Green Energy-Manufacturing Policy Dept: 10 Things to Know about BP Spill

10 Things You Need

(But Don't Want) To Know

About the BP Oil Spill

 

By Daniela Perdomo

AlterNet, May 30, 2010

http://www.alternet.org/story/147014/

It's been 37 days since BP's offshore oil rig, Deepwater Horizon, exploded in the Gulf of Mexico. Since then, crude oil has been hemorrhaging into ocean waters and wreaking unknown havoc on our ecosystem -- unknown because there is no accurate estimate of how many barrels of oil are contaminating the Gulf.

Though BP officially admits to only a few thousand barrels spilled each day, expert estimates peg the damage at 60,000 barrels or over 2.5 million gallons daily. (Perhaps we'd know more if BP hadn't barred independent engineers from inspecting the breach.) Measures to quell the gusher have proved lackluster at best, and unlike the country's last big oil spill -- Exxon-Valdez in 1989 -- the oil is coming from the ground, not a tanker, so we have no idea how much more oil could continue to pollute the Gulf's waters.

The Deepwater Horizon disaster reminds us what can happen -- and will continue to happen -- when corporate malfeasance and neglect meet governmental regulatory failure.

The corporate media is tracking the disaster with front-page articles and nightly news headlines every day (if it bleeds, or spills, it leads!), but the under-reported aspects to this nightmarish tale paint the most chilling picture of the actors and actions behind the catastrophe. In no particular order, here are 10 things about the BP spill you may not know and may not want to know -- but you should.

1. Oil rig owner has made $270 million off the oil leak
Transocean Ltd., the owner of the Deepwater Horizon rig leased by BP, has been flying under the radar in the mainstream blame game. The world's largest offshore drilling contractor, the company is conveniently headquartered in corporate-friendly Switzerland, and it's no stranger to oil disasters. In 1979, an oil well it was drilling in the very same Gulf of Mexico ignited, sending the drill platform into the sea and causing one of the largest oil spills by the time it was capped... nine months later.
This experience undoubtedly influenced Transocean's decision to insure the Deepwater Horizon rig for about twice what it was worth. In a conference call to analysts earlier this month, Transocean reported making a $270 million profit from insurance payouts after the disaster. It's not hard to bet on failure when you know it's somewhat assured.

2. BP has a terrible safety record
BP has a long record of oil-related disasters in the United States. In 2005, BP's Texas City refinery exploded, killing 15 workers and injuring another 170. The next year, one of its Alaska pipelines leaked 200,000 gallons of crude oil. According to Public Citizen, BP has paid $550 million in fines. BP seems to particularly enjoy violating the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, and has paid the two largest fines in the Occupational Safety and Health Administration's history. (Is it any surprise that BP played a central, though greatly under-reported, role in the failure to contain the Exxon-Valdez spill years earlier?)

With Deepwater Horizon, BP didn't break its dismal trend. In addition to choosing a cheaper -- and less safe -- casing to outfit the well that eventually burst, the company chose not to equip Deepwater Horizon with an acoustic trigger, a last-resort option that could have shut down the well even if it was damaged badly, and which is required in most developed countries that allow offshore drilling. In fact, BP employs these devices in its rigs located near England, but because the United States recommends rather than requires them, BP had no incentive to buy one -- even though they only cost $500,000.

SeizeBP.org estimates that BP makes $500,000 in under eight minutes.

3. Oil spills are just a cost of doing business for BP
According to the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies, approximately $1.6 billion in annual economic activity and services are at risk as a result of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Compare this number -- which doesn't include the immeasurable environmental damages -- to the current cap on BP's liability for economic damages like lost wages and tourist dollars, which is $75 million. And compare that further to the first-quarter profits BP posted just one week after the explosion: $6 billion.

BP's chief executive, Tony Hayward, has solemnly promised that the company will cover more than the required $75 million. On May 10, BP announced it had already spent $350 million. How fantastically generous of a company valued at $152.6 billion, and which makes $93 million each day.
The reality of the matter is that BP will not be deterred by the liability cap and pity payments doled out to a handful of victims of this disaster because they pale in comparison to its ghastly profits. Indeed, oil spills are just a cost of doing business for BP.

This is especially evident in a recent Citigroup analyst report prepared for BP investors: "Reaction to the Gulf of Mexico oil leak is a buying opportunity."

4. The Interior Department was at best, neglectful, and at worst, complicit

It's no surprise BP is always looking out for its bottom line -- but it's at least slightly more surprising that the Interior Department, the executive department charged with regulating the oil industry, has done such a shoddy job of preventing this from happening.

Ten years ago, there were already warnings that the backup systems on oil rigs that failed on Deepwater Horizon would be a problem. The Interior Department issued a "safety alert" but then left it up to oil companies to decide what kind of backup system to use. And in 2007, a government regulator from the same department downplayed the chances and impact of a spill like the one that occurred last month: "[B]lowouts are rare events and of short duration, potential impact to marine water quality are not expected to be significant."

The Interior Department's Louisiana branch may have been particularly confused because it appears it was closely fraternizing with the oil industry. The Minerals Management Service, the agency within the department that oversees offshore drilling, routinely accepted gifts from oil companies and even considered itself a part of the oil industry, rather than part of a governmental regulatory agency. Flying on oil executives' private planes was not rare for MMS inspectors in Louisiana, a federal report released Tuesday says. "Skeet-shooting contests, hunting and fishing trips, golf tournaments, crawfish boils, and Christmas parties" were also common.

Is it any wonder that Deepwater Horizon was given a regulatory exclusion by MMS?

It gets worse. Since April 20, when the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded, the Interior Department has approved 27 new permits for offshore drilling sites. Here's the kicker: Two of these permits are for BP.
But it gets better still: 26 of the 27 new drilling sites have been granted regulatory exemptions, including those issued to BP.

5. Clean-up prospects are dismal
The media makes a lot of noise about all the different methods BP is using to clean up the oil spill. Massive steel containment domes were popular a few weeks ago. Now everyone is touting the "top kill" method, which involves injecting heavy drilling fluids into the damaged well.
But here's the reality. Even if BP eventually finds a method that works, experts say the best cleanup scenario is to recover 20 percent of the spilled oil. And let's be realistic: only 8 percent of the crude oil deposited in the ocean and coastlines off Alaska was recovered in the Exxon-Valdez cleanup.
Millions of gallons of oil will remain in the ocean, ravaging the underwater ecosystem, and 100 miles of Louisiana coastline will never be the same.

6. BP has no real cleanup plan
Perhaps because it knows the possibility of remedying the situation is practically impossible, BP has made publicly available its laughable "Oil Spill Response Plan" which is, in fact, no plan at all.
Most emblematic of this farcical plan, BP mentions protecting Arctic wildlife like sea lions, otters and walruses (perhaps executives simply lifted the language from Exxon's plan for its oil spill off the coast of Alaska?). The plan does not include any disease-preventing measures, oceanic or meteorological data, and is comprised mostly of phone numbers and blank forms. Most importantly, it includes no directions for how to deal with a deep-water explosion such as the one that took place last month.

The whole thing totals 600 pages -- a waste of paper that only adds insult to the environmental injury BP is inflicting upon the world with Deepwater Horizon.

7. Both Transocean and BP are trying to take away survivors' right to sue
With each hour, the economic damage caused by Deepwater Horizon continues to grow. And BP knows this.
So while it outwardly is putting on a nice face, even pledging $500 million to assess the impacts of the spill, it has all the while been trying to ensure that it won't be held liable for those same impacts.
Just after the Deepwater explosion, surviving employees were held in solitary confinement, while Transocean flacks made them waive their rights to sue. BP then did the same with fishermen it contracted to help clean up the spill though the company now says that was nothing more than a legal mix-up.
If there's anything to learn from this disaster, it's that companies like BP don't make mistakes at the expense of others. They are exceedingly deliberate.

8. BP bets on risk to employees to save money -- and doesn't care if they get sick
When BP unleashed its "Beyond Petroleum" re-branding/greenwashing campaign, the snazzy ads featured smiley oil rig workers. But the truth of the matter is that BP consistently and knowingly puts its employees at risk.
An internal BP document shows that just before the prior fatal disaster -- the 2005 Texas City explosion that killed 15 workers and injured 170 -- when BP had to choose between cost-savings and greater safety, it went with its bottom line.

A BP Risk Management memo showed that although steel trailers would be safer in the case of an explosion, the company went with less expensive options that offered protection but were not "blast resistant." In the Texas City blast, all of the fatalities and most of the injuries occurred in or around these trailers.
Although BP has responded to this memo by saying the company culture has changed since Texas City, 11 people died on the Deepwater Horizon when it blew up. Perhaps a similar memo went out regarding safety and cost-cutting measures?
Reports this week stated that fishermen hired by BP for oil cleanup weren't provided protective equipment and have now fallen ill. Hopefully they didn't sign waivers.

9. Environmental damage could even include a climatological catastrophe
It's hard to know where to start discussing the environmental damage caused by Deepwater Horizon. Each day will give us a clearer picture of the short-term ecological destruction, but environmental experts believe the damage to the Gulf of Mexico will be long-term.
In the short-term, environmentalists are up in arms about the dispersants being used to clean up the oil slick in the Gulf. Apparently, the types BP is using aren't all that effective in dispersing oil, and are pretty high in toxicity to marine fauna such as fish and shrimp. The fear is that what BP may be using to clean up the mess could, in the long-term, make it worse.

On the longer-term side of things, there are signs that this largest oil drilling catastrophe could also become the worst natural gas and climate disaster. The explosion has released tremendous amounts of methane from deep in the ocean, and research shows that methane, when mixed with air, is the most powerful (read: terrible) greenhouse gas -- 26 times worse than carbon-dioxide.

Our warming planet just got a lot hotter.

10. No one knows what to do and it will happen again
The very worst part about the Deepwater Horizon calamity is that nobody knows what to do. We don't know how bad it really is because we can't measure what's going on. We don't know how to stop it -- and once we do, we won't know how to clean it up.

BP is at the helm of the recovery process, but given its corporate track record, its efforts will only go so far -- it has a board of directors and shareholders to answer to, after all. The U.S. government, the only other entity that could take over is currently content to let BP hack away at the problem. Why? Because it probably has no idea what to do either.
Here's the reality of the matter -- for as long as offshore drilling is legal, oil spills will happen. Coastlines will be decimated, oceans destroyed, economies ruined, lives lost. Oil companies have little to no incentive to prevent such disasters from happening, and they use their money to buy government regulators' integrity.

Deepwater Horizon is not an anomaly -- it's the norm.

Daniela Perdomo is a staff writer and editor at AlterNet. Follow Daniela on Twitter. Write her at danielaalternet [at] gmail [dot] com.

© 2010 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/147014/

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'Deficit Hawks' Leading to a Greater Depression

On Jobs and Teacher Bills:
Some Democrats Ignore
Economics and Politics 101

By Robert Creamer

Political organizer, strategist and author

As of Thursday morning, Democratic leaders are having trouble lining up enough votes to pass two critical pieces of legislation before the Memorial Day Congressional break.

One is a jobs bill that would provide continued aid to states whose budgets have been devastated by the Great Recession, extend unemployment benefits and prevent doctors from having their payments for services to Medicare patients cut by 20%.
 
The other is a provision that would continue federal aid to states to avert 160,000 teacher layoffs.
The difficulty is that many swing Democrats have been pummeled by Republican charges that it is "irresponsible" to engage in spending that is not "paid for" by tax revenues and would increase the short-term deficit.

There is no question that Republicans have done a good job promoting the "deficits -- and government -- are out of control" narrative. Left unanswered, it has traction with some swing voters. But anyone who has studied either Economics or Politics 101 should realize that failure to pass measures that create jobs poses a much graver political danger to members -- and economic danger to the country.

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The White Blindspot and the Tea Party

Graphic: Cryspus Attucks, African American, One of the First to Fall

 

What If the Tea Party Were Black?

By Tim Wise, AlterNet

Posted on April 25, 2010,

http://www.alternet.org/story/146616/

Let’s play a game, shall we? The name of the game is called “Imagine.” The way it’s played is simple: we’ll envision recent happenings in the news, but then change them up a bit. Instead of envisioning white people as the main actors in the scenes we’ll conjure - the ones who are driving the action - we’ll envision black folks or other people of color instead. The object of the game is to imagine the public reaction to the events or incidents, if the main actors were of color, rather than white. Whoever gains the most insight into the workings of race in America, at the end of the game, wins.

So let’s begin.

Imagine that hundreds of black protesters were to descend upon Washington DC and Northern Virginia, just a few miles from the Capitol and White House, armed with AK-47s, assorted handguns, and ammunition. And imagine that some of these protesters —the black protesters — spoke of the need for political revolution, and possibly even armed conflict in the event that laws they didn’t like were enforced by the government? Would these protesters — these black protesters with guns — be seen as brave defenders of the Second Amendment, or would they be viewed by most whites as a danger to the republic? What if they were Arab-Americans? Because, after all, that’s what happened recently when white gun enthusiasts descended upon the nation’s capital, arms in hand, and verbally announced their readiness to make war on the country’s political leaders if the need arose.

Imagine that white members of Congress, while walking to work, were surrounded by thousands of angry black people, one of whom proceeded to spit on one of those congressmen for not voting the way the black demonstrators desired. Would the protesters be seen as merely patriotic Americans voicing their opinions, or as an angry, potentially violent, and even insurrectionary mob? After all, this is what white Tea Party protesters did recently in Washington.

Imagine that a rap artist were to say, in reference to a white president: “He’s a piece of shit and I told him to suck on my machine gun.” Because that’s what rocker Ted Nugent said recently about President Obama.

Imagine that a prominent mainstream black political commentator had long employed an overt bigot as Executive Director of his organization, and that this bigot regularly participated in black separatist conferences, and once assaulted a white person while calling them by a racial slur. When that prominent black commentator and his sister — who also works for the organization — defended the bigot as a good guy who was misunderstood and “going through a tough time in his life” would anyone accept their excuse-making? Would that commentator still have a place on a mainstream network? Because that’s what happened in the real world, when Pat Buchanan employed as Executive Director of his group, America’s Cause, a blatant racist who did all these things, or at least their white equivalents: attending white separatist conferences and attacking a black woman while calling her the n-word.

Imagine that a black radio host were to suggest that the only way to get promoted in the administration of a white president is by “hating black people,” or that a prominent white person had only endorsed a white presidential candidate as an act of racial bonding, or blamed a white president for a fight on a school bus in which a black kid was jumped by two white kids, or said that he wouldn’t want to kill all conservatives, but rather, would like to leave just enough—“living fossils” as he called them—“so we will never forget what these people stood for.” After all, these are things that Rush Limbaugh has said, about Barack Obama’s administration, Colin Powell’s endorsement of Barack Obama, a fight on a school bus in Belleville, Illinois in which two black kids beat up a white kid, and about liberals, generally.

Imagine that a black pastor, formerly a member of the U.S. military, were to declare, as part of his opposition to a white president’s policies, that he was ready to “suit up, get my gun, go to Washington, and do what they trained me to do.” This is, after all, what Pastor Stan Craig said recently at a Tea Party rally in Greenville, South Carolina.

Imagine a black radio talk show host gleefully predicting a revolution by people of color if the government continues to be dominated by the rich white men who have been “destroying” the country, or if said radio personality were to call Christians or Jews non-humans, or say that when it came to conservatives, the best solution would be to “hang ‘em high.” And what would happen to any congressional representative who praised that commentator for “speaking common sense” and likened his hate talk to “American values?” After all, those are among the things said by radio host and best-selling author Michael Savage, predicting white revolution in the face of multiculturalism, or said by Savage about Muslims and liberals, respectively. And it was Congressman Culbertson, from Texas, who praised Savage in that way, despite his hateful rhetoric.

Imagine a black political commentator suggesting that the only thing the guy who flew his plane into the Austin, Texas IRS building did wrong was not blowing up Fox News instead. This is, after all, what Anne Coulter said about Tim McVeigh, when she noted that his only mistake was not blowing up the New York Times.

Imagine that a popular black liberal website posted comments about the daughter of a white president, calling her “typical redneck trash,” or a “whore” whose mother entertains her by “making monkey sounds.” After all that’s comparable to what conservatives posted about Malia Obama on freerepublic.com last year, when they referred to her as “ghetto trash.”

Imagine that black protesters at a large political rally were walking around with signs calling for the lynching of their congressional enemies. Because that’s what white conservatives did last year, in reference to Democratic party leaders in Congress.

In other words, imagine that even one-third of the anger and vitriol currently being hurled at President Obama, by folks who are almost exclusively white, were being aimed, instead, at a white president, by people of color. How many whites viewing the anger, the hatred, the contempt for that white president would then wax eloquent about free speech, and the glories of democracy? And how many would be calling for further crackdowns on thuggish behavior, and investigations into the radical agendas of those same people of color?

To ask any of these questions is to answer them. Protest is only seen as fundamentally American when those who have long had the luxury of seeing themselves as prototypically American engage in it. When the dangerous and dark “other” does so, however, it isn’t viewed as normal or natural, let alone patriotic. Which is why Rush Limbaugh could say, this past week, that the Tea Parties are the first time since the Civil War that ordinary, common Americans stood up for their rights: a statement that erases the normalcy and “American-ness” of blacks in the civil rights struggle, not to mention women in the fight for suffrage and equality, working people in the fight for better working conditions, and LGBT folks as they struggle to be treated as full and equal human beings.

And this, my friends, is what white privilege is all about. The ability to threaten others, to engage in violent and incendiary rhetoric without consequence, to be viewed as patriotic and normal no matter what you do, and never to be feared and despised as people of color would be, if they tried to get away with half the shit we do, on a daily basis.

Game Over.

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The Democrat Wars: Left-Center vs. Center-Right

 

Who Let The

Blue Dogs Out?

By Norman Solomon

Media Monitors

April 21, 2010

"It’s one thing to support a Blue Dog Democrat in a general election against a Republican. It’s quite another thing for members of the Progressive Caucus to defend a Blue Dog Democrat against a primary challenge from a genuine progressive Democrat."

This is a grim story about the care and feeding of a Blue Dog.

Right now, Congresswoman Jane Harman is facing a serious primary challenge from a genuine progressive, Marcy Winograd, in Southern California’s 36th congressional district.

Last Saturday afternoon (April 17), I sat on stage with both candidates and other panelists at a forum during the California Democratic Party convention in Los Angeles. The room was filled with several hundred progressive delegates.

Harman has been refusing to debate her opponent, but she couldn’t stay away from the forum that afternoon. The entire convention would be voting the next day on whether to withhold endorsement of her for re-election.

The incumbent is a member of the center-right caucus of House Democrats known as the Blue Dog Coalition. In sharp contrast, she chose not to join the Congressional Progressive Caucus. When I asked why, Harman dodged the question.

Winograd promptly brought their differences into focus. She called for the government “to invest in housing, education, healthcare, transportation -- not to perpetuate a war economy that is draining us, robbing us of money that we desperately need.” And she added: “I challenge my opponent to stop voting for this war machine.”

While belonging to the largest caucus on Capitol Hill (with a membership now above 80), some members of the Progressive Caucus often say that they need more colleagues who’ll be willing to vote against war and in favor of a truly progressive legislative agenda.

But if Progressive Caucus members want to move the House of Representatives in a progressive direction, you’d never know it when there’s a chance to replace a Blue Dog with a progressive.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Harman -- who once proclaimed “I am proud to be introduced as the best Republican in the Democratic Party” -- has been straining lately to present herself as progressive while she tries to fend off the Winograd challenge.

With that goal, Harman has trumpeted endorsements from several well-known members of the Progressive Caucus. In particular, she has synced up her campaign spin with two of them from California -- Henry Waxman and Lynn Woolsey.

Rep. Waxman came through with a January fundraising letter that declared: “In Marcy Winograd’s foreign policy, Israel would cease to exist.” The powerful congressman went on to trash the co-founder of LA Jews for Peace as an enemy of Israel: “In Marcy Winograd’s vision, Jews would be at the mercy of those who do not respect democracy or human rights.”

In the same month, the co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Rep. Woolsey, startled longtime progressive admirers when her name headlined the invitation to a fundraiser for Harman’s campaign.

Within days, an open letter to Woolsey -- initially signed by Progressive Democrats of America leaders Tim Carpenter, Mimi Kennedy, Donna Smith and me -- gained more than 3,000 signatures from PDA activists across the country. We asked Woolsey to cancel her scheduled high-profile appearance at the Harman fundraiser.
http://pdamerica.e-actionmax.com/showalert.asp?aaid=4409

“Given your longstanding and exemplary leadership on a wide range of peace and justice issues, it would be counterproductive to aid Rep. Harman’s re-election efforts,” we wrote. “Her pro-war record is well known, having voted most recently to spend billions to continue the occupation of Iraq and escalate in Afghanistan. Her October 2002 vote to authorize the invasion of Iraq was in stark contrast to the ‘no’ votes by most House Democrats.”

Our letter added: “Harman has an equally appalling record on civil liberties, having lobbied the New York Times to suppress the story about Bush’s wiretaps on the eve of the 2004 election, then going on television to defend the illegal wiretaps. In addition, she voted for the bankruptcy bill, then more recently voted against mortgage relief in bankruptcy court, despite the fact that several thousand of her constituents are facing foreclosure. On the health care front, she recently voted against fast-tracking affordable generic medications for patients with breast cancer, brain tumors, Parkinson’s and rare diseases.”

And we noted that primary challenges to incumbent Blue Dog Democrats are essential for replacing pro-war Congress members with genuine progressives: “The reason that we have Rep. Donna Edwards in the House today as a stalwart advocate for peace and justice is precisely because of her successful primary campaign that unseated a non-progressive Democratic incumbent. Surely such victories are in the interests of all progressives.”

Meanwhile, the entire executive board of the California Democratic Party’s Progressive Caucus -- the largest caucus in the state party -- also wrote a public letter to Woolsey asking her not to go through with the Harman fundraiser.

When Woolsey went ahead with the Harman event, there was scant significance to the modest amount of funds raised. (Money is not a problem for Harman, one of the richest members of Congress.) What Woolsey’s appearance conferred on Harman’s campaign was the imprimatur of a political embrace from a longtime peace advocate who co-chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

As the winter went on, progressives in California hoped that such maneuvers would not be repeated. But the care and feeding of a Blue Dog is apt to be habitual.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

On Friday, April 16 -- just before the opening of the state Democratic Party convention that would decide whether to endorse Congresswoman Harman for re-election -- the delegates received robo-calls from a heavyweight member of Congress. “I’m Henry Waxman, and my congressional district is right next to that of Jane Harman, who I’m proud to support for re-election,” the message began. It concluded: “We need to keep effective leaders like Jane in Congress.”

On Sunday morning, I was one of more than 1,000 delegates to enter the convention hall and find a four-page glossy flyer that had been placed on every chair. Most of the first page was a picture of Harman and Woolsey, standing together in front of the Capitol.

The photo caption was a quote from Congresswoman Woolsey: “Jane has proven herself to be a leader on Capitol Hill, and I join other Congressional progressives like John Conyers, Jim McGovern and Henry Waxman in endorsing her candidacy.” The second page was devoted to a letter from Woolsey extolling Harman.

When delegates voted later that morning, Harman won endorsement, 599-417.

Harman had to go to extraordinary lengths to win a party endorsement that is usually automatic for incumbent Democrats in Congress. She was able to do so largely because one-third of state convention delegates are appointed by elected Democrats -- incumbents who are very rarely willing to support any primary challenge to an incumbent.

It’s one thing to support a Blue Dog Democrat in a general election against a Republican. It’s quite another thing for members of the Progressive Caucus to defend a Blue Dog Democrat against a primary challenge from a genuine progressive Democrat.

In the case of the Harman-Winograd race, the best grassroots response from progressives around the country will be to strongly support the Winograd campaign between now and Election Day, June 8.
http://winogradforcongress.com

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Soon after visiting Afghanistan last summer, I went to Capitol Hill and met with a few House members and staff. All of them were “anti-war” and involved with the Progressive Caucus. Yet the extent of insularity and the lack of urgency were stunning. Official Washington was numb.

What’s propelling the Winograd campaign -- with its passion, commitment, fearlessness and antipathy toward the corporate warfare state -- is exactly what Congress and the country need.

Source:

by courtesy & © 2010 Norman Solomon

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Trumka on Winning Jobs: Unite the Working class, Win Over the Public Intellectuals and Reject Rightwing Hate and Divisiveness

 

 

Why Working People

Are Angry and Why

Politicians Should Listen

Remarks by AFL-CIO President Richard L. Trumka at the Institute of Politics, Harvard Kennedy School, April 07, 2010

Good evening.  Thank you, John.  I will never be able to express how much I owe you and how much the American labor movement owes you.  The Institute of Politics is fortunate to have you as a fellow this semester.  And let me add my thanks to the Institute of Politics and Bill Purcell for inviting me to be here with you tonight. 

I am going to talk tonight about anger—and specifically the anger of working people.  I want to explain why working people are right to be mad about what has happened to our economy and our country, and then I want to talk about why there is a difference between anger and hatred.  There are forces in our country that are working hard to convert justifiable anger about an economy that only seems to work for a few of us into racist and homophobic hate and violence directed at our President and heroes like Congressman John Lewis.  Most of all, those forces of hate seek to divide working people – to turn our anger against each other. 

So I also want to talk to you tonight about what I believe is the only way to fight the forces of hatred—with a strong progressive tradition that includes working people in action, organizing unions and organizing to elect public officials committed to bold action to address economic suffering.  That progressive tradition has drawn its strength from an alliance of the poor and the middle class—everyone who works for a living. 

Alliance with Public Intellectuals

But the alliance between working people and public minded intellectuals is also crucial—it is all about standing up to entrenched economic power and the complacency of the affluent.  It's an alliance that depends on intellectuals being critics, and not the servants, of economic privilege.   

I am here tonight at the Kennedy School of Government to say that if you care about defending our country against the apostles of hate, you need to be part of the fight to rebuild a sustainable, high wage economy built on good jobs – the kind of economy that can only exist when working men and women have a real voice on the job.

Our republic must offer working people something other than the dead-end choice between the failed agenda of greed and the voices of hate and division and violence.  Public intellectuals have a responsibility to offer a better way. 

The stakes could not be higher.  Mass unemployment and growing inequality threaten our democracy.  We need to act—and act boldly—to strike at the roots of working people's anger and shut down the forces of hatred and racism.  

We have to begin the conversation by talking about jobs—the 11 million missing jobs behind our unemployment rate of 9.7 percent.

Now, you may think to yourself, that is so retro.  Jobs are so twentieth century.  Sweat is for gyms, not workplaces.

For a generation, our intellectual culture has suggested that in the new global age, work is something someone else does.  Someone we never met far away in an export processing zone will make our clothes, immigrants with no rights in our political process or workplaces will cook our food and clean our clothes. 

And for the lucky top 10 percent of our society, that has been the reality of globalization—everything got cheaper and easier.

But for the rest of the country, economic reality has been something entirely different.  It has meant trying to hold on to a good job in a grim game of musical chairs where every time the music stopped, there were fewer good jobs and more people trying to get and keep one.  Over the last decade, we lost more than 5 million manufacturing jobs—a million of them professional and design jobs.  We lost 20 percent of our aerospace manufacturing jobs.  We're losing high-tech jobs—the jobs we were supposed to keep.

For most of us, economic reality has meant trying to pay for the ever-more-expensive education needed to pursue a good job—the cost of a college degree has gone up more than 24 percent since 2000 while average wages and salaries have increased less than one percent.  It has meant trying to pay for exorbitant health care as employer coverage went away or got hollowed out.  It has meant trying to eke out a decent retirement even as the private sector shed real pensions and long-term investment returns evaporated.  Meanwhile, Wall Street middlemen raked in the bonuses.

And that was the reality for most Americans before the Great Recession began in 2007.  Since then, we have lost 8 million jobs when the economy needed to add nearly three million just to keep up with population growth.  That's 11 million missing jobs. 

We used the public's money to bail out the major banks, only to see those same banks return to the behavior that got us here in the first place—aggressive risk taking in securities and derivatives markets, and handing out gigantic bonuses.  Most galling of all—they used the funds we gave them --  courtesy of TARP and endless cheap credit from the Federal Reserve -- to fight even the most modest, common sense reforms of our financial system.

President Obama's economic recovery program has done a lot of good for working people—creating or saving more than 2 million jobs.  But the reality is that 2 million jobs is just 18 percent of the hole in our labor market. 

Anger caused by shrinking jobs and pay

The jobs hole – and the decades-long stagnation in real wages -- are the source of the anger that echoes across our political landscape.  People are incensed by the government's inability to halt massive job loss and declining living standards, on the one hand, and the comparative ease with which government led by both parties has made the world safe again for JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, on the other hand.

Rescuing the big banks hasn't done much for Main Street.  The very same financial institutions that got bailed out have not only cut way back on lending to business, they have never stopped foreclosing on American families' homes. 

The fact is that for a generation we have built our economy on a lie—that we can have a low-wage, high-consumption society and paper over the contradiction with cheap credit funded by our foreign trading partners and financial sector profits made by taking a cut of the flow of cheap credit. 

So now a lot of Americans are angry.  And we should be angry.  And just as we have seen throughout history, there are plenty of purveyors of hate and division looking to profit from our hurt and our anger. 

I am a student of history, and now is the time to remember our history as a nation.  Remember that when President Franklin Roosevelt said, "We have nothing to fear but fear itself," other voices were on the radio, voices saying that what we really needed to fear was each other – voices preaching anti-Semitism and Nazi-style racial hatred.   

Remember that when President John F. Kennedy stepped off the plane in Dallas on November 22, 1963, radio voices were calling for violence against the President of the United States.  And the violence came—and took John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King and Medgar Evers and so many others.  

But in the United States, we chose to turn away from the voices of hatred at those critical moments in the twentieth century.  In much of Europe, racial hatred and political violence prevailed in response to the mass unemployment of the Great Depression.  And in the end, we had to rescue those countries from fascism-- from the horrible consequences of the failure of their societies to speak to the pain and anger bred by mass unemployment. 

Why did our democracy endure through the Great Depression?  Because working people discovered it was possible to elect leaders who would fight for them and not for the financial barons who had brought on the catastrophe.  Because our politics offered a real choice besides greed and hatred.  Because our leaders inspired the confidence to reject hate and charted a path to higher ground through broadly shared prosperity.    

This is a similar moment.  Our politics have been dominated by greed and the forces of money for a generation.  Now, amid the wreckage that came from that experiment, we hear the voices of hatred, of racism and homophobia.

At this moment of economic pain and anger, political intellectuals face a great choice—whether to be servants or critics of economic privilege.  And I think this is an important point to make here at Harvard.  The economic elites at JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and the other big Wall Street banks are happy to hire intellectual servants wherever they can find them.  But the stronger the alliance between intellectuals and economic elites, the more the forces of hatred—of anti-intellectualism—will grow.  If you want to fight the forces of hatred, you have to help empower the forces of righteous anger.     

And at this moment, the labor movement is working to give voice to the justified anger of the American people.  We need help.  We need public intellectuals who will help design the policies that will replace the bubble economy with a real, sustainable economy that works for all of us.

Working people want an American economy that creates good jobs, where wealth is fairly shared, and where the economic life of our nation is about solving big problems like the threat of climate change rather than creating big problems like the foreclosure crisis.  We know that growing inequality undermines our ability to grow as a nation by squandering the talents and the contributions of our people and consigning entire communities to stagnation and failure.  But despite our best efforts, we have endured a generation of stagnant wages and collapsing benefits—a generation where the labor movement has been much more about defense than about offense.   

We in the labor movement have to challenge ourselves to make our institutions into a voice for all working people.  And we need to begin with jobs.  Eleven million missing jobs is not tolerable.   That's why we are fighting for the AFL-CIO's five point jobs program—extending unemployment benefits, including COBRA health benefits for unemployed workers; expanding federal infrastructure and green jobs investments; dramatically increasing federal aid to state and local governments facing fiscal disaster; creating jobs directly, especially in distressed communities; and finally, lending TARP money to small and medium sized businesses that can't get credit because of the financial crisis.

As we meet tonight, organizers working for the AFL-CIO's 3 million-member community affiliate Working America are knocking on doors across our country talking jobs.  We are organizing support for George Miller's Local Jobs for America Act that would target $100 billion in job creation dollars toward our country's hardest hit communities—to keep teachers in the classroom and first responders on the job, and to create new jobs where Wall Street destroyed them.  We are organizing support for financial reform and accountability for Wall Street.  We are working to counter the Glenn Beck effect and turn anger into action for real change. 

Make Speculative Finance Capital Pay to Clean Up Their Mess

But we are not just talking about how to create jobs, we are talking about how to pay for them. Wall Street should pay to clean up the mess they made, and we are supporting four ways for the big banks to pay—President Obama's bank tax, a special tax on bank bonuses, closing the carried interest tax loophole for hedge funds and private equity, and most important, a financial speculation tax levied on all financial transactions—including derivatives—that would raise over $150 billion a year, according to the Congressional Budget Office.  The financial speculation tax would have negligible impact on long-term investors, but would discourage the short termism in the capital markets that led to so much destruction over the last decade.

When it comes to creating jobs, some in Washington say: Go slow—take half steps, don't spend real money.  Those voices are harming millions of unemployed Americans and their families -- and they are jeopardizing our economic recovery.  It is responsible to have a plan for paying for job creation over time.  But it is bad economics and suicidal politics not to aggressively address the job crisis at a time of stubbornly high unemployment.  In fact, budget deficits over the medium and long term will be worse if we allow the economy to slide into a long job stagnation -- unemployed workers don't pay taxes and they don't go shopping; businesses without customers don't hire workers, they don't invest and they also don't pay taxes.

But we must do much more to restore broadly shared prosperity.   

We must take action to restore workers' voices.  The systematic silencing of America's workers by denying their freedom to form unions is at the heart of the disappearance of good jobs in America.  We must pass the Employee Free Choice Act so that workers can have the chance to turn bad jobs into good jobs, and so we can reduce the inequality which is undermining our country's prospects for stable economic growth.   

We must have an agenda for restoring American manufacturing—a combination of fair trade and currency policies, worker training, infrastructure investment and regional development policies targeted to help economically distressed areas.  We cannot be a prosperous middle class society in a dynamic global economy without a healthy manufacturing sector.

We must have an agenda to address the daily challenges workers face on the job – to ensure safe and healthy workplaces and family-friendly work rules.                  

And we need comprehensive reform of our immigration policy based on ending exploitation and securing fairness, working for an America where there are no second class workers.     

Each of these initiatives should be rooted in a crucial alliance of the middle class and the poor—the majority of the American people.  And those of us in the labor movement know that we can only achieve these great things if we work together with community partners who share our goals, and with government leaders who share our vision.               

Government that acted in the interests of the majority of Americans has produced our greatest achievements.  The New Deal.  The Great Society and the Civil Rights movement -- Social Security, Medicare, the minimum wage and the forty-hour work week, and the Voting Rights Act.  This is what made the United States a beacon of hope in a confused and divided world.  In the end, I believe the health care bill signed into law last month is an achievement on this order, one we can continue to improve upon to secure health care for all.

But too many thought leaders have become the servants of a different kind of politics—a politics that sees middle-class Americans as overpaid and underworked.  That sees Social Security as a problem rather than the only piece of our retirement system that actually works.  A mentality that feels sorry for homeless people, but fails to see the connections between downsizing, outsourcing, inequality and homelessness.  A mentality that sees mass unemployment as something that will take care of itself, eventually.            

We need to return to a different vision.              

President Obama said in his inaugural address, "The state of the economy calls for action, bold and swift, and we will act -- not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth."  Now is the time to make good on these words – for Congress, for President Obama and for the American people.                  

These are big challenges.  But it is long past time to take them on.  If you are worried about the anger in our country, if you don't want the forces of hatred to grow, be a part of the fight for economic justice and a new economic foundation for America.  Be a critic of power and privilege, not its servant.              

Be the source of the ideas that can rebuild our economy and restore confidence in government.  As students, as teachers, as workers—all of us can play a role in this great effort.  Whether here within the university, at think tanks, in the government, in the press, or even working with us in the labor movement, working people need the help of engaged policy intellectuals if we are together going to build an economy that works for all.              

Think about the great promise of America and the great legacy we have inherited.  Our wealth as a nation and our energy as a people can deliver, in the words of my predecessor Samuel Gompers, "more schoolhouses and less jails; more books and less arsenals; more learning and less vice; more leisure and less greed; more justice and less revenge; in fact, more of the opportunities to cultivate our better natures."                 

That is the American future the labor movement is working for.  Let me be clear:  There is no excuse for racism and hatred.  All Americans need to unite against it.  The labor movement must be a powerful voice against it.  But you cannot fight hatred with greed.  Working people are angry—and we are right to be angry at the betrayal of our economic future.  Help us turn that anger into the energy to win a better country and a better world.

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Generational Politics and the Future of Youth

We Can't Afford to Be Quiet

About the Rising Cost of College

Justin Sullivan, Getty Images

Demonstrators at Oakland City Hall, in California, last month during a national day of protest against cuts in higher-education budgets

 

By Tom Hayden

"There are some things we feel, feelings that our prevailing, acquisitive, and competitive corporate life, including tragically the universities, is not the way of life for us. ..."

That heartfelt plea for university reform, issued in 1969, is striking because it was voiced by Hillary Rodham, a student at Wellesley College. Are there any lessons or comparisons to be drawn from those turbulent times for the students and faculty members who are today demonstrating against the rising cost of higher education? As a student at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in those days and an itinerant sociologist at Scripps College now, I believe we can look to the past as legacy but not as blueprint.

The current generation of young people deserves admiration for the contributions they already have made: creating hip-hop culture, winning sweatshop-free purchasing agreements, leading online advocacy groups like MoveOn.org, and for being the backbone of Barack Obama's unprecedented volunteer campaign. They will be the cradle of social activism for the next 20 years. But the challenges they face on their campuses are far different from those of my generation, and perhaps more profound. Tuition at Michigan in 1960 cost less than $150 per semester. So I could obtain my degree, edit the student newspaper, go south to work in the civil-rights movement for two years, return and enter graduate school, and never feel that I was falling behind in the competitive economic rat race that young Hillary spoke out against.

Students today, however—even those who hold two part-time jobs—fall tens of thousands of dollars into debt, a burden that limits their career choices. Dropping out for social activism brings competitive disadvantage. The speedup of academic pressures dries up discretionary time that used to go to dreaming and exploring. Campuses are crowded with scrambling multitaskers for the most part too busy to protest the pace. Meanwhile, increases in the cost of college exceed inflation every year, intensifying the squeeze.

We had different grievances. The curriculum was often irrelevant to the social crisis we perceived ourselves inheriting; it needed reform. Students were powerless under the paternal doctrine of in loco parentis; we wanted rights. Students were disenfranchised, even though men could be drafted; we needed the vote and alternatives to the draft. Structurally excluded, we went to the streets, to the outside, demanding change on the inside. It's an exaggeration, but only after strikes, rioting, and taking over buildings did colleges offer the mainstream menu of women's studies; black, Latino and Asian studies; queer studies; and environmental programs that they do today. Now most students read Howard Zinn in history classes; back then Zinn was fired from Spelman College for marching with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

In those days, university administrators were personified by the impersonal managerial elites depicted by C. Wright Mills, our sociologist hero. In recent decades, the multiversity has been succeeded by a privatized hybrid institution enmeshed in Wall Street machinations, a development epitomized by the former Harvard University president Lawrence H. Summers. Excessive financial risk-taking has resulted in depleted portfolios everywhere. No longer independent, higher education has succumbed to the political pressures of regents and trustees who all too often are tied to banks and corporations. For an example of this inbred conservatism, consider a recent survey that showed the public favoring the use of federal stimulus money to keep tuition down, even if that meant leaving less money for operations. In response, a spokesman for the American Council on Education said, "The public is not always right."

The question for today's students is not whether they can read Noam Chomsky, Anaïs Nin, or Zinn, but whether they can afford to. The recent outbreak of protests on hundreds of campuses is a promising sign that economic populism will be a central dynamic in any student movement of the future. Since many of the most active protesters today are students of color, there is greater potential for a coalition that includes inner-city taxpaying communities than there was when so many of the militants were from affluent suburbs. Making college less affordable just as a large number of qualified aspirants are emerging from disadvantaged minority communities is an explosive issue. The numbers of women in college are larger than in the past, which might also widen the coalition.

The value of the past lies in remembering how recently higher education was affordable, even cheap. It's not inevitable that a college education today costs so much. Undergraduate education is virtually free at the Sorbonne or the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and a year at Oxford costs no more than community colleges charge here. The choices we have made as a country—to relentlessly privatize our public institutions; to eventually spend three trillion dollars, by some estimates, on the war in Iraq instead of on our public universities; to bail out billionaires on Wall Street while hitting students and their families with repeated tuition increases—are choices with consequences that we have to rethink or accept.

As recently as 1982, when I entered the California State Assembly, my first battle as a naïve new legislator was against fee increases at community colleges, which then were proudly free and accessible. Under President Ronald Reagan and Gov. George Deukmejian, the (Republican) lobbyists for the colleges supported first-time fee increases to avoid budget cuts. Their motivation was not merely budgetary but also a matter of ideological principle. Nothing, they said, should be free in life, which meant that investment in public colleges and universities should be replaced by a consumer-marketplace approach. Most of the Democrats went along when they were promised that the fees would be temporary. When the recession of that period ended, those fees became permanent, and they have escalated ever since. A similar pattern has been true of tuition increases at California State University and the University of California.

Were I still in politics, I would run for office on a promise to keep the magical possibilities of higher education affordable for today's American families, and for the next generation seeking new opportunities for their children. I wonder why the silence from politicians is so deafening. Is it that colleges and universities are easier targets at budget time than corporate-tax loopholes are? Is it that students and faculty members are marginal players in the great game of campaign contributions? Or that college constituencies are too fragmented, divided, and transitory to unify as an effective force for change?

The recent discontent on campuses is a healthy challenge to America's priorities. I hope that Hillary Clinton hears an echo of herself before she and her colleagues become the politicians she warned us against.

Tom Hayden is a visiting professor of sociology at Scripps College, in Claremont, Calif. His most recent book is The Long Sixties: From 1960 to Barack Obama (Paradigm, 2009).

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Tea Party Getting Nasty, Dividing Right

What Next for

the Tea Partiers?

By Leonard Zeskind

Progressive America Rising

March 23, 2010 - After a year of fast-paced growth and increasing influence, the Tea Partiers suffered their first ever political defeat on Sunday when the House of Representatives passed health care reform.

Remember, it was the Tea Parties protests at town hall meetings last August that slowed the legislative drive toward reform and effectively took the single-payer option out of the Democratic Party's playbook. Tea Partiers started to push "independents" away from the Democrats, and they pushed the Republican establishment into becoming the party of no-compromise opposition.

Now a simple up or down vote has thrown the first roadblock in front of the Tea Partiers, and the question emerges: how will they respond over the next five months? Already there are some clues. Tea Party Patriots has announced a "Repeal the Bill" petition on its website and has gathered about 20,000 signatures at the time this article was written.

They claim they want 100,000 names. Once they amass those names and email addresses, however, they will be faced once again with the question of what to do. Some Tea Partiers gathered at the capitol in Atlanta, hoping Georgia state legislators will pass a constitutional amendment allowing them to opt out of federal healthcare mandates. And across the country a similar scenario can be expected to unfold as states rights advocates enlist Tea Party activists in a common attempt to annul the effect of federal statutes.

The nastier side of these protests has already shown itself multiple times, and the racist and homophobic name calling and spitting at Democratic congressmen as they walked through the Longworth Building on Saturday may also augur a different type of tactics. While the incidents themselves have been reported, less well known is the Tea Partiers response to these reports.

At the Tea Party Express, one of the networks most closely allied with Republican Party operatives, Amy Kremer claimed that people in her movement "won't tolerate" racist slurs. A few Tea Party Nation activists similarly decided that name-calling was bad public relations and that the offending parties should be "identified and ran out." However, the majority of bloggers in this particular website discussion claimed that there was no evidence beyond the word of the offended congressmen that anything untoward had happened--and therefore they decided that nothing did happen.

And besides, one respondent argued, he was a libertarian and believed in free speech. "I could care less what some crackpot with an "I'm an Official Tea Party Member" T-shirt on has to say about anything," he wrote. Racist name-calling apparently did not bother him. For their part, Republican congressman have promised lawsuits and court actions designed to prevent health care reform from being implemented. Obviously they would need a favorable decision from an (activist) judge.

But for these politicians, the ultimate remedy is in the November elections, and they have started working overtime to keep Tea Party activists stumping for Republican candidates over the next five months. The danger for these Republicans is that the Tea Partiers will run in primaries against establishment politicians or be drawn away from electoral politics altogether and in ever more radical directions.

And that too is about to happen. Consider the call over the internet last Friday by an Alabama militia devotee: "To all modern Sons of Liberty," he wrote, "This is your time. Break their windows. Break them now." Sure enough, the windows of several Democratic representatives who had voted for health care, including Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords' office in Tucson, were broken out with bricks over the weekend. There is no evidence that any Tea Partiers were involved in these crimes, but as their frustration grows over the next months, the choice between Republican Party electioneering, racist sloganeering, and militia-style brick throwing may be difficult for them to make.

 [Leonard Zeskind, author of Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream, is president of the Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights, www.IREHR.org ]

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Tea Party Racism: You Don't Even Need a Secret Decoder Ring

Graphic: Rightwing poster vs. Obama

The Tea Party

Is All About Race

 

By Bob Cesca
Huffington Post

March 3, 2010 - I was going to open this piece with an analogy about the tea party groups and why they're treated seriously by the press and the Republicans. The analogy would go something like: "Imagine [insert left-wing activist group here] getting a serious profile in a mainstream newspaper, and imagine serious Democratic politicians appearing at their convention."

The problem is, when I really evaluated what the various far-left activist groups are all about and compared them with the tea party movement, there really wasn't any equivalency. At all.

Because when you strip away all of the rage, all of the nonsensical loud noises and all of the contradictions, all that's left is race. The tea party is almost entirely about race, and there's no comparative group on the left that's similarly motivated by bigotry, ignorance and racial hatred.

I hasten to note that I'm talking about real racism, insofar as it's impossible for the majority race -- the 70 percent white majority -- to be on the receiving end of racism. That is unless white males, for example, are suddenly an oppressed racial demographic. But judging by the racial composition of, say, the Senate or AM talk radio or the cast members playing the Obamas on SNL, I don't think white people have anything to worry about.

This isn't an epiphany by any stretch. From the beginning, with their witch doctor imagery, watermelon agitprop and Curious George effigies, the wingnut right has been dying to blurt out, as Lee Atwater famously said, "nigger, nigger, nigger!"

But they can't.

Strike that. Correction. TeaParty.org founder Dale Robertson brandished a sign with the (misspelled) word "niggar." So they're not even as restrained as the generally unstrung Atwater anymore.

Most of the time, they merely imply the use of the word. Rush Limbaugh referring to the president as a "black man-child," for example. Every week, a new example pops up on the radio and somehow the offenders are able to keep their job while Howard Stern is fined for saying the comparatively innocuous word "blumpkin." Limbaugh, on the other hand, can stoke racial animosity on his show by suggesting that health care reform is a civil rights bill -- reparations -- and no one seems to mind. And no, the impotence isn't an adequate Karmic punishment for Limbaugh's roster of trespasses.

The tea party is an extension of talk radio. It's an extension of Fox News Channel. It's an extension of the southern faction of the Republican Party -- the faction that gave us the Southern Strategy, the Willie Horton ad, the White Hands ad and the racially divisive politics of Lee Atwater and Karl Rove. It's an extension of the race-baiting and, often, the outright racism evident in all of those conservative spheres.

But unlike the heavy-handedness of Dale Robertson and others, the tea party followers are generally more veiled about why they're so outraged by our current president.

In the New York Times this past weekend, David Barstow profiled a teabagger from Idaho:

SANDPOINT, Idaho -- Pam Stout has not always lived in fear of her government. She remembers her years working in federal housing programs, watching government lift struggling families with job training and education. She beams at the memory of helping a Vietnamese woman get into junior college.

But all that was before the Great Recession and the bank bailouts, before Barack Obama took the White House by promising sweeping change on multiple fronts, before her son lost his job and his house. Mrs. Stout said she awoke to see Washington as a threat, a place where crisis is manipulated -- even manufactured -- by both parties to grab power.

Now you might be saying to yourself, I don't see the racism here. But if you eliminate all of the reasons for Stout's participation in the tea party movement as being contradictory or nonsensical, all that's left is race.

Let's deconstruct.

She claims to be against the bank bailouts, but the tea party is against the president's bank fee designed to recover the TARP money. They also appear to be against financial regulatory reform. None of this makes any sense. If tea partiers are against the bailouts, basic logic dictates that they ought to be in favor of getting the money back. Or do they prefer that the banks keep the money and orchestrate further meltdowns? Honestly, I'm not even entirely sure they realize that the bailouts and the recovery act (stimulus) are two different things. But they're also against the recovery act -- you know, whatever that is.

She also told the New York Times that she's tired of politicians "manufacturing crisis."

Right. Three things here.

First, where was she -- where were the teabaggers -- when the far-right endorsed and supported a massive increase in the size of government, unitary executive power grabs and unconstitutional measures fueled by fear-mongering over the very remote threat of terrorism? Crickets chirping. The odds of being killed in an airborne terrorist attack are literally 1 in 10 million. You're much more likely to kill yourself than to be killed by a terrorist.

Second, I refuse to believe that health care is a "manufactured crisis." People are going broke and dying every day. Even the most conservative estimates show that there are 9/11-level casualties each month due to a lack of adequate health insurance. The horror stories are readily available online. Just Google "health insurance horror story" and see how manufactured the crisis is.

Third, look at any bar graph of the economy as of one year ago or any basic jobs number and tell me if the crisis is manufactured. Hell, Pam Stout's son lost his house! How can she possibly suggest the economic crisis was manufactured?

I hate to single out one person, but Stout's incongruous anger is indicative of the entire movement.

From the outset, the tea party was based on a contradictory premise (the original tea party was a protest against a corporate tax cut). And when you throw out all of the nonsense and contradictions, there's nothing left except race. There's no other way to explain why these people were silent and compliant for so long, and only decided to collectively freak out when this "foreign" and "exotic" president came along and, right out of the chute, passed the largest middle class tax cut in American history -- something they would otherwise support, for goodness sake, it was $288 billion in tax cuts! -- we're left to deduce no other motive but the ugly one that lurks just beneath the pale flesh, the tri-corner hats and the dangly tea bag ornamentation.

Irrespective of whether the president passed a huge tax cut or went out of his way to bring Republicans into the health care process, the seeds of racial animosity from the far-right were sown during the campaign. In those lines waiting for then-vice presidential candidate and current tea party heroine Sarah Palin, their loud noises spread the pre-scripted lies, lies that entirely hinged on the president's African heritage. A white candidate would never be accused of being a secret Muslim. A white candidate would never be accused of being a foreign usurper. Only a black candidate with a foreign name would be accused of "palling around with domestic terrorists."

In the final analysis, when you boil away all of the weirdness, it becomes clear that the teabaggers are pissed because there isn't yet another doddering old white guy in the White House -- like they're used to. That's what this is all about.

By way of a postscript, one of the many faceless radio talk show wingnuts, Jim Quinn, this week called President Obama a "Kenyan wuss" who should be "slapped silly." The Kenyan lie and the "slap silly" insult aside, this president is no wuss. You know how I know? He's a black man who ran for president and won despite the growing mob of gun-toting militant white bigots like Jim Quinn who are sucking air in America. President Obama achieving this despite the hatred and threats against him takes serious guts. Guts that Jim Quinn and the tea party movement will never understand.

Followup article:

Last week, I wrote a piece about the tea party movement and the obvious through-line of race, race-baiting, racism and the use of the Southern Strategy within the movement. The responses were mostly positive and supportive, while the responses from the far-right and tea party people were predictably obnoxious, contradictory and fact-free.

The dominant theme throughout the most outraged responses was, essentially: We're not racists, but here's why we're pissed about blacks and immigrants. For example, here's a particularly illustrative e-mail, reprinted as it was received:

The Tea Party is NOT about race, it is about me paying taxes to support every non contributing individual that has the ability to pro create. It is not my/our fault that the majority of NON contributors are minority. It is not my/our fault some refuse to learn English, thereby limiting their employment opportunities. Hell, the whole race thing is nothing but bullshit for losers such as Garafolo and yourself to capitalize on. Rest assured Booby Boy we no longer give a damn about what you think do or say The main reason the Tea Party exists is Obama's Marxist/Socialistic COMMUNISTIC leanings that will ultimately cost me, part of the 50% that pays taxes, as opposed to the 50% that DON'T PAY!! An ideology that will transform this Country into a third world nation. Try having some honest debate Booby and you might gain cred. Until then you're shining Garafolo's shoes. Sounds to me like you may be an immigrant yourself with an axe to grind. Is that the case Booby? If so you can always go home! Careful moron that light you're looking at is a train not the end of the tunnel......

Smart. I have dozens more just like it. Several of them tell me I'm an idiot for suggesting there's a racial component, followed closely with a line about how I should "go back to Cuba or Africa." Nope. No racism there. Nevertheless, no matter how unhinged the above message might be, it proves an important point -- my point.

Each topic abstractly hinges on race.

The insistence that the tea party movement is more about taxes, big government and personal freedoms is partly true. And many tea party people honestly believe it. But if you dig below the surface into the details underlying these banner themes, it's not difficult to find that, yes, it's about taxes -- taxes on the rich to finance the extravagant lives of layabout welfare queens, or big government "ramming health care down our throats" as a means of slavery reparations to African Americans, and personal freedoms being stripped away by a liberal fascist Nazi who wants to give money and handouts to minorities in the form of health care subsidies and mortgage relief. You know, typical Nazi behavior. If I had a dollar for every Nazi who wanted to funnel government cash to immigrants and minorities...

It's the subtext that gurgles just below the surface of these three topics that composes the tea party version of the Southern Strategy.

Developed by Republican strategists like Harry Dent and Pat Buchanan during the rebuilding of the GOP in the post Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act era, the Southern Strategy's goal was to win over southern whites by demonizing blacks using subterfuge, dog whistles and coded language. As I mentioned last week, the late Republican mastermind Lee Atwater described the use of the Southern Strategy as being all about the use of "abstract" issues that imply race without explicitly using direct racial epithets or even the words "black" or "white."

Atwater described some of the abstract issues of his era as "forced bussing" or taxes, and framing these issues in a way that subconsciously fuels white resentment towards blacks, and serves to coalesce white votes around Republican candidates. After all, Republicans will readily admit that trying to win over black voters has been a lost cause since LBJ, so why not exploit that loss by playing to white racial bias and thus locking down larger chunks of the white vote?

When Atwater was discussing this issue with political science professor Alexander P. Lamis (reported by Bob Herbert in the New York Times), the topic was Reagan and his cuts in food stamps and legal services in urban communities. Even though the Republicans had already won over the South, Atwater explained, these Reagan-era moves tended to reinforce white turnout and Wallace types. Again, it's not about direct racism, but it's borne out of a racial component.

That's the Southern Strategy. It's as old as the Civil War and the Southern white "fire-breathers," but only in the last 40 years has it become a significant subheading in the fear chapter of the Republican Party playbook.

In other words, this isn't a figment of my imagination or a wacky far-left conspiracy theory. The Southern Strategy was and still is very real. Look no further than the Willie Horton ad. The White Hands ad. The 2006 "Harold! Call me!" ad which set off white dog whistles in Tennessee about a black candidate having sex with a clearly naked blond white woman. Not ancient history by any stretch, nor have been the various attempts to fuel racial animosity against President Obama during and following the campaign.

Likewise, no one in charge of the tea party movement, save for obvious racist Dale Robertson (he of the pirate form of "niggaaarrrr"), is out there gathering members while sporting white headgear and spouting off obvious white supremacy slogans. This would backfire, as Atwater said during his Southern Strategy remarks. The subconscious racial element would suddenly become obvious and scare away supporters who aren't necessarily racist, or who are in denial about their racism. Instead, they rally supporters around issues like taxes, big government and personal freedoms. But with a not-so-hidden Southern Strategy wink.

The flimsy and contradictory policy arguments only make the winking racial subtext more obvious.

For instance, the president cut taxes for the middle class. According to the CBO, a full third of the projected national debt -- $3 trillion over the next 10 years -- is due to the president retaining middle class tax cuts and rolling back the alternative minimum tax so it doesn't absorb middle class earners. Tax cuts. So how, then, can the tea party reasonably claim that President Obama is all about taxing the middle class "to death," as some e-mailers argued?

For the tea party leadership, it's all politics, and politics is power. It's about saying "join us" so we can oppose "them" and their taxes to pay for the poor (wink, we mean blacks) and their health care handouts (for reparations to blacks, wink). Consequently, tea party organizers and their PR wing at Fox News and on talk radio are able to consolidate political and financial power.

Glenn Beck, this week, was at it again, suggesting that the U.S. Census was scheming to give lopsided representation to minorities. This on top of his ongoing line that President Obama hates white people and that health care reform is all about reimbursing black people because of slavery. Yeah. He's not so "abstract," as Lee Atwater once said.

In Beck's case, sure, he spends a considerable amount of time talking about freedom and something about red phones and assembling acronyms that spell out non-words like "OLGIARHY." But the race argument is ever present. As obvious as it is, he doesn't say outright that his viewers should hate black people or immigrants. But he's clearly stoking white resentment for ratings and financial gain. Beck, like it or not, is a major player in the tea party movement, as is Fox News Channel. Together, they've spent countless sums of cash promoting tea party rallies and endorsing tea party causes. They are inextricably linked. And the Southern Strategy is right out there in plain view.

To date, for all of their protests and e-mails, I have yet to hear or read about any tea party participant who has denounced Beck. Or denounced Limbaugh for his daily race-based grabassery (yesterday is was a pun about Eric Massa, Governor Patterson and the racial epithet "massa"). Or denounced the scores of people who turn up with witch doctor signs and other racially-insensitive agitprop.

And finally, no. I'm not implying that everyone who disagrees with President Obama is a racist. Hell, I disagree with him on a number of issues. And no, not every member of the tea party movement is an outright racist. There are surely some earnest, decent (though politically misguided) people who are unaware of the race-baiting that's happening around them, and it's reasonable to suggest that there are more than a few people who simply don't recognize racism when they see it. But it's clear that a major component of the tea party movement -- the movement -- is the use of race, anti-immigrant sentiment and abstract racism as a strategy. Naturally, it wouldn't be used if there wasn't anything to gain. Sadly, however, the target demographic for the tea party movement is low-information white middle class voters who have a tendency, no matter how subconscious, to respond to political dog whistles.

No matter how loud and obnoxious they might become, the urgency is to make sure the tea party isn't taken any more seriously than its backwards and contradictory positions on the issues, its phony Astroturfing, and its Southern Strategy politics. This is essentially a corporate-driven assembly of angry white people gathered around abstractly racial issues for the purposes of venting rage while financially benefiting the far-right power elites who are pulling the strings. The broader conservative movement, say nothing of anyone who takes seriously the issues confronting the nation, would do well to stay away from the tea party, leaving it to flail in the margins where it belongs.

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Correction: Atwater's discussion took place with Alexander P. Lamis, and was first reported by Bob Herbert.

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Van Jones, Still the Driving Force for Green Jobs

 

After Right-Wing Smears,

Van Jones gets a second chance

 

By Katrina vanden Heuvel

The Nation

Van Jones, who resigned from the White House Council on Environmental Quality last fall in the face of a coordinated smear campaign by conservative activists, has reemerged from his self-imposed exile. He'll be teaching at Princeton University and taking up a senior fellowship at the Center for American Progress, where he will head a "green opportunity initiative."

And today, Jones will accept the NAACP President's Award from Benjamin Jealous, who mounts an eloquent defense of Jones in an op-ed.

A founder of "Green for All" and the online civil rights group "Color of Change," Jones penned a bestseller, "The Green Collar Economy," which provided a blueprint for using green technologies to bring jobs to deindustrialized American cities and create pathways out of poverty. He was a driving force behind the passage of the 2007 Green Jobs Act and one of America's most pragmatic environmental visionaries.

As we wrote in The Nation soon after Jones was run out of his job by clownish demagogue Glenn Beck,

The idea that Van Jones...was some kind of crypto-radical bent on subverting American capitalist democracy from the inside has as much relationship to the truth as the notion that Obama is hatching a plan for mandatory euthanasia of America's seniors. In giving him the NAACP's President's Award, Jealous referred to Jones's missteps, including political statements made years ago. Yes, it was a misstep to sign a 911truth.org petition. But Jones repudiated his signature and said the petition's wording didn't then and doesn't now represent his views. In a saner political environment, that would have been the end of it. Or, as the NAACP'S Jealous put it, "we can never afford to forget that a defining trait of our country is our collective capacity to practice forgiveness and celebrate redemption. This is a nation built on second chances."

It is good news that Jones has gotten that quintessentially American second chance. I am sure he will be a force working "outside" the White House -- oxygenating the grassroots with his fertile ideas.

Yet I remain sad for my country. Jones is one in a line of would-be public servants, stretching from Lani Guiner and Jocelyn Elders all the way back to those harassed by Sen. Joe McCarthy (R-Wis.), who were driven out of public office because right-wing demagogues targeted and distorted their views. How is it that a man working to help Americans invest in a green collar economy ended up branded as an untouchable radical? How is it that such attacks led a skittish White House, admittedly battling attacks on many fronts, to jettison a powerful voice for environmental justice?

What a victory that was for the demagogues among us. Van Jones is back, but there will be other targets and well-coordinated attacks that Americans must resist, instead of giving in to those who would debase our politics through smears.

By Katrina vanden Heuvel | February 26, 2010; 12:58 PM ET

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Obama Pressed by US 'Long Warriors'

 

Threat to Iraq

Withdrawal Plan

 

By Tom Hayden

Peace & Justice Resource Center

Was it too good to be true? In February at Camp Lejeune, our new President Barack Obama surprised all observers by pledging to withdraw all US troops from Iraq by 2012, in accord with a pact secretly negotiated at the end of the Bush era. Previously, Obama was promising to withdraw all combat troops, leaving a "residual force" dominating Iraq for years.

Obama has restated his commitment to the full withdrawal on several occasions. But heavy pressure is building to make the president drop his commitment.

The most ominous sign of the gathering campaign to make Obama cave in came in an Feb. 24 op-ed piece in the New York Times by Thomas Ricks, the pre-eminent mainstream historian of the war. Given the political gridlock and growing turbulence in Iraq, Ricks says that breaking his campaign promise is the "best course" for Obama to pursue.

Ricks says "it would be best to let [read: pressure] Iraqi leaders to make the first public move to re-open the status of forces agreement" under which US combat troops will soon be departing.

"As a longtime critic of the American invasion of Iraq, I am not happy about advocating a continued military presence there", Ricks writes. Perhaps he is forgetting his 2009 book celebrating Gen. David Petraeus, The Gamble, in which Ricks predicted that Obama would have to break his vow to remove all combat troops to avoid "abandoning Iraq." Or his prediction in the same book that the US is only "halfway through" the Iraq War.

Ricks' epilogue was titled "The Long War", making him one of the earliest warrror-journalists to embrace the notion of a 50-80 year war projected by top counterinsurgency advisers to Petraeus and the Pentagon.

Everyone including Ricks agrees that the American public is completely soured on the Iraq War. Just this week a federal agency noted that the $53 billion spent on Iraq reconstruction, the largest aid effort since the Marshall Plan, has been squandered. [NYT, Feb. 22, 2010]

That doesn't phase our ideological fanatics who believe in permanent war until all their ideological fanatics are dead.

No matter that both Iraq and Afghanistan are trillion-dollar wars and, according the latest federal budget analysis, there is "virtually no room for domestic initiatives for Mr. Obama or his successors." The neo-conservative stealth strategy of destroying government programs by "strangling the baby in the bathtub" [the phrase of Grover Norquist] is working. 

The reason US military combat may continue in Iraq is that the Pentagon has not won the war. On the one hand, the US has installed a brutal authoritarian Shiite-dominated coalition in power in Baghdad, one closely aligned with the Pentagon's strategic enemies in Iran. That's not a victory. That same Shiite coalition has used its power to purge the minority Sunni candidates from running in the elections scheduled for next month. Gen. Ray Odierno recently stated the obvious, that the key Iraqi politicians purging the Sunni candidates "clearly are influenced by Iran." [NYT, Feb. 17, 2010]

Not surprisingly, the top Iraqi blocking Sunni participation, according to Gen. Odiorno, is the same Ahmed Chalabi who conspired with the neo-cons to pass along false information leading to the 2003 invasion.

These events may drive the Sunni community to revive its insurgency, which was contained by US funding of the "Awakening" movement and promises of protection. The return of insurgency would mean civil war. The alternative may be more likely, a demand from the Sunnis that their former enemies, the Americans, stay in Iraq to protect them from the Shiites. This scenario would be in accord with the doctrine advocated by Petraeus advisor Stephen Biddle [see Foreign Affairs, Mar.-April 2006]. Divide and conquer may succeed.

What are the chances Obama will keep to his commitment? At this point, the most likely withdrawal we can expect from the President is not from Iraq but from his previous commitment. How can he politically succeed in withdrawing against warnings from all sides that chaos and bloodshed will be the result? The Long War advocates have him where they want him.

The peace movement may protest, and public opinion may be unenthusiastic, but cannot be counted on to stop this Long War plan for Iraq if Obama caves. Last month there were only five American deaths in Iraq; for 2009, the count was 149 [compared to 822 in 2006].

If renewed American intervention cannot be stopped, neither can a reckoning down the road, however. The cost of occupation is more than a fiscal one. A permanent American occupation of Iraq will be like a giant breeder reactor generating deadly and unpredictable opposition from Iraqi nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism for years to come.

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People Power Vs. 'The Long Warriors'

How To Rebuild

The Peace Movement

From the Bottom Up

 

By Tom Hayden

Peace and Justice Resource Center

Here at the PJRC we are exploring ways to implement communications with peace activist at local or regional levels, including a series of conference calls. In the meantime, let me share some specific thoughts about building the peace and justice movement from the bottom up.

Social movements always depend on leadership, a commitment by a single individual or small group to continue their work in the face of all odds. Then there's the question of a strategy for being effective. We always have to measure our capacity against the goals we set.

PEOPLE POWER AGAINST THE PILLARS OF POLICY

The bottom-up strategy which I propose is building the pressure of people power against the pillars of policy that prop up the Long War.

The key pillars for the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan include, first, the pillar of public opinion; second, the pillar of budgetary support; and third, the pillar of our military resources. Other pillars include the mainstream media, religious institutions and, of course, the required stability of America's ally Kabul.

In the end, it's about public opinion. We have to argue that the American people are not any safer for having fought these wars, and we cannot afford the cost in casualties and tax dollars.

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Tea Party Factions Prepare for 2010 Vote and Beyond

Revival and Revolt:

Inside the Tea Party

National Convention

By Devin Burghart
Huffington Post

Feb. 10, 2010, Nashville - The rancor and division among Tea Partiers that erupted in the weeks leading up to the first Tea Party National Convention was nowhere to be found inside the expansive biosphere-like confines of the Gaylord Opryland Resort and Convention Center. Squabbles set aside, at least for the moment, the real business of the February 4-7 convention was three-fold: culture warring, movement building, and campaign winning.

Organized by Judson Phillips, a Nashville attorney, and his wife Sherry, Tea Party Nation (or TPN) is one of several different Tea Party factions vying to be the voice of those angry white voters wanting to “take America back!”

TPN describes itself as a “user-driven group of like-minded people who desire our God given Individual Freedoms which were written out by the Founding Fathers. We believe in Limited Government, Free Speech, the 2nd Amendment, our Military, Secure Borders and our Country!” These threads ran through the convention.

The crowd of roughly six hundred came to Nashville from across the country. Among the TPN conventioneers was an attorney from Virginia, an IT professional from Atlanta, a retired executive from Lansing, a veterinarian from rural Pennsylvania, a power plant engineer from Houston, a teacher from rural Idaho, and snowbirds from Arizona.  The crowd skewed slightly older, primarily from the 55+ demographic range, and was split almost evenly between men and women.

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