown Americans with the highest rates of unemployment and poverty will be the most affected by the cutbacks. Thus fighting austerity means fighting racism. It means fighting for women's equality. Single moms are special victims of austerity.

Austerity will have a huge impact on senior citizens many of whom rely on Social Security as their sole means of support. Indeed, most of the 60 million Social Security recipients are barely making it and should get a raise, not cuts. It also should be remembered that this constituency votes and unless the Democrats want to give up the fight for the Congress, they need to repeal the "sequester" and drop the proposed "chained CPI," which is nothing but a cut.

I am disappointed that the Obama administration saw fit to make new concessions to the right that run counter to the spirit and the letter of the issues that won in the last elections. It is straining the unity of the broad coalition.

Besides Social Security is not an entitlement. In 1935 when it was passed, the life span for the average person was only 61.7 years and most people of color were not included in the system. Today the average person lives about 14 years after reaching 65. African Americans live only 10.1 years after age 65. Black men on average survive only to age 72.

After paying into the system ones entire work life the average person only gets 14 years of Social Security and if you are a black man it's only 7 years.

Rather than cutting back on Social Security a more humane proposal would be to lower the retirement age and subsidize the benefits so that they are livable. Let's "scrap the cap" on payroll taxes and stop playing with people's lives. The fight would bring people together.

As the troops are coming home, it's time to transfer that money to human needs otherwise the economic crisis is likely to deepen.

We must be among those organizers that are helping the millions to find their way to struggle.

The sequester debacle and the vote on gun control does not mean all is lost. The battle ahead is clear. To move things forward, the labor and people's multi-racial coalition that won the day last November needs to be in the streets in large numbers.

Politicians, who align themselves with that coalition, including the president, have to present a legislative and political program that is worth fighting for and will unify.

History provides a lesson in this regard: Roosevelt had to be pushed to accept the New Deal: Today we have to do the same thing: push.

I agree with those like CPUSA chair Sam Webb who say we have to up the struggle ante. It's already happening but it needs to be taken to a higher level. The larger labor and people's May Day actions around the country and internationally are good indication of what is needed.

With united action, the fight against austerity can be won. Stimulating the economy by increasing the buying power of the working class is key to a real recovery.

Photo: Demonstrators in Dublin march against austerity policies that cut health and education while bailing out banks and corporations with taxpayer subsidies (via ThinkProgress).