Richard Salzman

From the folks who brought you Occupy Wall Street...

2012-01-30T16:29:00.000-08:00

Hey you redeemers, rebels and radicals out there,

Against the backdrop of a global uprising that is simmering in dozens of countries and thousands of cities and towns, the G8 and NATO will hold a rare simultaneous summit in Chicago this May. The world’s military and political elites, heads of state, 7,500 officials from 80 nations, and more than 2,500 journalists will be there.

And so will we.

On May 1, 50,000 people from all over the world will flock to Chicago, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and #OCCUPYCHICAGO for a month. With a bit of luck, we’ll pull off the biggest multinational occupation of a summit meeting the world has ever seen.

And this time around we’re not going to put up with the kind of police repression that happened during the Democratic National Convention protests in Chicago, 1968 … nor will we abide by any phony restrictions the City of Chicago may want to impose on our first amendment rights. We’ll go there with our heads held high and assemble for a month-long people’s summit … we’ll march and chant and sing and shout and exercise our right to tell our elected representatives what we want … the constitution will be our guide.

And when the G8 and NATO meet behind closed doors on May 19, we’ll be ready with our demands: a Robin Hood Tax … a ban on high frequency ‘flash’ trading … a binding climate change accord … a three strikes and you’re out law for corporate criminals … an all out initiative for a nuclear-free Middle East … whatever we decide in our general assemblies and in our global internet brainstorm – we the people will set the agenda for the next few years and demand our leaders carry it out.

And if they don’t listen … if they ignore us and put our demands on the back burner like they’ve done so many times before … then, with Gandhian ferocity, we’ll flashmob the streets, shut down stock exchanges, campuses, corporate headquarters and cities across the globe … we’ll make the price of doing business as usual too much to bear.

Jammers, pack your tents, muster up your courage and prepare for a big bang in Chicago this Spring. If we don’t stand up now and fight now for a different kind of future we may not have much of a future … so let’s live without dead time for a month in May and see what happens …

for the wild,
Culture Jammers HQ

http://www.adbusters.org/blogs/adbusters-blog/tactical-briefing-25.html

Moyers: "...Triumph Over Corporate Power"

2011-12-13T09:46:00.000-08:00

Why 'We The People' Must Triumph Over Corporate Power

by Bill Moyers
December 12, 2011

Rarely have so few imposed such damage on so many. When five conservative members of the Supreme Court handed for-profit corporations the right to secretly flood political campaigns with tidal waves of cash on the eve of an election, they moved America closer to outright plutocracy, where political power derived from wealth is devoted to the protection of wealth. It is now official: Just as they have adorned our athletic stadiums and multiple places of public assembly with their logos, corporations can officially put their brand on the government of the United States as well as the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the fifty states.

The decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission giving “artificial entities” the same rights of “free speech” as living, breathing human beings will likely prove as infamous as the Dred Scott ruling of 1857 that opened the unsettled territories of the United States to slavery whether future inhabitants wanted it or not. It took a civil war and another hundred years of enforced segregation and deprivation before the effects of that ruling were finally exorcised from our laws. God spare us civil strife over the pernicious consequences of Citizens United, but unless citizens stand their ground, America will divide even more swiftly into winners and losers with little pity for the latter. Citizens United is but the latest battle in the class war waged for thirty years from the top down by the corporate and political right. Instead of creating a fair and level playing field for all, government would become the agent of the powerful and privileged. Public institutions, laws, and regulations, as well as the ideas, norms, and beliefs that aimed to protect the common good and helped create America’s iconic middle class, would become increasingly vulnerable. The Nobel Laureate economist Robert Solow succinctly summed up the results: “The redistribution of wealth in favor of the wealthy and of power in favor of the powerful.” In the wake of Citizens United, popular resistance is all that can prevent the richest economic interests in the country from buying the democratic process lock, stock, and barrel.

America has a long record of conflict with corporations. Wealth acquired under capitalism is in and of itself no enemy to democracy, but wealth armed with political power — power to choke off opportunities for others to rise, power to subvert public purposes and deny public needs — is a proven danger to the “general welfare” proclaimed in the Preamble to the Constitution as one of the justifications for America’s existence.

In its founding era, Alexander Hamilton created a financial system for our infant republic that mixed subsidies, tariffs, and a central bank to establish a viable economy and sound public credit. James Madison and Thomas Jefferson warned Americans to beware of the political ambitions of that system’s managerial class. Madison feared that the “spirit of speculation” would lead to “a government operating by corrupt influence, substituting the motive of private interest in place of public duty.” Jefferson hoped that “we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and [to] bid defiance to the laws of our country.” Radical ideas? Class warfare? The voters didn’t think so. In 1800, they made Jefferson the third president and then reelected him, and in 1808 they put Madison in the White House for the next eight years.

Andrew Jackson, the overwhelming people’s choice of 1828, vetoed the rechartering of the Second Bank of the United States in the summer of 1832. Twenty percent of its stock was government-owned; the rest was held by private investors, some of them foreigners and all of them wealthy. Jackson argued that the bank’s official connections and size gave it unfair advantages over local competition. In his veto message, he said: “[This act] seems to be predicated on the erroneous idea that the present stockholders have a prescriptive right not only to the favor but to the bounty of Government. ... It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes.” Four months later, Jackson was easily reelected in a decisive victory over plutocracy.

The predators roared back in the Gilded Age that followed the Civil War. Corruption born of the lust for money produced what one historian described as “the morals of a gashouse gang.” Judges, state legislators, the parties that selected them and the editors who supported them were purchased as easily as ale at the local pub. Lobbyists roamed the halls of Congress proffering gifts of cash, railroad passes, and fancy entertainments. The U.S. Senate became a “millionaires’ club.” With government on the auction block, the notion of the “general welfare” wound up on the trash heap; grotesque inequality and poverty festered under the gilding. Sound familiar?

Then came a judicial earthquake. In 1886, a conservative Supreme Court conferred the divine gift of life on the Southern Pacific Railroad and by extension to all other corporations. The railroad was declared to be a “person,” protected by the recently enacted Fourteenth Amendment, which said that no person should be deprived of “life, liberty or property without due process of law.” Never mind that the amendment was enacted to protect the rights of freed slaves who were now U.S. citizens. Never mind that a corporation possessed neither a body to be kicked nor a soul to be damned (or saved!). The Court decided that it had the same rights of “personhood” as a walking, talking citizen and was entitled to enjoy every liberty protected by the Constitution that flesh-and-blood individuals could claim, even though it did not share their disadvantage of being mortal. It could move where it chose, buy any kind of property it chose, and select its directors and stockholders from anywhere it chose. Welcome to unregulated multinational conglomerates, although unforeseen at the time. Welcome to tax shelters, at home and offshore, and to subsidies galore, paid for by the taxes of unsuspecting working people. Corporations were endowed with the rights of “personhood” but exempted from the responsibilities of citizenship.

That’s the doctrine picked up and dusted off by the John Roberts Court in its ruling on Citizens United. Ignoring a century of modifying precedent, the court gave our corporate sovereigns a “sky’s the limit” right to pour money into political campaigns for the purpose of influencing the outcome. And to do so without public disclosure. We might as well say farewell to the very idea of fair play. Farewell, too, to representative government “of, by, and for the people.”

Unless.

Unless “We, the People” — flesh-and-blood humans, outraged at the selling off of our government — fight back.

It’s been done before. As my friend and longtime colleague, the historian Bernard Weisberger, wrote recently, the Supreme Court remained a procorporate conservative fortress for the next fifty years after the Southern Pacific decision. Decade after decade it struck down laws aimed to share power with the citizenry and to promote “the general welfare.” In 1895, it declared unconstitutional a measure providing for an income tax and gutted the Sherman Antitrust Act by finding a loophole for a sugar trust. In 1905, it killed a New York state law limiting working hours. In 1917, it did likewise to a prohibition against child labor. In 1923, it wiped out another law that set minimum wages for women. In 1935 and 1936, it struck down early New Deal recovery acts.

But in the face of such discouragement, embattled citizens refused to give up. Into their hearts, wrote the progressive Kansas journalist William Allen White, “had come a sense that their civilization needed recasting, that the government had fallen into the hands of self-seekers, that a new relationship should be established between the haves and the have-nots.” Not content merely to wring their hands and cry “Woe is us,” everyday citizens researched the issues, organized public events to educate their neighbors, held rallies, made speeches, petitioned and canvassed, marched and exhorted. They would elect the twentieth-century governments that restored “the general welfare” as a pillar of American democracy, setting in place legally ordained minimum wages, maximum working hours, child labor laws, workmen’s safety and compensation laws, pure foods and safe drugs, Social Security and Medicare, and rules to promote competitive rather than monopolistic financial and business markets.

The social contract that emerged from these victories is part and parcel of the “general welfare” to which the Founders had dedicated our Constitution. The corporate and political right seeks now to weaken and ultimately destroy it. Thanks to their ideological kin on the Supreme Court, they can attack the social contract using their abundant resources of wealth funneled — clandestinely — into political campaigns. During the fall elections of 2010, the first after the Citizens United decision, corporate front groups spent $126 million while hiding the identities of the donors, according to the Sunlight Foundation. The United States Chamber of Commerce, which touts itself as a “main street” grass-roots organization, draws most of its funds from about a hundred businesses, including such “main street” sources as BP, Exxon-Mobil, JPMorgan Chase, Massey Coal, Pfizer, Shell, Aetna, and Alcoa. The ink was hardly dry on the Citizens United decision when the Chamber organized a covertly funded front and fired volley after volley of missiles, in the form of political ads, into the 2010 campaigns, eventually spending approximately $75 million. Another corporate cover group — the Americans Action Network — spent over $26 million of undisclosed corporate money in six Senate races and 28 House of Representative elections. And “Crossroads GPS” seized on Citizens United to raise and spend at least $17 million that NBC News said came from “a small circle of extremely wealthy Wall Street hedge fund and private equity moguls,” all determined to water down the financial reforms designed to avoid a collapse of the financial system that their own greed and reckless speculation had helped bring on. As I write in the summer of 2011, the New York Times reports that efforts to thwart serious reforms are succeeding. The populist editor Jim Hightower concludes that today’s proponents of corporate plutocracy “have simply elevated money itself above votes, establishing cold, hard cash as the real coin of political power. The more you spend on politics, the bigger your voice is in government, making the vast vaults of billionaires and corporations far superior to the voices of mere voters.”

Against such odds, discouragement comes easily. But if the generations before us had given up, slaves would be waiting on our tables and picking our crops, women would be turned back at the voting booths, and it would be a crime for workers to organize. Like our forebears, we will not fix the broken promise of America — the promise of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” for all our citizens, not just the powerful and privileged — if we throw in the proverbial towel. Surrendering to plutocracy is not an option. Confronting a moment in our history that is much like the one Lincoln faced — when “we can nobly save or meanly lose the last best hope on earth” — we must fight back against the forces that are pouring dirty money into the political system, turning it into a sewer.

How to fight back is the message of this book. Jeffrey Clements saw corporate behavior up close during two stints as assistant attorney general in Massachusetts, litigating against the tobacco industry, enforcing fair trade practices, and leading more than one hundred attorneys and staff responsible for consumer and environmental protection, antitrust practices, and the oversight of health care, insurance, and financial services. He came away from the experience repeating to himself this indelible truth: “Corporations are not people.” Try it yourself: “Corporations are not people.” Again: “Corporations are not people.” You are now ready to join what Clements believes is the most promising way to counter Citizens United: a campaign for a constitutional amendment affirming that free speech and democracy are for people and that corporations are not people. Impossible? Not at all, says Clements. We have already amended the Constitution twenty-seven times. Amendment campaigns are how we have always made the promise of equality and liberty more real. Difficult? Of course; as Frederick Douglass taught us, power concedes nothing without a struggle. To contend with power, Clements and his colleague John Bonifaz founded Free Speech for People, a nationwide nonpartisan effort to overturn Citizens United and corporate rights doctrines that unduly leverage corporate economic power into political power. What Clements calls the People’s Rights Amendment could be our best hope to save the “great American experiment.”

To find out why, read on, and as you read, keep in mind the words of Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican, who a century ago stood up to the mighty combines of wealth and power that were buying up our government and called on Americans of all persuasions to join him in opposing the “naked robbery” of the public’s trust:

It is not a partisan issue; it is more than a political issue; it is a great moral issue. If we condone political theft, if we do not resent the kinds of wrong and injustice that injuriously affect the whole nation, not merely our democratic form of government but our civilization itself cannot endure.

To L.A. Mayor Villaraigosa's Great Shame

2011-12-08T19:41:00.000-08:00

Dear Mayor Villaraigosa,

I grew up in Los Angeles and have followed your political career from my new home on California's Northcoast. I always assumed that one day I'd have an opportunity to vote for you when you were ready to run for Governor or United States Senator, and I looked forward to doing so. After reading Patrick Meighan's account of the actions you first authorized and then praised at Occupy L.A., I don't expect that opportunity will ever arise. I certainly hope not. But if it does, you can be assured I will work vigorously to see that you are defeated.

I think your career in politics is over. You might have learned something from the Chancellor of U.C Davis about the use of excessive force, but apparently not. And it seems the LAPD has not only not changed since I use to encounter them as a youth on the streets of Venice, but that they and not you are really calling the shots.

This is all very sad for me, as I once held you high regard.

Please resign now and save yourself any further humiliation.

Shame on you,
Richard Salzman
Arcata CA.

(email address is: mayor at lacity dot org)
---
My Occupy LA Arrest, by Patrick Meighan

My name is Patrick Meighan, and I’m a husband, a father, a writer on
the Fox animated sitcom “Family Guy”, and a member of the Unitarian
Universalist Community Church of Santa Monica.

I was arrested at about 1 a.m. Wednesday morning with 291 other people
at Occupy LA. I was sitting in City Hall Park with a pillow, a
blanket, and a copy of Thich Nhat Hanh’s “Being Peace” when 1,400
heavily-armed LAPD officers in paramilitary SWAT gear streamed in. I
was in a group of about 50 peaceful protestors who sat Indian-style,
arms interlocked, around a tent (the symbolic image of the Occupy
movement). The LAPD officers encircled us, weapons drawn, while we
chanted “We Are Peaceful” and “We Are Nonviolent” and “Join Us.”

As we sat there, encircled, a separate team of LAPD officers used
knives to slice open every personal tent in the park. They forcibly
removed anyone sleeping inside, and then yanked out and destroyed any
personal property inside those tents, scattering the contents across
the park. They then did the same with the communal property of the
Occupy LA movement. For example, I watched as the LAPD destroyed a
pop-up canopy tent that, until that moment, had been serving as Occupy
LA’s First Aid and Wellness tent, in which volunteer health
professionals gave free medical care to absolutely anyone who
requested it. As it happens, my family had personally contributed that
exact canopy tent to Occupy LA, at a cost of several hundred of my
family’s dollars. As I watched, the LAPD sliced that canopy tent to
shreds, broke the telescoping poles into pieces and scattered the
detritus across the park. Note that these were the objects described
in subsequent mainstream press reports as “30 tons of garbage” that
was “abandoned” by Occupy LA: personal property forcibly stolen from
us, destroyed in front of our eyes and then left for maintenance
workers to dispose of while we were sent to prison.

When the LAPD finally began arresting those of us interlocked around
the symbolic tent, we were all ordered by the LAPD to unlink from each
other (in order to facilitate the arrests). Each seated, nonviolent
protester beside me who refused to cooperate by unlinking his arms had
the following done to him: an LAPD officer would forcibly extend the
protestor’s legs, grab his left foot, twist it all the way around and
then stomp his boot on the insole, pinning the protestor’s left foot
to the pavement, twisted backwards. Then the LAPD officer would grab
the protestor’s right foot and twist it all the way the other
direction until the non-violent protestor, in incredible agony, would
shriek in pain and unlink from his neighbor.

It was horrible to watch, and apparently designed to terrorize the
rest of us. At least I was sufficiently terrorized. I unlinked my arms
voluntarily and informed the LAPD officers that I would go peacefully
and cooperatively. I stood as instructed, and then I had my arms
wrenched behind my back, and an officer hyperextended my wrists into
my inner arms. It was super violent, it hurt really really bad, and he
was doing it on purpose. When I involuntarily recoiled from the pain,
the LAPD officer threw me face-first to the pavement. He had my hands
behind my back, so I landed right on my face. The officer dropped with
his knee on my back and ground my face into the pavement. It really,
really hurt and my face started bleeding and I was very scared. I
begged for mercy and I promised that I was honestly not resisting and
would not resist.

My hands were then zipcuffed very tightly behind my back, where they
turned blue. I am now suffering nerve damage in my right thumb and
palm.

I was put on a paddywagon with other nonviolent protestors and taken
to a parking garage in Parker Center. They forced us to kneel on the
hard pavement of that parking garage for seven straight hours with our
hands still tightly zipcuffed behind our backs. Some began to pass
out. One man rolled to the ground and vomited for a long, long time
before falling unconscious. The LAPD officers watched and did nothing.

At 9 a.m. we were finally taken from the pavement into the station to
be processed. The charge was sitting in the park after the police said
not to. It’s a misdemeanor. Almost always, for a misdemeanor, the
police just give you a ticket and let you go. It costs you a couple
hundred dollars. Apparently, that’s what happened with most every
other misdemeanor arrest in LA that day.

With us Occupy LA protestors, however, they set bail at $5,000 and
booked us into jail. Almost none of the protesters could afford to
bail themselves out. I’m lucky and I could afford it, except the LAPD
spent all day refusing to actually *accept* the bail they set. If you
were an accused murderer or a rapist in LAPD custody that day, you
could bail yourself right out and be back on the street, no problem.
But if you were a nonviolent Occupy LA protestor with bail money in
hand, you were held long into the following morning, with absolutely
no access to a lawyer.

I spent most of my day and night crammed into an eight-man jail cell,
along with sixteen other Occupy LA protesters. My sleeping spot was on
the floor next to the toilet.

Finally, at 2:30 the next morning, after twenty-five hours in custody,
I was released on bail. But there were at least 200 Occupy LA
protestors who couldn’t afford the bail. The LAPD chose to keep those
peaceful, non-violent protesters in prison for two full days… the
absolute legal maximum that the LAPD is allowed to detain someone on
misdemeanor charges.

As a reminder, Antonio Villaraigosa has referred to all of this as
“the LAPD’s finest hour.”

So that’s what happened to the 292 women and men were arrested last
Wednesday. Now let’s talk about a man who was not arrested last
Wednesday. He is former Citigroup CEO Charles Prince. Under Charles
Prince, Citigroup was guilty of massive, coordinated securities fraud.

Citigroup spent years intentionally buying up every bad mortgage loan
it could find, creating bad securities out of those bad loans and then
selling shares in those bad securities to duped investors. And then
they sometimes secretly bet *against* their *own* bad securities to
make even more money. For one such bad Citigroup security, Citigroup
executives were internally calling it, quote, “a collection of
dogshit”. To investors, however, they called it, quote, “an attractive
investment rigorously selected by an independent investment adviser”.

This is fraud, and it’s a felony, and the Charles Princes of the world
spent several years doing it again and again: knowingly writing bad
mortgages, and then packaging them into fraudulent securities which
they then sold to suckers and then repeating the process. This is a
big part of why your property values went up so fast. But then the
bubble burst, and that’s why our economy is now shattered for a
generation, and it’s also why your home is now underwater. Or at least
mine is.

Anyway, if your retirement fund lost a decade’s-worth of gains
overnight, this is why.

If your son’s middle school has added furlough days because the school
district can’t afford to keep its doors open for a full school year,
this is why.

If your daughter has come out of college with a degree only to
discover that there are no jobs for her, this is why.

But back to Charles Prince. For his four years of in charge of
massive, repeated fraud at Citigroup, he received fifty-three million
dollars in salary and also received another ninety-four million
dollars in stock holdings. What Charles Prince has *not* received is a
pair of zipcuffs. The nerves in his thumb are fine. No cop has thrown
Charles Prince into the pavement, face-first. Each and every peaceful,
nonviolent Occupy LA protester arrested last week has has spent more
time sleeping on a jail floor than every single Charles Prince on Wall
Street, combined.

The more I think about that, the madder I get. What does it say about
our country that nonviolent protesters are given the bottom of a
police boot while those who steal hundreds of billions, do trillions
worth of damage to our economy and shatter our social fabric for a
generation are not only spared the zipcuffs but showered with rewards?

In any event, believe it or not, I’m really not angry that I got
arrested. I chose to get arrested. And I’m not even angry that the
mayor and the LAPD decided to give non-violent protestors like me a
little extra shiv in jail (although I’m not especially grateful for it
either).

I’m just really angry that every single Charles Prince wasn’t in jail with me.

Thank you for letting me share that anger with you today.

Patrick Meighan

SHERIFF GAYLEN: "Well, if ...somebody tells me that there's going to be trouble....it's my duty to stop them."

2011-12-03T22:43:00.000-08:00

Protesters of Occupy Eureka were physically detained with handcuffs while the EPD removed and confiscated a 10'x 15' PVC structure which was the skeleton of what could have become a canopy and was being used as an informational space within which was a table with literature, buttons and bumper stickers. While "pallets" may have been near by, no pallet or tarp was ever placed on this "structure", which remained a skeleton at the time of this police action on Nov 30th, 2011. The following is an excerpt is from an email sent on Dec 2nd by City of Eureka CA, interim Chief of Police Murl Harpham:

From: Murl Harpham
Sent: Fri Dec 02 12:04:36 2011
Subject: RE: Shameful Constitutional Violations by Humboldt County!

" ....We even told them that they could put up a pop-up canopy to protect their handouts. But they pushed the envelope and put up a second and a third and then put walls around them and hauled in 23 wooden pallets for a room and people started living there again. After we removed that, then what happened? Less than a week later [Nov 30th] they brought in more pallets and started constructing a 10’ by 20’ structure..."
-----
Flash back to:

March 1966

Robert Kennedy, as member of the US Senate Subcommittee on Migratory Labor he served on the committee hearings in Delano, Calif., during the early days of the UFW grape pickers strike.

Sen. Kennedy, who was one of the last to arrive on the third days of the hearings, along with an aide, Rev. James L. Vizzard, S.J., had to push by a local policeman after the policeman refused to budge, claiming that the local fire marshal was forbidding anyone further from entering the hall, despite Sen. Kennedy identifying himself as a member of the subcommittee.

More than 100 people were in the hall as the senators began taking their places at the committee table. Another 400 stood outside waiting for admission.

The left side of the auditorium was reserved for various classes from Delano High School, which rotated throughout the day. The middle section of the hall was occupied by members and friends of the anti-union Independent Kern-Tulare Farm Workers Association (IKTFW). Beside them and against the far wall were members of the NFWA and AWOC.

Sen. Harrison Williams (D-N.J.), the committee chairman, opened the session with a quick announcement that a rotation system was being worked out and at the lunch break the auditorium would be emptied and those presently waiting outside would be allowed to enter. He also warned the audience against demonstrations while testimony before the subcommittee was being given.

Mayor Clifford Loader was the first witness, welcoming the senators to Delano, but quickly pointing out that he felt their trip was unnecessary, since no strike really existed in the area. "The simple truth is, gentlemen, that there is no strike in Delano," he said.

Complying with the request made by Sens. George Murphy (R-Calif,) and Williams after Cesar Chavez's testimony in Sacramento on the opening day of the hearings, law enforcement officials from Kern and Tulare counties appeared before the subcommittee in Delano.

After several other witnesses testified, the law enforcement officials were asked to answer charges made by Chavez regarding their harassing of pickets and extending preferential treatment to the local growers.

Kern County District Attorney Kit Nelson acknowledged to the subcommittee that he had not arrested or taken any of the growers to trial because he personally held a "reasonable doubt" that the were guilty. He went on to emphasize to the senators, however, that he had warned a number of growers "not to break the law in the future, or I would have to enforce the provisions of the law."

Sheriff Leroy Galen from Kern County then answered questions put to him by Sen. Kennedy on the allegations that he and his department had badgered striking grape pickers by stopping them frequently on no charge, making unwarranted arrests, and repeatedly taking their pictures.

A subsequent exchange between the former US attorney general and a local symbol of "law and order" would later become the stuff out of which legends are made -- almost tantamount to sacred scripture -- in the farmworker communities throughout California's valleys, where the law has always stood for the will of the local growers, and order the enforcement of that will.

SEN. KENNEDY: "...When they [the pickets] are just walking along, what did you arrest them for?"

SHERIFF GAYLEN: "Well, if I have reason to believe that there's going to be a riot started and somebody tells me that there's going to be trouble if you don't stop them, it's my duty to stop them."

KENNEDY: "Then do you go out and arrest them?"

GAYLEN: "Yes."

KENNEDY: "And charge them?"

GAYLEN: "Charge them."

KENNEDY: "What do you charge them with?"

GAYLEN: "Violation of -- unlawful assembly."

KENNEDY: "I think that's most interesting. Who told you that they're going to riot?"

GAYLEN: "The men right out in the field that they were talking to said, 'If you don't get them out of here [the pickets], we're going to cut their hearts out.' So rather than let them get cut, we removed the cause ..."

KENNEDY: "As the former US attorney general, this is the most interesting concept, I think, that you suddenly hear talk about the fact that somebody makes a report about somebody going to get out of order, perhaps violate the law, and you go out and arrest them, and they haven't done any thing wrong. How can you arrest somebody if they haven't violated the law?"

GAYLEN: "They‚re ready to violate the law ..."

CHAIRMAN SEN. WILLIAMS: "We will recess ..."

KENNEDY: "Could I suggest that the district attorney and sheriff reconsider their procedures in connection with these matters, because it really is of great concern to me. In the last five minutes, it's a considerable concern to me."

GAYLEN: "Before I do anything, I ask the district attorney what to do. Just like these labor people out here, they ask their attorney, 'What shall we do?'"

KENNEDY: "Can I suggest in the interim period of time, the luncheon period of time, that the sheriff and the district attorney review their procedures and start by reading the Constitution of the United States!"

Which rules are enforced

2011-11-21T13:40:00.000-08:00

UC Davis Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi responsible for torture of her students for sitting on a path

2011-11-19T22:25:00.000-08:00

All this over someone setting up a nylon pup tent. They didn't spend the night, they simply set up a tent and then sat down on a path during the day while the campus was open. This has gone way, way too far. At least in Humboldt County when they used pepper spray as a (then experimental) "pain compliance technique" it was used INSTEAD of brute force. Here, immediately following the use of the pepper spray they drag the students away with brute force anyway. What possible purpose did using the pepper spray first serve, other then to inflict pain on these non-violent protesters? (Here's a link to video shot from another perspective)

To call for Chancellor Katehi's immediate "dismissal" email the UC Regents: regentsoffice@ucop.edu
and write to Governor Jerry Brown:
http://gov.ca.gov/m_contact.php
---

From: http://thesecondalarm.wordpress.com/2011/11/20/ucdavis-chancellor-video/ :
A pretty remarkable thing just happened. A press conference, scheduled for 2:00pm between the UC Davis Chancellor and police on campus, did not end at 2:30. Instead, a mass of Occupy Davis students and sympathizers mobilized outside, demanding to have their voice heard. After some initial confusion, UC Chancellor Linda Katehi refused to leave the building, attempting to give the media the impression that the students were somehow holding her hostage. A group of highly organized students formed large gap for the chancellor to leave. They chanted “we are peaceful” and “just walk home,” but nothing changed for several hours. Eventually student representatives convinced the chancellor to leave after telling their fellow students to sit down and lock arms.

ME: Chancellor, do you still feel threatened by the students?
KATEHI: No.

One of the students pepper sprayed yesterday, a young man wearing a brown down coat over a tie-dye shirt, said he met with Kotehi and personally showed her a video of pepper spraying attack. Speaking to about a thousand students with the “human mic,” the young man said he personally asked for her resignation.

-----

Lt. John Pike's home phone at 530-752-3989.
cell phone at 530-979-0184.
email:: japikeiii@ucdavis.edu.

Also:

UC Davis Chief of Police Annette Spicuzza
Email: amspicuzza@ucdavis.edu
Police Line: (530) 752-1727
Facebook

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To donate to "Occupy UC Davis" click here.
All funds will be used to support the efforts of Occupy UC Davis. These are general funds that will be consensed upon by the General Assembly before being used.

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UC Davis Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi, demand for immediate resignation by UC Professor Brown:

18 November 2011

Open Letter to Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi

Linda P.B. Katehi,

I am a junior faculty member at UC Davis. I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, and I teach in the Program in Critical Theory and in Science & Technology Studies. I have a strong record of research, teaching, and service. I am currently a Board Member of the Davis Faculty Association. I have also taken an active role in supporting the student movement to defend public education on our campus and throughout the UC system. In a word: I am the sort of young faculty member, like many of my colleagues, this campus needs. I am an asset to the University of California at Davis.

You are not.

I write to you and to my colleagues for three reasons:

1) to express my outrage at the police brutality which occurred against students engaged in peaceful protest on the UC Davis campus today

2) to hold you accountable for this police brutality

3) to demand your immediate resignation

Today you ordered police onto our campus to clear student protesters from the quad. These were protesters who participated in a rally speaking out against tuition increases and police brutality on UC campuses on Tuesday—a rally that I organized, and which was endorsed by the Davis Faculty Association. These students attended that rally in response to a call for solidarity from students and faculty who were bludgeoned with batons, hospitalized, and arrested at UC Berkeley last week. In the highest tradition of non-violent civil disobedience, those protesters had linked arms and held their ground in defense of tents they set up beside Sproul Hall. In a gesture of solidarity with those students and faculty, and in solidarity with the national Occupy movement, students at UC Davis set up tents on the main quad. When you ordered police outfitted with riot helmets, brandishing batons and teargas guns to remove their tents today, those students sat down on the ground in a circle and linked arms to protect them.

What happened next?

Without any provocation whatsoever, other than the bodies of these students sitting where they were on the ground, with their arms linked, police pepper-sprayed students. Students remained on the ground, now writhing in pain, with their arms linked.

What happened next?

Police used batons to try to push the students apart. Those they could separate, they arrested, kneeling on their bodies and pushing their heads into the ground. Those they could not separate, they pepper-sprayed directly in the face, holding these students as they did so. When students covered their eyes with their clothing, police forced open their mouths and pepper-sprayed down their throats. Several of these students were hospitalized. Others are seriously injured. One of them, forty-five minutes after being pepper-sprayed down his throat, was still coughing up blood.

This is what happened. You are responsible for it.

You are responsible for it because this is what happens when UC Chancellors order police onto our campuses to disperse peaceful protesters through the use of force: students get hurt. Faculty get hurt. One of the most inspiring things (inspiring for those of us who care about students who assert their rights to free speech and peaceful assembly) about the demonstration in Berkeley on November 9 is that UC Berkeley faculty stood together with students, their arms linked together. Associate Professor of English Celeste Langan was grabbed by her hair, thrown on the ground, and arrested. Associate Professor Geoffrey O’Brien was injured by baton blows. Professor Robert Hass, former Poet Laureate of the United States, National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winner, was also struck with a baton. These faculty stood together with students in solidarity, and they too were beaten and arrested by the police. In writing this letter, I stand together with those faculty and with the students they supported.

One week after this happened at UC Berkeley, you ordered police to clear tents from the quad at UC Davis. When students responded in the same way—linking arms and holding their ground—police also responded in the same way: with violent force. The fact is: the administration of UC campuses systematically uses police brutality to terrorize students and faculty, to crush political dissent on our campuses, and to suppress free speech and peaceful assembly. Many people know this. Many more people are learning it very quickly.

You are responsible for the police violence directed against students on the UC Davis quad on November 18, 2011. As I said, I am writing to hold you responsible and to demand your immediate resignation on these grounds.

On Wednesday November 16, you issued a letter by email to the campus community. In this letter, you discussed a hate crime which occurred at UC Davis on Sunday November 13. In this letter, you express concern about the safety of our students. You write, “it is particularly disturbing that such an act of intolerance should occur at a time when the campus community is working to create a safe and inviting space for all our students.” You write, “while these are turbulent economic times, as a campus community, we must all be committed to a safe, welcoming environment that advances our efforts to diversity and excellence at UC Davis.”

I will leave it to my colleagues and every reader of this letter to decide what poses a greater threat to “a safe and inviting space for all our students” or “a safe, welcoming environment” at UC Davis: 1) Setting up tents on the quad in solidarity with faculty and students brutalized by police at UC Berkeley? or 2) Sending in riot police to disperse students with batons, pepper-spray, and tear-gas guns, while those students sit peacefully on the ground with their arms linked? Is this what you have in mind when you refer to creating “a safe and inviting space?” Is this what you have in mind when you express commitment to “a safe, welcoming environment?”

I am writing to tell you in no uncertain terms that there must be space for protest on our campus. There must be space for political dissent on our campus. There must be space for civil disobedience on our campus. There must be space for students to assert their right to decide on the form of their protest, their dissent, and their civil disobedience—including the simple act of setting up tents in solidarity with other students who have done so. There must be space for protest and dissent, especially, when the object of protest and dissent is police brutality itself. You may not order police to forcefully disperse student protesters peacefully protesting police brutality. You may not do so. It is not an option available to you as the Chancellor of a UC campus. That is why I am calling for your immediate resignation.

Your words express concern for the safety of our students. Your actions express no concern whatsoever for the safety of our students. I deduce from this discrepancy that you are not, in fact, concerned about the safety of our students. Your actions directly threaten the safety of our students. And I want you to know that this is clear. It is clear to anyone who reads your campus emails concerning our “Principles of Community” and who also takes the time to inform themselves about your actions. You should bear in mind that when you send emails to the UC Davis community, you address a body of faculty and students who are well trained to see through rhetoric that evinces care for students while implicitly threatening them. I see through your rhetoric very clearly. You also write to a campus community that knows how to speak truth to power. That is what I am doing.

I call for your resignation because you are unfit to do your job. You are unfit to ensure the safety of students at UC Davis. In fact: you are the primary threat to the safety of students at UC Davis. As such, I call upon you to resign immediately.

Sincerely,

Nathan Brown
Assistant Professor
Department of English
Program in Critical Theory
University of California at Davis

U.S. Congress 2nd District A monumental election for Humboldt County

2011-11-19T01:34:00.000-08:00

Dear fellow Humboldters and residents of California's Redwood Coast,

It has been twelve years since the last time we were given a choice as to who would represent us in the United States Congress. As Mike Thompson is now running in the new "inland" 5th District, we here on the Redwood Coast are being given the all too rare opportunity to once again choose who will be our Representative. For this reason I feel that the election of 2012 is monumental and while there are several interesting choices, it is my belief that the person who can best represent our interest in Humboldt County is Susan Adams, a woman who spent most of her life as a nurse and later as a professor of nursing, and the candidate with the closest ties to the Northcoast.

I hope that you will find an opportunity to meet this woman, listen to what she has to say and ask her the tough questions. I believe you will find that she is "the real deal".

Thank you,
Richard

For more information about Susan Adams or to donate to her campaign, please visit www.susanadamsforcongress.com

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Candidate for Congress Susan Adams, chair of the Marin County Board of Supervisors is focused on four key issues affecting the Redwood Coast: rebuilding thriving economies, protecting access to quality healthcare, applying innovative solutions to public safety and implementing clean renewable energy.

As a maternity clinical specialist and a women’s health nurse practitioner Adams has dedicated her life to healthy families. As a public servant she has earned a reputation for innovative solutions to local problems -- including her work on green energy jobs, therapeutic, justice programs, and a comprehensive Health & Wellness Campus, built with tobacco settlement money.

Susan also has a brother who served seven tours of active duty overseas compelling her to work even harder to bring our men and women home safely. She has made veterans’ affairs a top priority especially their post-war after care.

Adams is a mother and grandmother and has deep ties to the North Coast. Her extended family has worked their ranch in Mendocino County for four generations now and she has a brother who's raised his family in Carlotta.

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Susan Adams for Congress
PO Box 4429 San Rafael, CA 94913
HQ:707.376.8683
Fax 707.825.6600
info@SusanAdamsForCongress.com

OCCUPY CAL VOTES FOR NOVEMBER 15th HIGHER EDUCATION GENERAL STRIKE!

2011-11-14T21:42:00.000-08:00

Following brutal attacks by riot police against unarmed non-violent student protesters at Occupy Cal, Berkeley Chancellor Robert J. Birgeneau had this to say:

"It is unfortunate that some protesters chose to obstruct the police by linking arms and forming a human chain to prevent the police from gaining access to the tents. This is not non-violent civil disobedience..."

"...We regret that, given the instruction to take down tents and prevent encampment, THE POLICE WERE FORCED TO USE THEIR BATONS to enforce the policy."

Full text below See video of attacks here: berkeleycuts.org

To call for Chancellor Birgeneau's immediate dismissal, email the UC Regents at regentsoffice@ucop.edu or go to universityofcalifornia.edu/regents/contact.html

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OCCUPY CAL VOTES FOR NOVEMBER 15th HIGHER EDUCATION GENERAL STRIKE!

After a mass rally and march of over 3,000 people, and repeated police assaults on the encampment, the Occupy Cal general assembly decided — with over 500 votes, 95% of the assembly — to organize and call for a strike and day of action on Tuesday, November 15 in all sectors of higher education. We will strike in opposition to the cuts to public education, university privatization, and the indebting of our generation.

We also call for simultaneous solidarity actions in workplaces and K-12 schools. We will organize through daily, 5pm strike planning meetings at our encampments, followed by general assemblies.

——

On Wednesday, November 16 there will be a mass convergence starting at 7am at the UC Regents meeting at the UCSF Mission Bay campus to protest cuts to all levels of public education and to call to refund California by making the banks and super rich pay.
More info: reclaimuc.blogspot.com/2011/11/update-on-strike-endorsements-and.html

Sign up for buses here

Invite your friends to the Facebook event

Folks at other schools: organize your own spaces, general assemblies, etc. and strike, occupy, take over your campuses!

Solidarity!

-berkeleycuts.org

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[full text from 11.10.11]
UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert J. Birgeneau:
To the Extended UC Berkeley Community:

As you know, yesterday an effort was made to establish an encampment on Sproul Plaza, by the “Occupy Cal” movement. This followed and marred the aftermath of an impressive, peaceful noontime rally on Sproul on behalf of public education, which was attended by some 3,000 participants and observers, including many campus leaders. We compliment the organizers and speakers for setting an example of peaceful protest and mobilization. As we informed the campus community earlier this week, we understand and share the concern of the Occupy movement about the extreme concentration of wealth in US society and the steady disinvestment in public higher education by California and other States.

We want to clarify our position on “no encampments” so you better understand why we do not allow this to occur on our campus. When the no-encampment policy was enacted, it was born out of past experiences that grew beyond our control and ability to manage safely. Past experiences at UC Berkeley, along with the present struggles with entrenched encampments in Oakland, San Francisco, and New York City, led us to conclude that we must uphold our policy.

This decision is largely governed by practical, not philosophical, considerations. We are not equipped to manage the hygiene, safety, space, and conflict issues that emerge when an encampment takes hold and the more intransigent individuals gain control. Our intention in sending out our message early was to alert everyone that these activities would not be permitted. We regret that, in spite of forewarnings, we encountered a situation where, to uphold our policy, we were required to forcibly remove tents and arrest people.

We want to thank our student leaders, faculty, and community members who worked hard to maintain a peaceful context last night. We have been in discussions with the ASUC, Graduate Assembly, and other student leaders who have provided a number of alternative proposals for working with the student protesters. One such discussion led last night to our offering protesters the opportunity to use Sproul Plaza 24/7 for one week, as a venue for gathering and discussing the issues. However, we stipulated that no tents, stoves, and sleeping bags would be allowed. They could gather in Sproul for discussion, but not for sleeping. This was rejected by a vote of the mass of the protesters.

It is unfortunate that some protesters chose to obstruct the police by linking arms and forming a human chain to prevent the police from gaining access to the tents. This is not non-violent civil disobedience. By contrast, some of the protesters chose to be arrested peacefully; they were told to leave their tents, informed that they would be arrested if they did not, and indicated their intention to be arrested. They did not resist arrest or try physically to obstruct the police officers’ efforts to remove the tent. These protesters were acting in the tradition of peaceful civil disobedience, and we honor them.

We regret that, given the instruction to take down tents and prevent encampment, the police were forced to use their batons to enforce the policy. We regret all injuries, to protesters and police, that resulted from this effort. The campus’s Police Review Board will ultimately determine whether police used excessive force under the circumstances.

We call on the protesters to observe campus policy or, if they choose to defy the policy, to engage in truly non-violent civil disobedience and to accept the consequences of their decisions.

We ask supporters of the Occupy movement to consider the interests of the broader community—the tens of thousands who elected not to participate in yesterday’s events. We urge you to consider the fact that there are so many time-tested ways to have your voices heard without violating the one condition we have asked you to abide by.

Robert J. Birgeneau, Chancellor
George Breslauer, Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost
Harry LeGrande, Vice Chancellor for Studies Affairs

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To call for Chancellor Birgeneau's immediate dismissal, email the UC Regents at regentsoffice@ucop.edu or go to universityofcalifornia.edu/regents/contact.html

Honor Vets at Occupy 11.11.11

2011-11-12T09:18:00.001-08:00

From Wall Street to Oakland, from Minneapolis to Chicago, Veterans around the country are standing with the Occupy movement:
www.thenation.com/article/164553/veterans-occupy-wall-street

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To the people of Humboldt County

Pat Kanzler/For the Times-Standard
11/11/2011

The Occupy Eureka site at the county courthouse on the corner of I and Fifth streets is being told to immediately take down our tents and cease camping. The fear we are attracting criminal activity and unsanitary conditions.

I would like to address the first viewpoint. Occupy Eureka intends to stand in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street and all the thousands in America and the world. We have a right to demonstrate and protest peacefully as stated in the first amendment. The tents are part and parcel of where we stand vigil for 24 hours and contain many of the items we need to pronounce our intentions, sign material, markers, sheets, cardboard, blankets, tarps, duct tape, rain gear, clothing, etc.

We have zero tolerance toward any drug or alcohol use in the area and signs to that effect.

We have zero tolerance for abuse of public property.

Chanting and yelling will be kept to a minimum during the hours of 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. although we cannot stop the noise of traffic.
We encourage all participants of Occupy Eureka to respect health and sanitary conditions and will direct all participants to utilize appropriate off-site sanitary facilities as the country has locked its doors to us.

We will continue to keep a dialog with country and city, although the city locked its doors last night to us during its normal hours for meeting.

We will have a community relations speaker on site at all times to answer questions by community or organizations.

Note: we are trying to establish sanitary facilities off-site as the county has locked their doors to us, and we have made compost and recycling bins ourselves. There are people who will donate portable toilets and other large items we need. We always need donations and we encourage the people in Eureka to Occupy Wall Street together.

Occupy Wall Street is a grassroots, people-powered movement financed by no political affiliations. We have had liberals, conservatives and Tea Partyers in solidarity with us besides many others Occupy Wall Street began on Sept. 17, 2011; many cities around the globe followed, and Occupy Eureka began Oct. 8, 2011. We are fighting back against the corrosive power of major banks and large corporations over the democratic process and the role in Wall Street in creating an economic collapse that has caused the greatest recession in generations. The movement is inspired by popular uprisings in early America and aims to expose the rules of an unfair global economy that is foreclosing on our future.

We use a tool called a people's assembly to facilitate collective decision-making in an open manner. We welcome all to join us!
The consensus of Occupy Eureka is here to stay.

Pat Kanzler resides in Eureka.

Arrest Occupiers

2011-11-08T16:06:00.000-08:00

“it will be a bitter pill for many Americans to swallow the idea of doing with less so that big business can have more.”
-William Simon, A Time for Truth

Support Occupy Wall St. here

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How Wall Street Occupied America

by Bill Moyers
The Nation
November 2, 2011

During the prairie revolt that swept the Great Plains in 1890, populist orator Mary Elizabeth Lease exclaimed, “Wall Street owns the country…. Money rules…. Our laws are the output of a system which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags. The parties lie to us and the political speakers mislead us.”

She should see us now. John Boehner calls on the bankers, holds out his cup and offers them total obeisance from the House majority if only they fill it. Barack Obama criticizes bankers as “fat cats,” then invites them to dine at a pricey New York restaurant where the tasting menu runs to $195 a person.

That’s now the norm, and they get away with it. The president has raised more money from employees of banks, hedge funds and private equity managers than any Republican candidate, including Mitt Romney. Inch by inch he has conceded ground to them while espousing populist rhetoric that his very actions betray.

Let’s name this for what it is: hypocrisy made worse, the further perversion of democracy. Our politicians are little more than money launderers in the trafficking of power and policy—fewer than six degrees of separation from the spirit and tactics of Tony Soprano.

Why New York’s Zuccotti Park is filled with people is no mystery. Reporters keep scratching their heads and asking, “Why are you here?” But it’s clear they are occupying Wall Street because Wall Street has occupied the country. And that’s why in public places across the nation workaday Americans are standing up in solidarity. Did you see the sign a woman was carrying at a fraternal march in Iowa the other day? It read, I Can’t Afford to Buy a Politician So I Bought This Sign. Americans have learned the hard way that when rich organizations and wealthy individuals shower Washington with millions in campaign contributions, they get what they want.

In his Pulitzer Prize–winning book The Radicalism of the American Revolution, historian Gordon Wood says that our nation discovered its greatness “by creating a prosperous free society belonging to obscure people with their workaday concerns and pecuniary pursuits of happiness.” This democracy, he said, changed the lives of “hitherto neglected and despised masses of common laboring people.”

Those words moved me when I read them. They moved me because Henry and Ruby Moyers were “common laboring people.” My father dropped out of the fourth grade and never returned to school because his family needed him to pick cotton to help make ends meet. Mother managed to finish the eighth grade before she followed him into the fields. They were tenant farmers when the Great Depression knocked them down and almost out. The year I was born my father was making $2 a day working on the highway to Oklahoma City. He never took home more than $100 a week in his working life, and he made that only when he joined the union in the last job he held. I was one of the poorest white kids in town, but in many respects I was the equal of my friend who was the daughter of the richest man in town. I went to good public schools, had the use of a good public library, played sandlot baseball in a good public park and traveled far on good public roads with good public facilities to a good public u
niversity. Because these public goods were there for us, I never thought of myself as poor. When I began to piece the story together years later, I came to realize that people like the Moyerses had been included in the American deal. “We, the People” included us.

* * *

It’s heartbreaking to see what has become of that bargain. Nowadays it’s every man for himself. How did this happen? The rise of the money power in our time goes back forty years. We can pinpoint the date. On August 23, 1971, a corporate lawyer named Lewis Powell—a board member of the death-dealing tobacco giant Philip Morris and a future justice of the Supreme Court—released a confidential memorandum for his friends at the US Chamber of Commerce. We look back on it now as a call to arms for class war waged from the top down.

Recall the context of Powell’s memo. Big business was being forced to clean up its act. Even Republicans had signed on. In 1970 President Nixon put his signature on the National Environmental Policy Act and named a White House Council to promote environmental quality. A few months later millions of Americans turned out for Earth Day. Nixon then agreed to create the Environmental Protection Agency. Congress acted swiftly to pass tough amendments to the Clean Air Act, and the EPA announced the first air pollution standards. There were new regulations directed at lead paint and pesticides. Corporations were no longer getting away with murder.

Powell was shocked by what he called an “attack on the American free enterprise system.” Not just from a few “extremists of the left” but also from “perfectly respectable elements of society,” including the media, politicians and leading intellectuals. Fight back and fight back hard, he urged his compatriots. Build a movement. Set speakers loose across the country. Take on prominent institutions of public opinion—especially the universities, the media and the courts. Keep television programs “monitored the same way textbooks should be kept under constant surveillance.” And above all, recognize that political power must be “assiduously cultivated; and that when necessary, it must be used aggressively and with determination” and “without embarrassment.”

Powell imagined the Chamber of Commerce as a council of war. Since business executives had “little stomach for hard-nosed contest with their critics” and “little skill in effective intellectual and philosophical debate,” they should create think tanks, legal foundations and front groups of every stripe. These groups could, he said, be aligned into a united front through “careful long-range planning and implementation…consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing available only through joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and united organizations.”

The public wouldn’t learn of the memo until after Nixon appointed Powell to the Supreme Court that same year, 1971. By then his document had circulated widely in corporate suites. Within two years the board of the Chamber of Commerce had formed a task force of forty business executives—from US Steel, GE, GM, Phillips Petroleum, 3M, Amway, and ABC and CBS (two media companies, we should note). Their assignment was to coordinate the crusade, put Powell’s recommendations into effect and push the corporate agenda. Powell had set in motion a revolt of the rich. As historian Kim Phillips-Fein subsequently wrote, “Many who read the memo cited it afterward as inspiration for their political choices.”

They chose swiftly. The National Association of Manufacturers announced that it was moving its main offices to Washington. In 1971 only 175 firms had registered lobbyists in the capital; by 1982 nearly 2,500 did. Corporate PACs increased from fewer than 300 in 1976 to more than 1,200 by the mid-’80s. From Powell’s impetus came the Business Roundtable, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Manhattan Institute, Citizens for a Sound Economy (precursor to what we now know as Americans for Prosperity) and other organizations united in pushing back against political equality and shared prosperity. They triggered an economic transformation that would in time touch every aspect of our lives.

The Chamber of Commerce, in response to the memo, doubled its membership, tripled its budget and stepped up its lobbying efforts. It’s going stronger than ever. Most recently, it called in its agents in Congress to kill a bill to provide healthcare to 9/11 first responders for illnesses linked to their duty on that day. The bill would have paid for their medical care by ending a special tax loophole exploited by foreign corporations with business interests in America. The Chamber, along with nearly 1,300 business and trade groups, urged Congress to pass the new tax bill, signed into law just before this past Christmas and filled with all kinds of stocking stuffers, including about fifty tax breaks for businesses. The bill gave some of our biggest banks, financial companies and insurance firms another year’s exemption to shield their foreign profits from being taxed here in the United States; among the beneficiaries were giants Citigroup, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and Mor
gan Stanley, all of which survived the financial debacle of their own making because taxpayers bailed them out in 2008.

The coalition got another powerful jolt of adrenaline in the late ’70s from the wealthy right-winger who had served as Nixon’s treasury secretary, William Simon. His book A Time for Truth argued that “funds generated by business” must “rush by multimillions” into conservative causes to uproot the institutions and the “heretical strategy” of the New Deal. He called on “men of action in the capitalist world” to mount “a veritable crusade” against progressive America. BusinessWeek(October 12, 1974) somberly explained that “it will be a bitter pill for many Americans to swallow the idea of doing with less so that big business can have more.”

Those “men of action in the capitalist world” were not content with their wealth just to buy more homes, more cars, more planes, more vacations and more gizmos than anyone else. They were determined to buy more democracy than anyone else. And they succeeded beyond their expectations. After their forty-year “veritable crusade” against our institutions, laws and regulations—against the ideas, norms and beliefs that helped to create America’s iconic middle class—the Gilded Age is back with a vengeance.

If you want to see the story pulled together in one compelling narrative, read Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class, by political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson. They wanted to know how America had turned into a society starkly divided into winners and losers. They found the culprit: the revolt triggered by Lewis Powell, fired up by William Simon and fueled by rich corporations and wealthy individuals. “Step by step,” they write, “and debate by debate America’s public officials have rewritten the rules of American politics and the American economy in ways that have benefited the few at the expense of the many.”

There you have it. They bought off the gatekeeper, got inside and gamed the system. As the rich and powerful got richer and more powerful, they owned and operated the government, “saddling Americans with greater debt, tearing new holes in the safety net, and imposing broad financial risks on Americans as workers, investors, and taxpayers.” Now, write Hacker and Pierson, the United States is looking more and more like “the capitalist oligarchies, like Brazil, Mexico, and Russia,” where most of the wealth is concentrated at the top while the bottom grows larger and larger with everyone in between just barely getting by.

The revolt of the plutocrats was ratified by the Supreme Court in its notorious Citizens United decision last year. Rarely have so few imposed such damage on so many. When five pro-corporate conservative justices gave “artificial legal entities” the same rights of “free speech” as humans, they told our corporate sovereigns that the sky’s the limit when it comes to their pouring money into political campaigns.

The ink was hardly dry on the Citizens United decision when the Chamber of Commerce organized a covertly funded front and rained cash into the 2010 campaigns. According to the Sunlight Foundation, corporate front groups spent $126 million in the fall of 2010 while hiding the identities of the donors. Another corporate cover group—the American Action Network—spent more than $26 million of undisclosed corporate money in just six Senate races and twenty-six House elections. And Karl Rove’s groups, American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS, seized on Citizens United to raise and spend at least $38 million, which NBC News said came from “a small circle of extremely wealthy Wall Street hedge fund and private equity moguls”—all determined to water down financial reforms that might prevent another collapse of the financial system. Jim Hightower has said it well: today’s proponents of corporate plutocracy “have simply elevated money itself above votes, establishing cold, hard cash
as the real coin of political power.”

No wonder so many Americans have felt that sense of political impotence that historian Lawrence Goodwyn described as “the mass resignation” of people who believe in the “dogma of democracy” on a superficial public level but whose hearts no longer burn with the conviction that they are part of the deal. Against such odds, discouragement comes easily. But if the generations before us had given up, slaves would still be waiting on their masters, women would still be turned away from the voting booths on election day and workers would still be committing a crime if they organized.

* * *

So take heart from the past, and don’t ever count the people out. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the Industrial Revolution created extraordinary wealth at the top and excruciating misery at the bottom. Embattled citizens rose up. Into their hearts, wrote the progressive Kansas journalist William Allen White, “had come a sense that their civilization needed recasting, that their government had fallen into the hands of self-seekers, that a new relation should be established between the haves and have-nots.” Not content to wring their hands and cry “Woe is us,” everyday citizens researched the issues, organized to educate their neighbors, held rallies, made speeches, petitioned and canvassed, marched and marched again. They plowed the fields and planted the seeds—sometimes on bloody ground—that twentieth-century leaders used to restore “the general welfare” as a pillar of American democracy. They laid down the now-endangered markers of a civilized society: le
gally ordained minimum wages, child labor laws, workers’ safety and compensation laws, pure foods and safe drugs, Social Security, Medicare and rules that promote competitive markets over monopolies and cartels.

The lesson is clear: Democracy doesn’t begin at the top; it begins at the bottom, when flesh-and-blood human beings fight to rekindle what Arlo Guthrie calls “The Patriot’s Dream.”

Living now here but for fortune
Placed by fate’s mysterious schemes
Who’d believe that we’re the ones asked
To try to rekindle the patriot’s dreams

Arise sweet destiny, time runs short
All of your patience has heard their retort
Hear us now for alone we can’t seem
To try to rekindle the patriot’s dreams

Can you hear the words being whispered
All along the American stream
Tyrants freed, the just are imprisoned
Try to rekindle the patriot’s dreams

Ah but perhaps too much is being asked of too few
You and your children with nothing to do
Hear us now for alone we can’t seem
To try to rekindle the patriot’s dreams

Who, in these cynical times, with democracy on the ropes and America’s body politic pounded again and again by the blows of organized money—who would dream such a radical thing? Look around.

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Support OCCUPY WALL ST. here: http://www.nycga.net/how-to-help/

Time to consider a municipal bank

2011-10-19T11:50:00.000-07:00

The Eureka Times-Standard
Richard Salzman
10/19/2011

Ten days into the Occupy Wall Street protests, I wrote a letter to the editor complaining about the lack of mainstream media coverage. By the time that letter was printed, they finally got to the story, to their credit.

There are now “Occupy” actions taking place in 1,482 cities across the country (as tracked at OccupyTogether.org), including in my own town of Arcata in Humboldt County, California.

Surprisingly, even as the media has covered the story, many in the mainstream press seem mystified by the motives and/or lack of cohesive message. Does “people's needs, not corporate greed” explain it?

San Francisco Supervisor John Avalos, a mayoral candidate, wants his City Hall to pull its money out of corporate financial institutions and start a municipal bank “so we can control how we are investing in local businesses.” I hope Humboldt County will also consider that option.

Long ago, I pulled my money from a big bank and put it into a local credit union. Then, it was recently publicized that the CEO of my small “nonprofit” credit union was taking home just shy of $1 million a year in compensation (making the $160K that our county administrative officer earns seem pretty reasonable). I'm sure people would love to put their money in a county-owned bank whose CEO doesn't get $1 million (see publicbankinginstitute.org for more on this subject).

Here are six more excellent ideas taken from Sens. Bernie Sanders and Matt Taibbi, writing in Rolling Stone magazine:

1. Break'em up. If a financial institution is too big to fail, it's too big to exist. Start with repeal of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act and mandate the separation of insurance, investment and commercial banks.

2. Pay for bailouts. A Wall Street speculation fee on credit default swaps, derivatives, stock options and futures would both pay for the bailouts and do plenty to fight the deficits.

3. Cap credit card interest rates, end usury. Citigroup, Bank of America, and JP Chase should not be permitted to charge 25 to 30 percent interest when they received over $4 trillion in loans from us.

4. Tax hedge-fund gamblers. Repeal the carried-interest tax break, which taxes hedge-fund titans only 15 percent on their income.

5. The Federal Reserve needs to provide small businesses in America with the same low-interest loans it gave to foreign banks.

6. Stop Wall Street oil speculators from artificially increasing gasoline and heating oil prices.
--
Richard Salzman, who lives in Arcata, works as an illustrators' rep and political consultant.

http://www.times-standard.com/guest_opinion/ci_19145550

Krugman on Wall St.: Losing Their Immunity

2011-10-17T15:35:00.000-07:00

Losing Their Immunity

by Paul Krugman
N.Y. Times
10/17/11

As the Occupy Wall Street movement continues to grow, the response
from the movement's targets has gradually changed: contemptuous
dismissal has been replaced by whining. (A reader of my blog suggests
that we start calling our ruling class the "kvetchocracy.") The
modern lords of finance look at the protesters and ask, Don't they
understand what we've done for the U.S. economy?

The answer is: yes, many of the protesters do understand what Wall
Street and more generally the nation's economic elite have done for
us. And that's why they're protesting.

On Saturday The Times reported what people in the financial industry
are saying privately about the protests. My favorite quote came from
an unnamed money manager who declared, "Financial services are one of
the last things we do in this country and do it well. Let's embrace
it."

This is deeply unfair to American workers, who are good at lots of
things, and could be even better if we made adequate investments in
education and infrastructure. But to the extent that America has
lagged in everything except financial services, shouldn't the
question be why, and whether it's a trend we want to continue?

For the financialization of America wasn't dictated by the invisible
hand of the market. What caused the financial industry to grow much
faster than the rest of the economy starting around 1980 was a series
of deliberate policy choices, in particular a process of deregulation
that continued right up to the eve of the 2008 crisis.

Not coincidentally, the era of an ever-growing financial industry was
also an era of ever-growing inequality of income and wealth. Wall
Street made a large direct contribution to economic polarization,
because soaring incomes in finance accounted for a significant
fraction of the rising share of the top 1 percent (and the top 0.1
percent, which accounts for most of the top 1 percent's gains) in the
nation's income. More broadly, the same political forces that
promoted financial deregulation fostered overall inequality in a
variety of ways, undermining organized labor, doing away with the
"outrage constraint" that used to limit executive paychecks, and more.

Oh, and taxes on the wealthy were, of course, sharply reduced.

All of this was supposed to be justified by results: the paychecks of
the wizards of Wall Street were appropriate, we were told, because of
the wonderful things they did. Somehow, however, that wonderfulness
failed to trickle down to the rest of the nation - and that was true
even before the crisis. Median family income, adjusted for inflation,
grew only about a fifth as much between 1980 and 2007 as it did in
the generation following World War II, even though the postwar
economy was marked both by strict financial regulation and by much
higher tax rates on the wealthy than anything currently under
political discussion.

Then came the crisis, which proved that all those claims about how
modern finance had reduced risk and made the system more stable were
utter nonsense. Government bailouts were all that saved us from a
financial meltdown as bad as or worse than the one that caused the
Great Depression.

And what about the current situation? Wall Street pay has rebounded
even as ordinary workers continue to suffer from high unemployment
and falling real wages. Yet it's harder than ever to see what, if
anything, financiers are doing to earn that money.

Why, then, does Wall Street expect anyone to take its whining
seriously? That money manager claiming that finance is the only thing
America does well also complained that New York's two Democratic
senators aren't on his side, declaring that "They need to understand
who their constituency is." Actually, they surely know very well who
their constituency is - and even in New York, 16 out of 17 workers
are employed by nonfinancial industries.

But he wasn't really talking about voters, of course. He was talking
about the one thing Wall Street still has plenty of thanks to those
bailouts, despite its total loss of credibility: money.

Money talks in American politics, and what the financial industry's
money has been saying lately is that it will punish any politician
who dares to criticize that industry's behavior, no matter how gently
- as evidenced by the way Wall Street money has now abandoned
President Obama in favor of Mitt Romney. And this explains the
industry's shock over recent events.

You see, until a few weeks ago it seemed as if Wall Street had
effectively bribed and bullied our political system into forgetting
about that whole drawing lavish paychecks while destroying the world
economy thing. Then, all of a sudden, some people insisted on
bringing the subject up again.

And their outrage has found resonance with millions of Americans. No
wonder Wall Street is whining.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/17/opinion/krugman-wall-street-loses-its-immunity.html

Breakthrough Journal: Liberalism and the New Inequality

2011-10-17T15:08:00.000-07:00

From: Michael Shellenberger
Date: October 17, 2011

If Occupy Wall Street protesters have struggled to articulate their demands beyond taxing the rich, part of their challenge is the changed nature of the economy. In a new article for The Breakthrough Journal, NYU sociologist Dalton Conley notes that while the 1929 stock market crash reduced inequality by wiping out fortunes, the 2008 crash provoked measures that sustained it. "But greater equality after the crash came at a very high price: the Great Depression. So while the response to the 2008 crisis sustained the top-heavy structure of the American economy, it also averted the free fall that threw tens of millions of Americans into unemployment and breadlines throughout the 1930s."

Moreover, even as the gap between the "99%" and the richest one percent has grown, "the interests of workers are increasingly yoked to those of their bosses," Conley notes. "Half of Americans today have direct or indirect investments in the stock market, largely thanks to the shift to defined contribution pension plans and the ease of Internet investing... So if the rest of us want to save our 401ks, we have to save the status quo for the robber barons of Wall Street in the process."

Couldn't the problem have been solved by nationalizing the banks and redistributing wealth? Such a strategy "might have distributed the costs and benefits of the bailouts more fairly," writes Conley, and "higher income taxes on the rich, along with more strongly redistributive social programs might succeed in mitigating some degree of inequality. But there are also powerful socioeconomic forces driving inequality." Conley points to growing global demand for elite knowledge workers (such as by the financial sector) and the widening skills gap.

How should liberalism evolve to deal with the new inequality? By shifting its focus from absolute to relative poverty. When Americans were poor, liberalism's priorities were food and shelter. Now most Americans are overweight and own their own homes. At the same time, poor and working-class Americans, living in districts with low-performing schools, are at serious risk of being left behind. Liberalism must thus focus on to new ways to expand opportunity, and Conley lays out several.

We should decouple school funding from local property taxes — and/or allow school choice, so the poor can attend elite schools. "Yes," writes Conley, "fund private school attendance with vouchers, but require participating schools to enroll students from across the income spectrum, thereby increasing opportunity for education and facilitating entrance into the knowledge class."

We should "de-skill" credentialing monopolies in health care and education. "For example, health care could be provided more affordably if everyone was willing to see nurse practitioners or medical assistants in drive-through clinics and forsake the latest high-tech tests and procedures. College could be more affordable if we adopted an open courseware model and de-emphasized the need for face-to-face contact with faculty members."

Finally, we must go beyond the fantasy that America's problems can be fixed simply through higher taxes on the richest one percent. Liberals should embrace reform that could appeal to both reasonable liberals and reasonable conservatives. Tax all income, including capital gains, the same, but also implement a national, value-added (sales) tax, and restrict government revenue to 25 percent of GDP.

While Tea Partiers and Wall St. Occupiers offer ideological slogans to vexing problems, Conley's ground-breaking essay points to a set of pragmatic solutions — solutions with the potential to appeal to Americans divided by ideology but united in their view that expanding opportunity is a core national value.

— Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus

--

October 18, 2011

Liberalism and the New Inequality

by Dalton Conley

Breakthrough Journal

The 2008 financial crisis and Great Recession that followed offered a bracing rebuke to those of us who had reassured ourselves that the increasingly unequal American economy would self-correct once it reached some natural trigger point of unfairness. After the 1929 crash, which was preceded by similarly high levels of inequality, top earners saw their share of national income shrink by one-third, and then continue to shrink until 1969. Many progressives hoped something similar would occur after the collapse of 2008, but no such correction was forthcoming. American inequality is nearly as high today as it was before the crash.

One obvious difference is that, in 1929, government intervention was minimal: there were no bank bailouts, auto rescues, or stimulus efforts. The free market was left to destroy fortunes, ill-gained or not, thereby reducing gross inequalities in wealth. But greater equality after the crash came at a very high price: the Great Depression. So while the response to the 2008 crisis sustained the top-heavy structure of the American economy, it also averted the free fall that threw tens of millions of Americans into unemployment and breadlines throughout the 1930s. Nationalizing the banks, as many critics of the Troubled Asset Relief Program suggest, might have distributed the costs and benefits of the bailouts more fairly. And going forward, higher income taxes on the rich, along with more strongly redistributive social programs might succeed in mitigating some degree of inequality. But there are also powerful socioeconomic forces driving inequality. That is, the high levels of economic inequality we have witnessed over the last decade might be inescapable to some degree.
In our affluent but unequal society, poverty is a relative, not an absolute, condition. High levels of inequality coexist with rising living standards, even for those at the bottom. Meanwhile, due to rising wealth and asset ownership among all Americans, including the poor, the fortunes of the majority are increasingly tied to those of the elite. The sooner we confront these structural forces, the sooner we can move on to constructing a new social contract befitting this new economic age.

1.

Globalization and the rising value of knowledge-based work mean that those at the top of the knowledge economy are increasingly able to charge a premium for their labor in a global marketplace -- even as that same marketplace de-skills the labor of many occupations. The rich used to derive almost all of their income from capital, rent, and business profits, and little from wages. But today, as economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez show, the top one percent of Americans derive a significant (and growing) share of economic resources from wages.1 Meanwhile, global supply chains and new telecommunications technologies are enabling both outsourcing and global economies of scale that exert downward pressure on most workers' wages.

These trends are ominously self-reinforcing. Education -- and the skills, connections, and credentials that come with it -- is the critical determinant of success in the new knowledge economy. Due to greater social and economic inequality and segregation, poor and working-class people must cross an educational gap that is widening at precisely the moment when education has become most critical to their economic prospects.

Yet even as that gap grows, the interests of workers are increasingly yoked to those of their bosses. Half of Americans today have direct or indirect investments in the stock market, largely thanks to the shift to defined contribution pension plans and the ease of Internet investing.2 But while most of us are in it for a penny, it's still the super wealthy who are in for a pound. A study by the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank found that the richest 10 percent own upwards of 85 percent of stocks and other financial assets.3 So if the rest of us want to save our 401ks, we have to save the status quo for the robber barons of Wall Street in the process.

The same is true for housing. Home equity makes up an ever-greater share of household wealth the lower your rank on the income ladder. Back in 1930, less than half of Americans lived in a home they owned; by the housing market peak in the 2000s, the rate hit close to 70 percent.4 Now we all have a stake in real estate values. A sluggish housing market used to be good news for many at the bottom of the pyramid thanks to falling rents. But today, when most of us have our life savings in a home or use our house as an ATM through home equity lines of credit, price drops are devastating.

Many policy scholars, myself included, have argued that wider-spread asset ownership increases opportunity, teaches good financial habits, orients poor children to the future, and ultimately increases the public's stake in capitalism and the rule of law. But we must be honest about the fact that an "ownership society" (to use former President George W. Bush's term) also means a country in which the economic interests of the wealthy and the non-wealthy are increasingly tied to each other. The problem is that while in absolute terms, everyone wants the same things -- rising house and stock prices -- in relative terms, those in the middle (and bottom) fall further and further behind. In an economy in which those at the top already control the lion's share of wealth, economic growth need not be disproportionate itself in order to disproportionately benefit the wealthy.

As such, today's historically high levels of inequality appear likely to remain a long-term structural feature of the American economy. The expansion of assets and ownership down the income distribution has meant that the economic interests of those at the top of the income ladder and those at the bottom are increasingly difficult to disentangle. This development, combined with America's culture of competitive individualism, makes both class conflict and redistributive social policies increasingly unlikely.

2.

These sobering trends aside, we should not overlook the reality that Americans remain wealthy by any global or historical perspective and are getting wealthier still. Even among the poorest Americans, life expectancy has risen, infant mortality has decreased, homicides are down, and educational attainment is up. While poverty persists and the poor are still disproportionately victims of crime, incarceration, ill health, and higher mortality, their overall wealth and standard of living have risen.

Statistics showing that real wages have stagnated since 1973 are misleading. Wage statistics calculate "real dollars" over time only by adjusting for inflation, which is measured by totaling the cost of a set of common consumer goods in a basket. This makes inflation an accurate short-term measure, but it's a terrible long-term one because the average consumer's actual basket of goods changes a lot more rapidly than the theoretical basket of goods the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) uses to calculate the Consumer Price Index.

Mobile phones are just one example. Though they first hit the consumer market in 1983, the BLS did not factor mobile phones into the inflation rate until 15 years later. Consequently, the BLS missed the massive price declines. Moreover, today's lower cell phone prices do not reflect the value of quality improvements. Just think of the difference between a 1995 cell phone and your iPhone today.

As a result, the focus on wages misses the point. Basic living standards have risen for virtually every American even as real wages have stagnated. Whether we pay less at Wal-Mart while earning less, or pay more while taking in higher wages, the end result is the same.

The idea that greater inequality, as opposed to greater poverty, results in worse social outcomes at a societal level is also highly questionable. Consider poor health outcomes, which have been widely linked to high levels of social inequality. Careful statistical analyses have shown that the observed correlation between income inequality on the one hand and health outcomes on the other is really an artifact of the non-linear relationship between individual income and health.

In other words, since an additional dollar is worth more to you health-wise if you are poor than if you are rich, merely comparing countries, states, or counties with more unequal income distributions will make it appear as though those places have worse health outcomes than their more equal counterparts. But what's driving the difference is absolute income, not relative income shares. For instance, health outcomes are worse in the United States than many European countries, not because of our higher levels of inequality, but rather because of our higher levels of poverty.

3.

If living standards for those at the bottom of the income distribution have demonstrably improved over the last 40 years and research has not been able to establish a causal link between inequality and life outcomes, should we still concern ourselves with societal inequality?

We should, but not for the reasons typically given. Consider that as society becomes more affluent and basic material needs are increasingly satisfied for even the poorest Americans, more and more of our consumption takes on a relative dimension. The economic shift from absolute to relative goods can be seen in household budgets. As recently as the 1950s, the typical American family spent one-third of its income on food while low-income families spent about half of their incomes on the same.5 Today, food makes up only 17 percent of the average poor family's budget, and almost one-third of that (30 percent) is spent eating out. Meanwhile housing now represents about 40 percent of household budgets for low-income Americans.6

While we all need food and a roof over our heads, what drives the rising cost of housing for the poor are the relative dimensions of the housing market, not the absolute ones. Today even poor Americans live in substantially larger homes than they did three or four decades ago. Competition for housing in better school districts, with increasing square footage, is largely responsible for increasing the share of household budgets allocated to housing among all Americans.

In his 1976 classic, The Social Limits to Growth, Fred Hirsch called these relative goods "positional goods" due to their relative and inherently limited nature.7 While everyone can, at least theoretically, own a home and pursue an education, it is impossible for everyone to own a beachfront home or go to Harvard. And it turns out that these types of positional goods represent the greatest obstacles to economic mobility for those at the bottom of the income distribution.

In my own research into the intergenerational effects of social class on educational and occupational outcomes, I have demonstrated that the most important determinants of those outcomes are parental wealth and education. By contrast, I found that race, parental income, and parental occupation did not matter at all. It is perhaps no coincidence that the key determinants of success and social mobility in America -- education and wealth (which continues to be dominated by home equity for most American families) -- are both positional goods. Moreover, the two are linked: housing values are closely related to school performance.

In addition to the fact that more of the economy may contain this relative status nature, the provision of certain key goods and services is predicated on a need for high-skill workers. Consider three of the biggest costs to families -- education, health care, and housing -- and how they are linked to skill and status. Higher education is expensive because it presents the double whammy of being a relative status good (to the extent that degrees, prestige, and comparative advantage in the labor market matter) that is provided by high-skilled employees. Health care, however, is typically not a status good (we just want to be cured and don't begrudge others for being healthy) but still requires very highly skilled workers. Conversely, housing generally requires less-skilled workers, but has become highly relative for many American families seeking ever-larger McMansions and top-notch school districts.

This simple table (see: breakthroughjournal.org) illustrates the interactions between the relative nature of goods and the labor skill level required to produce them. Whereas the New Deal and its offspring policies were meant to insure American households from going without basic material necessities that were absolute in nature (the upper-left quadrant), the major sources of economic anxiety today relate to high-skill services that are often relative (i.e., status) goods (the lower-right quadrant). Relative deprivation is a much trickier problem to solve and will require a fundamentally different approach to social policy.

The challenge is exacerbated by the fact that the most relative and/or high-skill quadrants appear to be linked to each other: housing becomes an intense status good by virtue of the fact that it is linked to the education system (thanks to the financing of education through local property taxes plus the desire of high-income parents to surround their kids with other wealthy peers). Wealth, meanwhile, is largely held in the form of primary residence equity for most American families. And health care expenses are the single biggest cause of bankruptcy in the United States.

4.

In some respects, the age of affluent inequality should facilitate the creation of a new social contract capable of improving social and economic mobility. In theory, high levels of inequality should make it easier to concentrate the tax burden on the shoulders of a small minority. While our national tax debate seems to belie this claim, evidence from local school districts, compiled by economists Sean Corcoran and William Evans, shows that higher inequality leads to greater investment in public schooling through higher taxes.8 Moreover, the enormous private fortunes of our new gilded age have often been invested in a variety of socially beneficial ways. We can thank the benevolent tycoons of generations past, such as Andrew Carnegie and the Rockefeller family, for the New York Public Library and the Green Revolution, respectively. Today, Bill Gates's and Warren Buffett's private funding decisions have greatly advanced the global fight against malaria.

Nonetheless, we are unlikely to return to the 90 percent marginal tax rates of the postwar era. Nor can we reasonably depend upon the benevolence of the super wealthy to make up for the failings of our present social safety net. In the end, progressives would be well served to focus less on soaking the rich and more on raising sufficient revenues to minimize the consequences of the positional arms race.

A good place to start would be to eliminate incentives for taxpayers to game the system by treating all income equally. We could raise dividend taxes and capital gains taxes to the same level as the top marginal tax bracket on wages, tax health and other benefits as income, and convert the estate tax to an inheritance tax that hits heirs at the same rate. This proposal might even appeal to conservatives if it were tied to provisions that established a flat tax that eliminated deductions and a national sales, or value-added, tax that held federal revenues to one-quarter of the GDP.

Taken together, these measures, combined with a raise on the payroll tax cap above the current $120,000 level, would probably end up being no less progressive than the current tax system. In addition, we might be able to shore up the Social Security trust fund and rein in health care spending, for additional budgetary savings above and beyond those that will be triggered by the Affordable Care Act.

A simpler and fairer tax system will still be hard pressed to address the ways in which social and economic inequality is self-reinforcing. Addressing these dynamics will require us to limit the importance of socioeconomic disparities by reducing the opportunity for distinctions in the areas of housing, education, and other status goods.

We should start by challenging skill-based credentialing monopolies in areas such as health care and education. For example, health care could be provided more affordably if everyone was willing to see nurse practitioners or medical assistants in drive-through clinics and forsake the latest high-tech tests and procedures. College could be more affordable if we adopted an open courseware model and de-emphasized the need for face-to-face contact with faculty members.

We also need to reduce the relative nature of health care, housing, and education by delinking them from each other. For instance, decoupling school district funding from local property taxes, or allowing public school choice across district or municipality lines, could increase access to higher-quality education for those at the bottom of the income ladder. Health care reform may help sever the tie between health care and the housing sector, resulting in less risk of mortgage default or bankruptcy when twin calamities, job loss and negative health events, occur simultaneously.

Still, the incentives for economic segregation are likely to remain high and the challenges to overcoming them loom large, suggesting the consideration of more radical ideas. One approach would randomly assign every child to a pool of 10,000 people across the United States at birth that she would stay in until her death. Each "pod" of 10,000 people would levy taxes to be distributed among the members to cover things that welfare and education policies typically cover (e.g., K-12 schooling, health care, disability payments, food stamps). Because the pods are relatively small in number, members could direct spending to try to maximize benefit through online budget negotiations and voting. And while siblings would end up in the same pods, parents would already have been assigned to pods long before they gave birth and would likely not end up in the same pods as their partners or children.

Such a system could re-create the social fabric of the 18th century small town in 21st century cyber-network fashion, thereby reducing segregation and halting widespread withdrawal from the public sphere. Since individuals would not be located in the same geographic area as the rest of the members of their pod, health care, education, and other social programs would need to be provided through mechanisms such as vouchers that relied on free market allocation of the actual service wherever pod members lived. This system would create better incentives for preventative care, educational investments, etc., since individuals would have an interest in keeping the lifetime costs of their risk pool down.

Less radically, if we funded private school vouchers we could sever the link between place of residence and quality of school. This approach would only succeed if we combined this free market approach to education, which should appeal to conservatives, with a commitment to economic diversity, which should appeal to progressives. Yes, fund private school attendance with vouchers, but require participating schools to enroll students from across the income spectrum, thereby increasing opportunity for education and facilitating entrance into the knowledge class.

Liberals may object to this as privatization, but there is nothing inherently egalitarian about public institutions. Unlike its public counterpart (and rival) UC Berkeley, Stanford, a highly endowed, private university, charges no tuition for families with incomes under $100,000. Of course, this is only possible because Stanford has the financial resources to dial down its sticker price to lure less wealthy families. As it stands currently, the University of California system writ large -- largely thanks to its population of community college transfer students -- is one of the success stories when it comes to income diversity. Private institutions may need to be nudged (or even required) to spend their considerable resources on admitting low-income students (such as community college transfers).

Pods? Facebook-style democracy? Harvard online? It sounds bizarre, to be sure. But what should be clear is that the basic structure of the American economy has profoundly changed, as has the nature of poverty and inequality. The old New Deal safety net was created to prevent absolute deprivation, which, thanks to rising, if unequally distributed prosperity, is largely a thing of the past. In this new age of affluent inequality, we need to find ways to turn that safety net on its side and make it into a rope lattice everyone can climb. /

1. Piketty, Thomas & Emmanuel Saez. 2003. "Income Inequality in the United States 1913-1998." The Quarterly Journal of Economics. February. (back)

2. Jacobe, Dennis. 2011. "In U.S., 54% Have Stock Market Investments, Lowest Since 1999." Gallup. April 20th. (back)

3. Guo, Hui. 2001. A Simple Model of Limited Stock Market Participation. Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. May/June. (back)

4. United States Census Bureau. Housing Characteristics in the US. (back)

5. US Bureau of Labor Statistics. 2006. "100 Years of Consumer Spending." BLS Report 991; Conley, Dalton. 2005. "Poverty and Life Chances: The Conceptualization and Study of the Poor." Sage Handbook of Sociology, Eds. Craig Calhoun, Chris Rojek and Bryan S. Turner. London: Sage Limited, U.K. (back)

6. US Bureau of Labor Statistics. 2010. Food for Thought. November; Holland, Laurence H. M. and David M. Ewalt. 2006. "How Americans Make and Spend Their Money. Forbes. July 19th. (back)

7. Hirsch, Fred. 1976. The Social Limits to Growth. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. (back)

8. Corcoran, Sean & William N. Evans. 2010. Income Inequality, the Median Voter, and the Support for Public Education. NBER Working Paper No. 16097. (back)

Free speech for all or for none

2011-10-16T01:29:00.000-07:00

It's great to see so many stories on the Occupy Wall Street movement. While Tea Party members may not feel much affinity with the Occupy Wall Street members, to quote Zach St. George writing in the North Coast Journal, "...their members might find more in common if they paused to consider."

I was pleased to read in our local media that in Arcata CA., even the Mayor was out in support of the protesters. But I must point out that while many in Arcata support the right of these "occupiers" to hold up their signs with any number of statements and demands, if one of these protesters dares to include a request for donations on one of those signs, they will be in violation of Arcata's Panhandling Ordinance--over which, as covered on The Journal's Blogthing, I am currently suing the city.

If we want to support free speech for Tea Party Members and Wall Street Occupiers alike, we need to also tolerate free speech by panhandlers.

Richard Salzman
Founding member of Humboldt Civil Liberties Defense Fund

The 1930s Sure Sound Familiar

2011-10-16T00:21:00.001-07:00

The 1930s Sure Sound Familiar
by JOE NOCERA
October 14, 2011

Not long ago, someone suggested that I read “Since Yesterday,” a book by Frederick Lewis Allen, a popular historian of the 1930s and 1940s. Published in 1940, it turned out to be a shrewd, concise, wonderfully written account of America in the ’30s.

It also turned out to be something else: a reminder of why history matters. It is impossible to read “Since Yesterday” without reflecting, again and again, on the parallels between then and now. The Great Depression, of course, dominates the book — and is far worse than anything we’ve been through. Still, when Allen writes about Ivar Kreuger, the industrialist who built an empire that some considered a Ponzi scheme, you instantly think of Bernie Madoff. The country’s fixation with the Lindbergh kidnapping seems strikingly similar to the country’s fixation with Casey Anthony.

And when Allen describes “Hooverville” — a large encampment of war veterans demanding promised bonus payments — Occupy Wall Street springs to mind. The veterans, who had gathered in a park near the Capitol, were treated well at first, but were eventually routed by the Army in a brutal show of force.

In “Since Yesterday,” bankers are vilified; homes are foreclosed on; people desperately search for work — just like today. Businessmen speak of the need for “confidence,” a word that “enters the vocabulary only when confidence is lacking.” Elsewhere Allen writes, “No longer were vital economic decisions made at international conferences of bankers; now they were made only by the political leaders of states.”

Allen makes the surprising point that, while small business suffered terribly during the Great Depression, big corporations did well. When large companies needed to lay off workers to maintain profitability, they did so ruthlessly. Bursts of economic growth, however, were rarely accompanied by an increase in employment. Why? Because new technology allowed companies to increase productivity at the expense of workers. Just like today.

What dominates “Since Yesterday” — as it must dominate any history of the Great Depression — is the government’s responses to the crisis. Herbert Hoover was “leery of any direct governmental offensive against the Depression,” writes Allen. “So he stood aside and waited for the healing process to assert itself, as according to the hallowed principles of laissez-faire economics it should.” Sticking to his convictions, Hoover allowed the country to sink deeper and deeper into Depression, becoming in the process one of its victims — “along with the traditional economic theories of which he was the obstinate and tragic spokesman.”

Then came Roosevelt, untethered to any economic theory and willing to try anything to get people back to work. Allen describes the alphabet soup of agencies he created, the deficits he generated, the regulations he enacted. The economy, which bottomed out in 1932, steadied and then began to grow until, by 1937, it appeared that the Great Depression had ended.

Allen then takes us through the terrible days of late 1937, when the economy collapsed again. “Roosevelt’s Depression,” businessmen called it, blaming it on a business tax they particularly loathed. In fact, Allen makes the convincing case that the real problem was that Roosevelt had tried to do something business wanted: balance the budget. Shrinking government spending dried up demand. And not until the following spring, when he reversed course and decided to “go in for heavy spending again,” did conditions begin to improve.

The tragedy of Washington today, as the supercommittee begins its task of finding $1.2 trillion in cuts, is that nobody seems to remember the lessons of “Since Yesterday” — and most other books about the Great Depression.

Cutting deficits always sounds good. Certainly, nobody wants the inflation that runaway deficits can produce. But in a depressed economy, cutting spending can lead to deflation, which is every bit as ruinous. To read “Since Yesterday” at this particular moment — with the economy hanging in the balance, with President Obama’s jobs program already voted down in the Senate, with fiscal policy so stubbornly focused on the wrong things — is to fear that we are headed for worse times ahead, not better times.

Toward the end of his book, Allen sums up the mood of the country. By 1939, people were weary of hard economic times, but they were also weary of Roosevelt’s endless experiments. Many modern historians believe that Roosevelt’s biggest problem was not that he’d done too much, but that he’d done too little — that the Depression required a response bigger than even Roosevelt’s New Deal. Implicitly, Allen agrees with that.

Still, he writes, “Despite all the miseries of the Depression and the recurrent fears of new economic decline and of war, the bulk of the American people had not yet quite lost their basic asset of hopefulness.”

He concludes: “A nation tried in a long ordeal had not yet lost heart.” When our current long ordeal finally ends, will we be able to say the same?

2011-10-10T17:22:00.000-07:00

Support the protesters

Letter to the Editor
Posted: 09/29/2011
Times Standard

If you've not seen coverage of the protests happening on Wall Street for the last two weeks (since Sept. 17th), and you likely have not if your only news comes from mainstream media sources, then you should take a moment to read about (and offer support to) them at the organizers' website OccupyWallSt .org. It's been thousands of people holding rallies day after day to protest the class war that's been waged by Wall Street and the banking industry and corporations against working Americans for the last 30-plus years and finally, people are starting to fight back. I support these protesters and I hope you will too.
Richard Salzman
Sunny Brae

http://www.times-standard.com/letters/ci_19002371

Panic of the Plutocrats

2011-10-10T15:54:00.000-07:00

Panic of the Plutocrats

by PAUL KRUGMAN
New York Times
October 9, 2011

It remains to be seen whether the Occupy Wall Street protests will change America’s direction. Yet the protests have already elicited a remarkably hysterical reaction from Wall Street, the super-rich in general, and politicians and pundits who reliably serve the interests of the wealthiest hundredth of a percent.

And this reaction tells you something important — namely, that the extremists threatening American values are what F.D.R. called “economic royalists,” not the people camping in Zuccotti Park.
Consider first how Republican politicians have portrayed the modest-sized if growing demonstrations, which have involved some confrontations with the police — confrontations that seem to have involved a lot of police overreaction — but nothing one could call a riot. And there has in fact been nothing so far to match the behavior of Tea Party crowds in the summer of 2009.

Nonetheless, Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, has denounced “mobs” and “the pitting of Americans against Americans.” The G.O.P. presidential candidates have weighed in, with Mitt Romney accusing the protesters of waging “class warfare,” while Herman Cain calls them “anti-American.” My favorite, however, is Senator Rand Paul, who for some reason worries that the protesters will start seizing iPads, because they believe rich people don’t deserve to have them.

Michael Bloomberg, New York’s mayor and a financial-industry titan in his own right, was a bit more moderate, but still accused the protesters of trying to “take the jobs away from people working in this city,” a statement that bears no resemblance to the movement’s actual goals.

And if you were listening to talking heads on CNBC, you learned that the protesters “let their freak flags fly,” and are “aligned with Lenin.”

The way to understand all of this is to realize that it’s part of a broader syndrome, in which wealthy Americans who benefit hugely from a system rigged in their favor react with hysteria to anyone who points out just how rigged the system is.

Last year, you may recall, a number of financial-industry barons went wild over very mild criticism from President Obama. They denounced Mr. Obama as being almost a socialist for endorsing the so-called Volcker rule, which would simply prohibit banks backed by federal guarantees from engaging in risky speculation. And as for their reaction to proposals to close a loophole that lets some of them pay remarkably low taxes — well, Stephen Schwarzman, chairman of the Blackstone Group, compared it to Hitler’s invasion of Poland.

And then there’s the campaign of character assassination against Elizabeth Warren, the financial reformer now running for the Senate in Massachusetts. Not long ago a YouTube video of Ms. Warren making an eloquent, down-to-earth case for taxes on the rich went viral. Nothing about what she said was radical — it was no more than a modern riff on Oliver Wendell Holmes’s famous dictum that “Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.”

But listening to the reliable defenders of the wealthy, you’d think that Ms. Warren was the second coming of Leon Trotsky. George Will declared that she has a “collectivist agenda,” that she believes that “individualism is a chimera.” And Rush Limbaugh called her “a parasite who hates her host. Willing to destroy the host while she sucks the life out of it.”

What’s going on here? The answer, surely, is that Wall Street’s Masters of the Universe realize, deep down, how morally indefensible their position is. They’re not John Galt; they’re not even Steve Jobs. They’re people who got rich by peddling complex financial schemes that, far from delivering clear benefits to the American people, helped push us into a crisis whose aftereffects continue to blight the lives of tens of millions of their fellow citizens.

Yet they have paid no price. Their institutions were bailed out by taxpayers, with few strings attached. They continue to benefit from explicit and implicit federal guarantees — basically, they’re still in a game of heads they win, tails taxpayers lose. And they benefit from tax loopholes that in many cases have people with multimillion-dollar incomes paying lower rates than middle-class families.

This special treatment can’t bear close scrutiny — and therefore, as they see it, there must be no close scrutiny. Anyone who points out the obvious, no matter how calmly and moderately, must be demonized and driven from the stage. In fact, the more reasonable and moderate a critic sounds, the more urgently he or she must be demonized, hence the frantic sliming of Elizabeth Warren.

So who’s really being un-American here? Not the protesters, who are simply trying to get their voices heard. No, the real extremists here are America’s oligarchs, who want to suppress any criticism of the sources of their wealth.

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/paulkrugman/index.html?inline=nyt-per

Occupy Wall Street: The Most Important Thing in the World Now

2011-10-10T15:21:00.000-07:00

Occupy Wall Street: The Most Important Thing in the World Now

by Naomi Klein
The Nation
October 6, 2011

I was honored to be invited to speak at Occupy Wall Street on Thursday night. Since amplification is (disgracefully) banned, and everything I say will have to be repeated by hundreds of people so others can hear (a k a “the human microphone”), what I actually say at Liberty Plaza will have to be very short. With that in mind, here is the longer, uncut version of the speech.

I love you.

And I didn’t just say that so that hundreds of you would shout “I love you” back, though that is obviously a bonus feature of the human microphone. Say unto others what you would have them say unto you, only way louder.

Yesterday, one of the speakers at the labor rally said: “We found each other.” That sentiment captures the beauty of what is being created here. A wide-open space (as well as an idea so big it can’t be contained by any space) for all the people who want a better world to find each other. We are so grateful.

If there is one thing I know, it is that the 1 percent loves a crisis. When people are panicked and desperate and no one seems to know what to do, that is the ideal time to push through their wish list of pro-corporate policies: privatizing education and social security, slashing public services, getting rid of the last constraints on corporate power. Amidst the economic crisis, this is happening the world over.

And there is only one thing that can block this tactic, and fortunately, it’s a very big thing: the 99 percent. And that 99 percent is taking to the streets from Madison to Madrid to say “No. We will not pay for your crisis.”

That slogan began in Italy in 2008. It ricocheted to Greece and France and Ireland and finally it has made its way to the square mile where the crisis began.

“Why are they protesting?” ask the baffled pundits on TV. Meanwhile, the rest of the world asks: “What took you so long?” “We’ve been wondering when you were going to show up.” And most of all: “Welcome.”

Many people have drawn parallels between Occupy Wall Street and the so-called anti-globalization protests that came to world attention in Seattle in 1999. That was the last time a global, youth-led, decentralized movement took direct aim at corporate power. And I am proud to have been part of what we called “the movement of movements.”

But there are important differences too. For instance, we chose summits as our targets: the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, the G8. Summits are transient by their nature, they only last a week. That made us transient too. We’d appear, grab world headlines, then disappear. And in the frenzy of hyper patriotism and militarism that followed the 9/11 attacks, it was easy to sweep us away completely, at least in North America.

Occupy Wall Street, on the other hand, has chosen a fixed target. And you have put no end date on your presence here. This is wise. Only when you stay put can you grow roots. This is crucial. It is a fact of the information age that too many movements spring up like beautiful flowers but quickly die off. It’s because they don’t have roots. And they don’t have long term plans for how they are going to sustain themselves. So when storms come, they get washed away.

Being horizontal and deeply democratic is wonderful. But these principles are compatible with the hard work of building structures and institutions that are sturdy enough to weather the storms ahead. I have great faith that this will happen.

Something else this movement is doing right: You have committed yourselves to non-violence. You have refused to give the media the images of broken windows and street fights it craves so desperately. And that tremendous discipline has meant that, again and again, the story has been the disgraceful and unprovoked police brutality. Which we saw more of just last night. Meanwhile, support for this movement grows and grows. More wisdom.

But the biggest difference a decade makes is that in 1999, we were taking on capitalism at the peak of a frenzied economic boom. Unemployment was low, stock portfolios were bulging. The media was drunk on easy money. Back then it was all about start-ups, not shutdowns.

We pointed out that the deregulation behind the frenzy came at a price. It was damaging to labor standards. It was damaging to environmental standards. Corporations were becoming more powerful than governments and that was damaging to our democracies. But to be honest with you, while the good times rolled, taking on an economic system based on greed was a tough sell, at least in rich countries.

Ten years later, it seems as if there aren’t any more rich countries. Just a whole lot of rich people. People who got rich looting the public wealth and exhausting natural resources around the world.

The point is, today everyone can see that the system is deeply unjust and careening out of control. Unfettered greed has trashed the global economy. And it is trashing the natural world as well. We are overfishing our oceans, polluting our water with fracking and deepwater drilling, turning to the dirtiest forms of energy on the planet, like the Alberta tar sands. And the atmosphere cannot absorb the amount of carbon we are putting into it, creating dangerous warming. The new normal is serial disasters: economic and ecological.

These are the facts on the ground. They are so blatant, so obvious, that it is a lot easier to connect with the public than it was in 1999, and to build the movement quickly.

We all know, or at least sense, that the world is upside down: we act as if there is no end to what is actually finite—fossil fuels and the atmospheric space to absorb their emissions. And we act as if there are strict and immovable limits to what is actually bountiful—the financial resources to build the kind of society we need.

The task of our time is to turn this around: to challenge this false scarcity. To insist that we can afford to build a decent, inclusive society—while at the same time, respect the real limits to what the earth can take.

What climate change means is that we have to do this on a deadline. This time our movement cannot get distracted, divided, burned out or swept away by events. This time we have to succeed. And I’m not talking about regulating the banks and increasing taxes on the rich, though that’s important.

I am talking about changing the underlying values that govern our society. That is hard to fit into a single media-friendly demand, and it’s also hard to figure out how to do it. But it is no less urgent for being difficult.

That is what I see happening in this square. In the way you are feeding each other, keeping each other warm, sharing information freely and proving health care, meditation classes and empowerment training. My favorite sign here says, “I care about you.” In a culture that trains people to avoid each other’s gaze, to say, “Let them die,” that is a deeply radical statement.

A few final thoughts. In this great struggle, here are some things that don’t matter.

§ What we wear.
§ Whether we shake our fists or make peace signs.
§ Whether we can fit our dreams for a better world into a media soundbite.
And here are a few things that do matter.
§ Our courage.
§ Our moral compass.
§ How we treat each other.

We have picked a fight with the most powerful economic and political forces on the planet. That’s frightening. And as this movement grows from strength to strength, it will get more frightening. Always be aware that there will be a temptation to shift to smaller targets—like, say, the person sitting next to you at this meeting. After all, that is a battle that’s easier to win.

Don’t give in to the temptation. I’m not saying don’t call each other on shit. But this time, let’s treat each other as if we plan to work side by side in struggle for many, many years to come. Because the task before will demand nothing less.

Let’s treat this beautiful movement as if it is most important thing in the world. Because it is. It really is.

http://www.thenation.com/article/163844/occupy-wall-street-most-important-thing-world-now

Wall Street Protests: A Good Place to Start

2011-10-10T15:16:00.001-07:00

Wall Street Protests: A Good Place to Start
by Sen. Bernie Sanders
The Boston Globe
07 October 2011
The protest movement called Occupy Wall Street has struck a nerve. The demonstrators’ goals may be vague, but their grievances are very real. If our country is to break out of this horrendous recession and create the millions of jobs we desperately need, if we are going to create a financially-stable future, we must take a hard look at Wall Street and demand fundamental reforms. I hope the protesters provide the spark that ignites that process.
The truth is that millions of Americans lost their jobs, their homes and their life savings because of the greed, recklessness and illegal behavior of Wall Street. Even Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke agreed when I questioned him this week at a Joint Economic Committee hearing that that there was "excessive risk taking" by Wall Street. Bernanke also said the protesters “with some justification” hold the financial sector responsible for “getting us into this mess” and added, “I can't blame them.”
The demonstrators and millions of sympathetic Americans understand that odds are stacked in Wall Street’s favor because of the extraordinary economic and political clout of the big banks. Believe it or not, the country’s six largest financial institutions (Bank of America, CitiGroup, JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs) now have amassed assets equal to more than 60 percent of our gross domestic product. The four largest banks issue two-thirds of all credit cards, half of all mortgages, and hold nearly 40 percent of all bank deposits. Incredibly, after we bailed out the behemoth banks that were “too big to fail,” three out of the four are now even bigger than before the financial crisis.
Not only do these financial institutions have enormous economic clout, their wealth makes them an extremely potent political force. From 1998 through 2008, in order to achieve their goal of repealing Glass-Steagall and other financial regulations, they spent more than $5 billion on lobbying and campaign contributions. They also spent hundreds of millions to water down last year’s Dodd-Frank reform bill. After the law was passed, hundreds of millions more were spent to repeal provisions and weaken regulations. They never give up.
Where do we go from here? How do we convert the protesters’ enthusiasm into concrete results?
For starters, we should break up the giant financial institutions. Left to their own selfish devices, Wall Street bankers will continue to gamble with other people’s money. Sooner or later, when their bets go wrong, they will come back to Congress asking to be bailed out again. Why not nip that in the bud? There also is a sound economic argument against too few owning far too much. The idea that six giant financial institutions can exert such enormous control over the economy should frighten anyone who believes in a competitive free-market system. Good Republican presidents like William Howard Taft and Teddy Roosevelt broke up Standard Oil, the railroad trusts and other huge monopolies a century ago. Now is the time for us to end the financial oligarchy that has been so destructive to our economy. If a bank is too big to fail, it is too big to exist.
Wall Street reform also must address the powerful and secretive Federal Reserve. A Government Accountability Office audit that I requested found that the central bank provided $16 trillion in revolving, low-interest loans to every major financial institution in this country, multi-national corporations, and some of the wealthiest people in the world. The Fed even helped bail out other central banks around the world. When Wall Street was on the verge of collapse, the Fed acted boldly. Today, with the middle class collapsing, the Fed must act with equal vigor.
Real unemployment is more than 16 percent. Median family income has declined by $3,600 over the last decade. A record 46 million Americans live in poverty. The gap between the very rich and everyone else, the widest of any major country, is growing wider.
Under emergency provisions already in law, the Fed has the authority to provide low-interest loans to small businesses that are starving for capital so that they can create the millions of jobs our economy needs. It should do so.
The Fed also has authority to make credit card issuers stop bilking consumers with sky-high fees and interest rates of 30 percent or more. Especially in a recession, working people use credit cards to stretch their paychecks for basic needs. Usury is already regarded as a sin in the eyes of every major religion. It should be a crime. The Fed has the authority to limit interest rates and fees. It should do so.
The Occupy Wall Street demonstrators are shining a light on one of the most serious problems facing the United States: the greed, recklessness and power of Wall Street. Now is the time for the president and Congress to follow that light – and act. The future of our economy is at stake.

Chris Hedges on Occupy Wall Street!

2011-10-01T11:06:00.001-07:00

The Best Among Us

Sept. 29, 2011

by Chris Hedges

There are no excuses left. Either you join the revolt taking place on Wall Street and in the financial districts of other cities across the country or you stand on the wrong side of history. Either you obstruct, in the only form left to us, which is civil disobedience, the plundering by the criminal class on Wall Street and accelerated destruction of the ecosystem that sustains the human species, or become the passive enabler of a monstrous evil. Either you taste, feel and smell the intoxication of freedom and revolt or sink into the miasma of despair and apathy. Either you are a rebel or a slave.

To be declared innocent in a country where the rule of law means nothing, where we have undergone a corporate coup, where the poor and working men and women are reduced to joblessness and hunger, where war, financial speculation and internal surveillance are the only real business of the state, where even habeas corpus no longer exists, where you, as a citizen, are nothing more than a commodity to corporate systems of power, one to be used and discarded, is to be complicit in this radical evil. To stand on the sidelines and say “I am innocent” is to bear the mark of Cain; it is to do nothing to reach out and help the weak, the oppressed and the suffering, to save the planet. To be innocent in times like these is to be a criminal. Ask Tim DeChristopher.

Choose. But choose fast. The state and corporate forces are determined to crush this. They are not going to wait for you. They are terrified this will spread. They have their long phalanxes of police on motorcycles, their rows of white paddy wagons, their foot soldiers hunting for you on the streets with pepper spray and orange plastic nets. They have their metal barricades set up on every single street leading into the New York financial district, where the mandarins in Brooks Brothers suits use your money, money they stole from you, to gamble and speculate and gorge themselves while one in four children outside those barricades depend on food stamps to eat. Speculation in the 17th century was a crime. Speculators were hanged. Today they run the state and the financial markets. They disseminate the lies that pollute our airwaves. They know, even better than you, how pervasive the corruption and theft have become, how gamed the system is against you, how corporations have cemented into place a thin oligarchic class and an obsequious cadre of politicians, judges and journalists who live in their little gated Versailles while 6 million Americans are thrown out of their homes, a number soon to rise to 10 million, where a million people a year go bankrupt because they cannot pay their medical bills and 45,000 die from lack of proper care, where real joblessness is spiraling to over 20 percent, where the citizens, including students, spend lives toiling in debt peonage, working dead-end jobs, when they have jobs, a world devoid of hope, a world of masters and serfs.

The only word these corporations know is more. They are disemboweling every last social service program funded by the taxpayers, from education to Social Security, because they want that money themselves. Let the sick die. Let the poor go hungry. Let families be tossed in the street. Let the unemployed rot. Let children in the inner city or rural wastelands learn nothing and live in misery and fear. Let the students finish school with no jobs and no prospects of jobs. Let the prison system, the largest in the industrial world, expand to swallow up all potential dissenters. Let torture continue. Let teachers, police, firefighters, postal employees and social workers join the ranks of the unemployed. Let the roads, bridges, dams, levees, power grids, rail lines, subways, bus services, schools and libraries crumble or close. Let the rising temperatures of the planet, the freak weather patterns, the hurricanes, the droughts, the flooding, the tornadoes, the melting polar ice caps, the poisoned water systems, the polluted air increase until the species dies.

Who the hell cares? If the stocks of ExxonMobil or the coal industry or Goldman Sachs are high, life is good. Profit. Profit. Profit. That is what they chant behind those metal barricades. They have their fangs deep into your necks. If you do not shake them off very, very soon they will kill you. And they will kill the ecosystem, dooming your children and your children’s children. They are too stupid and too blind to see that they will perish with the rest of us. So either you rise up and supplant them, either you dismantle the corporate state, for a world of sanity, a world where we no longer kneel before the absurd idea that the demands of financial markets should govern human behavior, or we are frog-marched toward self-annihilation.

Those on the streets around Wall Street are the physical embodiment of hope. They know that hope has a cost, that it is not easy or comfortable, that it requires self-sacrifice and discomfort and finally faith. They sleep on concrete every night. Their clothes are soiled. They have eaten more bagels and peanut butter than they ever thought possible. They have tasted fear, been beaten, gone to jail, been blinded by pepper spray, cried, hugged each other, laughed, sung, talked too long in general assemblies, seen their chants drift upward to the office towers above them, wondered if it is worth it, if anyone cares, if they will win. But as long as they remain steadfast they point the way out of the corporate labyrinth. This is what it means to be alive. They are the best among us.

Class Warfare by Chris MacNeil

2011-09-26T20:12:00.000-07:00

Do right by Senator Sanders, as he's trying to do right by us!

2011-09-23T15:29:00.000-07:00

Rick Perry and his fellow Republicans have been repeating a lie over and over, that Social Security is "broke". That is simply not true. Currently there is $2.7 trillion (with a T) surplus in the Social Security account. Over the next 20+ years there will be less money coming in then going out and that will slowly deplete this large trust fund that now exists. Below is a simple solution, put forth by my hero Bernie Sanders which will keep Social Security healthy for at least another 75 years, along with a link which I hope you'll click on to add your name in support!

Below that is a piece by Richard Wolff on "Class War" and then a longer explanation from Senator Sanders on his plan to strengthen Social Security.

Thanks for reading!
-Richard
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For 76 years, through good times and bad, Social Security has paid out every benefit owed to every eligible American. The most effective way to strengthen Social Security for the next 76 years is to scrap the payroll tax cap for those earning $250,000 a year or more.

Right now, someone who earns $106,800 pays the same amount of money into Social Security as billionaires like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. That is because today, all income above $106,800 is exempt from the Social Security tax. As a result, 94% of Americans pay Social Security tax on all of their income, but the wealthiest 6% do not.

The "Keeping Our Social Security Promises Act" will ensure the long-term solvency of Social Security without cutting benefits, raising the retirement age or raising taxes on the middle class.

Join Sen. Bernie Sanders and Democracy for America members from across the county in fighting to strengthen Social Security -- become a citizen co-sponsor of the Keeping Our Social Security Promises Act, sign here:

http://www.democracyforamerica.com/activities/622?akid=1344.1289664.YFszZI&rd=1&t=1

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The Truth About "Class War" in America
Thursday 22 September 2011
by: Richard D. Wolff, Truthout | News Analysis

Republicans and conservatives have done us a service by describing federal policies in terms of "class war." But by applying the term only to Obama's latest proposals to raise taxes on the rich, they have it all backward and upside down. The last 50 years have indeed seen continuous class warfare in and over federal economic policies.

But it was a war waged chiefly by business and conservatives. They won, as we show below, and the mass of middle-income and poor Americans lost. Obama's modest proposal for tax increases on the rich does not begin a class war. On the contrary, it is a small, modest effort to reduce the other side's class war victories.

Big business and conservatives have worked to undo the regulations and taxes imposed on them in the wake of the Great Depression of the 1930s. Then, an upsurge in labor union organization (the Congress of Industrial Organizations sweep across basic US industries) and in membership in both the socialist and communist parties gave Franklin Delano Roosevelt the support and the pressure to tax business and the rich. He took their money to pay for the massive federal hiring program (11 million federal jobs filled between 1934 and 1941) and to start the Social Security Administration etc. He regulated their business activities to try to prevent devastating capitalist depressions from recurring in the nation's future.

Since the end of the Great Depression - and especially since the 1970s - the class warfare waged by business and its allies (most conservatives in both parties) was successful. For example, at the end of World War II, for every dollar Washington raised in taxes on individuals, it raised $1.50 in taxes on business profits. In contrast, today, for every dollar Washington gets in taxes on individuals, it gets 25 cents in taxes on business. Business and its allies successfully shifted most of its federal tax burden onto individuals.

Over the same period, the tax rates on the richest Americans fell from 91 percent in the 1950s and 1960s, and 70 percent in the 1970s to the current low rate of 35 percent. The richest Americans won that spectacular tax cut. Middle- and lower-income Americans won no such cuts, while paying a higher proportion of their income for Social Security that the rich were required to do.

In plain English, the last 50 years saw a massive shift of the burden of federal taxation from business to individuals and from rich individuals to everyone else. Class war policies, yes, but a war that victimized the vast majority of working Americans.

Of course, Republicans and conservatives carefully avoided using "class war" to describe those tax-shifting achievements over the last half-century. They wanted us to believe that all they cared about was economic growth and job creation. But when Obama now proposes modest increases in tax rates on rich individuals ("modest" because they don't begin to return to the tax rates in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s), the Republicans and conservatives howl "class warfare." Obama claims that higher taxes on the rich reduce the need for spending cuts that would slow growth and increase unemployment.

Republicans and conservatives argue that raising taxes on corporations and rich individuals punishes those who create jobs and thus will hurt efforts to reduce unemployment. Neither logic nor evidence supports their arguments. Last Friday, the US Federal Reserve reported a record quantity of cash on the books of US businesses (hoarding over $2 trillion). Despite the currently very low taxes on businesses and the rich, that cash is NOT being invested and NOT creating jobs. Nor is it being distributed to anyone else who is spending it either. Washington could tax a portion of that cash and spend it to stimulate the economy. That would be especially effective if the taxed cash were spent to hire the unemployed rather than leaving the cash idle in businesses' hoards.

Billionaire investor Warren Buffett recently upset many of his fellow super rich individuals by a New York Times op-ed that he wrote. It explained that he had never met any serious investor who decided about investments based on tax rates. Rather the prospects of profits and sales made the key difference to investors. Buffett urged higher income taxes on rich Americans like himself partly because those higher taxes would not negatively impact job creation in the future just as it had not done in the past. He implied that it was becoming dangerous for capitalism's survival to keep providing the minority of rich people with lower federal tax rates than the middle and lower income majority paid.

Economists know that a long time - usually years - separates making an investment and reaping the profits from selling the output of that investment. Anyone making an investment today cannot know what tax rates will be in the future. They may be higher or lower or the same as they are today. That's why investors' decisions depend far more on real costs today and estimates about future sales, markets and prices in the future than on speculation about future tax rates. The claim that tax increases today will cut investments now, thinly disguises an effort to lower taxes on business and the rich now.

History reinforces the same point. In the 1950s and 1960s, tax rates on corporations and the rich were much, much higher than today. Yet, those years had lower unemployment and higherrates of investment and growth than today. Low tax rates on businesses and the rich do not create jobs.

Struggles over taxes always pit business and the rich against the middle-income earners and the poor. Each side seeks to shift the tax burden off of itself and on to the other side. "Class war" in that sense is nothing new. Accusing only one side of waging that war is ignorant at best and dishonest at worst. No one should be fooled. Today, business and the rich are waging class war yet again to avoid even a small, modest reverse in the huge tax cuts they won in that war over the last half-century.
http://www.truth-out.org/class-war-issue/1316617081

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From Senator Sanders:

Republicans hate Social Security because it has been an extraordinary success and has done exactly what it was designed to do. It is the most successful government program in our nation's history and is enormously popular.

When Social Security was developed, 50 percent of seniors lived in poverty. Today, that number is 10 percent -- still too high, but a testament to the success of Social Security.

Republicans have spent years demonizing Social Security and spreading lies about its sustainability. They want to scare Americans and build support for making drastic cuts to the program or privatizing it entirely. Their long-term goal is to end Social Security as we know it, and convert it into a private account system which will enable Wall Street to make hundreds of billions in profits.

The truth is that, today, according to the Social Security Administration, Social Security has a $2.7 trillion surplus and can pay out every benefit owed to every eligible American for the next 25 years.

Further, because it is funded by the payroll tax and not the U.S. Treasury, Social Security has not contributed one nickel to our deficit.

Now -- in a prolonged recession that has decimated the poor and middle class and pushed more Americans into poverty than at any point in modern history -- we need to strengthen Social Security. That's why I, along with nine co-sponsors, have introduced the "Keeping Our Social Security Promises Act." This legislation would lift the Social Security Payroll tax cap on all income over $250,000 a year, would require millionaires and billionaires to pay their fair share into the Social Security Trust Fund, and would extend the program for the next 75 years.

Join me now as a citizen co-sponsor of the Keeping Our Social Security Promises Act.

For 76 years, through good times and bad, Social Security has paid out every benefit owed to every eligible American. The most effective way to strengthen Social Security for the next 76 years is to scrap the payroll tax cap for those earning $250,000 a year or more.

Right now, someone who earns $106,800 pays the same amount of money into Social Security as billionaires like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. That is because today, all income above $106,800 is exempt from the Social Security tax. As a result, 94% of Americans pay Social Security tax on all of their income, but the wealthiest 6% do not.

That makes no sense.

The "Keeping Our Social Security Promises Act" will ensure the long-term solvency of Social Security without cutting benefits, raising the retirement age or raising taxes on the middle class.

Join me and Democracy for America in fighting to strengthen Social Security -- Sign on as a citizen co-sponsor of the Keeping Our Social Security Promises Act.

Social Security is keeping tens of millions of seniors out of poverty today. I can think of no more important issue facing our country today than making sure that Social Security remains strong for generations to come.

Thank you.

-Bernie

Senator Bernie Sanders
U.S. Senator from Vermont

become a citizen co-sponsor of the Keeping Our Social Security Promises Act, sign here.

--

Class Warfare

2011-09-20T20:34:00.000-07:00

We've been at the losing end of a "class war" for at least the last 30 years. It's well past time we started fighting back!
Here's a good piece by one of the best minds on the subject:
--

A Good Fight

Tuesday 20 September 2011
by: Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog | Op-Ed

So the really big fight — perhaps the defining battle of 2012 — won’t be over Medicare. It won’t even be over Obama’s jobs program.

It will be over whether the rich should pay more taxes.

The President has vowed to veto any plan to tame the debt that doesn’t increase taxes on the rich. The Republicans have vowed to oppose any tax increases on the rich.

It’s a good fight to have.

In a Rose Garden ceremony this morning, Obama proposed new taxes on the wealthy — including a special new tax for millionaires, the closing of loopholes and deductions for people making more than $250,000 a year, and an end to the portion of the Bush tax cut going to higher incomes.

Republicans accuse the President of instigating “class warfare.” But it’s not warfare to demand the rich pay their fair share of taxes to bring down America’s long-term debt.

After all, the richest 1 percent of Americans now takes home more than 20 percent of total income. That’s the highest share going to the top 1 percent in almost 90 years.

And they now pay at the lowest tax rates in half a century — half the rate they paid on ordinary income prior to 1981.

(Unfortunately, the President isn’t proposing to raise the capital-gains tax — which, now at 15 percent, creates a loophole large enough for the super-rich to drive their Ferrari’s through. About 80 percent of the income of America’s richest 400 comes in the form of capital gains. Here’s where billionaire hedge-fund and private-equity fund managers make out like bandits. As I’ve noted, I also wish he aimed higher — for more brackets and higher rates at the very top. But at least he’s drawn a line in the sand. The veto message is clear.)

Anyone who says the American economy suffers when the rich pay more in taxes doesn’t know history. We grew faster the first three decades after World War II than we have since.

Trickle-down economics has been a cruel joke.

On the other hand — given projected budget deficits — if the rich don’t pay their fair share, the rest of us will have to bear more of a burden. And that burden inevitably will come in the form of either higher taxes or fewer public services.

If anyone’s declared class warfare it’s the people who inhabit the top rungs of big corporations and Wall Street (and who comprise a disproportionate number of America’s super rich). They’ve declared it on average workers.

The ratio of corporate profits to wages is higher than it’s been since before the Great Depression. And even as corporate salaries and perks keep rising, the median wage keeping dropping, and jobs continue to be shed.

You’ve got the chairman of Merck taking home $17.9 million last year. This year Merck announces plans to boot 13,000 workers. The CEO of Bank of America takes in $10 million, and the bank announces it’s firing 30,000 workers.

Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but the way I see it we’ve got a huge budget deficit and a giant jobs problem. And under these circumstances it seems to me people at the top who have never had it so good should sacrifice a bit more, so the rest of us don’t have to sacrifice quite as much.

According to the polls, most Americans agree.

--
ROBERT REICH
Robert Reich is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. He has written thirteen books, including The Work of Nations, Locked in the Cabinet, Supercapitalism, and his most recent book, Aftershock.

http://www.truth-out.org/good-fight/1316540233

Bruce LeBel LTE of Arcata Eye re: Panhandling Lawsuit

2011-09-08T21:12:00.000-07:00

From the Arcata Eye
9.7.11

Editor –

My answer to the question “Whose Arcata?” posed on the cover of last week’s North Coast Journal is this:

Arcata is everyone’s who is here, with our rights enumerated in the US Constitution and with constraints in activities and behaviors defined by laws, regulations and zoning. That these shared rights and constraints pit the preferences of one against the rights of another is a source of conflict engendered by some who are impatient or offended by others, as illustrated by Arcata’s reactionary panhandling ordinance.

The City will certainly lose the current lawsuit challenging the panhandling ordinance, as the geographic constraint on free speech by the ordinance is essentially total in the commercial area. (A reminder of the foundation of civil rights that our society, including Arcata, is built on was provided by a Federal judge’s recent ruling in favor of a panhandler on a Fifth Ave. sidewalk in Manhattan. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/30/nyregion/panhandler-on-fifth-avenue-wins-respite-from-arrests.html?adxnnl=1&ref=todayspaper&adxnnlx=1314705644-IhDc2tjvqDLJLI/BBPXCrg).

There were already municipal ordinances that define aggressive panhandling as illegal, and the further elements of the new ordinance that address aggressive panhandling are not being challenged.

Although our respective individual economic positions, available time, health, energy and worldview give each of us our capabilities to engage in our chosen ways with our Arcata community, we all share our civil rights and share the responsibility to comply with applicable laws. However, when a law attempts to erode our Constitutional foundation of civil rights, those who take a stand challenging the misguided ordinance are representing all of us, every one of us in Arcata, because other than the air there is nothing shared more commonly among all of us whose Arcata this is than our civil rights.

And yes, an increase in respectful behavior would be nice, but you can’t create that from the City Council dais, particularly when the Council takes a position disrespecting our Bill of Rights.

Bruce LeBel
Arcata, CA

* * *

Response to Michele Bachmann

2011-09-06T14:36:00.001-07:00

Maybe sever weather is God's way of encouraging deficit spending as economic stimulus?

City of Arcata to be Sued for Denying Public Records Request

2011-09-05T09:02:00.000-07:00

Arcata threatened with lawsuit over records

Jessica Cejnar/The Times-Standard
09/05/2011

A former Arcata commissioner is threatening to sue the city unless it releases information on the amount of money it spends on private attorneys.

According to Arcata resident Marc Delany, city officials refused to release the total amount of fees it paid to every private attorney hired to represent Arcata over the last three years.

According to a letter attorney Peter Martin sent to the Arcata City Council on Delany's behalf Wednesday, city officials refused to release that information, claiming it is subject to attorney-client privilege.

Arcata City Manager Randy Mendosa said the city spent a substantial amount of time and cost to meet Delany's request but said he was unsure if the legal costs were included. Mendosa also said because Delany has hired an attorney to represent him and has threatened to sue the city, he couldn't comment further on the issue.

”Our staff works hard to comply with as many public records as requested by the public,” he said. “It's something we take very seriously.”

Arcata City Attorney Nancy Diamond was unavailable for comment.

Martin and Delany, a former member of Arcata's Historic and Design Review Commission, are part of a new organization called the Humboldt Civil Liberties Defense Fund, which formed last week. Martin said Delany filed the public records act request with the city on July 11 and received a response 10 days later asking for more time to compile the requested documents.

When the city again responded on Aug. 11, it turned over records of the cases Arcata has been involved in and the attorneys who represented the city, but the amount of public funds spent to pay for those attorneys was missing, Delany said.

”We're trying to figure out what the trend line is for city expenditures for legal costs,” Delany said. “We're kind of curious about things the city has done that clearly didn't match up with what the rules and regulations were.”

According to Martin, the city claimed that its legal costs is privileged information.

”In my view of the law, there's no basis for that,” he said, adding that he and Delany would give the city two more weeks to respond to their records request. “Mr. Delany will then bring an action in superior court to enforce the demand if it's not complied with.”

The amount of money cities pay in legal fees is a matter of public record, said Duffy Carolan, an attorney with San Francisco law firm Davis Wright Tremaine LLP. Any advice and confidential communications that take place between a city council and their outside counsel can be redacted, she said, but the amount of attorneys' fees isn't something that can be withheld from the public.

”Many agencies hire outside counsel that are private attorneys as opposed to just having something done through the city attorney,” Carolan said. “How would the public ever be able to assess the city's decision to go with that particular firm in light of other firms?”

Martin said the Humboldt Civil Liberties Defense Fund will monitor cases in which peoples' civil liberties may have been affected and will provide funding to help pay for cases that it feels are a worthy cause. One case the organization is interested in is Richard Salzman's lawsuit against Arcata over its panhandling ordinance, said Martin, who is representing Salzman.

Jessica Cejnar can be reached at 441-0504 or at jcejnar@times-standard.com.

http://www.times-standard.com/localnews/ci_18829322

Cover art for 8th Annual Gathering at Pamplin Grove

2011-08-11T09:45:00.001-07:00

August 20-22, 2011 Pamplin Grove

Humboldt County, California

1987 Labor Day Party invite: Graphics Urinalysis Center

2011-07-15T17:16:00.001-07:00

Double click either or both images to read text.
If need be you can then "zoom in" under "view" in your menu bar, to enlarge further.

Lara Logan blamed for brutal attack by Cairo mob

2011-06-29T21:35:00.000-07:00

The Lara Logan victim blaming goes on

An editorial about "female naivete" sets off a controversy --

By Mary Elizabeth Williams for Salon

It's a good rule of thumb that when a writer says something like"obviously we shouldn't blame the victims," he's about to say something that completely contradicts that notion. Likewise, when Philadelphia's Broad Street Review editor in chief Dan Rottenberg wrote this month that "Women today are technically free to do all sorts of things that were forbidden to their grandmothers, which is all well and good," what else could possibly have followed but a tawdry screed of victim-blaming? And what happened next has blossomed into a durable dialogue in the Philadelphia press -- and provided the inspiration for a provocatively titled new play.

It began as an editor's response to an earlier story in the BSR, an online arts publication, about "Male sex abuse and the silence of women," in which writer Sarakay Smullens wrote about the need for women to "speak up" about sexual abuse, and mentioned, among other things, Lara Logan's brutal assault in Egypt last winter. Rottenberg's piece, in contrast, features a photo of a glamorous Logan in a low-cut dress with the caption, "What message was the TV journalist Lara Logan sending here?" Oh, wait, I know this one. Was it, go ahead and rape me at some later date, angry mob?

He then goes on, I kid you not, to devote a whole subhed of his story to "Logan’s cleavage," and note, "I can’t help thinking that women also need to take sensible precautions before they’re victimized …. if you want to be taken seriously as a journalist, don't pose for pictures that emphasize your cleavage." And then it gets worse. He advises women flatly, "Don’t trust your male friends. Don’t go to a man’s home at night unless you’re prepared to have sex with him. " He explains, "Rape and the notion of sexual conquest persist for the same reason that warfare persists: because the human animal -- especially the male animal -- craves drama as much as food, shelter and clothing. Conquering an unwilling sex partner is about as much drama as a man can find without shooting a gun -- and, of course, guns haven't disappeared either. Earth to liberated women: When you display legs, thighs or cleavage, some liberated men will see it as a sign that you feel good about yourself and your sexuality. But most men will see it as a sign that you want to get laid."

Earth to Dan Rottenberg: "Conquering an unwilling sex partner" is not a "craving" on par with food, shelter and clothing. It is not even a "drama." "Game of Thrones" is a drama. Rape is a violent crime. And normal, functioning men don't automatically take a woman's "display of legs, thighs and cleavage" as an automatic green light they "want to get laid" -- and even those who do don't mistake wanting to get laid with wanting to be abused.

Rottenberg then caps his polemic with a tale of two women on his block back in the day, one of whom was never assaulted and the other, who "could be seen puttering around her living room in shorts and a halter" and had a far rougher time.

Since the editorial ran early this month, the response from the local Philadelphia arts community and media has been intense. A piece by Tara Murtha in last week's Philadelphia Weekly called Rottenberg out for his ability to "in less than 800 words ... normalize the desire to rape; attribute that desire to rape to all men ... and [saddle] women and girls with the responsibility of avoiding being attacked." Change.org and the Women's Media Center haveorganized a petition, so far over 2,500 signatures strong, asking for Rottenberg's removal as editor of the BSR.

Local playwright Cara Blouin, meanwhile, has whipped up a provocatively titled new short theater piece, "Dan Rottenberg Is Thinking About R@ping You," which debuts Saturday night in Philadelphia as a benefit for Slutwalk. Blouin told PW this week that Rottenberg's original article "itself is inherently theatrical ... Immediately I imagined it as a presentation from him, offering his advice as a five-step program to avoiding sexual assault ... I think every woman has been in the position of trying to explain why this kind of thing is not OK and knows how frustrating it is to try to explain it. Satire gets at it much more closely."

Whether Rottenberg gets either the joke or the seriousness of his words remains to be seen. But his deeply felt faulty reasoning is sure there on display in every line of his cleavage-obsessed screed. It's there when he writes of his two female neighbors, "Ann, you see, saw crime as a personal issue to be solved through her own ingenuity. Sarah perceived it as a political issue to be solved by changing the world."

Here's the crazy thing, Rottenbergs of the world. They're both right. Most of us with common sense, male and female, do lock our doors and circumvent the dicey neighborhoods. But the idea that deviant male behavior is something women need to keep in check is a big wide load of horse manure, and we're going to keep calling BS on it until the world does change. And if you're a rapist, that might be my problem, but that doesn't make it my fault.

• Mary Elizabeth Williams is a staff writer for Salon and the author of "Gimme Shelter: My Three Years Searching for the American Dream." Follow her on Twitter: http://twitter.com/embeedub More: Mary Elizabeth Williams

---

There was a similar story in February and after an overwhelmingly negative reaction to his tweets, Nir Rosen has resigned his post at N.Y.U.

Dan Rottenberg has written a response (of sorts) to the reaction to his editorial on the Broad Street Review website.

I feel it's a weak excuse for the apology he'd have been wise to have issued. If you want to call for his removal, you need to reach out to his board of directors at the Broad Street Review.

They're names are listed online here.

Below is the only contact information I have found for these board members. If you contact them, please be civil and use reason. If we come off as too angry, we’ll be less effective (even if makes us feel good at the time), and I’d like to see results, such as Rottenberg’s dismissal.

Board of Directors:

Dr Gresham G Riley

156 N 3rd St Philly. PA 19106-1814

(215) 413-2036

W. Bourne Ruthrauff
Ruthrauff@bbs-law.com
215-567-2883

Neil Kleinman
nkleinman@uarts.edu
(voice mail can be left at uarts) 800.616.2787

Priscilla M. Luce
c/o
The Albert M Greenfield Foundation
thealbertmgreenfieldfoundation.org/contact
215-354-0604

Richardson Grove as important as general plan update [for Humboldt County]

2011-06-24T13:14:00.000-07:00

Richardson Grove as important as general plan update

Ken Miller/For The Times-Standard
06/22/2011

Wholesale STAA access through Richardson Grove is potentially the most immediately devastating threat to our county.
It would open the north-south link in a circuit connecting Interstate 5 and U.S. Highway 101 via routes 199, 299, and 20, putting large diesel trucks on 101 through, not just into, our county, 24-hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.
Signaling or one-way traffic would create harmful congestion in the grove, and do nothing about the STAA traffic through the county.

Who benefits?

Mainly the international trucking industry and a few local businesses. Caltrans' EIR acknowledges that local industries do not need these trucks: “... There is a maximum weight restriction for loads as well as maximum length of cabs and trailers, and that for heavy loads, the economic advantage for the larger vehicles is not there,” concluding that the “Proposed project would not result in significant increases in overall economic productivity in the region.”

Wal-Mart and Home Depot in Crescent City have been the squeakiest wheels for Richardson Grove and 199, whining that lack of STAA access costs them $15,000 monthly, savings they would surely use to undercut local businesses, and exchange good paying jobs for low-wage employment as their stores are linked all along the 101 corridor.
Could the new general plan stand up to STAA-related sprawl development?

Vehicular traffic from the proposed Marina Center is estimated at 16,000 trips daily. Add STAA to that and the pressure to open and widen Waterfront Drive and bypass Eureka escalates. Caltrans never considers this, despite the 2003 Caltrans-funded study warning about the “constraint on economic development” from “traffic congestion on U.S. 101 in Eureka's commercial and retail areas due to heavy overlapping uses for trucking, through traffic, and local traffic.”

Ambulance and coroner business may spike. These large trucks represent less than 3 percent of vehicles, but are involved in 14 percent of fatal crashes, and automobile passengers constitute 98 percent of the fatalities in car vs. truck accidents.

Who loses?

The project is a job killer for many local businesses, and will cost the rest of us in road damages, safety hazards, noise and air pollution, congestion, and quality of life. Trinidad will not be so quaint, or quiet, with 24/7 STAA on the 101 grade.
Many of these trucks have extra cabs with kitchens and beds enabling transit from Mexico to Canada without needing a motel or restaurant.

Ancient redwoods may not tolerate modern road use and construction technology. Trees that have survived for a century next to the current roadbed may have benefited from the paucity of heavy truck traffic, as well as construction in 1915 with horse and buggies, hand tools, and gravel, mitigating factors that this project would undo overnight.

Arguments that road construction will not harm ancient redwoods rely on Caltrans' arborists who have no expertise in redwoods, and on Caltrans' own claims.

Experts like Steve Sillett and Stan Binnie registered serious concerns about disturbing woody and feeder roots, justified by the numerous ancient redwoods whose tops are dying back along 101, and those which have fallen, revealing evidence of road or path-induced damage. Hence Redwood Park warnings to avoid walking over roots.

Scientific literature is clear that redwood roots interconnect for up to 500 feet, and that roots larger than one inch are considered “major.” Yet Caltrans claims that roots larger than two inches in diameter will not be cut in the structural root zone, ignoring the critical feeder roots. According to HSU's Professor Sillett, there have been no relevant studies on the impacts of roadways on redwood roots.
If ancient redwoods suffer due to this project, how many hundreds or thousands of years will it take for the damage to show up? And what penalty, or relief, is there?

Perhaps the saddest casualty has been the failure to consider alternatives to 6 mpg STAA trucks for our goods movement in the face of greenhouse gas emissions, rising fuel costs and sea levels, and climate change.

Short sea shipping from our undeveloped port is the most efficient transport modality on the planet, and with 299 STAA access it could meet nearly all of our shipping needs, creating boatloads of jobs.

A 2003 Caltrans' Cambridge Systematics study summed up the benefit of not widening 101 through Richardson Grove, and retaining the critical buffer between 101 and I-5: “The county's relative geographic isolation has spared it from some of the sprawl and growth pressures that have impacted many of California's coastal communities, lending the area a quality of life cherished by residents.”

Ken Miller resides in McKinleyville.

More info: www.saverichardsongrove.org

Arcata Eye on Lawsuit

2011-05-26T09:31:00.000-07:00

Lawsuit Targets Arcata Panhandling Law
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
by Daniel Mintz - Eye Correspondent

ARCATA – Having declined to strike aspects of its panhandling ordinance, the City of Arcata will have to defend itself against a lawsuit from a well-known political consultant.

Arcata resident Richard Salzman, who has helped coordinate the campaigns of District Attorney Paul Gallegos and several other liberal candidates, announced his filing of the lawsuit on May 19. It attacks the ordinance’s prohibitions against spoken and written requests for handouts, arguing that they’re unconstitutional.

The complaint, filed by Salzman’s attorney, Peter Martin, states that the ordinance’s ban on panhandling signage and comments “places an impermissible burden on the free speech rights of citizens in a public forum” and “presents an unacceptable risk of chilling and/or suppressing protected speech.”

Salzman is asking the court for an injunction on enforcing the ordinance, a declaration that it’s unconstitutional and recovery of costs involved with filing the lawsuit.

The ordinance’s prohibition of aggressive panhandling isn’t being challenged in the lawsuit.

In a press release, Salzman alleged that the City is violating basic civil rights and targeting the poor. “If first they silence the poor and the homeless, and I say nothing, who will speak up when they try to silence me?” he asked.

The City Council approved the ordinance last year but Arcata Mayor Susan Ornelas and Councilmember Shane Brinton voted against it. The council recently voted not to amend the ordinance, with Brinton casting a lone dissent vote.

In addition to banning aggressive panhandling and solicitations, the ordinance prohibits begging within 20 feet of businesses, parking lots, banks with automatic teller machines, bus stops, foot bridges and intersections.

Its findings section states that other city laws have failed to have an effect on a situation that has “generated an enhanced sense of fear, intimidation and disorder, and has caused many retail customers to avoid shopping or dining within the City.”

In an interview last February, when Salzman notified the City of his intent to sue, City Attorney Nancy Diamond said the ordinance is modeled after what’s been done elsewhere in the state and country, and what’s been tested in court.

“We are not the first community to look at panhandling ordinances,” she said. “This is very widespread and there is a fair amount of judicial law we were able to look at … we weren’t acting in a vacuum.”

http://www.arcataeye.com/2011/05/lawsuit-targets-arcata-panhandling-law-–-may-25-2011/comment-page-1/#comment-31373

Salzman files lawsuit against City of Arcata

2011-05-20T21:06:00.000-07:00

5.20.11 Arcata, CA – On Thursday May 19th Richard Salzman filed a lawsuit in Superior Court of California against the City of Arcata claiming that their Panhandling Ordinance is unconstitutional.

In March the City of Arcata declined Salzman’s request to amend its panhandling ordinance. ”I requested that they amend their ordinance so as to comply with our guaranteed protection of free speech as outlined in the United States Constitution. Since they declined to do so I felt compelled to file a complaint yesterday in the Superior Court of California against the city” said Salzman.

Salzman has stated that he is a proud lifelong member of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and staunch defender of the Constitution of the United States and the First Amendment right to free speech.

As written, the ordinance makes it a crime to merely hold up a sign asking for a hand out. By denying citizens constitutional right of free speech, Salzman contends the City Council overstepped its authority.

“If first they silence the poor and the homeless, and I say nothing, who will speak up when they try to silence me?” Salzman asked. He notes that the section of the ordinance against “aggressive panhandling,” including blocking one’s path, any physical contact or shouting, was left unchallenged by this legal action.

--
http://kiem-tv.com/node/1841
http://www.times-standard.com/localnews/ci_18126963
http://humboldtherald.wordpress.com/2011/05/20/salzman-sues-arcata/
http://www.northcoastjournal.com/blogthing/2011/05/20/salzman-sues-arcata-over-panhandling-law/

Actually, "the Rich" Don't "Create Jobs," We Do

2011-05-15T15:48:00.000-07:00

Saturday 14 May 2011
by: Dave Johnson, Campaign for America's Future

You hear it again and again, variation after variation on a core message: if you tax rich people it kills jobs. You hear about "job-killing tax hikes," or that "taxing the rich hurts jobs," "taxes kill jobs," "taxes take money out of the economy, "if you tax the rich they won't be able to provide jobs." ... on and on it goes. So do we really depend on "the rich" to "create" jobs? Or do jobs get created when they fill a need?

Here is a recent typical example, Obama Touts Job-Killing Tax Plan, written by a "senior fellow at the Cato Institute and chairman of the Institute for Global Economic Growth,"

Some people, in their pursuit of profit, benefit their fellow humans by creating new or better goods and services, and then by employing others. We call such people entrepreneurs and productive workers.

Others are parasites who suck the blood and energy away from the productive. Such people are most often found in government.
Perhaps the most vivid description of what happens to a society where the parasites become so numerous and powerful that they destroy their productive hosts is Ayn Rand’s classic novel “Atlas Shrugged.” ...

Producers and Parasites

The idea that there are producers and parasites as expressed in the example above has become a core philosophy of conservatives. They claim that wealthy people "produce" and are rich because they "produce." The rest of us are "parasites" who suck blood and energy from the productive rich, by taxing them. In this belief system, We, the People are basically just "the help" who are otherwise in the way, and taxing the producers to pay for our "entitlements." We "take money" from the producers through taxes, which are "redistributed" to the parasites. They repeat the slogan, "Taxes are theft," and take the "money we earned" by "force" (i.e. government.)
Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner echoes this core philosophy of "producers" and "parasites," saying yesterday:

I believe raising taxes on the very people that we expect to reinvest in our economy and to hire people is the wrong idea,” he said. “For those people to give that money to the government…means it wont get reinvested in our economy at a time when we’re trying to create jobs.”
"The very people" who "hire people" shouldn't have to pay taxes because that money is then taken out of the productive economy and just given to the parasites -- "the help" -- meaning you and me...

So is it true? Do "they" create jobs? Do we "depend on" the wealthy to "create jobs?"

Demand Creates Jobs

I used to own a business and have been in senior positions at other businesses, and I know many others who have started and operated businesses of all sizes. I can tell you from direct experience that I tried very hard to employ the right number of people. What I mean by this is that when there were lots of customers I would add people to meet the demand. And when demand slacked off I had to let people go.

If I had extra money I wouldn't just hire people to sit around and read the paper. And if I had more customers than I could handle that -- the revenue generated by meeting the additional demand from the extra customers -- is what would pay for employing more people to meet the demand. It is a pretty simple equation: you employ the right number of people to meet the demand your business has.
If you ask around you will find that every business tries to employ the right number of people to meet the demand. Any business owner or manager will tell you that they hire based on need, not on how much they have in the bank. (Read more here, in last year's Businesses Do Not Create Jobs.)

Taxes make absolutely no difference in the hiring equation. In fact, paying taxes means you are already making money, which means you have already hired the right number of people. Taxes are based on subtracting your costs from your revenue, and if you have profits after you cover your costs, then you might be taxed. You don't even calculate your taxes until well after the hiring decision has been made. You don't lay people off to "cover" your taxes. And even if you did lay people off to "cover' taxes it would lower your costs and you would have more profit, which means you would have more taxes... except that laying someone off when you had demand would cause you to have less revenue, ... and you see how ridiculous it is to associate taxes with hiring at all!

People coming in the door and buying things is what creates jobs.

The Rich Do Not Create Jobs

Lots of regular people having money to spend is what creates jobs and businesses. That is the basic idea of demand-side economics and it works. In a consumer-driven economy designed to serve people, regular people with money in their pockets is what keeps everything going. And the equal opportunity of democracy with its reinvestment in infrastructure and education and the other fruits of democracy is fundamental to keeping a demand-side economy functioning.

When all the money goes to a few at the top everything breaks down. Taxing the people at the top and reinvesting the money into the democratic society is fundamental to keeping things going.

Democracy Creates Jobs

This idea that a few wealthy people -- the "producers" -- hand everything down to the rest of us -- "the parasites" -- is fundamentally at odds with the concept of democracy. In a democracy we all have an equal voice and an equal stake in how our society and our economy does. We do not "depend" on the good graces of a favored few for our livelihoods. We all are supposed to have an equal opportunity, and equal rights. And there are things we are all entitled to -- "entitlements" -- that we get just because we were born here. But we all share in the responsibility to cover the costs of democracy -- with the rich having a greater responsibility than the rest of us because they receive the most benefit from it. This is why we have "progressive taxes" where the rates are supposed to go up as the income does.
Taxes Are The Lifeblood Of Democracy And The Prosperity That Democracy Produces

In a democracy the rich are supposed to pay more to cover things like building and maintaining the roads and schools because these are the things that enable their wealth. They actually do use the roads and schools more because the roads enable their businesses to prosper and the schools provide educated employees. But it isn't just that the rich use roads more, it is that everyone has a right to use roads and a right to transportation because we are a democracy and everyone has the same rights. And as a citizen in a democracy you have an obligation to pay your share for that.

A democracy is supposed have a progressive tax structure that is in proportion to the means to pay. We do this because those who get more from the system do so because the democratic system offers them that ability. Their wealth is because of our system and therefore they owe back to the system in proportion. (Plus, history has taught the lesson that great wealth opposes democracy, so democracy must oppose the accumulation of great, disproportional wealth. In other words, part of the contract of living in a democracy is your obligation to protect the democracy and high taxes at the top is one of those protections.)

The conservative "producer and parasite" anti-tax philosophy is fundamentally at odds with the concepts of democracy (which they proudly acknowledge - see more here, and here) and should be understood and criticized as such। Taxes do not "take money out of the economy" they enable the economy. The rich do not "create jobs, We, the People create jobs.

ACLU & Tea Party United on Free Speech

2011-05-05T09:48:00.000-07:00

ACLU, Tea Party unite in Northern California over free speech

By ROBIN HINDERY, Associated Press
05/05/2011

SAN FRANCISCO -- A free-speech dispute in a Northern California city has forged an unlikely alliance between two strange political bedfellows: the regional chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union and a local tea party group.

The ACLU of Northern California and the North State Tea Party Alliance are often at opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, but they have come together in their opposition to new restrictions on leafleting in front of the library in Redding.

The policy requires reservations for leafleting at the library and restricts the activity to about 10 percent of the main entrance. It also prohibits pamphleteers from approaching patrons or placing materials on car windshields in the library parking lot.

The two groups filed parallel lawsuits last week claiming the new regulations are unconstitutional. Shasta County Superior Court Judge Monica Marlow on Wednesday issued a temporary restraining order blocking implementation of the Outdoor Public Forum Policy, which was approved last month by the Redding city council.

The plaintiffs acknowledge that the two groups are unexpected allies, but say free speech is an issue that unites people of all political stripes.

"We have differences of opinion, but on this issue we agree," said Don Yost, a plaintiff in the ACLU lawsuit and chair of the organization's Shasta-Tehama-Trinity chapter. "First Amendment freedoms aren't just for people you agree with."

Tim Pappas, the attorney for the North State Tea Party Alliance, which includes eight or nine smaller tea party organizations in the region, said the two groups have found humor in the public's and the media's surprised reaction to their partnership.

"We kind of laugh and talk about how we don't see eye-to-eye on every issue," said Pappas, who also serves as assistant public defender for Shasta County. "But the issues that we do see eye-to-eye on make us absolute, 100 percent partners."

The collaboration has expanded outside the courtroom. Yost was invited to discuss the ACLU's efforts to protect free speech at a recent rally of about 150 tea party activists in Redding -- an experience he described as "very pleasant."

The lawsuits allege Redding is violating its citizens' constitutional right to free speech and free assembly in a publicly owned space.
The library, which receives about 20,000 visitors each month, is "a real cultural cornerstone of the community, a central place in Redding where people come to receive and exchange ideas," said Linda Lye, staff attorney for the San Francisco-based ACLU of Northern California.

The next hearing is scheduled for June 13.

Redding city attorney Rick Duvernay, who drafted the leafleting policy, said the final ruling will hinge on whether the judge believes the library is a traditional public forum. If so, the new restrictions would have to withstand the highest level of free-speech protection guaranteed by law.

Supporters of the policy believe the library is a limited public forum, said Duvernay, whose office is representing the defendants in the lawsuits. Both suits name the city of Redding and its city council, but ACLU also names the county's public libraries director, Jan Erickson, while the tea party suit includes city manager Kurt Starman.

"They have the opinion that the library is a quiet place where people come to get information, not necessarily a place where First Amendment activities are practiced, where ideas are pushed upon them," Duvernay said.

http://www.mercurynews.com/crime-courts/ci_17999235?nclick_check=1

"Johnny Too Bad" re-write for John Ross

2011-05-03T12:38:00.000-07:00

"Johnny Too Bad"
re-write for John Ross
(original by The Slickers)

Written and preformed at John Ross' memorial service held at Trinidad CA Cemetery at the grave of E. B. Schnaubelt who's headstone reads: 1855–1913, “Murdered by Capitalism” on May Day 2011, by: Fred Neighbor, Joyce Hough, Steve Griffith, Gregg Moore.

Walking down the road
with a notepad in your waist
Johnny you’re too bad, ohhhh

Walking down the road
with a typewriter round your waist
Johnny you’re too bad, ohhh

You’ve been writin’ and a fightin’ for changes
for so long
You were an old muckracker and an agitator
you had no fear, John.

There were many days when yo...

Tornados Devastate U.S.

2011-04-30T12:07:00.000-07:00

Support tornado relief:

Contact the Red Cross:
1-800-RED-CROSS
or text “REDCROSS” to 90999 to make a $10 donation.

Tell the Republicans in Congress to stop cutting FEMA and NOAA!
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Top Climate Scientist on the Monster Tornadoes: It Is Irresponsible Not to Mention Climate Change

Saturday 30 April 2011
by: Brad Johnson, ThinkProgress

Throughout human history, the climate system has been a source of life and death, the sun and rain capable of feeding our crops and bringing us comfort, or unleashing terrible devastation in wind, fire, drought, storm, and flood. Each tragedy that occurs — such as the terrible outbreak of tornadoes and flooding storms [4] this week in the South — reminds us of that awesome power, which is beyond our control and at the limits of our comprehension. We have also learned that humanity is meddling with that power, primarily through the burning of coal and oil that increases the amount of heat trapped in the atmosphere and oceans. Scientists have been warning our leaders for decades [5] that this interference with the climate system is dangerous, and have worked tirelessly to explain how these threats are now coming to pass.

However, the Republican Party is now dominated by ideologues who deny the threat of polluting our climate, even when faced with direct evidence of what the climate system can do to the people they are sworn to protect.

Conservatives attack any discussion of climate policy within the context of the killer tornadoes as “grotesque [6],” saying that to do so is blaming the victims[7].

In an email interview with ThinkProgress, Dr. Kevin Trenberth, one of the world’s top climate scientists, who has been exploring for years how greenhouse pollution influences extreme weather [8], said he believes that it is “irresponsible not to mention climate change” in the context of these extreme tornadoes. Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, added that the scientific understanding of how polluting our atmosphere with billions of tons of greenhouse gases affects tornadic activity is still ongoing:

It is irresponsible not to mention climate change. … The environment in which all of these storms and the tornadoes are occurring has changed from human influences (global warming). Tornadoes come from thunderstorms in a wind shear environment. This occurs east of the Rockies more than anywhere else in the world. The wind shear is from southerly (SE, S or SW) flow from the Gulf overlaid by westerlies aloft that have come over the Rockies. That wind shear can be converted to rotation. The basic driver of thunderstorms is the instability in the atmosphere: warm moist air at low levels with drier air aloft. With global warming the low level air is warm and moister and there is more energy available to fuel all of these storms and increase the buoyancy of the air so that thunderstorms are strong. There is no clear research on changes in shear related to global warming. On average the low level air is 1 deg F and 4 percent moister than in the 1970s.

Climate scientist Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, explains further that “climate change is present in every single meteorological event”:

The fact remains that there is 4 percent more water vapor–and associated additional moist energy–available both to power individual storms and to produce intense rainfall from them. Climate change is present in every single meteorological event, in that these events are occurring within a baseline atmospheric environment that has shifted in favor of more intense weather events.

Climate scientist Gavin Schmidt, climate modeller at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, concurred:

It is a truism to say that everything has been affected by climate change so far and therefore this latest outbreak must in some sense have been affected, but attribution is hard and the further down the chain the causality is supposed to go, the harder this is. For heat waves it is easier, for statistics on precipitation intensity it easier – there are multiple levels of good modelling, theory and observations to back it up. But we have much less to go on with tornadoes.

Those who deny the threat of polluting our climate system are not to blame for its fury — but none of us can shirk our responsibility to end our interference with the weather.

http://thinkprogress.org/2011/04/29/climate-science-tornadoes/

Salzman International now on Facebook

2011-04-26T11:24:00.000-07:00

I've put up a Facebook page for Salzman International. If you're on Facebook, please click through and "LIKE" the page, or even post the url onto your wall!
Thank you,
Richard

John Ross Poet & Rebel Journalist - Memorial and Reading

2011-04-18T13:21:00.000-07:00

JOHN ROSS READING & MEMORIAL - APRIL 29TH 7:PM

Arcata's Northtown Books will host a reading of poems and stories in memory of John Ross on Friday, April 29th from 7 to 8:30 p.m. The well-known journalist, who died this past winter in Mexico, has been celebrated in Mexico City and San Francisco‚s Mission District, both for his writing and his devotion to be-bop and rebellion.

John Ross lived in Humboldt County for a decade beginning in the mid 70's, mostly in the three or four blocks of downtown Arcata. His first poetry chapbooks were read and published on H Street, and while others were issued from San Francisco and Mexico City and his journalism brought him international renown, the poems and stories of those years appear throughout his work.

The event will be hosted by Jerry Martien and will feature old friends and fellow writers reading from John's work, followed by a performance of some of his poems set to the music of SquarPeg.

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MEMORIAL SERVICE - MAY 1ST 2:PM

A memorial ceremony will take place the following Sunday, May 1, in Trinidad. Meet in front of the elementary school at 2 PM, rain or shine. Bring a single red flower. Be prepared to walk to the cemetery (about a quarter mile).

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RADIO SHOW APRIL 24TH 2:30PM

KHSU will be airing vintage shows of John Ross and Sista Soul this Sunday April 24th from 2:30-4:pm on KHSU (streamcast on KHSU.org) The shows are from 1992 and 1996.

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I'm copying the articles I posted after his death here:

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Counterpunch
All the Right Enemies
A Farewell to the Utterly Unique John Ross
By FRANK BARDACKE
Jan 17th 2011

John’s gone. John Ross. I doubt that we will ever see anyone remotely like him again.

The bare bones, as he would say, are remarkable enough. Born to show business Communists in New York City in 1938, he had minded Billie Holliday’s dog, sold dope to Dizzy Gillespie, and vigiled at the hour of the Rosenberg execution, all before he was sixteen years old. An aspiring beat poet, driven by D.H. Lawrence’s images of Mexico, he arrived at the Tarascan highlands of Michoacan at the age of twenty, returning to the U.S. six years later in 1964, there to be thrown in the Federal Penitentiary at San Pedro, for refusing induction into the army.

Back on the streets of San Francisco eighteen months later, he joined the Progressive Labor Movement, then a combination of old ex-CPers fleeing the debased party and young poets and artists looking for revolutionary action. For a few years he called the hip, crazy, Latino 24th and Mission his “bio-region,” as he ran from the San Francisco police and threw dead rats at slumlords during street rallies of the once powerful Mission Coalition.

When the not so ex-Stalinists drove him and others out of P.L. (“break the poets’ pencils” was the slogan of the purge) he moved up north to Arcata where he became an early defender of the forest and the self-described town clown and poet in residence. From there it was Tangier and the Maghreb, the Basque country, anti-nuke rallies in Ireland, and then back to San Francisco, where he finally found his calling as a journalist. “Investigative poet” was the title he preferred, and in 1984, he was dispatched by Pacific News Service to Latin America, where he walked with the Sendero Luminoso, broke bread with the Tupac Amaru, and hung out with cadres of the M-19.

In 1985, after the earthquake, he moved into the Hotel Isabela in the Centro Historico of Mexico City, where for the next 25 years he wrote the very best accounts in English (no one is even a close second) of the tumultuous adventures of Mexican politics.

During the Mexican years, he managed to write nine books in English, a couple more in Spanish, and a batch of poetry chapbooks, all the while he was often on the road, taking a bus to the scene of a peasant rebellion or visiting San Francisco or becoming a human shield in Baghdad, or protecting a Palestinian olive harvest from marauding Israeli settlers.

He died this morning, a victim of liver cancer, at the age of 73, just where he wanted to, in the village of Tepizo, Michoacan, in the care of his dear friends, Kevin and Arminda.

That’s the outline of the story. Then there was John. Even in his seventies, a tall imposing figure with a narrow face, a scruffy goatee and mustache, a Che T-shirt covered by a Mexican vest, a Palestinian battle scarf thrown around his neck, bags of misery and compassion under his eyes, offset by his wonderful toothless smile and the cackling laugh that punctuated his comical riffs on the miserable state of the universe.

He was among the last of the beats, master of the poetic rant, committed to the exemplary public act, always on the side of the poor and defeated. His tormentors defined him. A sadistic prison dentist pulled six of his teeth. The San Francisco Tac Squad twice bludgeoned his head, ruining one eye and damaging the other. The guards of Mexico’s vain, poet-potentate Octavio Paz beat him to the ground in a Mexico City airport, and continued to kick him while he was down. Israeli settlers pummeled him with clubs until he bled, and wrecked his back forever.

He had his prickly side. He hated pretense, pomposity and unchecked power wherever he found it. Losing was important to him. Whatever is the dictionary opposite of an opportunist—that’s what John was. He never got along with an editor, and made it a matter of principle to bite the hand that fed him. It got so bad, he left so few bridges unburnt, that in order to read his wonderful weekly dispatches in the pre-internet years, I had to subscribe to an obscure newsletter, a compilation of Latin American news, and then send more money to get the editors to send along John’s column. [John had a relationship lasting many years with CounterPunch, publishing hundreds of dispatches, with only trifling hiccups with the editors. AC/JSC.]

He had his sweet side, too. He was intensely loyal to his friends, generous with all he had, proud of his children, grateful for Elizabeth’s support and collaboration, and wonderful, warm company at an evening meal. When my son, Ted, arrived in Mexico in 1990, John helped him get a job, find a place to live, introduced him around, and became his Sunday companion and confidant, as they huddled in front of John’s 11-inch TV watching the weekly broadcasts of NBA games.

He was a great, true sports fan, especially of basketball. One of the last times I saw him was at a friend’s house in San Francisco, in between radiation treatments, watching a Warriors game on a big screen TV, smoking what he still called the “killer weed.” Joe and I listened to him recount NY Knicks history, the origin of the jump shot, and Kareem’s last game, which somehow led to a long complaint about kidneys for sale in Mexico that had been harvested in China out of the still warm body of some poor, rural immigrant who had been legally executed for jaywalking in Beijing.

The very last time I had the pleasure of his company was at breakfast in Los Angeles when Ted and I saw him off on his last book tour, promoting El Monstruo, his loving history of Mexico City. He was in great form. His cancer was in remission—a “cancer resister,” he called himself—and he entertained us with a preview of his trip: long, tiresome Greyhound rides, uncomfortable couches, talks to tiny groups of the marginalized, the last defenders of lost causes without the money to buy his books. It would be a losing proposition, like so many of his others, all of which secure his place among the angels.

Frank Bardacke taught at Watsonville Adult School, California’s Central Coast, for 25 years. His history of the United Farm Workers and Cesar Chavez, Trampled in the Vintage, is forthcoming from Verso. He can be reached at bardacke@sbcglobal.com

http://www.counterpunch.org/bardacke01182011.html

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The Nation
Rebel Journalist John Ross, the Master of Speaking Truth to Power, Is Dead

John Nichols | January 18, 2011

When the brave and brilliant journalist John Ross was offered official honors by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 2009—for telling "stories nobody else could or would tell"—he refused the recognition. He then recalled having run unsuccessfully for the board in the "Summer of Love" year of 1967—with a perfect think globally, act locally slogan: "Rent Control Now! Out of Vietnam!"—demanded his election filing fee back and complained about how when he had appeared before the board in the 1960s and 1970s as a tenant rights organizer "certain disgruntled board members would signal San Francisco County deputies to throw a hammerlock on me, drag me out of the chambers, and book me at the so-called Hall of Justice on charges of disturbing the peace."

As another fine reporter, San Francisco Bay Guardian editor Tim Redmond recalled , "Typically, when people are honored by the supervisors, they thank the board, praise the wonders of this city and politely and meekly receive their award. Not John Ross. The half-blind, half deaf rabble rouser made a short statement in which he managed to insult city government, denounce the entire process of giving out awards and demand that the board reject the Muni fare hike. Then he read a poem denouncing the "motherfuckers" who are driving poor people out of the Mission."

On a roll, Ross recounted repeated clashes with authorities, in San Francisco, Baghdad and Palestine. He put them all in the context of his practice of journalism—not the drab stenography to power practiced by so many reporters, but the vibrant speak-truth-to-power reporting and activism that saw Ross repeatedly risk his life to tell great stories and to demand that political and economic elites respond.

"Life, like reporting, is a kind of death sentence," Ross told the supervisors. "Pardon me for having lived it so fully."

As epitaphs go, that is a good one for Ross, who died this week in Mexico, where he had for five decades chronicled the struggles of indigenous people and the poor for justice. The activist author who in 1995 received the American Book Award for his groundbreaking book Rebellion from the Roots: Zapatista Uprising in Chiapas (Common Courage Press), died Monday at age 72 after a last battle with liver cancer.

In addition to the American Book Award, Ross collected the Upton Sinclair Award in 2005 for his epic tome Murdered By Capitalism: 150 Years of Life and Death on the American Left (Nation Books). His editor, Carl Bromley, recalls that, "I worked with John for seven years, on three books. It was an extraordinary education for me. I took the greatest pride when Thomas Pynchon faxed the office with a huge endorsement for John's book, Murdered By Capitalism." Pynchon described the book as "a ripsnorting and honorable account of an outlaw tradition in American politics, which too seldom gets past the bouncers at the gateway of our national narrative."

Ross also penned books of poetry and, as a child of the Beat Generation and the jazz clubs of 1950s New York, some of the most politically informed cultural writing of our time. His 2009 book, El Monstruo: Dread and Redemption in Mexico City (Nation Books), was part people's history, part love letter to the city where Ross lived on and off for decades. "Of all his books, I think El Monstruo, his last, was my favorite of his, an extraordinary, phantasmagoric personal history of Mexico City, told over the last 5 million years," says Bromley. "I rate him with Galeano."

There is so much more to be said about the remarkable Ross, but he was a wordsmith. So let's give him the last word.

Here, in full, is his statement from 2009 to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors:

Forty years ago when I would appear before this honorable board as an organizer for the Mission Tenants Union to protest the devastation of working class housing in our neighborhood, certain disgruntled board members would signal San Francisco County deputies to throw a hammerlock on me, drag me out of the chambers, and book me at the so-called Hall of Justice on charges of disturbing the peace.

To prevent a repeat of these painful events, I ask my companeros and companeras to join me at the podium today and watch my back.

Punishment for the commission of the crime of independent journalism can be harsh. I have danced with death throughout my checkered career—May 1st 1986, the 100th anniversary of International Workers Day on the streets of Santiago Chile when I inadvertently walked into one of Pinochet's machine guns; climbing into a guerrilla camp in the Cauca Valley of Colombia; at the end of a road to a Waste Management toxic incinerator above Playas de Tijuana where some company goon took 13 potshots at my person—when I called the Examiner for whom I then slaved, I was told to forget all about it.

Death was on our plate when we set out for Baghdad to place our bodies between Bush's bombs and the Iraqi people in March 2003 and when I went picking olives with Palestinian farmers in the Nablus Valley where Israeli settlers beat me within an inch of my life.

Life like reporting is a kind of death sentence. Pardon me for having lived it so fully.

I have mulled too long about whether or not to accept an honor from a city that has become nothing less than a sanctuary for the rich. This was once a sanctuary city for the refugees of U.S. wars in Latin America—now the indocumentados are being rousted, jailed, and sent back to their devastated home countries from right here in Sanctuary City. I have debated receiving an honor from a city where greedy landlords bleed their tenants dry, a city that pushes the poor into the street and treats the homeless like so many cockroaches, a city where the police continue to run riot in neighborhoods of color—a few weeks ago, recuperating from liver cancer chemotherapy I was slammed twice in the chest and threatened with being sent back to hospital by a Mission District cop while I witnessed a rough arrest on Valencia and 24th—you can read all about it in my citizens' complaint recently reprinted in the Bay Guardian.

How can I accept an honor from a city that cloaks itself in rampant hypocrisy and the fake green of filthy lucre?

The truth is I cannot. Thanks anyway.

Hell, I don't even live here anymore. For the past 25 years, I have been an expat holed up in the Centro Historico of Mexico City, an exile from the racist social and economic policies of the United States of North America.Instead of drawing up hollow proclamations "honoring" derelict beat poets and wild parrots, the Board of Supervisors would do well to honor the poor and working class citizens of this city who struggle daily to survive here in this lap of luxury by making San Francisco a place where they can still live. One place to start is by nullifying the outrageous Muni fare hikes that will soon come before you.

There is one more thing you can do for me today. In 1967, I ran for the Board of Supervisors under the banner of "Rent Control Now! Out of Vietnam!" We paid our registration fee and five days later I was attacked by the SFPD after an anti-police brutality rally at the old Mission station—I eventually lost my left eye as a result of this attack. The notoriety attracted the interest of a candidate with a similar name—Tom Ross—who had me barred from the ballot after he discovered that I was an ex-felon—I was the first U.S. citizen to be sent to federal prison for refusing induction in the Vietnam-era military. When we demanded our filing fee returned the county registrar refused. On election day, people who voted for me were arrested for tampering with the voting machines.

I want my filing fee back. With interest.

As a veteran San Francisco performing poet, I am obligated to leave the Board with a poem from a recent collection "Against Amnesia."

RONCO Y DULCE

Coming out of the underground
On the BART escalator,
The Mission sky
Is washed by autumn,
The old men and their garbage bags
Are clustered in the battered plaza
We once named for Cesar Augusto Sandino.
Behind me down below
In the throat of the earth
A rough bracero sings
Of his comings and goings
In a voice as ronco y dulce
As the mountains of Michoacan and Jalisco
For the white zombies
Careening downtown
To the dot coms.
They are trying to kick us
Out of here
Again
They are trying to drain
This neighborhood of color
Of color
Again.
This time we are not moving on.
We are going to stick to this barrio
Like the posters so fiercely pasted
To the walls of La Mision
With iron glue
That they will have to take them down
Brick by brick
To make us go away
And even then our ghosts
Will come home
And turn those bricks
Into weapons
And take back our streets
Brick by brick
And song by song
Ronco y dulce
As Jalisco and Michaocan
Managua, Manila, Ramallah
Pine Ridge, Vietnam, and Africa.
As my compa QR say
We here now motherfuckers
Tell the Klan and the Nazis
And the Real Estate vampires
To catch the next BART out of here
For Hell.

Source URL: http://www.thenation.com/blog/157839/rebel-journalist-john-ross-master-speaking-truth-power-dead
Links:
http://www.johnross-rebeljournalist.com/
http://www.sfbg.com/politics/2009/05/13/john-ross-takes-no-prisoners
http://www.amazon.com/Rebellion-Roots-Indian-Uprising-Chiapas/dp/1567510426/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1295386511&sr=1-1
http://www.wtop.com/?nid=389&sid=2237821
http://www.amazon.com/Murdered-Capitalism-Memoir-American-Nation/dp/1560255781/ref=pd_sim_b_3
http://www.amazon.com/El-Monstruo-Dread-Redemption-Mexico/dp/1568584245/ref=pd_sim_b_5
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/nationnow/id399704758?mt=8

http://www.thenation.com/blog/157839/rebel-journalist-john-ross-master-speaking-truth-power-dead#post-your-comments

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Village Voice
New York Legends
John Ross, 1938-2011, Beat Poet, Revolutionary Journalist
By Tom Robbins, Tue., Jan. 18 2011

John Ross -- beat-era poet and revolution-championing journalist -- died this week in Mexico of liver cancer. He was 72 --- or was it 73? The Associated Press says the former,Counterpunch's Frank Bardacke, another veteran of the Bay Area left, says the latter. Whatever, the age matters less than the life lived, and Ross got the most out of whatever years he had.

He was mainly a West Coast phenomenon these past few decades, but Ross's roots were here in the Village where he was a true child of the early beat era. But even if the name is new to you, John Ross's passing is worth noting if only to confirm that these marvelous characters once walked the earth, and their kind is not likely to pass this way again.

For starters, there were Ross's travels with Latin American revolutionaries, including the secretive Zapatistas of Chiapas province in Mexico whose story he told in "Rebellion From the Roots," which won an American Book Award in 1995.

Then there's his autobiography, "Murdered by Capitalism: A Memoir of 150 Years on the American Left," Nation Books, 2004. Thomas Pynchon, whose praise is almost as hard to find as his picture, dubbed it "a rip-snorting and honorable account of an outlaw tradition in American politics which too seldom gets past the bouncers at the gates of our national narrative."

In between there was poetry and politics, and lots of it. The poems were published in ten little chapbooks (Bomba! was his most recent), and read aloud alongside Lawrence Ferlinghetti, both in Mexico City and at City Lights in San Francisco.

That was his Village roots showing through. Ross did his first public poetry reading as a teenager from the stage of the Half-Note, after Charles Mingus had finished playing. Backstage at Town Hall, he sold a joint to Dizzy Gillespie. He helped Max Gordon book Jack Kerouac into a disastrous week-long gig at the Village Vanguard, and did promo for one of the Voice's first events - a Billie Holiday concert at the old Loew's Sheraton on Seventh Avenue. Lady Day arrived hours late. Ross was thrilled because he got to hold her tiny dog.

As for the politics, it earned him a year in the federal can for refusing induction into the army in 1964,one of the first to take that ultimate stand. He later hooked up with the then pro-poet and pro-Maoist Progressive Labor Party and ran for election in 1967 to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors on its ticket. When police broke up a rally during that summer of love, Ross caught a nightstick in the face leaving him with an eye injury from which he never fully recovered. Years later, he caught another beating, this time from Israeli settlers when he tried to help Palestinian farmers pick olives from their own fields in Nablus.

He tried to put himself in harm's way again in 2006, when he went to Iraq on the eve of the war where he tried to serve as a "human shield." Saddam's minders considered him a threat and booted him from the country. A year ago, as John Nichols writes in The Nation, where Ross was a contributor, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors - now loaded with sympathizers - tried to honor Ross. Nothing doing. He denounced them as toadies who were throwing poor people out of the Mission.

John Ross. Live like him.

http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2011/01/john_ross_1938-.php

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Mobylives
Hail & Farewell: John Ross
20 January 2011

Our friend and colleague Carl Bromley, the editorial director of Nation Books, wrote to us yesterday with the news that John Ross had died Monday the 17th. He was 72. The activist journalist, poet, and novelist, described in Tim Redmond‘s San Francisco Bay Guardian eulogy as an “uncontrollable shit disturber,” had lived in Mexico City as a self-described “exile from the racist social and economic policies of the United States of North America.”

Ross wrote his own epitaph, and that of the noisy and violent form of political life which he advocated, inMurdered by Capitalism: A Memoir of 150 years of Life and Death on the American Left, “… a highly idiosyncratic account of industrial trade unionism, the socialist, communist, and anarchist movements, government repression …”

On the book’s cover is an endorsement by Thomas Pynchon, a friend from Ross’s Humboldt County days: “A ripsnorting and honorable account of an outlaw tradition in American politics which too seldom gets past the bouncers at the gateways of our national narrative.”

In his July 2004 Harper’s Magazine review (subscription only), the late John Leonarddescribed the then sixty-six-year-old author as a “Huck Finn/Holden Caulfield/Dennis the Menace/Weatherman wannabe and subversive journalist … who’s been on the losing side of every cause since the Spanish Civil War.” According to Carl, who published three of Ross’s more than twenty books, Ross loved it.

Ross began writing for the San Francisco Bay Guardian in 1984 and is credited with being the first American to report the 1993 Zapatista rebellion, in the Anderson Valley Advertiser. After reporting on the deadly 1985 earthquake in Mexico City, Ross made his home there, at the Hotel Isabel. In 1995, Ross won the American Book Award forRebellion from the Roots: Indian Uprising in Chiapas. In 2003, he volunteered as human shield in Baghdad, protecting Iraqi civilians from attack; according to Redmond in his Bay Guardian remembrance, Ross signed his emails, “John Ross, humanshield”

Redmond also reported Ross’s refusal, in 2009, to be honored by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors:

“Typically, when people are honored by the supervisors, they thank the board, praise the wonders of this city and politely and meekly receive their award. Not John Ross. The half-blind, half deaf rabble rouser made a short statement in which he managed to insult city government, denounce the entire process of giving out awards and demand that the board reject the Muni fare hike. Then he read a poem denouncing the “motherfuckers” who are driving poor people out of the Mission.”

(At the Nation website John Nichols has posted Ross’s statement from 2009 to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.)

In this Democracy Now! appearance from April 2010, Ross talks about life in his adopted city, the subject of his last book, El Monstruo: Dread and Redemption in Mexico City “a phantasmagoric retelling” of “4,000,000,000 years of history,” reviewed by Iain Sinclairas “Coruscating and necessary. Here is one of those rare books that convinces from the first sentence: a writer embedded in his writing, wholly present in the subject, leading us with savage grace to the heart of the beast.”

Ross is survived by his son, Dante A. Ross, a daughter, Carla Ross-Allen, and a granddaughter, Zoe Ross-Allen, as well as a stepdaughter, Dylan Melbourne and her daugther Honore, as well as a sister, Susan Gardner.

Let Redmond have the last word:

When John Ross left Terminal Island, the federal prison in Los Angeles, after serving a couple of years for refusing the Vietnam draft, the warden shook his head and said: “Ross, you never learned how to be a prisoner.”

I’m not writing the epitaph for whatever gravestone he has or doesn’t have, wherever it might be in the world, but that’s what I’d put on it: “John Ross, 1938-2011. Never learned how to be a prisoner.”

http://mhpbooks.com/mobylives/?p=27075

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John Ross, author, poet, journalist, dies
John Coté, S.F. Chronicle
Wednesday, January 19, 2011

John Ross, an author, poet, liberal activist and journalist who toiled against perceived injustice from the jungles of Chiapas, Mexico, to the baked streets of Baghdad, died Monday of liver cancer at Lake Patzcuaro in Mexico. He was 72.
"The word 'passionate' is overused a lot these days - but he was," said Mary Jo McConahay, a friend and former colleague of Ross' at Pacific News Service in San Francisco.

Mr. Ross was jailed for refusing to be drafted in the Vietnam War era, was the first person to chronicle in English the pending uprising of indigenous Zapatistas in Mexico's Chiapas state, and went to Iraq on the eve of the U.S. invasion in 2003 to serve as a human shield, although Iraqi officials forced him and other volunteers out of country.

In refusing a commendation at San Francisco's Board of Supervisors in May 2009 because the city "has become nothing less than a sanctuary for the rich," Mr. Ross said he had faced "one of (Augusto) Pinochet's machine guns" in Chile in 1986; climbed into a guerrilla camp in the Cauca Valley of Colombia; and been shot at 13 times by "some company goon" when he went to investigate a toxic incinerator in Tijuana, Mexico.

"Life, like reporting, is a kind of death sentence," he told the board. "Pardon me for having lived it so fully."

His reporting appeared in the San Francisco Examiner, CounterPunch, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Pacific News Service, Pacifica Radio, LA Weekly and others, including the Mexico City daily La Jornada.

A young member of the Beat generation, Mr. Ross authored 10 chapbooks of poetry and 10 books of fiction and nonfiction. He received the American Book Award in 1995 for "Rebellion From the Roots: Zapatista Uprising in Chiapas" and the Upton Sinclair Award in 2005 for "Murdered By Capitalism: 150 Years of Life and Death on the American Left."

Bruce Brugmann, editor and publisher of the Bay Guardian, called him "a terribly unusual talent."

"If you sent him over to City Hall, you'd get a helluva story," Brugmann said. "It wouldn't be on some measure. He wouldn't cover the hearing. He wouldn't cover the vote. He'd have something lyrical that would get to the political point."

Born in New York City on March 11, 1938, to parents who were committed leftists, Mr. Ross grew up in Greenwich Village surrounded by jazz, Beat poetry, abstract expressionist painting and radical politics, according to his biography.

By age 18, Mr. Ross was reading his poems in Greenwich Village bars accompanied by renowned bass player Charles Mingus, according to his official biography. In 1957, he followed the trail other Beat writers had cut to Mexico City, then lived in an indigenous community in the Michoacan state.

He returned to United States in the early 1960s, was jailed for refusing to be drafted, and was sent to a federal lockup. When he was released after about two years, he went to San Francisco, where he became a community activist in the Mission District for housing, civil rights and other issues.

Mr. Ross ran for the Board of Supervisors in 1967 under the slogan "Rent Control Now! Out of Vietnam!" But five days after paying his registration fee, Mr. Ross said he was attacked by San Francisco police at an anti-police brutality rally, and suffered injuries he says resulted in him losing use of his left eye. Ross said he was then barred from the ballot over his draft-dodging conviction. The county registrar refused to refund his candidate filing fee.

"I want my filing fee back - with interest," Mr. Ross, in a good-humored tone, told the Board of Supervisors 42 years later when May 12, 2009, was declared John Ross Day. He is survived by his sister, Susan Gardner; children, Dante Ross of New York and Carla Ross-Allen of New York; and one grandchild, Zoe Ross-Allen.

Memorial services will be announced at a later date.

E-mail John Coté at jcote@sfchronicle.com.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/01/19/BA4N1HA7Q8.DTL

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How Wall Street Crooks Get Out of Jail Free

2011-04-05T18:58:00.000-07:00

William Greider: How Wall Street Crooks Get Out of Jail Free
William Greider | March 23, 2011

When Charles Ferguson received an Oscar for his documentary on the financial crisis, Inside Job, he reminded the audience that “not a single financial executive has gone to jail, and that’s wrong.” Given the abundant evidence of massive fraud, Americans everywhere have asked the same question: Why haven’t any of those bankers gone to jail? If federal investigators could not establish criminal intent for any top-flight executives, didn’t they have enough evidence to prosecute banks or financial houses as law-breaking corporations?

Evidently not. Except for occasional civil complaints by the Securities and Exchange Commission, the nation is left to face a disturbing spectacle: crime without punishment. Massive injuries were done to millions of people by reckless bankers, and vast wealth was destroyed by elaborate financial deceptions. Yet there are no culprits to be held responsible.

Former Senator Ted Kaufman was especially upset by this. Kaufman was appointed in 2008 to fill out the remaining two years of Vice President Biden’s term as senator from Delaware. With no ambition to stay in politics, he was free to speak his mind. He made unpunished bankers his special cause.

“People know that if they rob a bank they will go to jail,” Kaufman declared in an early speech. “Bankers should know that if they rob people, they will go to jail too.” Serving on the Senate Judiciary Committee, he helped get expanded funding and manpower for investigative agencies. In hearings, he politely prodded the Justice Department, the SEC and the FBI to be more aggressive.

“At the end of the day,” Senator Kaufman warned, “this is a test of whether we have one justice system in this country or two. If we do not treat a Wall Street firm that defrauded investors of millions of dollars the same way we treat someone who stole $500 from a cash register, then how can we expect our citizens to have any faith in the rule of law?”

Kaufman, now retired, sounded slightly embarrassed when I reminded him of his question. “When you look at what we got, it ain’t very much,” he conceded. “I’m genuinely concerned there are a lot of guys walking around Wall Street, the bad apples, saying, ‘Hey, man, we got away with it. We’re going to do it again.’”

If the legal system cannot locate the villains in this story, then “the law is a ass—a idiot,” as Charles Dickens put it. The technical difficulties in making a case for criminal prosecutions are real enough, given the complexities of modern finance. But the government’s lack of response to enormous wrongdoing reflects a deeper conflict of values. Will society’s sense of right and wrong prevail, or will corporate capitalism’s amoral need to maximize profit? So far, the marketplace appears to be winning.

The government’s ambivalence about prosecuting the largest corporate interests could be heard in the president’s comments. “Nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past,” Barack Obama said in a different context (crimes of torture and unlawful detention committed under the Bush administration). Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner bluntly dismissed the “public desire for Old Testament justice.” That might be morally satisfying, he said, but it would be “dramatically damaging” to economic recovery.

No one had to tell federal prosecutors to go easy. They can read the newspapers. The Treasury’s inspector general called the financial system “a target-rich environment” for financial fraud. But the government at the same time expended a vast fortune in public funds to rescue and restore the biggest banks and brokerages. Criminal indictments would not be good for investor confidence.

The economic argument dilutes, even checks, law enforcement. This occurred in government policy long before the financial crisis erupted, with its revelations of widespread fraud. During the past decade, the government demonstrated a similar reluctance to act aggressively against corporations. The Justice Department instead adopted a softer, more forgiving approach, at least for major companies. The intention was to limit the economic damage that can result from vigorous prosecution.

Instead of “Old Testament justice,” federal prosecutors seek “authentic cooperation” from corporations in trouble, urging them to come forward voluntarily and reveal their illegalities. In exchange, prosecutors will offer a deal. If companies pay the fine set by the prosecutor and submit to probationary terms for good behavior, perhaps an outside monitor, then government will defer prosecution indefinitely or even drop it entirely. The corporation thus avoids the stigma of a criminal trial and the bad headlines that depress stock prices. More to the point, the “deferred prosecution agreement,” as it’s called, allows the company to escape the more severe consequences of criminal conviction—the loss of banking and professional licenses, charters, deposit insurance or other government benefits, including eligibility for federal contracts and healthcare programs. In other words, the punishment prescribed in numerous laws.

“With cooperation by the corporation, the government may be able to reduce tangible losses, limit damage to reputation, and preserve assets for restitution,” the Justice Department’s authorizing memorandum explained in 2003. “A deferred prosecution or non-prosecution agreement can help restore the integrity of a company’s operations and preserve the financial viability of a corporation that has engaged in criminal conduct.”

The favored argument for the more conciliatory approach was that criminal indictment may amount to a death sentence for a corporation. The fallout will destroy it, and the economy will lose valuable productive capacity. The collateral consequences are unfair to employees who lose jobs and stockholders who lose wealth. Corporate defenders cited Arthur Andersen, the giant accounting firm that imploded after it was convicted in 2002 of multiple offenses in Enron’s collapse. But was it the firm’s indictment or its criminal behavior that caused clients, accountants and investors to abandon it?

A better name for the Justice Department’s softened policy might be “too big to prosecute.” Just as the Federal Reserve used the “too big to fail” doctrine to rescue big financial institutions from their mistakes, Justice has created an express lane for businesses and banks to avoid the uglier consequences of their illegal behavior. As a practical matter, the option is reserved for the larger companies represented by the leading law firms. They have the skill and clout to negotiate a tolerable settlement.

* * *

Russell Mokhiber, longtime editor of the Corporate Crime Reporter, describes deferred prosecutions as another chapter in the long-running degradation of corporate law. “Over the past twenty-five years,” Mokhiber says, “the corporate lobbies have watered down the corporate criminal justice system and starved the prosecutorial agencies. Young prosecutors dare not overstep their bounds for fear of jeopardizing the cash prize at the end of the rainbow—partnership in the big corporate defense law firms after they leave public service. The result—if there are criminal prosecutions, they now end in deferred or nonprosecution agreements—instead of guilty pleas. If executives are criminally prosecuted, they tend to be low-level executives.”

Deferring prosecution was made standard practice by George W. Bush’s Justice Department, which over eight years deferred or canceled some 108 prosecutions. The Los Angeles law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher took the lead in promoting the new policy and has negotiated numerous agreements. A lawyer in a rival firm wisecracked that Gibson, Dunn had become “the West Coast branch of the Bush Justice Department.”

During Obama’s first two years, Justice deferred action on fifty-three corporate defendants. None of those cases stemmed from the financial crisis. In a recent article Gibson, Dunn’s leading lawyers dubbed deferred prosecution “the new normal for handling corporate misconduct.” The Justice Department does still indict hundreds of business entities every year for crimes ranging from routine price-fixing to environmental destruction. Some major corporations still plead guilty as charged, especially drug companies, but prosecutions are overwhelmingly aimed at garden-variety fraud and crimes of smaller enterprises. As Gibson, Dunn lawyers put it, negotiated settlements “are now the primary tool in DoJ’s efforts to combat corporate crime.” The statistics in this account are unofficial, drawn from Gibson, Dunn’s periodic reports to clients on deferred prosecutions.

Important corporations that have settled without a public trial include Boeing, AIG, AOL, Halliburton, BP, Health South, Daimler Chrysler, Wachovia, Merrill Lynch, Pfizer, UBS and Barclays Bank. The crimes ranged from healthcare fraud to cheating the government on military contracts, bribing foreign governments, money laundering, tax evasion and violating trade sanctions.

“Too big to prosecute” has generated controversy in legal circles but very little in politics. William Lerach, the notorious trial lawyer who has won huge investor lawsuits against Enron and many other corporations, describes deferred prosecutions as “sham guilt. They create a thin veneer of responsibility, but nothing really happens.” (Lerach is not a neutral or untarnished expert, having gone to prison himself for illegally recruiting plaintiffs.) “I call them headline fines—they make for good reading, but that’s all,” Lerach says. “The companies can pay them in a heartbeat. You know what it is to them? A cost of doing business, that’s all. The profitability of the illegal activity far exceeds the cost of the penalty.”

Lerach argues that negotiated settlements of corporate cases serve a different purpose: they shield the company’s top officers and directors, who could be held personally liable for crimes. “It shifts the blame to the corporate entity—the fictional person—rather than the individuals who engaged in the misconduct and really gained financially from it,” Lerach charges.

“The actual law says you are not allowed to indemnify a corporate officer or board member from prosecution for deliberate dishonest acts, i.e., criminal behavior,” he explains. “The way they get around this is a misuse of these agreements. They settle with the government on what is a criminal charge, and the shareholders end up paying. They use corporate guilt to pay off the prosecutor.”

Some of the penalties are huge—Pfizer paid $2.3 billion for marketing drugs in violation of labeling restrictions—but many fines seem trivial alongside a company’s ill-gotten gains. A series of federal judges have accused Justice and SEC lawyers of letting defendants off too easy. “A facade of enforcement,” New York Judge Jed Rakoff complained when he objected to a $33 million SEC settlement with Bank of America. The bank subsequently agreed to pay $150 million.

Judge Emmet Sullivan in Washington, DC, hammered Justice Department lawyers for giving “a free ride” to Barclays, which was accused of evading US sanctions on Iran and Cuba. Evidence made clear that its officers knew they were breaking the law, but none of them were indicted. “You know what?” Judge Sullivan told the government lawyers. “If other banks saw that the government was being rough and tough with banks and requiring banking officials to stand before federal judges and enter pleas of guilty, that might be a powerful deterrent to this type of conduct.”

In fact, federal judges have no authority to block or alter such agreements. The discretion belongs solely to Justice Department prosecutors and US Attorneys—in effect, a semi-private system with virtually no external checks. When New Jersey Governor Chris Christie was a US Attorney, he approved a series of deferred prosecution agreements and handed out sinecures to political pals—the lucrative lawyer’s job of monitoring the corporations. In one settlement Christie ordered Bristol-Myers-Squibb to finance an endowed chair in business ethics at Seton Hall law school, Christie’s alma mater. This became a minor issue in his gubernatorial campaign but not enough to defeat him.

Professor Kent Greenfield of Boston College, author of The Failure of Corporate Law, views all this as an ominous trend. “It has become the increasing normalization of law-breaking by corporations,” he says. When epic crimes go unpunished by the legal system, the wrongful behavior seems less shocking when it is repeated in the future, tolerated by discouraged citizens or regarded as an acceptable option by corporate managers.

“Crime is defined as price rather than punishment,” Greenfield notes. In the new normal, “corporations can say, ‘Well, is the crime worth the price, discounted by the probability of getting caught?’ Because you can’t make a corporation go to prison. They have no morality, no human personality or sense of morals, other than the morality of the market that reduces everything to money. If the only way to punish companies is with money, then the fine sets the price for crime.”

* * *

This amoral economic logic epitomizes the deep conflict over values our society is gradually losing. Corporate leaders may protest my characterization of business values, but Greenfield points out that during the past generation this bloodless market logic has become mainstream thinking among legal scholars. A rough version of the same thinking has crept into law enforcement. Oft-cited legal scholars Frank Easterbrook and Daniel Fischel argue, as Greenfield summarizes, that “corporations should, with some exceptions, seek to maximize profits even when they must break the law to do so…. As long as the expected penalties from illegality are less than the expected profits, the corporation should act illegally.” As Easterbrook and Fischel write: “Managers have no general obligation to avoid violating regulatory laws, when violations are profitable to the firm.” They even argue that “managers not only may but also should violate the rules when it is profitable to do so.”

The confusion of values starts with the fictitious premise that the corporation is a person, for purposes of law. The Supreme Court has awarded it many of the constitutional rights that a person possesses—free speech, the right to due process. But corporations are not mortal beings, of course, and unlike people, they can live forever. The language of “corporate personhood” is really a slick way of saying property rights come before people’s rights.

Government says it is acceptable to execute people for their crimes, then turns around and tries to eliminate the death penalty for corporations. When an actual person is sentenced to prison, the court does not pause to weigh the unfortunate collateral consequences for his children. “How many individuals do you know who get a deferred prosecution agreement?” Lerach asks. “They get marched into court and put in the clink.”

Lerach is sympathetic to the “death penalty” argument, because he has seen the negative consequences for people whose firms collapsed. “But you can’t have it both ways,” he says. “You can’t say you won’t indict the corporation because it will injure a lot of innocent people and have catastrophic impact. OK, but then you don’t indict the individuals who were responsible. And you let them use corporate money to pay the fine. That’s just a big game. There’s no accountability there.”

Restoring justice thus has two parts—establishing individual responsibility within the company and redefining criminal liability for the corporation in ways that have real impact on corporate behavior. Both require reforms that are fiendishly difficult to achieve, given the corporate dominance of politics. Prosecuting individuals is complicated, as Greenfield says, because responsibility is diffused within the corporation.

“It is hard to find the one individual who had a proper mental state that satisfies criminal intent, because everyone has a part of it,” Greenfield says. “The purpose of limited liability is to protect people from being responsible. If we put the assumptions about how we organize business in other areas of our lives and politics, people would be aghast.”

In other words, restoring individual responsibility requires big changes in the corporation itself—anti-trust legislation to make the big boys get smaller, and internal governance reforms that give voice and influence to other stakeholders, like employees and small shareholders, who now suffer most from recklessness at the top. People throughout the firm need incentives to take responsibility for its acts.

Corporations do not experience human guilt, since they exist only as artificial entities constructed from law. It is intolerable that these organizations wield so much power over society, but for many years people have been led to believe that corporate good fortune is synonymous with general prosperity. As broadly shared prosperity is steadily withdrawn, people may rise up and demand serious reforms.

* * *

Lerach thinks any reform is hopeless for now, but he nonetheless has lots of ideas about what it might look like. “Corporations are too big, too powerful,” he says. “The prosecutors are completely outgunned by the law firms, setting aside the fact that a young prosecutor is probably thinking about a job someday in a private firm. Corporate executives are not only greedy; they tend to be pretty smart. They surround themselves with professionals who tell them what they’re doing is reasonable. That creates a structural shield against prosecution.”

Yet Lerach thinks criminal penalties “can be created for corporations that wouldn’t amount to the death penalty for them but are still painful. So you wouldn’t put the prosecutor in that terrible bind where indictment might cost innocent people their jobs but would still put pressure on the company.”

If a company is convicted, law could prescribe a rising scale of mandatory measures depending on the severity of the crime: forcing the company to sell off subsidiaries, drop lines of business, surrender government licenses and contracts. This would be the equivalent of “three strikes, you’re out” for the mammoth corporations. The courts could also punish executives past and present, break up the company or put the entire enterprise up for sale at depressed prices. These actions are harsh—in some cases, fatal—but not really worse than what happens routinely to smaller businesses in the marketplace. Business failure gets punished unsentimentally. Criminal behavior should be clearly defined as business failure.

What will give political momentum to these ideas? Continuation of the status quo. Nobody went to jail, so eventually the corporate crooks will do it again. Next time, the rebellion won’t be aimed at government.

http://www.thenation.com/article/159433/how-wall-street-crooks-get-out-jail-free

The Ten Worst Corporate Tax Avoiders

2011-03-30T10:05:00.000-07:00

The Ten Worst Corporate Tax Avoiders: It's Time for Them to Pay up and Share the Sacrifice

by Sen. Bernie Sanders

March 27, 2011

BuzzFlash

While hard working Americans fill out their income tax returns this tax season, General Electric and other giant profitable corporations are avoiding U.S. taxes altogether.

With Congress returning to Capitol Hill on Monday to debate steep spending cuts, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said the wealthiest Americans and most profitable corporations must do their share to help bring down our record-breaking deficit.

Sanders renewed his call for shared sacrifice after it was reported that General Electric and other major corporations paid no U.S. taxes after posting huge profits. Sanders said it is grossly unfair for congressional Republicans to propose major cuts to Head Start, Pell Grants, the Social Security Administration, nutrition grants for pregnant low-income women and the Environmental Protection Agency while ignoring the reality that some of the most profitable corporations pay nothing or almost nothing in federal income taxes.

Sanders compiled a list of some of some of the 10 worst corporate income tax avoiders:

1) Exxon Mobil made $19 billion in profits in 2009. Exxon not only paid no federal income taxes, it actually received a $156 million rebate from the IRS, according to its SEC filings.

2) Bank of America received a $1.9 billion tax refund from the IRS last year, although it made $4.4 billion in profits and received a bailout from the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department of nearly $1 trillion.

3) Over the past five years, while General Electric made $26 billion in profits in the United States, it received a $4.1 billion refund from the IRS.

4) Chevron received a $19 million refund from the IRS last year after it made $10 billion in profits in 2009.

5) Boeing, which received a $30 billion contract from the Pentagon to build 179 airborne tankers, got a $124 million refund from the IRS last year.

6) Valero Energy, the 25th largest company in America with $68 billion in sales last year received a $157 million tax refund check from the IRS and, over the past three years, it received a $134 million tax break from the oil and gas manufacturing tax deduction.

7) Goldman Sachs in 2008 only paid 1.1 percent of its income in taxes even though it earned a profit of $2.3 billion and received an almost $800 billion from the Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury Department.

8) Citigroup last year made more than $4 billion in profits but paid no federal income taxes. It received a $2.5 trillion bailout from the Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury.

9) ConocoPhillips, the fifth largest oil company in the United States, made $16 billion in profits from 2007 through 2009, but received $451 million in tax breaks through the oil and gas manufacturing deduction.

10) Over the past five years, Carnival Cruise Lines made more than $11 billion in profits, but its federal income tax rate during those years was just 1.1 percent.

Sanders has called for closing corporate tax loopholes and eliminating tax breaks for oil and gas companies. He also introduced legislation to impose a 5.4 percent surtax on millionaires that would yield up to $50 billion a year. The senator has said that spending cuts must be paired with new revenue so the federal budget is not balanced solely on the backs of working families.

"We have a deficit problem. It has to be addressed," Sanders said, "but it cannot be addressed on the backs of the sick, the elderly, the poor, young people, the most vulnerable in this country. The wealthiest people and the largest corporations in this country have got to contribute. We've got to talk about shared sacrifice."

A Century After Triangle Fire, Labor Struggles Remain

2011-03-22T17:23:00.000-07:00

A Century After Triangle Fire, Labor Struggles Remain

Factory blaze that left 146 dead energized the US worker movement

Peter Fedynsky | New York March 22, 2011

Fire ladders only reached the sixth floor, and onlookers watched in horror as more than 50 people on the ninth floor jumped to their deaths to escape the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory.

On March 25, 1911, 146 people died when fire swept through an overcrowded New York City garment factory. The victims were mostly young immigrant women. The so-called Triangle fire fueled public outrage over unsafe and unfair working conditions, which had already been at the center of a bitter struggle between labor and management. A century later, the battle is not over for many workers.

The tragedy happened near quitting time on a Saturday at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, which was located on the top three floors of the Asch Building. A discarded cigarette on the eighth floor set off the conflagration. People on the tenth floor, including the owners, were warned by telephone and escaped.

Most workers - who were on the ninth floor - were doomed by a locked door to prevent theft, panic, a dozen pails of water and a small elevator. At least 50 burned to death. Fire ladders could only reach the sixth floor, and onlookers watched in horror as more than 50 people jumped to their deaths. Nineteen fell into an empty elevator shaft. Twenty more fell from a shoddy fire escape.

Leigh Benin, a professor at Adelphi University and co-author of a book on the Triangle Fire, says greed and cut-throat competition among garment industry owners contributed to the tragedy.

“Their drive for profits persuaded them to do something that was unsafe: put too many people in that space with too few exits," says Benin. "And they certainly didn’t opt to have sprinkler systems, which could have been installed, and they resisted.”

Safety had been an issue two years before in a 1909 strike by 20,000 garment workers. They demanded better pay and shorter hours at a time when 14-to-16 hour work days were common. But garment industry owners not only hired goons and prostitutes to fight women on the picket line, they also bribed police to arrest strikers who defended themselves. Additionally, the Triangle factory owners did not recognize the union.

An estimated 400,000 people - one of every 10 New Yorkers - braved the driving rain to pay their respects to victims of the Triangle fire.
The Triangle fire revived public memory of the strikes. An estimated 400,000 people - one of every 10 New Yorkers - came in a driving rain to pay their respects to victims of the fire.

“And people wondered, had they won that struggle more decisively, had the union been recognized, would this fire have been avoided,” says Benin.

After Triangle, government officials could no longer ignore the public.

“There was this tremendous sense in this country that somebody should do something," says Katherine Weber, author of “Triangle,” a history of the fire. "For the first time, government wasn’t just serving business, wasn’t just serving the interests of commerce, but was actually expected by the people of the United States to take care of people.”

In response, the government set standards for workplace safety, minimum wages and maximum hours. Those standards remain in effect throughout the United States, but not elsewhere.

Last year, a garment factory fire killed 21 workers in Bangladesh.
Just last year in Bangladesh, 21 garment workers died in a blaze similar to the Triangle fire. Shanaz Begum lost her mother in the disaster.

"My mother went to the factory for her night shift duty and as the factory caught fire she could not come out because the gate of the factory was locked and she died," she says.

After the Triangle fire, a jury acquitted factory owners Isaac Harris and Max Blanck of deliberately locking a door to prevent theft. The decision further energized the labor reform movement. But now, those victories of U.S. labor 100 years ago could become an empty triumph, as Americans lose jobs that are shipped to countries without adequate labor laws.

The building where the Triangle fire occurred is now part of New York University.
“Labor, if it wants to prevent that truly horrible eventuality from taking place, needs to be an international movement," says Benin. "It needs to have solidarity across national lines. The corporations are already transnational or multinational. The labor movement has to be the same.”

The building where the Triangle fire occurred was donated to New York University and is now known as the Brown Science Building. Plaques commemorate the victims, and their legacy for the American labor movement is remembered every year.

Cockburn on California Nuke Power

2011-03-18T14:33:00.000-07:00

Here, on the Other Side of the Ring of Fire

by: Alexander Cockburn, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

Americans read the increasingly panic-stricken reports of deepening catastrophe at Fukushima 1, speed to the pharmacy to buy iodine and ask, "It's happened there; can it happen here?"

Along much of California's coastline runs the "ring of fire," which stretches round the Pacific plate, from Australia, north past Japan, to Russia, round to Alaska, down America's West Coast to Chile. 90 percent of the world's earthquakes happen round the ring.

The late great environmentalist David Brower used to tell audiences, " Nuclear plants are incredibly complex technological devices for locating earthquake faults."

Halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles is the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant, planned in 1968 when no one knew about the Hosgri fault, part of the ring of fire, a few miles offshore. Further inquiry established that there'd been a 7.1 earthquake 40 years earlier, offshore from the plant, completed in 1973. The power company -- Pacific Gas and Electric -- said it would beef up defenses. In their haste, the site managers reversed the blueprints for the new earthquake proofing of the two reactors, and so the retrofit wasn't a total success.

They recently discovered yet another fault and are now worried about "ground liquefaction" in the event of a big quake. In 2008, there was a terrorist attack by jellyfish, which blocked the cold water intake, and the plant was shut down for a couple of days.

Head south another 150 miles, and we get to the San Onofre plant, right on the shoreline. In fact, I've swum in its shadow, in waters highly esteemed by anglers because fish gather there, enjoying the elevated water temp; some also claim the fish there get bigger, faster. There are storage ponds for spent fuel in a decommissioned unit in a spherical containment of concrete and steel with the smallest wall being 6 feet thick, just about the same as the ruptured containment at one of the Fukushima units.

The power company says San Onofre is built to withstand a 7.0 quake. There is a 25-foot sea wall, which is just over half the height of the walls that crumbled like sand last week along Japan's northeast coast. San Onofre is seawater cooled. Environmentalists don't care for that, so they plan to build two cooling towers the other side of Interstate 5, California's main north-south road, thus immune to jellyfish attack, but open to other methods of assault.

The Uniform California Earthquake Rupture Forecast figures the probability of an earthquake 6.7 or higher is 67 percent for Los Angeles, 63 percent for San Francisco. Up where I live, in the Cascadia subduction zone, we have a 10 percent possibility of an 8- or 9-force quake.

There are robust souls who look on the bright side. Some of them are in the pay of the nuclear industry -- President Obama for example, who took plenty of money from the nuclear industry for his presidential campaign, and in his State of the Union address last January reaffirmed his commitment to "clean, safe" nuclear power, about as insane a statement as pledging commitment to a nice clean form of syphilis. This week, Obama's press spokesman confirmed that nuclear energy "remains a part of the President's overall energy plan."

The United States produces more nuclear energy than any other nations. It has 104 nuclear plants, many of them old, many prone to endless shutdowns, all of them dangerous.

The benchmark catastrophe amid peacetime nuclear disasters remains the explosion in the fourth reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power station on April 26, 1986, in the Ukraine. In 2009, the New York Academy of Sciences published "Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment," a 327-page volume by three scientists -- Alexey Yablokov and Vassily and Alexey Nesterenko -- the definitive study to date. In the summary of his chapter "Mortality After the Chernobyl Catastrophe," Yablokov says flatly, "The calculations suggest that the Chernobyl catastrophe has already killed several hundred thousand human beings in a population of several hundred million that was unfortunate enough to live in territories affected by the fallout."

Set Fukushima next to Chernobyl and its ongoing lethal aftermath. Think of Southern California or North Carolina. Nuclear expert Robert Alvarez, who advised President Clinton on nuclear matters, writes this week that a single spent fuel rod pool -- as in Fukushima (or Diablo Canyon or San Onofre) -- holds more cesium-137 than was deposited by all atmospheric nuclear weapons tests in the Northern Hemisphere combined, and an explosion in that pool could blast "perhaps three to nine times as much of these materials into the air as was released by the Chernobyl reactor disaster."

In the past few years, there's been an explicit political trade-off here in the U.S. and in Europe, too, between the nuclear industry and many green organizations and prominent environmentalists, fixated solely on the increasingly disheveled hypothesis of humanly caused global warming. When the House of Representatives (though not the U.S. Senate) voted for a climate bill in 2009, the inclusion of a clean-energy bank to provide financial backing for new energy production, including nuclear, was part of the bargain.

This shameful pact has got to end. Nuclear power is over, or should be. Look at the false predictions, the blunders, the elemental truth that Nature bats last and that human folly and greed are ineluctable ingredients of man's condition. There's no middle ground.

Alexander Cockburn is co-editor with Jeffrey St. Clair of the muckraking newsletter CounterPunch. He is also co-author of the new book "Dime's Worth of Difference: Beyond the Lesser of Two Evils," available through www.counterpunch.com.

Tell Congress: No more taxpayer $ for more nuclear power

2011-03-16T22:37:00.000-07:00

From: Nuclear Information and Resource Service

The situation at the Fukushima nuclear site in Japan continues to deteriorate. We are now looking at the very real possibility--even likelihood--of multiple reactor meltdowns coupled with multiple failures of irradiated fuel pools. Our thoughts and prayers go out to the people of Japan at this hour.

We are posting updates as fast as we can obtain reliable information on our website: www.nirs.org. Please check often for new information.

The lesson of this catastrophe is clear: we must end use of nuclear power.

And that must start with the prevention of any new nuclear reactors. It is outrageous that the Obama Administration continues to say nuclear power will be part of its "clean energy" strategy. How anyone can view the images coming from Japan and continue to claim nuclear power is somehow "clean" is beyond our ability to comprehend.

If ever there was a time for Congress to hear our voice, it is now.
Click here to take action or go to www.nirs.org.

Arcata's Law Unconstitutional

2011-03-04T09:46:00.000-08:00

Contending that Arcata’s panhandling ordinance is unconstitutional, resident Richard Salzman informed the City Council that he intends to file a lawsuit unless the ordinance is amended.

As written, the ordinance makes it a crime to merely hold up a sign asking for money. By denying citizens constitutional right of free speech, Salzman contends the City Council overstepped its authority.

“If first they silence the poor and the homeless, and I say nothing, who will speak up when they try to silence me?” Salzman asked.

He noted that the section of the ordinance against “aggressive panhandling,” including blocking one’s path, any physical contact or yelling, would be left unchallenged by this legal action.

--

February 14, 2011

Susan Ornelas, Mayor
Michael Winkler, Vice-Mayor
Shane Brinton, Council Member
Alexandra Stillman, Council Member
Mark Wheetley, Council Member
Randy Mendosa, City Manager
Nancy Diamond, Esq., City Attorney

City of Arcata
736 F Street
Arcata, CA 95521

Re: Unconstitutional Panhandling Ordinance enacted April 16, 2010, as Arcata Municipal Code [AMC] Sections 4280-4282.

Dear City Council, City Manager and City Attorney:

Please take notice that Mr. Richard Salzman, a resident of, and taxpayer within, the City of Arcata, has retained the undersigned to bring an action against the City of Arcata to declare its panhandling ordinance unconstitutional and to enjoin the City from any further enforcement of said ordinance. The purpose of this letter is to invite the City to amend its panhandling ordinance as set forth herein, and thereby avoid the expense, uncertainty and unpleasantness of contested litigation.

Specifically, Mr. Salzman contends that AMC Sections 4282B, 4282C, 4282D, 4282E, 4282F and 4282G are unconstitutional. The overall impact of these sections is to criminalize begging in most of the City where it would be fruitful to beg. Begging is a charitable solicitation. The First Amendment clearly protects charitable solicitations. No distinction of constitutional dimension exists between soliciting funds for oneself and for charity. The fact that a beggar keeps the money she receives does not strip the speech of First Amendment protection. A speaker’s rights are not lost merely because compensation is received; a speaker is no less a speaker because she is paid to speak.

To be lawful, the ordinance must serve a compelling interest that is narrowly drawn to achieve its end. The City’s compelling interest, if one exists, is well-served by the ordinance’s ban on aggressive panhandling, to which Mr. Salzman does not take exception. Mr. Salzman objects to the near-total ban on begging in public fora, the justification for which can be little more than avoiding “annoyance” to the public, hardly a compelling interest in First Amendment jurisprudence. Moreover, the ordinance’s ban on begging is not “narrowly tailored;” indeed, it is embarrassingly broad. To achieve the City’s goal of criminalizing the speech of a few beggars, the City has criminalized all solicitations for money. A girl scout cannot sell cookies on the City’s streets. Nor may any charity solicit money in most of the City. A beggar cannot even hold a sign up to ask for money; a more clearly content-based restriction on speech is difficult to imagine.

The City’s attempt to justify these draconian restrictions on speech under the so-called “captive audience rule” is unavailing. The City’s expansion of that concept to include almost all public space within the City perverts the intent of the rule and strikes at the very heart of discourse in a democratic society- the right to communicate with one’s fellow citizens on the public commons.

Other constitutional concerns are implicated in the City’s ordinance. The criminalization of solicitation implicates equal protection concerns, to wit, the ordinance targets the First Amendment rights of the City’s poorest and most downtrodden residents, while it remains legal to accost members of the public to ask the time of day, or to sign a petition. The complexity of the ordinance, with its crazy patch-work of places where it is illegal to beg, implicates notice and due process concerns. A reasonable citizen of the City lacks adequate notice as to where she may beg and where she may not beg. Likewise, the ordinance’s definition of “panhandling” leaves questions unanswered: Is a check or credit card transaction on the City’s streets illegal, or just a cash transaction? This renders the ordinance subject to challenge for vagueness.

Mr. Salzman would prefer to resolve this matter without litigation, and to that end, invites the City and its attorneys to meet with the undersigned to work toward resolution of the issues raised herein.

Respectfully,

Peter E. Martin

--

Read article in Arcata Eye
and post on Humboldt Herald.
Link to JPR radio show on subject (starts at 30:min mark):
http://podcastdownload.npr.org/anon.npr-podcasts/podcast/172/510073/134265248/JPR_134265248.mp3?_kip_ipx=898705313-1299267811

Save Public Broadcasting

2011-02-16T11:19:00.000-08:00

Public Broadcasting Zeroed Out in House Budget Bill
Continuing Resolution Eliminates the Corporation for Public Broadcasting
The House Appropriations Committee has the full list of recommended spending cuts which includes the elimination of funding for public broadcasting. The House leadership said that debate on the measure (H.R. 1) will begin Tuesday 02/15.

Please contact your representatives in Congress now and urge them to stand up for public broadcasting funding. It is going to take hundreds of thousands of Americans calling and writing Congress to get this critical funding back into the budget proposal. Visit: 170MillionAmericans.org for more information.

Moyers speech: Facts Still Matter...

2011-02-15T13:15:00.000-08:00

------

Bill Moyers: "Facts Still Matter ..."
Monday 14 February 2011
by: Bill Moyers, t r u t h o u t | Speech

History Makers is an organization of broadcasters and producers from around the world concerned with the challenges and opportunities faced by factual broadcasting. Bill Moyers was the keynote speaker at the 2011 convention on January 27, 2011, in New York City.

Thanks to all of you for your welcome - and for the chance to be here among so many kindred spirits. Your dedication to factual broadcasting, to our craft and calling; your passion for telling stories that matter; for connecting the present to the past, has created a community whose work is essential in this disquieting time when "what is happening today, this hour, this very minute, seems to be our sole criterion for judgment and action." It is a sad world that exists only in the present, unaware of the long procession that brought us here. As Milan Kundera’s insight reminds us, the struggle against power "is the struggle of memory against forgetting."

I talked about this gathering when I was in California this past weekend and spent time with a good friend and supporter of my own work on television, Paul Orfalea. He's the maverick entrepreneur who founded Kinko's in a former hamburger stand with one small rented Xerox copier and turned it into a business service empire with more than two billion dollars a year in revenue. After selling Kinko's, Paul became one of the most popular, if unorthodox, teachers of undergraduates at the University of California/ Santa Barbara. When I told him what I would be doing today he applauded and understood immediately the importance of what you do. He described to me how he teaches history "backwards" to college students who have learned little about the past in high school, don't know that the past is even alive, much less that it lives in them and question its value today. He hands his students a contemporary story from some daily news source, tells them to begin with the "now" of it and to then walk the trail back down the chronology to trace the personalities, circumstances and choices that made it today's news. Their assignment, in effect, is to begin at the entrance to the cave and rewind Ariadne's thread in the opposite direction, back to the deep origins of the story. In an era marked by the lack of continuity and community between the generations, this strikes me as an inspired way to stretch young imaginations across the time zones of human experience.

And it's, of course, what you do so often in your work. No one I know does it more effectively than "Frontline." and I was pleased to learn that you are honoring its executive director, David Fanning, who is a genius, in my book, at story telling grounded in fact and presented with perspective. Over the past quarter century, I have been privileged to collaborate occasionally with David. But beyond my own personal and professional gratitude to him, all of us who produce current affairs and history programming know that he has kept the bar high while producing a body of work unequaled since Fred Friendly. Most of you are too young to have seen the whole arc of David's extraordinary career or to have known Fred Friendly's work. But some of us can never forget we're standing on the shoulder of those two giants.

I also had the privilege of witnessing Fred in action. When he was president of "CBS News" and I was the White House press secretary, he would come down from New York on the shuttle and slip in the back door of the White House and along the hall past the Cabinet Room to the private entrance to my office for an hour-or-so chat. I had done some preliminary work at the Office of Education on the future of public television in 1964, and we were soon talking about the medium's future; he was a true believer in television "that dignifies instead of debases" and of the importance "of at least one channel free of commercials and commercial values." Little did we know at the time that he would soon quit the job he relished as president of the news division that he and Edward R. Murrow had built. The two of them created "See It Now" and "CBS Reports," which set the standard for investigative reporting and documentaries of unprecedented power and impact. One of their collaborations was the famous documentary on the demagogic and dangerous Senator Joseph McCarthy. They made the brilliant decision to let McCarthy speak for himself, an entire broadcast's worth of his bullying words and techniques. McCarthy obligingly hanged himself on national television, far more effectively and fatally than anyone else's words could. His own words had turned Americans against his demagoguery - something for which the right to this day has never forgiven what they denounced as the "Communist Broadcasting System." Watching that documentary over and again, I realized that it is through such unhurried honoring of reality that we can approach the myriad and messy truths of human experience. For lasting effect, those truths cannot be forced into the mind of the public; they must be nurtured.

Fred never wanted to leave CBS, but in 1966, when the network refused to carry Senate hearings on the Vietnam War, choosing instead to run a repeat of "I Love Lucy," he resigned, became the media adviser to the Ford Foundation and was the prime mover in the creation of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. He became our Johnny Appleseed, persuading the foundation to put its money - millions of dollars - where his mind was.

I had left the White House by then to be publisher of Newsday and would soon join public television as anchor of a weekly broadcast. Fred's first teaching assistant, Martin Clancy, was my star producer. It was usually one of Fred's people who taught me the most about our craft - how it was possible through the coupling of word and image to come close to the verifiable truth and an honest accounting of reality. Fred played a critical role in my life when, after stints at both CBS and PBS, I had to choose between the two. I had found it increasingly difficult at the network to do the work I most wanted to do, but was reluctant to take off the golden handcuffs and leap into the world of independent production. I went over to see Fred at the foundation and there was nothing subtle in his advice. He said, "You're never going to do the work you most want to do until you do it for yourself." So, I followed him overboard.

Fred was right, as he so often was: independence meant the best hope for me to pursue journalism as a mission. Perhaps, we were naïve, but in those days many of us still assumed that an informed public is preferable to an uninformed one. Hadn't Thomas Jefferson proclaimed that, "Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government"? And wasn't a free press essential to that end?

Maybe not. As Joe Keohane reported last year in The Boston Globe, political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency "deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information." He was reporting on research at the University of Michigan, which found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in new stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts were not curing misinformation. "Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger."

I won't spoil it for you by a lengthy summary here. Suffice it to say that, while "most of us like to believe that our opinions have been formed over time by careful, rational consideration of facts and ideas and that the decisions based on those opinions, therefore, have the ring of soundness and intelligence," the research found that actually "we often base our opinions on our beliefs ... and rather than facts driving beliefs, our beliefs can dictate the facts we chose to accept. They can cause us to twist facts so they fit better with our preconceived notions."

These studies help to explain why America seems more and more unable to deal with reality. So many people inhabit a closed belief system on whose door they have hung the "Do Not Disturb" sign, that they pick and choose only those facts that will serve as building blocks for walling them off from uncomfortable truths. Any journalist whose reporting threatens that belief system gets sliced and diced by its apologists and polemicists (say, the fabulists at Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and the yahoos of talk radio.) Remember when Limbaugh, for one, took journalists on for their reporting about torture at Abu Ghraib? He attempted to dismiss the cruelty inflicted on their captives by American soldiers as a little necessary "sport" for soldiers under stress, saying on air: "This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation ... you [ever] heard of need to blow some steam off?" As so often happens, the Limbaugh line became a drumbeat in the nether reaches of the right-wing echo chamber. So, it was not surprising that in a nationwide survey conducted by The Chicago Tribune on First Amendment issues, half of the respondents said there should be some kind of press restraint on reporting about the prison abuse. According to Charles Madigan, the editor of the Tribune's Perspective section, 50 or 60 percent of the respondents said they "would embrace government controls of some kind on free speech, particularly when it has sexual content or is heard as unpatriotic."

No wonder many people still believe Obama was born in Kenya, not Hawaii, as his birth certificate shows; or that he is a Muslim, when in fact he is a Christian; or that he is a socialist when day by day he shows an eager solicitude for corporate capitalism. Partisans in particular - and the audiences for Murdoch's Fox News and talk radio - are particularly susceptible to such scurrilous disinformation. In a Harris survey last spring, 67 percent of Republicans said Obama is a socialist; 57 percent believed him to be a Muslim; 45 percent refused to believe he was born in America; and 24 percent said he "may be the antichrist."

The bigger the smear, the more it sticks. And there is no shortage of smear artists. Last year, Forbes Magazine, obviously bent on mischief, allowed the right-wing fantasist Dinesh D'Souza to tar Obama with a toxic brew so odious it triggered memories of racist babble - a perverted combination of half-baked psychology, biology and sociology - that marked the heyday of the Ku Klux Klan. Seizing upon the anti-colonial views of Obama's Kenyan father, who had deserted the family when the boy was two years old and whose absence from his life Obama meditated upon in his best-selling book "Dreams of My Father," D'Souza wrote that, "Incredibly, the US is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s. This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anticolonial ambitions, is now setting the nation's agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son."

In a sane political world, you might think at least a few Republican notables would have denounced such hogwash by their own kind for what it was. But no. Newt Gingrich, once their speaker of the House, whose own fantasies include succeeding Obama in the White House, set the tone by praising D'Souza's claptrap as the "most profound insight I have read in the last six years about Barack Obama." D'Souza, said Gingrich, has made a "stunning insight" and had unlocked the mystery of Obama. I could find only one conservative who stood up against this trash. David Frum, the former speechwriter for George W. Bush, wrote on his blog: "The argument that Obama is an infiltrating alien, a deceiving foreigner - and not just any kind of alien, but specifically a Third World alien - has been absorbed to the very core of the Republican platform for November 2010." Once again, the right-wing media machine had popularized a false narrative and made of it a destructive political weapon.

Disinformation is not unique to the right, of course. Like other journalists, I have been the object of malevolent assaults from the "9/11 truthers" for not reporting their airtight case proving that the Bush administration conspired to bring about the attacks on the World Trade Center. How did they discover this conspiracy? As the independent journalist Robert Parry has written, "the truthers" threw out all the evidence of al-Qaeda's involvement, from contemporaneous calls from hijack victims on the planes to confessions from al-Qaeda leaders both in and out of captivity that they had indeed done it. Then, recycling some of the right's sophistry techniques, such as using long lists of supposed evidence to overcome the lack of any real evidence, the "truthers" cherry-picked a few supposed "anomalies" to build an "inside-job" story line. Fortunately, this Big Lie never took hold in the public mind. These truthers on the left, if that is where GPS can find them on the political map, are outgunned, outmatched and outshouted by the media apparatus on the right that pounds the public like drone missiles loaded with conspiracy theories and disinformation and accompanied by armadas of outright lies.

George Orwell had warned six decades ago that the corrosion of language goes hand in hand with the corruption of democracy. If he were around today, he would remind us that "like the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket," this kind of propaganda engenders a "protective stupidity" almost impossible for facts to penetrate.

But you, my colleagues, can't give up. If you do, there's no chance any public memory of everyday truths - the tangible, touchable, palpable realities so vital to democracy - will survive. We would be left to the mercy of the agitated amnesiacs who "make" their own reality, as one of them boasted at the time America invaded Iraq, in order to maintain their hold on the public mind and the levers of power. You will remember that in Orwell's novel "1984," Big Brother banishes history to the memory hole, where inconvenient facts simply disappear. Control of the present rests on obliteration of the past. The figure of O'Brien, who is the personification of Big Brother, says to the protagonist, Winston Smith: "We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves." And they do. The bureaucrats in the Ministry of Truth destroy the records of the past and publish new versions. These in turn are superseded by yet more revisions. Why? Because people without memory are at the mercy of the powers that be; there is nothing against which to measure what they are told today. History is obliterated.

The late scholar Cleanth Brooks of Yale thought there were three great enemies of democracy. He called them "The Bastard Muses": Propaganda, which pleads sometimes unscrupulously, for a special cause at the expense of the total truth; sentimentality, which works up emotional responses unwarranted by, and in excess of, the occasion; and pornography, which focuses upon one powerful human drive at the expense of the total human personality. The poet Czeslaw Milosz identified another enemy of democracy when, upon accepting the Noble Prize for Literature, he said "Our planet that gets smaller every year, with its fantastic proliferation of mass media, is witnessing a process that escapes definition, characterized by a refusal to remember." Memory is crucial to democracy; historical amnesia, its nemesis.

Against these tendencies it is an uphill fight to stay the course of factual broadcasting. We have to keep reassuring ourselves and one another that it matters and we have to join forces to defend and safeguard our independence. I learned this early on.

When I collaborated with the producer Sherry Jones on the very first documentary ever about the purchase of government favors by political action committees, we unfurled across the Capitol grounds yard after yard of computer printouts listing campaign contributions to every member of Congress. The broadcast infuriated just about everyone, including old friends of mine who a few years earlier had been allies when I worked at the White House. Congressmen friendly to public television were also outraged, but, I am pleased to report, PBS took the heat without melting.

But shining the spotlight on political corruption is nothing compared to what can happen if you raise questions about corporate power in Washington, as my colleague Marty Koughan and I discovered when we produced a program for David Fanning and "Frontline" on pesticides and food. Marty had learned that industry was attempting behind closed doors to dilute the findings of the American Academy of Sciences study on the effects of pesticide residues on children. Before we finished the documentary, the industry somehow purloined a copy of our draft script - we still aren't certain how - and mounted a sophisticated and expensive campaign to discredit our program before it aired. Television reviewers and editorial pages of key newspapers were flooded with propaganda. Some public television managers were so unnerved by the blitz of misleading information about a film they had not yet broadcast that they actually protested to PBS with letters that had been prepared by the industry.

Here's what most perplexed us: the American Cancer Society - an organization that in no way figured in our story - sent to its 3,000 local chapters a "critique" of the unfinished documentary claiming, wrongly, that it exaggerated the dangers of pesticides in food. We were puzzled. Why was the American Cancer Society taking the unusual step of criticizing a documentary that it had not seen, that had not aired and that did not claim what the Society alleged? An enterprising reporter named Sheila Kaplan later looked into those questions for the journal Legal Times. It turns out that the Porter Novelli public relations firm, which had worked for several chemical companies, also did pro bono work for the American Cancer Society. Kaplan found that the firm was able to cash in some of the goodwill from that "charitable" work to persuade the compliant communications staff at the Society to distribute some harsh talking point about the documentary before it aired - talking points that had been supplied by, but not attributed to, Porter Novelli. Legal Times headlined the story "Porter Novelli Plays All Sides." A familiar Washington game.

Others also used the American Cancer Society's good name in efforts to tarnish the journalism before it aired, none more invidiously than the right-wing polemicist Reed Irvine, who pumped his sludge through an organization with the Orwellian name Accuracy in Media. He attacked our work as "junk science on PBS" and demanded Congress pull the plug on public broadcasting. Fortunately, PBS once again stood firm. The documentary aired, the journalism held up and the publicity liberated the National Academy of Sciences to release the study that the industry had tried to cripple.

However, there's always another round; the sharks are always circling. Sherry Jones and I spent more than a year working on another PBS documentary called "Trade Secrets," a two-hour investigative special based on revelations - found in the industry's own archives - that big chemical companies had deliberately withheld from workers and consumers damaging information about toxic chemicals in their products. These internal industry documents are a fact. They exist. They are not a matter of opinion or point of view. They state what the companies knew, when they knew it and what they did with what they knew (namely to deep-six it) at peril to those who worked with and consumed the potentially lethal products.

The revelations portrayed deep and pervasive corruption in a major American industry and raised critical policy implications about the safety of living under a regulatory system manipulated by the industry itself. If the public and government regulators had known what the industry knew about the health risks of its products when the industry knew it, America's laws and regulations governing chemical manufacturing would have been far more protective of human health. But the industry didn't want us to know. That's what the documents revealed and that was the story the industry fought to keep us from telling.

The industry hired as an ally a public relations firm in Washington noted for using private detectives and former CIA, FBI and drug enforcement officers to conduct investigations for corporations under critical scrutiny. One of the company's founders acknowledged that corporations may need to resort to "deceit" and other unconventional resources to counter public scrutiny. Given the scurrilous campaign that was conducted to smear our journalism, his comments were an understatement. To complicate matters, the Congressman, who for years had been the single biggest recipient of campaign contributions from the chemical industry, was the very member of Congress whose committee had jurisdiction over public broadcasting's appropriations. As an independent production firm, we had not used public funds to produce the documentary. But even our independence didn't stop the corporate mercenaries from bringing relentless pressure on PBS not to air the broadcast. The then president of PBS, Pat Mitchell, stood tall in resisting the pressure and was vindicated: one year later, The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences awarded "Trade Secrets" an Emmy for outstanding investigative journalism.

Now, you can understand how it is that journalism became for me a continuing course in adult education. It enabled me to produce documentaries like "Trade Secrets" and out-of-the-box series like "Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth." It enabled me to cover the summits of world leaders and the daily lives of struggling families in Newark. It empowered me to explain how public elections are subverted by private money, and to how to make a poem. Journalism also provided me a passport into the world of ideas, which became my favorite beat, in no small part because I never met anyone - philosopher or physicist, historian, artist, writer, scientist, entrepreneur or social critic - who didn't teach me something I hadn't known, something that enlarged my life.

Here's an example: One of my favorite of all interviews was with my sainted fellow Texan, the writer and broadcaster John Henry Faulk, who had many years earlier, been the target of a right-wing smear campaign that resulted in his firing by CBS from his job as a radio host here in New York, one of the low moments in that network's history. But John Henry fought back in court and won a landmark legal victory against his tormentors. After he returned home to Texas, I did the last interview with him before his death in 1990. He told me the story of how he and his friend Boots Cooper were playing in the chicken coop when they were about 12 years old. They spied a chicken snake in the top tier of nests, so close it looked like a boa constrictor. As John Henry put it, "All our frontier courage drained out our heels - actually it trickled down our overall legs - and Boots and I made a new door through that henhouse wall." Hearing all the commotion Boots' momma came out and said, "Don't you boys know chicken snakes are harmless? They can't harm you." And Boots, rubbing his forehead and behind at the same time, said, "Yes, Mrs. Faulk, I know that, but they can scare you so bad, it'll cause you to hurt yourself." John Henry Faulk told me that's a lesson he never forgot. Over and again I've tried to remember it, too, calling on it to restore my resolve and my soul.

I've had a wonderful life in broadcasting, matriculating as a perpetual student in the school of journalism. Other people have paid the tuition and travel and I've never really had to grow up and get a day job. I think it's because journalism has been so good to me that I am sad when I hear or read that factual broadcasting is passé - that television as a venue for forensic journalism is on its way out and that trying to find out "what really happened" - which is our mandate - is but a quaint relic in an age of post-structuralism and cyberspace. But despite all our personal electronic devices, people are watching more television than ever. Much of this programming is posted online; I believe at least half the audience for my last two weekly series on Friday night came over the weekend via streaming video, iPods and TIVO. I was pleased to discover that the web sites most frequented by educators are those of PBS and that our own sites were among the most popular destinations. That's what keeps us going, isn't it? The knowledge that all the bias and ignorance notwithstanding, facts still matter to critical thinking, that if we respect and honor, even revere them, they just might help us right the ship of state before it rams the iceberg.

That's why, on balance, I count WikiLeaks a plus for democracy. Whatever side you take on the controversy, whether or not you think this information should be disclosed, all parties - those who want it released and those who don't - acknowledge that information matters. Partly because I grew up in the south and partly because of my experience in the Johnson White House, I'm on the side of disclosure, even when it hurts. The truth about slavery had been driven from the pulpits, newsrooms and classrooms during the antebellum days; it took a bloody civil war to drive the truth home. At the Johnson White House, we circled the wagons and grew intolerant of news that didn't conform to our hopes, expectations and strategies for Vietnam, with terrible, tragic results for Americans and Vietnamese, north and south. I say: "Never again!"

Here's a sidebar: I remember vividly the day President Johnson signed the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA): July 4, 1966. He signed it "with a deep sense of pride," declaring in almost lyrical language "that the United States is an open society in which the people's right to know is cherished and guarded." That's what he said. The truth is, the president had to be dragged kicking and screaming to the signing ceremony. He hated the very idea of journalists rummaging in government closets, hated them challenging the authorized view of reality, hated them knowing what he didn't want them to know. He dug in his heels and even threatened to pocket veto the bill after it reached the White House. Only the courage and political skill of a Congressman named John Moss got the bill passed at all and that was after a 12-year battle against his Congressional elders, who blinked every time the sun shined on the dark corners of power. They managed to cripple the bill Moss had drafted and, even then, only some last-minute calls to LBJ from a handful of influential newspaper editors overcame the president's reluctance. He signed "the f------ thing," as he called it and then, lo and behold, went out to claim credit for it.

It's always a fight to find out what the government doesn't want us to know. The official obsession with secrecy is all the more disturbing today because the war on terrorism is a war without limits, without a visible enemy or decisive encounters. We don't know where the clandestine war is going on or how much it's costing and whether it's in the least effective. Even in Afghanistan, most of what we know comes from official, usually military, sources.

Thus, a relative handful of people have enormous power to keep us in the dark. And when those people are in league with their counterparts in powerful corporations, the public is hit with a double whammy. We're usually told the issue is national security, but keeping us from finding out about the danger of accidents at chemical plants is not about national security; it's about covering up an industry's indiscretions and liabilities. Locking up the secrets of meetings with energy executives is not about national security; it's about hiding confidential memos sent to the White House showing the influence of oil companies on policies of global warming We only learned about that memo from the Bush White House, by the way, thanks to the Freedom of Information Act.

Consider WikiLeaks, then, to be one big FOIA dump. Were some people in high places embarrassed? Perhaps. They did squeal, but I don't think they were stuck.

And even so, we learned some important things from WikiLeaks. For example, as Reza Alsan writes in The Atlantic, the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, may not be as fanatical as we think he is; the diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks portray him as "a moderate reformer who'd like to cut deals with the West, but can't because hard-liners are calling the shots." One of them even slapped Ahmadinejad across the face when, at a high-level meeting. he proposed that the government allow more personal and press freedom at the height of the 2009 public protests in Iran. Such information can help us evaluate the incessant demands of neoconservative warmongers - the very people who rode the circuit with news of "weapons of mass destruction" in an effort to build support for invading Iraq - that we use military force against Iran to eliminate its nuclear capacity.

There are other uses of the disclosures from WikiLeaks admirably compiled by Greg Mitchell in the current edition of The Nation, where the one-time editor of Editor and Publisher performed an important public service by culling the gold from the dust.

I will close with an urgent appeal to you about one fight we won't win unless all of us join it. I'm sure everyone here agrees that we will eventually be moving to the web, all of us and that "free, instant, worldwide connectivity" is the future. But I'm sure you know that this incredible, free, open Internet highway is at risk, that corporations are on the brink of muscling their way to the front of the line. Media companies want the power to censor Internet content they don't like, to put toll booths on the web so they can charge more for the privilege of driving in the fast lanes, to turn it into a private preserve.

You may have heard that last month the FCC decided to protect free/open Internet access only on landline connections, not wireless - which is to say, there's no net neutrality in most of the online world. As Jenn Ettinger of the nonpartisan, nonprofit Free Press reported in Yes! magazine just two days ago:

The rules that the FCC passed in December are vague and weak. The limited protections that were placed on wired connections, the kind you access through your home computer, leave the door open for the phone and cable companies to develop fast and slow lanes on the Web and to favor their own content or applications.

Worse, the rules also explicitly allow wireless carriers ... to block applications for any reason and to degrade and de-prioritize websites you access using your cell phone or a device like an iPad.

Perhaps the FCC is biding its time, waiting to see how things develop technologically, with the current FCC chair seemingly more open to citizen input than was his predecessor. Or, again, maybe the landline regulation was meant simply to get media reformers off the commission's back. We can't relax our vigilance. In Ettinger's words:

The FCC still has the opportunity to put in place a solid framework that would put the public interest above the profit motive of the phone and cable companies that it is supposed to regulate. And the FCC should take immediate steps to close the loopholes it created, to strengthen its rules and to include wireless protections. The fight is far from over. We can work to change the rules, demand better oversight and consumer protections and make sure that the big companies can't pad their bottom lines on the backs of their customers.

In this effort, we have a strong ally in FCC commissioner Michael Copps, who. on my broadcast last year, spelled out how "our future is going to ride on broadband. How we get a job is going to ride on broadband. How we take care of our health. How we educate ourselves about our responsibilities as citizens ... And it's absolutely imperative that we have a place, that we have a venue to go to, to make sure that that Internet is kept open ... That's our decision to make as a people, as citizens: who's going to control this ultimately?"

With all the media consolidation that's happening today, the web may be the last stand of independent factual broadcasters like you. The stakes are high and we have come to the decisive round. I'll leave you with a story Joseph Campbell told me years ago for my series "The Power of Myth." It seems a fellow rounding the corner saw a fight break out down the block. Running up to one of the bystanders, he shouted: "Is this a private fight or can anyone get in it?"

The Internet fight for democracy is a public fight. Come on in!

Reagan at 100 - The Truth vs. The Myth

2011-02-04T09:45:00.000-08:00

Tear Down This Myth
Wednesday 28 January 2009
by: Will Bunch, t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Last week didn't only mark the inauguration of Barack Obama. January 20, 2009, was also a less noticed anniversary - marking 20 years to the day that the 40th president, Ronald Reagan, said his final goodbye to the Oval Office. During those two decades since, the world evolved, and the man who some called a Great Communicator and others called a "Teflon president" passed away - yet, watching last year's presidential race unfold, you might have been excused if you'd thought Reagan was somehow on the ballot. In debates and in countless TV ads - mainly but not exclusively on the GOP side - a return to Reagan-era orthodoxy in tax cuts or building up the military remained on the front burner of US politics. This, even as the American economy was collapsing from the weight of rising debt, unfettered greed on Wall Street and shortsighted energy policies - all of which trace back to the 1980s and Reagan's toxic legacy.

The fact that the myth of Ronald Reagan - promoted and perverted by a modern generation of neoconservatives - persists even with the start of the Obama administration, makes it clear that this warped legend won't die - unless we work to combat it, That's why I wrote "Tear Down This Myth: How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future." The book has just been released by Free Press and one can receive news by joining the official Facebook group here.

Here's an excerpt from chapter one of the book:

It was Ronald Reagan himself who, as the spotlight faded on his presidency in 1988, tried to highlight his eight-year record by reviving a quote from John Adams, that "facts are stubborn things." The moment became quite famous because the then-77-year-old president had botched it, and said that "facts are stupid things." The tragedy of American politics was that just two decades later, facts were neither stubborn nor even stupid - but largely irrelevant.

Any information about Iran-Contra or how the 1979-81 hostages were released (Rudy Giuliani had falsely claimed during the 2008 race they were freed when "the Gipper" looked Iranian leaders in the eye) that didn't fit the new official story line was being metaphorically clipped out of the newspaper and tossed down "memory hole" - the fate of any information that would have undercut Reagan's image as an all-benevolent Big Brother still guiding the conservative movement from above.

A more factual synopsis of the Reagan presidency might read like this: That Reagan was a transformative figure in American history, but his real revolution was one of public-relations-meets-politics and not one of policy. He combined his small-town heartland upbringing with a skill for story-telling that was honed on the back lots of Hollywood into a personal narrative that resonated with a majority of voters, but only after it tapped into something darker, which was white middle class resentment of 1960s unrest.

His story arc did become more optimistic and peaked at just the right moment, when Americans were tired of the "malaise" of the Jimmy Carter years and wanted someone who promised to make the nation feel good about itself again. But his positive legacy as president today hangs on events that most historians say were to some great measure out of his control: An economic recovery that was inevitable, especially when world oil prices returned to normal levels, and an end to the Cold War that was more driven by internal events in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe than Americans want to acknowledge.

His 1981 tax cut was followed quickly by tax hikes that you rarely hear about, and Reagan's real lasting achievement on that front was slashing marginal rates for the wealthy - even as rising payroll taxes socked the working class. His promise to shrink government was uttered so many time that many acolytes believe it really happened, but in fact Reagan expanded the federal payroll, added a new cabinet post, and created a huge debt that ultimately tripped up his handpicked successor, George H.W. Bush. What he did shrink was government regulation and oversight - linked to a series of unfortunate events from the savings-and-loan crisis of the late 1980s to the sub-prime mortgage crisis of the late 2000s.

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 papered over some less noble moments in foreign policy, from trading arms for Middle East hostages to an embarrassing retreat from his muddled engagement in Lebanon to unpopular adventurism in Central America. The Iran-Contra scandal that stemmed from those policies not only weakened Reagan's presidency when it happened, but it arguably undermined the respect of future presidents for the Constitution - because he essentially got away with it. Over the course of eight years, the president that some want to enshrine on Mount Rushmore rated just barely above average for modern presidents in public popularity. He left on a high note - but only after two years of shifting his policy back to the center, seeking peace with the Soviets than confrontation, reaching a balanced new tax deal with Democrats and naming a moderate justice to the Supreme Court. It was not the Reaganism invoked by today's conservatives.

There has always been a place for mythology in American democracy - the hulking granite edifices of the Capitol Mall in Washington are a powerful testament to that - but this nation has arguably never seen the kind of bold, crudely calculated and ideologically driven legend-manufacturing as has taken place with Ronald Reagan. It is a myth machine that has been spectacularly successful, launched in the mid-1990s when the conservative brand was at low ebb.

The docudrama version of the Gipper's life story, successfully sold to the American public, helped to keep united and refuel a right-wing movement that consolidated power while citing Reaganism - as separate and apart from the flesh-and-blood Reagan - for misguided policies from lowering taxes in the time of war in Iraq to maintaining that unpopular conflict in a time of increasing bloodshed and questionable gains.
Just a quick footnote: In the early days of the Obama administration, the Reagan myth looms larger than ever. Although the new Democratic regime seems likely to reverse course in some areas like global warming, in other areas they are continuing to fight the Reagan legend, not just from GOP members of Congress, but also from the Beltway punditocracy. This is especially true in the areas of taxes, where conservatives want to weigh any economic stimulus plan more heavily to tax cuts - despite a golden opportunity to create "green jobs" and undo the neglect of key infrastructure projects like mass transit, neglect that began in the 1980s. In the end, the path to America's future still requires clearing away some of the brush from the past.

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Will Bunch is author of the new book "Tear Down This Myth: How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future," published by Simon & Schuster's Free Press. He is the senior writer for the Philadelphia Daily News and author of its popular blog Attytood; his articles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Mother Jones, The American Prospect, American Journalism Review, and elsewhere.

John Ross, 1938-2011, Beat Poet, Revolutionary Journalist

2011-01-21T10:16:00.000-08:00

This Sunday on KHSU at Sista's Place 2:30-4:pm, Sista Soul rebroadcast parts of a 1993 show that she did with John Ross as guest host. It is John exactly as we know and love him.
You can listen online at : khsu.streamguys.net/10030.mp3

There will be a memorial for John Ross in Humboldt County sometime in March. A notice will go out on the Redwood Progressive listserve, if you are not already, you can become a subscriber here: http://ourhumboldt.org/cgi-bin/dada/mail.cgi/list/progressive/

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Counterpunch
All the Right Enemies
A Farewell to the Utterly Unique John Ross
By FRANK BARDACKE
Jan 17th 2011

John’s gone. John Ross. I doubt that we will ever see anyone remotely like him again.

The bare bones, as he would say, are remarkable enough. Born to show business Communists in New York City in 1938, he had minded Billie Holliday’s dog, sold dope to Dizzy Gillespie, and vigiled at the hour of the Rosenberg execution, all before he was sixteen years old. An aspiring beat poet, driven by D.H. Lawrence’s images of Mexico, he arrived at the Tarascan highlands of Michoacan at the age of twenty, returning to the U.S. six years later in 1964, there to be thrown in the Federal Penitentiary at San Pedro, for refusing induction into the army.

Back on the streets of San Francisco eighteen months later, he joined the Progressive Labor Movement, then a combination of old ex-CPers fleeing the debased party and young poets and artists looking for revolutionary action. For a few years he called the hip, crazy, Latino 24th and Mission his “bio-region,” as he ran from the San Francisco police and threw dead rats at slumlords during street rallies of the once powerful Mission Coalition.

When the not so ex-Stalinists drove him and others out of P.L. (“break the poets’ pencils” was the slogan of the purge) he moved up north to Arcata where he became an early defender of the forest and the self-described town clown and poet in residence. From there it was Tangier and the Maghreb, the Basque country, anti-nuke rallies in Ireland, and then back to San Francisco, where he finally found his calling as a journalist. “Investigative poet” was the title he preferred, and in 1984, he was dispatched by Pacific News Service to Latin America, where he walked with the Sendero Luminoso, broke bread with the Tupac Amaru, and hung out with cadres of the M-19.

In 1985, after the earthquake, he moved into the Hotel Isabela in the Centro Historico of Mexico City, where for the next 25 years he wrote the very best accounts in English (no one is even a close second) of the tumultuous adventures of Mexican politics.

During the Mexican years, he managed to write nine books in English, a couple more in Spanish, and a batch of poetry chapbooks, all the while he was often on the road, taking a bus to the scene of a peasant rebellion or visiting San Francisco or becoming a human shield in Baghdad, or protecting a Palestinian olive harvest from marauding Israeli settlers.

He died this morning, a victim of liver cancer, at the age of 73, just where he wanted to, in the village of Tepizo, Michoacan, in the care of his dear friends, Kevin and Arminda.

That’s the outline of the story. Then there was John. Even in his seventies, a tall imposing figure with a narrow face, a scruffy goatee and mustache, a Che T-shirt covered by a Mexican vest, a Palestinian battle scarf thrown around his neck, bags of misery and compassion under his eyes, offset by his wonderful toothless smile and the cackling laugh that punctuated his comical riffs on the miserable state of the universe.

He was among the last of the beats, master of the poetic rant, committed to the exemplary public act, always on the side of the poor and defeated. His tormentors defined him. A sadistic prison dentist pulled six of his teeth. The San Francisco Tac Squad twice bludgeoned his head, ruining one eye and damaging the other. The guards of Mexico’s vain, poet-potentate Octavio Paz beat him to the ground in a Mexico City airport, and continued to kick him while he was down. Israeli settlers pummeled him with clubs until he bled, and wrecked his back forever.

He had his prickly side. He hated pretense, pomposity and unchecked power wherever he found it. Losing was important to him. Whatever is the dictionary opposite of an opportunist—that’s what John was. He never got along with an editor, and made it a matter of principle to bite the hand that fed him. It got so bad, he left so few bridges unburnt, that in order to read his wonderful weekly dispatches in the pre-internet years, I had to subscribe to an obscure newsletter, a compilation of Latin American news, and then send more money to get the editors to send along John’s column. [John had a relationship lasting many years with CounterPunch, publishing hundreds of dispatches, with only trifling hiccups with the editors. AC/JSC.]

He had his sweet side, too. He was intensely loyal to his friends, generous with all he had, proud of his children, grateful for Elizabeth’s support and collaboration, and wonderful, warm company at an evening meal. When my son, Ted, arrived in Mexico in 1990, John helped him get a job, find a place to live, introduced him around, and became his Sunday companion and confidant, as they huddled in front of John’s 11-inch TV watching the weekly broadcasts of NBA games.

He was a great, true sports fan, especially of basketball. One of the last times I saw him was at a friend’s house in San Francisco, in between radiation treatments, watching a Warriors game on a big screen TV, smoking what he still called the “killer weed.” Joe and I listened to him recount NY Knicks history, the origin of the jump shot, and Kareem’s last game, which somehow led to a long complaint about kidneys for sale in Mexico that had been harvested in China out of the still warm body of some poor, rural immigrant who had been legally executed for jaywalking in Beijing.

The very last time I had the pleasure of his company was at breakfast in Los Angeles when Ted and I saw him off on his last book tour, promoting El Monstruo, his loving history of Mexico City. He was in great form. His cancer was in remission—a “cancer resister,” he called himself—and he entertained us with a preview of his trip: long, tiresome Greyhound rides, uncomfortable couches, talks to tiny groups of the marginalized, the last defenders of lost causes without the money to buy his books. It would be a losing proposition, like so many of his others, all of which secure his place among the angels.

Frank Bardacke taught at Watsonville Adult School, California’s Central Coast, for 25 years. His history of the United Farm Workers and Cesar Chavez, Trampled in the Vintage, is forthcoming from Verso. He can be reached at bardacke@sbcglobal.com

http://www.counterpunch.org/bardacke01182011.html

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The Nation
Rebel Journalist John Ross, the Master of Speaking Truth to Power, Is Dead

John Nichols | January 18, 2011

When the brave and brilliant journalist John Ross was offered official honors by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 2009—for telling "stories nobody else could or would tell"—he refused the recognition. He then recalled having run unsuccessfully for the board in the "Summer of Love" year of 1967—with a perfect think globally, act locally slogan: "Rent Control Now! Out of Vietnam!"—demanded his election filing fee back and complained about how when he had appeared before the board in the 1960s and 1970s as a tenant rights organizer "certain disgruntled board members would signal San Francisco County deputies to throw a hammerlock on me, drag me out of the chambers, and book me at the so-called Hall of Justice on charges of disturbing the peace."

As another fine reporter, San Francisco Bay Guardian editor Tim Redmond recalled , "Typically, when people are honored by the supervisors, they thank the board, praise the wonders of this city and politely and meekly receive their award. Not John Ross. The half-blind, half deaf rabble rouser made a short statement in which he managed to insult city government, denounce the entire process of giving out awards and demand that the board reject the Muni fare hike. Then he read a poem denouncing the "motherfuckers" who are driving poor people out of the Mission."

On a roll, Ross recounted repeated clashes with authorities, in San Francisco, Baghdad and Palestine. He put them all in the context of his practice of journalism—not the drab stenography to power practiced by so many reporters, but the vibrant speak-truth-to-power reporting and activism that saw Ross repeatedly risk his life to tell great stories and to demand that political and economic elites respond.

"Life, like reporting, is a kind of death sentence," Ross told the supervisors. "Pardon me for having lived it so fully."

As epitaphs go, that is a good one for Ross, who died this week in Mexico, where he had for five decades chronicled the struggles of indigenous people and the poor for justice. The activist author who in 1995 received the American Book Award for his groundbreaking book Rebellion from the Roots: Zapatista Uprising in Chiapas (Common Courage Press), died Monday at age 72 after a last battle with liver cancer.

In addition to the American Book Award, Ross collected the Upton Sinclair Award in 2005 for his epic tome Murdered By Capitalism: 150 Years of Life and Death on the American Left (Nation Books). His editor, Carl Bromley, recalls that, "I worked with John for seven years, on three books. It was an extraordinary education for me. I took the greatest pride when Thomas Pynchon faxed the office with a huge endorsement for John's book, Murdered By Capitalism." Pynchon described the book as "a ripsnorting and honorable account of an outlaw tradition in American politics, which too seldom gets past the bouncers at the gateway of our national narrative."

Ross also penned books of poetry and, as a child of the Beat Generation and the jazz clubs of 1950s New York, some of the most politically informed cultural writing of our time. His 2009 book, El Monstruo: Dread and Redemption in Mexico City (Nation Books), was part people's history, part love letter to the city where Ross lived on and off for decades. "Of all his books, I think El Monstruo, his last, was my favorite of his, an extraordinary, phantasmagoric personal history of Mexico City, told over the last 5 million years," says Bromley. "I rate him with Galeano."

There is so much more to be said about the remarkable Ross, but he was a wordsmith. So let's give him the last word.

Here, in full, is his statement from 2009 to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors:

Forty years ago when I would appear before this honorable board as an organizer for the Mission Tenants Union to protest the devastation of working class housing in our neighborhood, certain disgruntled board members would signal San Francisco County deputies to throw a hammerlock on me, drag me out of the chambers, and book me at the so-called Hall of Justice on charges of disturbing the peace.

To prevent a repeat of these painful events, I ask my companeros and companeras to join me at the podium today and watch my back.

Punishment for the commission of the crime of independent journalism can be harsh. I have danced with death throughout my checkered career—May 1st 1986, the 100th anniversary of International Workers Day on the streets of Santiago Chile when I inadvertently walked into one of Pinochet's machine guns; climbing into a guerrilla camp in the Cauca Valley of Colombia; at the end of a road to a Waste Management toxic incinerator above Playas de Tijuana where some company goon took 13 potshots at my person—when I called the Examiner for whom I then slaved, I was told to forget all about it.

Death was on our plate when we set out for Baghdad to place our bodies between Bush's bombs and the Iraqi people in March 2003 and when I went picking olives with Palestinian farmers in the Nablus Valley where Israeli settlers beat me within an inch of my life.

Life like reporting is a kind of death sentence. Pardon me for having lived it so fully.

I have mulled too long about whether or not to accept an honor from a city that has become nothing less than a sanctuary for the rich. This was once a sanctuary city for the refugees of U.S. wars in Latin America—now the indocumentados are being rousted, jailed, and sent back to their devastated home countries from right here in Sanctuary City. I have debated receiving an honor from a city where greedy landlords bleed their tenants dry, a city that pushes the poor into the street and treats the homeless like so many cockroaches, a city where the police continue to run riot in neighborhoods of color—a few weeks ago, recuperating from liver cancer chemotherapy I was slammed twice in the chest and threatened with being sent back to hospital by a Mission District cop while I witnessed a rough arrest on Valencia and 24th—you can read all about it in my citizens' complaint recently reprinted in the Bay Guardian.

How can I accept an honor from a city that cloaks itself in rampant hypocrisy and the fake green of filthy lucre?

The truth is I cannot. Thanks anyway.

Hell, I don't even live here anymore. For the past 25 years, I have been an expat holed up in the Centro Historico of Mexico City, an exile from the racist social and economic policies of the United States of North America.Instead of drawing up hollow proclamations "honoring" derelict beat poets and wild parrots, the Board of Supervisors would do well to honor the poor and working class citizens of this city who struggle daily to survive here in this lap of luxury by making San Francisco a place where they can still live. One place to start is by nullifying the outrageous Muni fare hikes that will soon come before you.

There is one more thing you can do for me today. In 1967, I ran for the Board of Supervisors under the banner of "Rent Control Now! Out of Vietnam!" We paid our registration fee and five days later I was attacked by the SFPD after an anti-police brutality rally at the old Mission station—I eventually lost my left eye as a result of this attack. The notoriety attracted the interest of a candidate with a similar name—Tom Ross—who had me barred from the ballot after he discovered that I was an ex-felon—I was the first U.S. citizen to be sent to federal prison for refusing induction in the Vietnam-era military. When we demanded our filing fee returned the county registrar refused. On election day, people who voted for me were arrested for tampering with the voting machines.

I want my filing fee back. With interest.

As a veteran San Francisco performing poet, I am obligated to leave the Board with a poem from a recent collection "Against Amnesia."

RONCO Y DULCE

Coming out of the underground
On the BART escalator,
The Mission sky
Is washed by autumn,
The old men and their garbage bags
Are clustered in the battered plaza
We once named for Cesar Augusto Sandino.
Behind me down below
In the throat of the earth
A rough bracero sings
Of his comings and goings
In a voice as ronco y dulce
As the mountains of Michoacan and Jalisco
For the white zombies
Careening downtown
To the dot coms.
They are trying to kick us
Out of here
Again
They are trying to drain
This neighborhood of color
Of color
Again.
This time we are not moving on.
We are going to stick to this barrio
Like the posters so fiercely pasted
To the walls of La Mision
With iron glue
That they will have to take them down
Brick by brick
To make us go away
And even then our ghosts
Will come home
And turn those bricks
Into weapons
And take back our streets
Brick by brick
And song by song
Ronco y dulce
As Jalisco and Michaocan
Managua, Manila, Ramallah
Pine Ridge, Vietnam, and Africa.
As my compa QR say
We here now motherfuckers
Tell the Klan and the Nazis
And the Real Estate vampires
To catch the next BART out of here
For Hell.

Source URL: http://www.thenation.com/blog/157839/rebel-journalist-john-ross-master-speaking-truth-power-dead
Links:
http://www.johnross-rebeljournalist.com/
http://www.sfbg.com/politics/2009/05/13/john-ross-takes-no-prisoners
http://www.amazon.com/Rebellion-Roots-Indian-Uprising-Chiapas/dp/1567510426/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1295386511&sr=1-1
http://www.wtop.com/?nid=389&sid=2237821
http://www.amazon.com/Murdered-Capitalism-Memoir-American-Nation/dp/1560255781/ref=pd_sim_b_3
http://www.amazon.com/El-Monstruo-Dread-Redemption-Mexico/dp/1568584245/ref=pd_sim_b_5
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/nationnow/id399704758?mt=8

http://www.thenation.com/blog/157839/rebel-journalist-john-ross-master-speaking-truth-power-dead#post-your-comments

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Village Voice
New York Legends
John Ross, 1938-2011, Beat Poet, Revolutionary Journalist
By Tom Robbins, Tue., Jan. 18 2011

John Ross -- beat-era poet and revolution-championing journalist -- died this week in Mexico of liver cancer. He was 72 --- or was it 73? The Associated Press says the former,Counterpunch's Frank Bardacke, another veteran of the Bay Area left, says the latter. Whatever, the age matters less than the life lived, and Ross got the most out of whatever years he had.

He was mainly a West Coast phenomenon these past few decades, but Ross's roots were here in the Village where he was a true child of the early beat era. But even if the name is new to you, John Ross's passing is worth noting if only to confirm that these marvelous characters once walked the earth, and their kind is not likely to pass this way again.

For starters, there were Ross's travels with Latin American revolutionaries, including the secretive Zapatistas of Chiapas province in Mexico whose story he told in "Rebellion From the Roots," which won an American Book Award in 1995.

Then there's his autobiography, "Murdered by Capitalism: A Memoir of 150 Years on the American Left," Nation Books, 2004. Thomas Pynchon, whose praise is almost as hard to find as his picture, dubbed it "a rip-snorting and honorable account of an outlaw tradition in American politics which too seldom gets past the bouncers at the gates of our national narrative."

In between there was poetry and politics, and lots of it. The poems were published in ten little chapbooks (Bomba! was his most recent), and read aloud alongside Lawrence Ferlinghetti, both in Mexico City and at City Lights in San Francisco.

That was his Village roots showing through. Ross did his first public poetry reading as a teenager from the stage of the Half-Note, after Charles Mingus had finished playing. Backstage at Town Hall, he sold a joint to Dizzy Gillespie. He helped Max Gordon book Jack Kerouac into a disastrous week-long gig at the Village Vanguard, and did promo for one of the Voice's first events - a Billie Holiday concert at the old Loew's Sheraton on Seventh Avenue. Lady Day arrived hours late. Ross was thrilled because he got to hold her tiny dog.

As for the politics, it earned him a year in the federal can for refusing induction into the army in 1964,one of the first to take that ultimate stand. He later hooked up with the then pro-poet and pro-Maoist Progressive Labor Party and ran for election in 1967 to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors on its ticket. When police broke up a rally during that summer of love, Ross caught a nightstick in the face leaving him with an eye injury from which he never fully recovered. Years later, he caught another beating, this time from Israeli settlers when he tried to help Palestinian farmers pick olives from their own fields in Nablus.

He tried to put himself in harm's way again in 2006, when he went to Iraq on the eve of the war where he tried to serve as a "human shield." Saddam's minders considered him a threat and booted him from the country. A year ago, as John Nichols writes in The Nation, where Ross was a contributor, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors - now loaded with sympathizers - tried to honor Ross. Nothing doing. He denounced them as toadies who were throwing poor people out of the Mission.

John Ross. Live like him.

http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2011/01/john_ross_1938-.php

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Mobylives
Hail & Farewell: John Ross
20 January 2011

Our friend and colleague Carl Bromley, the editorial director ofNation Books, wrote to us yesterday with the news that John Ross had died Monday the 17th. He was 72. The activist journalist, poet, and novelist, described in Tim Redmond‘s San Francisco Bay Guardian eulogy as an “uncontrollable shit disturber,” had lived in Mexico City as a self-described “exile from the racist social and economic policies of the United States of North America.”

Ross wrote his own epitaph, and that of the noisy and violent form of political life which he advocated, in Murdered by Capitalism: A Memoir of 150 years of Life and Death on the American Left, “… a highly idiosyncratic account of industrial trade unionism, the socialist, communist, and anarchist movements, government repression …”

On the book’s cover is an endorsement by Thomas Pynchon, a friend from Ross’s Humboldt County days: “A ripsnorting and honorable account of an outlaw tradition in American politics which too seldom gets past the bouncers at the gateways of our national narrative.”

In his July 2004 Harper’s Magazine review (subscription only), the late John Leonarddescribed the then sixty-six-year-old author as a “Huck Finn/Holden Caulfield/Dennis the Menace/Weatherman wannabe and subversive journalist … who’s been on the losing side of every cause since the Spanish Civil War.” According to Carl, who published three of Ross’s more than twenty books, Ross loved it.

Ross began writing for the San Francisco Bay Guardian in 1984 and is credited with being the first American to report the 1993 Zapatista rebellion, in the Anderson Valley Advertiser. After reporting on the deadly 1985 earthquake in Mexico City, Ross made his home there, at the Hotel Isabel. In 1995, Ross won the American Book Award forRebellion from the Roots: Indian Uprising in Chiapas. In 2003, he volunteered as human shield in Baghdad, protecting Iraqi civilians from attack; according to Redmond in his Bay Guardian remembrance, Ross signed his emails, “John Ross, humanshield”

Redmond also reported Ross’s refusal, in 2009, to be honored by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors:

“Typically, when people are honored by the supervisors, they thank the board, praise the wonders of this city and politely and meekly receive their award. Not John Ross. The half-blind, half deaf rabble rouser made a short statement in which he managed to insult city government, denounce the entire process of giving out awards and demand that the board reject the Muni fare hike. Then he read a poem denouncing the “motherfuckers” who are driving poor people out of the Mission.”

In this Democracy Now! appearance from April 2010, Ross talks about life in his adopted city, the subject of his last book, El Monstruo: Dread and Redemption in Mexico City “a phantasmagoric retelling” of “4,000,000,000 years of history,” reviewed by Iain Sinclairas “Coruscating and necessary. Here is one of those rare books that convinces from the first sentence: a writer embedded in his writing, wholly present in the subject, leading us with savage grace to the heart of the beast.”

Ross is survived by his son, Dante A. Ross, a daughter, Carla Ross-Allen, and a granddaughter, Zoe Ross-Allen, as well as a stepdaughter, Dylan Melbourne and her daugther Honore, as well as a sister, Susan Gardner.

Let Redmond have the last word:

When John Ross left Terminal Island, the federal prison in Los Angeles, after serving a couple of years for refusing the Vietnam draft, the warden shook his head and said: “Ross, you never learned how to be a prisoner.”

I’m not writing the epitaph for whatever gravestone he has or doesn’t have, wherever it might be in the world, but that’s what I’d put on it: “John Ross, 1938-2011. Never learned how to be a prisoner.”

http://mhpbooks.com/mobylives/?p=27075

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John Ross, author, poet, journalist, dies
John Coté, S.F. Chronicle
Wednesday, January 19, 2011

John Ross, an author, poet, liberal activist and journalist who toiled against perceived injustice from the jungles of Chiapas, Mexico, to the baked streets of Baghdad, died Monday of liver cancer at Lake Patzcuaro in Mexico. He was 72.
"The word 'passionate' is overused a lot these days - but he was," said Mary Jo McConahay, a friend and former colleague of Ross' at Pacific News Service in San Francisco.

Mr. Ross was jailed for refusing to be drafted in the Vietnam War era, was the first person to chronicle in English the pending uprising of indigenous Zapatistas in Mexico's Chiapas state, and went to Iraq on the eve of the U.S. invasion in 2003 to serve as a human shield, although Iraqi officials forced him and other volunteers out of country.

In refusing a commendation at San Francisco's Board of Supervisors in May 2009 because the city "has become nothing less than a sanctuary for the rich," Mr. Ross said he had faced "one of (Augusto) Pinochet's machine guns" in Chile in 1986; climbed into a guerrilla camp in the Cauca Valley of Colombia; and been shot at 13 times by "some company goon" when he went to investigate a toxic incinerator in Tijuana, Mexico.

"Life, like reporting, is a kind of death sentence," he told the board. "Pardon me for having lived it so fully."

His reporting appeared in the San Francisco Examiner, CounterPunch, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Pacific News Service, Pacifica Radio, LA Weekly and others, including the Mexico City daily La Jornada.

A young member of the Beat generation, Mr. Ross authored 10 chapbooks of poetry and 10 books of fiction and nonfiction. He received the American Book Award in 1995 for "Rebellion From the Roots: Zapatista Uprising in Chiapas" and the Upton Sinclair Award in 2005 for "Murdered By Capitalism: 150 Years of Life and Death on the American Left."

Bruce Brugmann, editor and publisher of the Bay Guardian, called him "a terribly unusual talent."

"If you sent him over to City Hall, you'd get a helluva story," Brugmann said. "It wouldn't be on some measure. He wouldn't cover the hearing. He wouldn't cover the vote. He'd have something lyrical that would get to the political point."

Born in New York City on March 11, 1938, to parents who were committed leftists, Mr. Ross grew up in Greenwich Village surrounded by jazz, Beat poetry, abstract expressionist painting and radical politics, according to his biography.

By age 18, Mr. Ross was reading his poems in Greenwich Village bars accompanied by renowned bass player Charles Mingus, according to his official biography. In 1957, he followed the trail other Beat writers had cut to Mexico City, then lived in an indigenous community in the Michoacan state.

He returned to United States in the early 1960s, was jailed for refusing to be drafted, and was sent to a federal lockup. When he was released after about two years, he went to San Francisco, where he became a community activist in the Mission District for housing, civil rights and other issues.

Mr. Ross ran for the Board of Supervisors in 1967 under the slogan "Rent Control Now! Out of Vietnam!" But five days after paying his registration fee, Mr. Ross said he was attacked by San Francisco police at an anti-police brutality rally, and suffered injuries he says resulted in him losing use of his left eye. Ross said he was then barred from the ballot over his draft-dodging conviction. The county registrar refused to refund his candidate filing fee.

"I want my filing fee back - with interest," Mr. Ross, in a good-humored tone, told the Board of Supervisors 42 years later when May 12, 2009, was declared John Ross Day. He is survived by his sister, Susan Gardner; children, Dante Ross of New York and Carla Ross-Allen of New York; and one grandchild, Zoe Ross-Allen.

Memorial services will be announced at a later date.

E-mail John Coté at jcote@sfchronicle.com.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/01/19/BA4N1HA7Q8.DTL
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Budget Puzzle

2010-11-18T14:47:00.000-08:00

Budget Puzzle: You Fix the Budget
Today, you’re in charge of the nation’s finances. Some of your options have more short-term savings and some have more long-term savings. When you have closed the budget gaps for both 2015 and 2030, you are done. Make your own plan, then share it online:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/11/13/weekinreview/deficits-graphic.html

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Here's my solution:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/11/13/weekinreview/deficits-graphic.html?choices=03x245qm

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http://robertreich.org/post/1549020696

Why We Should Beware Budget-Deficit Mania
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 11, 2010
We’re in for another round of budget-deficit mania.

The first draft of the President’s deficit commission, written by its co-chairmen Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, is a pastiche of ideas – some good, some dumb, some intriguing, some wacky. The only unifying principle behind their effort seems to be to throw enough at the wall that something’s bound to stick.

At their best, presidential commissions focus the public’s attention — not only on the right solution to some important problem but also on the right problem. Sadly, this preliminary report does neither.

As to solution, the report mentions but doesn’t emphasize the biggest driver of future deficits – the relentless rise in health-care costs coupled with the pending corrosion of 77 million boomer bodies. This is 70 percent of the problem, but it gets about 3 percent of the space in the draft.

The report suffers a more fundamental error — the unquestioned assumption that America’s biggest economic challenge is to reduce the federal budget deficit.

The size of the budget deficit (and cumulative debt) is meaningless without reference to the size of the economy. What looks like a big debt 10 or 20 years from now may turn out to be small if growth has been rapid in the intervening years. By the same token, a seemingly small future debt can become unmanageable if the economy tanks, or barely grows at all.

In 1945, the nation’s debt was 120 percent of GDP. That proved to be no problem in later years, not because the debt shrank but because the U.S. economy soared.

Our biggest problem isn’t the size of pending federal budget deficits or debt but an anemic recovery that may drag on for years. And unless we’re careful, budget-deficit mania may further slow economic growth – thereby making future debts even less manageable.

If Congress and the President started right now to cut the federal deficit – slashing spending and raising taxes on the middle class – our anemic economy would quickly become comatose.

That’s because consumers still aren’t spending much. They’re overburdened by personal debt and don’t qualify for new bank loans. And absent enough consumers, businesses still aren’t spending on new factories, equipment, additional hiring. Instead, they’re expanding capacity abroad, buying back their own shares of stock, and gobbling up other companies. Exports can’t possibly make up the slack.

That leaves government. Until we get out of the gravitational pull of the Great Recession, government is the only remaining booster rocket. If anything, we need more government spending and lower taxes on the middle class. This means bigger deficits, at least for the time being.

Even worse, budget-deficit mania will slow future growth if it forces government to cut the things that fuel growth – education, basic R&D, child health, improved infrastructure.

No smart family would choose to balance the family budget over borrowing money to send the kids to college. The same logic holds for the nation as a whole. If certain government spending generates higher future productivity, we’d be nuts not to make the investment just to avoid a larger deficit.

Public investments like these are becoming ever more important to our future well being because private investment is more footloose globally. Giant American-based companies are now making more money abroad – and investing more there — than in the U.S. How do we get global capital to create good jobs in America? By having the skills and infrastructure to attract it.

Yet the deficit maniacs often want to slash spending across the board, including such key investments. And they often want to eliminate tax breaks that encourage these investments. (The Bowles-Simpson report is guilty of this.)

Don’t get me wrong. America’s projected budget deficits require attention. But in addressing them we need to focus on the right solutions, and make sure we’re solving the right problem.

The preliminary report of the President’s deficit commission doesn’t help. It’s another example of budget-deficit mania generating more heat than light.

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http://www.truth-out.org/what-voters-really-care-and-dont-care-about65226

What Voters Really Care, and Don't Care, About
Thursday 18 November 2010
by: Paul Krugman, Krugman & Co. | Op-Ed

I stopped watching the Nov. 3 postelection press conference after President Obama declared that Americans rejected Democrats at the polls in part because “we were in such a hurry to get things done that we didn’t change how things got done.”

Nobody cares about this stuff — voters only care about results. Nobody really cares about earmarks, which is just political code for spending less (less on somebody else).

They don’t care about civility and bipartisanship, which in practice are code for Democrats’ giving in to Republican demands.

Nobody cares about congressional maneuvers — some pundits may argue about the role health-care reform played in the midterm elections, but I bet not one American voter in 50 knows or cares that it was passed using a filibuster-preventing reconciliation measure. So were the sacred 2003 tax cuts approved during President George W. Bush’s administration that we are told must, absolutely must, be retained. If Mr. Obama had used some fancy footwork and held 2 a.m. sessions in order to pass a big public-works program in the United States, and this program had brought unemployment rates down, Republicans would be screaming about the process, but Democrats would have comfortably held control of Congress.

And nobody cares about the national deficit, either. People sometimes say they do, but it almost always turns out that they really mean something else. Look at all the fiscal hawks who suddenly lose all interest in balancing the budget when tax cuts are on the line.

One clear result of the elections is that there won’t be a further round of stimulus spending.

And this, in turn, means that the narrative of the Very Serious People will now be: that sort of fiscal policy was tried, it failed, and that’s that.

But the facts don’t at all support the conventional wisdom.

You often hear the United States’s experience compared to that of Germany, for example. According to the widely accepted narrative, the United States went for Keynesian policies, while Germany chose austerity — and Germany did better.

Germany has not, in fact, done better in terms of gross domestic product. Just look at the chart. It is true that Germany did do better on employment, but this is due to policies that American conservatives surely don’t support, including employment subsidies, strong unions and rules making it difficult to fire workers.

This may be even more surprising: Look at the chart that shows actual government purchases of goods and services, as opposed to transfer payments (many of them just transfer payments from the federal government to states).

You will find that Germany was actually more Keynesian than the United States. (Just to be clear, I am not saying that the Germans were big Keynesians; the point is that neither nation was.)

The current political climate is hostile to real accountability – and to the kind of journalism that keeps accountability alive. Keep lawmakers and corporations in check by supporting Truthout today.

So it’s truly an amazing achievement: President Obama and company managed to convince voters that big government failed without actually delivering big government.

Backstory: United States Turns Right

After the Nov. 2 midterm elections were over, the United States Senate remained in Democrats’ hands — just barely, with Democrats holding 53 of 100 seats. The Republicans, however, took control of the House of Representatives with a strong majority, and since most of these victories were based on anti-deficit, anti-stimulus campaigns, a shift in direction is likely for the nation.

Immediately after the votes were counted, Republicans vowed that once they take office in January, they will challenge Democrat-led initiatives. At the top of the list is dismantling President Barack Obama’s health-care reform bill, which was passed in March and is expected to cost the government about $938 billion over a decade. Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader in the Senate, has proposed immediate repeal of the bill, urging the House to deny its funding and the Senate to eschew some of its provisions. Shortly after the election, Representative John A. Boehner, the next speaker of the House, called the bill a “monstrosity,” that “will kill jobs in America, ruin the best health-care system in the world and bankrupt our country.”

The newly empowered Republicans also pledged to slash spending for domestic programs immediately, by about $100 billion within a year.

While debates on health care and spending cuts could lead to stalemates, one argument that will likely go the Republicans’ way is an extension of tax cuts for the wealthy, which are due to expire at the end of the year. Mr. Obama opposes extending them for the wealthiest American taxpayers.

Truthout has licensed this content. It may not be reproduced by any other source and is not covered by our Creative Commons license.

Paul Krugman joined The New York Times in 1999 as a columnist on the Op-Ed page and continues as a professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton University. He was awarded the Nobel in economic science in 2008.

Mr Krugman is the author or editor of 20 books and more than 200 papers in professional journals and edited volumes, including "The Return of Depression Economics" (2008) and "The Conscience of a Liberal" (2007).

Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company.

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