Those 267,574 people who voted “no” — which would approve the same-sex marriage law — were not dissuaded by an anti-gay coalition of conservatives and churches wielding more than $3 million, including more than $2 million from out-of-state donors, according to a report by the National Institute On Money In State Politics.

Much of the sparring over the referendum was funded on both sides by groups outside the state of Maine. Given that gay marriage has been a wedge issue for years, that’s hardly surprising. But in Maine?

Those who backed the gay marriage law ponied up 12 to 1 over donors to the anti-gay donors and had more money — $5 million. But they lost. The institute’s report, written by Tyler Evilsizer, says:

The measure pitted conservative groups and churches against gay-rights groups, a few wealthy donors, and more than 10,000 smaller donors from Maine and around the country. Question 1 attracted over $9 million, or 72 cents of every dollar raised around Maine’s seven ballot measures. [emphasis added]

But press attention, money, and political capital focused on a wedge issue to divide people of good conscience and faith and divert their attention from far more pressing matters. Maine needs more attention to the condition of its roads, bridges and airports than it does in the bedrooms of loving, consenting adults who wish to make a lifelong commitment.

The blunt end of the money hammer used in Maine against gays was primarily wielded by a group called Stand For Marriage Maine. Like all political communicators and niche interest groups these days, it has a website. But its site is notably deficient. It does not have links such as “About Us” or “Who We Are.” Such links usually provide a list of financial supporters, coalition partners, and the names and contact data for organization officers and staff. Stand For Marriage Maine does not provide such information on its website.

Wading through the organization’s press releases and media stories is needed to learn that Marc Mutty is chairman of Stand for Marriage Maine, that Scott K. Fish is communications director (releases provide a phone number) and that Bob Emrich is a member of the group’s executive committee.

That lack of clear, easy-to-find disclosure makes it difficult for those interested in the issue to find out more about the bona fides of donors and supporters who worked to repeal Maine’s gay-marriage law.

Why not explain “Who We Are”? Only conjecture is possible. It is, perhaps, easier to operate in ideological shadows. According to Mr. Evilsizer’s report, here are the principal sources of money that drove the effort to repeal gays’ right to marry in Maine. A few groups are well known outside Maine.

StandForMarriageMaine.com | $2,650,052
Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland | $553,608
Focus On The Family Maine Marriage Committee | $114,500
Family Research Council Action | $25,000
Maine Marriage PAC | $11,539
Maine Grassroots Coalition | $9,410
Marriage Matters in Maine | $2,678
Maine4Marriage | $230
Proponents’ total $3,367,018

Fred Karger, founder of Californians Against Hate, asked Maine ethics officials to investigate the organization. He said it was laundering money. His August letter

contained allegations religious organizations are hiding contributions to the Stand for Marriage Maine campaign. The letter reports how the National Organization for Marriage, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland, the national office of the Knights of Columbus and Focus on the Family had contributors give the money to their organizations, and in turn gave the money to the Stand for Marriage Maine to hide the donors’ identity.

But a federal judge ruled on Oct. 29 that the “state can compel the National Organization for Marriage to disclose the identities of donors who contributed to its effort to repeal Maine’s gay-marriage law.” In that story, the Portland Press Herald said NOM — based in Washington, D.C. — had funneled $1.6 million to Stand For Marriage Maine. A resolution of the lawsuit was “months away,” the story said — well after the Nov. 3 referendum. Mr. Evilsizer’s report contains a breakdown of donors to Stand For Marriage Maine showing NOM’s $1,622,152 donation.

But his report notes that financial supporters of gay marriage in Maine “from Away” were also plentiful. Those who supported the gay-marriage law raised $5,678,579.

The Human Rights Campaign, which bills itself as “the largest national lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender civil rights organization,” donated $267,589 to the principal umbrella organization, No On 1 Protect Maine Equality. The National Gay & Lesbian Task Force gave $139,056. Esmond Harmsworth, a founding partner of the Zachary Shuster Harmsworth Literary Agency in Boston and New York, gave $100,000. Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders of Boston gave $91,258.

The website of No On 1 Protect Maine Equality also has a “Who We Are” page that lists its coalition partners. Its “Contact Us” page list its physical address, mailing address, phone number and e-mail address. Its campaign manager is clearly identified as Jesse Connolly.

The gay marriage caravan now moves on, it seems, to New York state. Gov. David Patterson wants a same-sex marriage bill, passed twice in the state Assembly, on the floor of the Senate for debate on Tuesday.

And the money, both for and against, will likely move on as well.

The Scurlock Studio and Black Washington: Picturing the Promise a photo exhibition currently at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture Gallery. The exhibition runs through November 2009.

In our time they are a brand: three artistic African Americans from one family, who captured Washington, the District, this community of freedmen. Their images spoke clearly: here are our efforts, our military men, our debutantes, our ministers, our friends, our tuxedos, our cotillions, our geniuses, our great minds, our children. Our lights, our cameras, our work. – A.J. Verdelle

Verdelle is speaking about Addison Scurlock and his two sons George and Robert Scurlock of Washington, D.C. Addison Scurlock’s photography has been called the visual record of W.E.B.Du Bois’ strategy to uplift Black America by the “Talented Tenth.” Du Bois’ vision included an active and successful middle class whose behaviors and practices effectively countered prevailing racial stereotypes about African Americans. The images created in the Scurlock Studios inspired optimism in the African American community of Washington. The images were more than a response to racial stereotypes but a testament to the dreams and hopes of those pictured. These portraits were about how the person wished to be known and remembered.

There was a special “Scurlock look” – dignified, mature and sophisticated. Addison understood how to light the beautiful variety of African American skin tones. The son George Scurlock attributed the Scurlock style to three qualities – posing, lighting, and retouching – with the final image being fine-tuned on the negative itself. The Scurlocks used a large-format five-by-seven inch view camera with five-by-seven film backs. This yielded large enough negatives to permit retouching.

For nearly ninety years Howard University retained the Scurlock Studios as its official photographer. The resulting body of work presents Howard University as a vibrant institution of diversity and intellectual vigor. Those many decades saw visiting dignitaries such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Marion Anderson, the Roosevelts and the Kennedys, Mary McLeod Bethune and Jackie Robinson. Their work not only graced the University but the press as well.

In 1968 after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Washington erupted in waves of violence and riots. In response George Scurlock took his camera outside their U Street studio and recorded the neighborhood reaction. His images capture the National Guardsman with rifles and firefighters battling a blaze a few doors down from the studio. One of the images remaining from that period was a sign the Scurlocks displayed in their exterior display case that said “Soul Brothers All the Way.”

Addison retired in 1963 and sold the business to his two sons. He died the following year at the age of eighty-one. His work became known outside the African American community only after his death. Towards the end of Robert Scurlock’s life the vast collection of Scurlock Studio work was acquired by the Smithsonian Institution. The collection includes more than 250,000 negatives and 10,000 photographic prints along with cameras, studio and darkroom equipment, nearly a century of business records. Much of the collection has been digitized and is available to research on-line.

Here are a few of my favorites from this gorgeous collection.

Addison and Mamie Scurlock 1910-20

Charles Tignor Duncan 1930 – as an adult he went on to work on the landmark Brown vs Board of Education, first general counsel of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Dean of Howard University School of Law and advisor to Walter Washington during his tenure as mayor of the District of Columbia.

Lt. Alma Jackson 1945

Flappers at Griffith Stadium 1928/29

Howard University Baseball

The curator of the collection adds his thoughts here.

Nick Griffin, the leader of the tiny British National Party, has a very low profile outside the UK. Their best political showing has been to pick up two seats in the European Parliament, when they polled 6% of the UK vote in that election in June 2009.

They are a minority party and are unlikely to ever lead political thought in the UK, let alone Europe.

Griffin has never appeared on public television to either promote or defend his party. The BBC, acknowledging that he now represents a small, but distinct, subset of the British population, invited him onto their long-running political panel discussion show, Question Time.

Outside, angry demonstrators gathered to protest Griffin’s arrival. Hundreds of police battled hundreds of protestors. 25 broke through a barrier and managed to make it inside the BBC buildings before being dragged back outside. By the end of the evening, three policemen had been injured and six protestors arrested.

What gives?

The reason for this excitement is the platform espoused by the BNP. They demand that all “foreigners” be deported and that the borders be closed to immigrants. They’re a single-issue, racist party. That’s it.

There has been more than enough written about the BBC’s decision to invite the man that many Brits find personally offensive onto the public broadcaster. I’m a foreign-born Brit, and Jewish, so hardly someone that the BNP would allow as a member, but I believe that the BBC did the right thing.

Watching Griffin bumble about, claiming not to be a Nazi or a racist is amusing stuff. It allows his poison to be drawn and his opinions to be challenged, debated and held to account.

Unfortunately, that process is somewhat drained knowing that he had to fight his way through a lynch-mob just to get into the studio. Griffin may be a Nazi, but he’s a brave Nazi.

Breeding Headlines Breeding Extremists

There are a lot of people, both politicians and pundits, who make their living by catering to the fears and phobias of marginal groups. Until the coming of the telecommunications age, if these nutters wanted a mainstream platform, they’d have to pay for it themselves. It would cost a lot.

The Internet changed all that. Now even the most isolated loony can get a message out to other isolated members of the faithful. They can organise, communicate and incite each other to further levels of apoplexy.

But even this wouldn’t have much penetration into the lives of ordinary people.

Except for bloggers looking for something to write about.

Newspapers have long known the importance of a good headline. The film The Shipping News has the following exchange between Quoyle (Kevin Spacey), who is learning how to write for a local newspaper, and a colleague, Billy Pretty, played by Gordon Pinsent:

Pretty: It’s finding the centre of your story, the beating heart of it, that’s what makes a reporter. You have to start by making up some headlines. You know: short, punchy, dramatic headlines. Now, have a look, [pointing at dark clouds gathering in the sky over the ocean] what do you see? Tell me the headline.

Quoyle: HORIZON FILLS WITH DARK CLOUDS?

Pretty: IMMINENT STORM THREATENS VILLAGE.

Quoyle: But what if no storm comes?

Pretty: VILLAGE SPARED FROM DEADLY STORM.

The problem with this approach is that it leads to a selective understanding of events. When compounded by the rapid accretion of millions of “me-too” copies of the same story, it amounts to a “conversation” and swiftly becomes accepted wisdom.

It also becomes the benchmark for future headlines to rise above. This breeds ever-more hyperbolic headlines and hypes up the emotions of ever more people.

It is also an easy and cheap way to manipulate the mass media (which is what bloggers are these days) into giving away free advertising for a very small and indifferent bunch of nut-jobs.

All that a fledgling fascist has to do is make some inflammatory remark and watch the inevitable response from the blogosphere drive up awareness of his message. He can feed back into that opprobrium by simply selecting from some of the more extreme opposition comments and feed those back to his own support base.

What this does is remove the capacity for debate and push both opponents to the absolute extremes.

Coping with extremism in the blogosphere

Clearly progressive bloggers don’t set out to provide a platform for fascists and wing-nuts anymore than the BBC set out to promote the agenda of Nick Griffin.

The BBC’s approach is the best, and probably most difficult. It is to invite Griffin to present his own ideas and let him defend himself in a reasoned and reasonable debate. That debate couldn’t happen because it had become a moral crusade before he even arrived.

The violent protests show people that Griffin and those most opposed to him are equally thuggish and unpleasant. The true outrage and horror of the last 24 hours has not been Griffin, but the lack of respect for the institutions of the state, the press and the law exhibited by those claiming to defend it.

Now, it’s a tough job asking everyone with a loudhailer to speak softly, but that is precisely what is necessary.

Never before has the capacity for organisation and response to civil disagreements been so all-encompassing and speedy. Yet democracy and free speech is exactly all about giving the most unpleasant fringes of society a good airing.

Sunlight is a fantastic disinfectant. But baying for the blood of those at the edge just drives them and their supporters further away. They may express their fears badly, but not allowing them to express their fears at all will mean that they are never acknowledged, discussed and recognised.

Fighting extremism with extremism simply makes everyone a nut-case.

You remember that story, don’t you? Was all over the press in July 2012? Oh, wait, that hasn’t happened yet. Still to come, so to say. Let me get my thoughts arranged.

It was in 2009 that airport security added the new full-body x-ray scanners to their arsenal of devices to humiliate and traumatise travellers. Sarah Barrett, head of customer experience at Manchester airport, says, “This scanner completely takes away the hassle of needing to undress.” Because we’ll do it for you.

Now, before you tell me that the images could hardly be described as pornographic, let me direct you to Two Girls One Cup. If this is sufficient to cause some people to immediately discombobulate themselves in their trousers, I’m fairly sure that security camera images will be hot-stuff. Plus, imagine the job advert:

“Wanted: mature individuals to look at images of naked strangers of all shapes, sizes and ages for hours at a time while alone in a secluded booth; don’t worry, it’s not child porn if you do it for security reasons.”

Now don’t get me wrong. I fully appreciate the security difficulties faced by the world’s major transit authorities. There really are people out there who are out to kill us. But there are lots of ways to cause mayhem in a public place without resorting to actually getting on a plane.

And, we live in the information age. If the image exists then the image is public. Telling us, as Sarah Barrett does, that, “The images are not erotic or pornographic and they cannot be stored or captured in any way,” is just so much bullshit. Give that security guard a camera-phone; oh, wait, he has one already.

Yes, the technology is possible. No, this is not an acceptable use of that technology. Find another way.

If beating terrorists involves giving away all the privacy, confidentiality, liberty and respect for the individual that we are supposedly fighting so hard for, then we’re not really beating the terrorists.

Maybe it’s just that this technology is lazy. These images should be digitised, processed and then only random bits shown to security for final analysis. There are ways to ensure that this is entirely depersonalised. Otherwise profiling is likely; age, gender, even cultural origin are likely to be visible in these images.

Leave the embarrassing personal pictures to teenagers posting on Facebook. The rest of us are just travelling, nothing to see. And nothing we want you to see.

Click here to view the embedded video.

To quote from a recent BBC article:

Lee Ki-Churl, a corporation official, said he expected Tanzanians to benefit from the deal. “Some African countries export fruit and import fruit juice, or export olives and import olive oil, simply because their past colonialists did not teach them how to process food,” he told the AFP news agency. “We plan to set up an education centre for Tanzanian farmers in the food-processing zone in order to transfer agricultural know-how and irrigation expertise to them.”

I think it is both patronising and ignorant to assume that Africans don’t farm the way modern western farms operate because they are uneducated.  This almost seems to imply that Africans are too stupid to help themselves.

I’m not a purist when it comes to the “rationalism” of markets (the theory that every price includes all available information to reflect that price), but I do believe that in relatively unsophisticated African markets there are good reasons why farmers do not farm or invest in productive capacity:  weak rule of law, ineffective property rights, high taxes, bribery and corruption all add up to ensure that the cost exceeds the benefit of investment.

Anthony Mills, a soil scientist at the University of Stellenbosch contacted me regarding the difficulty of conducting development in Africa.  “The Zambian land tenure system is particularly problematic.  By law the land is owned by the President.  In practice it is owned by the chiefs.  The land is consequently probably even further from private ownership than in most developing countries.”

Yet, without any due acknowledgment of the political and legal environment standing in the way of growth and development, international projects duly waste cash on major interventions.  In 2004, the UN launched the Millennium Development Villages project in an effort to demonstrate how the goals for the Millennium Development Goals could be realised.

Promises of the Millennium

Millennium Promise was co-founded by the economist Jeffrey Sachs and the philanthropist Ray Chambers. The project work of the Millennium Villages are overseen by a Scientific Council composed of leading scientific and development authorities at the UN Millennium Project and The Earth Institute at Columbia University, both of which are headed by Sachs.

The project is a miserable example of the patronising and objectionable way in which development in Africa is imposed, as if like manna from a benevolent West.

The project hasn’t “failed” in the way a business would fail.  Jeffrey Sachs hasn’t been forced to live in a homeless shelter, and the villages themselves aren’t derelict.  My concerns have to do with the nature of the promises, and of the results.  My analysis is based using only their published information and claims (on their sites: http://www.unmillenniumproject.org/ and http://www.millenniumvillages.org/).

Their objectives are an overwhelming mish-mash of wants and desires:

“In its first 18 months, the MVP’s five main objectives were to: (i) Provide universal access and free distribution of long-lasting, insecticide treated bed nets to fight malaria; (ii) Achieve significant increases in staple crop yields; (iii) Ensure universal access to functioning health clinics; (iv) Increase primary school enrollments; and (v) Provide community access to improved and year-round water for consumption. In addition, the MVP emphasized cross-cutting interventions focused on addressing gender inequality; on community mobilization, participation and leadership; and on infrastructure for transport, energy, and information and communications technologies (ICT).”

“The Millennium Villages seek to end extreme poverty by working with the poorest of the poor, village by village throughout Africa, in partnership with governments and other committed stakeholders, providing affordable and science-based solutions to help people lift themselves out of extreme poverty.”

Ending extreme poverty is a known quantity.  Numerous countries have done it (from South Korea to Brazil) and what is required mostly boils down to accountable government and rule of law, plus sound economic principles premised on enforceable property rights.

So much for the background.  Let’s look at the viability of these projects themselves.

The region chosen

“Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Tanzania and Uganda.”

According to a quick check, the bottom 20% earn roughly $350 to $450 per annum in this region.  I’m being generous here, since the MDP aims to work with the absolute poorest which the UN usually defines as people earning less than $1/day.

“Between 1990 and 2001, the number of people in sub-Saharan Africa living on less than $1 a day rose from 227 million to 313 million, and the poverty rate rose from 45 percent to 46 percent. Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest rate of undernourishment in the world, with one-third of the population below the minimum level of nourishment.”

This implies a total of 62 – 63,000 villages (at their requirement of 5,000 people per village) who fall into the project scope.

The investment

“Each Millennium Village requires a donor investment of $300,000 per year for five years. This includes a cost of $250,000 per village per year (5,000 villagers per village multiplied by $50 per villager) and an additional $50,000 per village per year to cover logistical and operational costs associated with implementation, community training, and monitoring and evaluation. Note that this level of external support is fully consistent with the 2005 G8 commitments for official development assistance to Africa by 2010. The other $60 per villager per year will come from village members, local and national governments and partner organizations, making for total funding of $110 per person per year.”

This is a fudge.  Firstly, sure, the global community may have promised a grand total of $50billion in support, but that usually has strings attached, and includes a wide range of other bilateral investment.  So the full amount isn’t available.  Secondly, most African governments don’t spend their own money on internal development.  Thirdly, the villages have no money (since that is the reason they were chosen).  One way or another, all of that $110 will have to be donated.

That means we are investing $550k annually for each village over a five-year period (i.e. $2.75 million).  To reach all villages in the scope requires an investment of around $172 billion.

The return on investment

So much for the background.  One of the things I’m often asked on African tourism development projects is, “Does this town/area have good tourism potential for development?”  My answer is always this:  “Are there men and women by the side of the road selling curios?  If not, then no.”

People in Africa are not poor because they are ignorant of their own needs, or of how to earn a living.  Neither are they really victims of circumstances beyond their control.  Given the right environment, Africans are as capable of supporting themselves as is anyone else. When the Zimbabwe currency was worth less than spit, inflation was several trillion % and nothing was available for sale. A few months after the Zimbabwe government abandoned the Zimbabwe dollar in exchange for the US dollar everything is available, investment is happening and production is shooting up. Zimbabwe may even be entirely self-sufficient for food again by the end of next year. And that is without any major international intervention.

So, as far as the MDP villages are concerned, my first question is this:  “Are other villages visiting the MDP villages, becoming inspired, and copying this model?”

The answer is: No.  No-one is copying the villages.  No private investor has turned up and offered to do something similar.  Scratch that, George Soros turned up and made a spot donation of $50 million in 2006 to fund 33 villages.  But that is hardly investment.

There are a whole host of reasons that I can spot:

1. The investment changes nothing about the legal and economic situation in the country at hand; governments are still corrupt, infrastructure is still non-existent.  Even if the MDV were to produce a major food surplus, who would they sell it to and how would they get it to market?
2. The project makes a great deal of the village-based ownership structure.  This is a collectivist / communist system.  If no-one owns it, then there is little incentive for individuals to work harder, since everyone will get the same outcome.  Like most projects of this nature, the output will continue as long as the expensively-paid consultants are around, then it will return to its base level.  The only reason the Kibbutz system has lasted 100 years is the donations of both the Israeli government and of outside donors.  As soon as the Israeli government cut funding, then the Kibbutzim started to close.  Now only those most hardy (or the very few who have major industries earning revenue) are still functioning.  But at least the Kibbutzim were self-created.  The MDPs rely for their energy on do-gooder outsiders.
3. Who owns the investment?  If something intangible like a “village” owns the products of individual labour and investment, then what does a person with ambition do?  Can he/she sell their stake in the village and use the money to go to university, or buy a house?  Who decides on what the profits (should there be any) be spent on?

Even in the best-case scenario, all that you achieve is that a group of famished and unhealthy people are less famished and less unhealthy.  For an investment of $2.75 million.  Is it really sufficient to take people from earning $1/day to say $2/day?

What else could you achieve with that money?

You could build a nice, labour-intensive factory for $2.75 million.  Imagine the impact of 62,000 new factories on the central African economy?  And imagine all the things that would be required for such a thing to happen … roads, rule of law, healthcare, education.  All of which would be affordable if millions of people were earning proper salaries.

This isn’t happening.  There are no investors in Africa beyond a few resources and the inevitable mobile telephony.  Africa is 2% of the world economy.  To put the MDP investment in perspective ($110 per person), foreign direct investment in Africa is worth only $19 per person per year.

Whitey Basson of Shoprite, a major African retailer, put it best last week:  “It takes 15 inches of paper to cross a border in Africa.”  Africa’s countries are regularly ranked as the most appalling and corrupt places in which to do business.

The MDP villages do not change that situation.  The agricultural techniques behind the project may be sound, but the economics are a failure.

And, if the economics are a failure, then what is the point of the project?

As we all know, the nation has been alive with discourse of all flavors over the current state of the health care system and the insurance industry. Recently, Senator Baucus has brought forth his proposal, dubbed by some critics (rightly so, in my opinion) the “Insurance Industry Profit Protection and Enhancement Act.”

Please listen: The very reason we need the government to intervene is because millions of us have a Sword of Damocles hanging over our heads. Private industry has already proven that it cannot be trusted to look out for its bottom line and simultaneously safeguard and maintain the health of the American people, even if some of us are misguidedly rallying in the streets against our interests at the urgings of their preferred Chicken Littles of media and industry.

It is my belief that what needs to be accomplished is the affirmation of every American citizen’s right to a basic level of health, security and well-being above a private company’s right to make a profit, which it currently does in part by conveniently discounting and disregarding its customers’ human rights at its whims. Private insurers need to know, as my mother would say, that “your rights stop where another one’s starts.”

Legislation that hands millions of new customers directly over to health insurers, who have made clear that they give their profit motives precedence over honoring their commitments to their policyholders, sometimes with deadly consequences, is simply a conversion of taxpayer money into more income for the industry and a tacit acceptance of its horrific business practices.

As a taxpayer, I have no qualms about the cost of health care reform–I consider it our duty to one another as citizens, as a community, and as a nation. How do you think it looks when Washington puts us all further in hock frivolously throwing money down the toilets of the banking industry, tax cuts for the rich, and Iraq, to cite a few recent examples (our last president tried to flush Social Security as well), and then tries to tell us that we’re not entitled to a health care system that won’t be tainted by continued rewards to an industry with no reservations about flipping us the middle finger and leaving us for dead when we dare get sick? Why are regular people being taught to accept the ever-growing obligations to war, to creditors, and to failed industry, and at the same time not to make an across-the-board investment in one another as this nation’s human capital: workers; thinkers; doers; entrepreneurs; taxpayers; human beings?

I am free to help pay your medical bills, and those of my grandparents, and for those of us in states of extraordinary need, but not for a system that’s going to be there for me, free from the tentacles and inflated costs of private interests, even if I don’t have the right job, the right friends, a trust fund, a winning Powerball ticket, or the good fortune to remain healthy and free of accidents between now, at the age of 29, and my 65th birthday, should I find myself again without income or coverage?

Is continued corporate captivity the thanks we are going to get from our representatives for supporting them with our votes and paying for their salaries, benefits and pension plans? We not only sacrifice our own salaries, benefits and pension plans (and for many of us, our homes) for others’ bad decisions and greed, but now we can expect to be groomed to accept some compromise from Capitol Hill that may or may not improve our lives while the jackpots continue to flow upward?

A hostile climate has been created for every working person in this country. We have been told for years by the powerful, privileged and obscenely well-compensated that we are going to have to do things like “tighten our belts” and “weather the storm” (or, as some have called it, the “rough patch”). We’ve individually and collectively been subjected to repeated assaults on our financial well-being, our employment opportunities, our civil rights, our health and our futures by an ever more demanding section of the population so far insulated from what we are truly facing. One can turn on the television and at any given time watch a politician, executive, “industry expert” or news reporter talk about our right to access affordable health care, even though they themselves would never fathom or accept such treatment, as though United States citizens were no better than numbers on a balance sheet or some rogue band of freeloaders trying to burgle the upper class.

We all know who is really being burgled.

Let me tell you something: I don’t care to hear what anybody in a position of privilege has to say unless they have truly done their homework or they have first-hand life experience to back it up. I don’t care if some insurance executive is going to have to postpone the construction of his exact replica of the M.C. Hammer mansion in Dubai if he doesn’t get some additional payoff from the American public. I’ve got skin in the game here, too, and you and the rest of our representatives have the opportunity to come through with flying colors for me and for my fellow citizens. We’re all counting on you, even those of us who don’t know it or won’t admit it because it wouldn’t fit their politics or their way of thinking to do so.

We as Americans need to join the rest of the West in providing each other, across income, party and racial lines, with a guarantee of basic care not as some so-called “middle-class entitlement,” as I have heard wafting condescendingly out of the windpipes of more than one multimillionaire, but as a long-overdue recognition of our needs and our rights, and perhaps the making of amends over the treatment so many of us have endured from entities that have been allowed growing and crippling control over the quality, course, and length, of our lives.

If a strong stand is not ultimately taken on our behalf, it will be a damning and ominous indicator of what this country truly thinks of me, my neighbors, my family, my friends, and the rest of my fellow citizens. I implore you: Keep an irrevocable public option on the table and stick to your guns on it. To be blunt, some of your colleagues absolutely will do their best to beat you over the head with whatever you do, so you might as well make it worth doing in the first place and roll with the punches so that we, as a nation, will come out better for it. I don’t want something for nothing, as the elites would put it–I want something better for what I have put in and will continue to put in, and the people of this nation have more than paid for it in service to their employers, their families, their communities, their country–and some with their lives.

Thank you,
A. N. Cargo
Denver, Colorado (CO-01)

Competition at international sporting events is fierce and the pursuit of an edge, sometimes measured in hundredths of a second, leads some to cheat.  Steroid abuse aims to increase the strength, speed and endurance of what is natural.  But the androgens created by the body are not set to any standard.  Some people do genuinely produce more than others.  Figuring out what is normal and what is not is difficult.

And, sometimes, something else is going on.

In 1966, Erika Schinegger was the world champion women’s downhill skier.  The young Austrian was preparing for the Olympics in 1968 and a hoped-for gold medal.  However, 1968 was no ordinary year.

The politics of the time saw Communist countries forcing significant anabolic steroids on their athletes in an effort to ensure victory.  The concern was not just for the future of competitive sport, but also for the health of the athletes.  The East Germans, in particular, were serial abusers.  Manfred Ewald, architect of their doping scheme, was convicted and jailed in 2000 for his part in this.

Besides doping, though, many male athletes were entered as women to ensure an additional level of success.

Schinegger was one of the first Olympic athletes to undergo a gender test.  She discovered, to her shock, that she was actually male.  She was disqualified and had a sex-change, becoming Erik, a man.

Gender is not as simple as visually inspecting a person and deciding whether they are male or female.  Much of what we are comes down to the expression of our genes.

For hardened racists, it can be somewhat troubling and disconcerting to discover that we are both all and no races.  That a person who may live in Europe and whose family has been there for generations has components of their genetic code that prove incontrovertibly that they have African ancestors.

This doesn’t matter unless you enter a situation where hard rules are enforced, like South Africa’s racial rules of the Apartheid era.  The same is also true of gender.  It doesn’t much matter unless you wish to have children, or to compete in sporting events.

During the fertilisation of an egg by a sperm, the female egg has its X chromosome complemented by either of an X or Y chromosome from the sperm.  This results in a typical XX or XY paring.  However, in one pairing per thousand, something slightly different happens.

According to the Textbook of Sexual Medicine, “During the first weeks of development, genetic male and female fetuses are anatomically indistinguishable, with primitive gonads beginning to develop during approximately the sixth week of gestation. The gonads, in a bipotential state, may develop into either testes (the male gonads) or ovaries (the female gonads) depending on consequent events.”

The most common cause of sexual ambiguity is congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), an endocrine disorder in which the adrenal glands produce abnormally high levels of virilizing hormones.  This results in genetic females (XX chromosomes) producing male characteristics as they become extremely sensitive to male hormones.  Conversely, a genetic male (XY) could become insensitive to androgens, resulting in female characteristics.  And there are a wide range of other variations.

Milton Diamond, a prominent gender researcher, says this, “Foremost, we advocate use of the terms “typical,” “usual,” or “most frequent” where it is more common to use the term “normal.” When possible avoid expressions like maldeveloped or undeveloped, errors of development, defective genitals, abnormal, or mistakes of nature. Emphasize that all of these conditions are biologically understandable while they are statistically uncommon.”

In other words, while some of the impacts of these gender events can be disturbing for some, and statistically rare, they are all normal aspects of our genetic makeup.  Far from making race and gender simpler, modern genetics has made pure categorisation almost impossible.

All of this may be scant support for Caster Semenya as she undergoes the public scrutiny which has followed her victory in the 800 metres at the World Championships.

In every-day life, it certainly doesn’t matter what gender she may be. 

In the brutal world of competitive athletics, it is important.  This has nothing to do with the politics of gender or race, but it does with the arbitrary limitations required of competitive sport. 

Life is full of arbitrary definitions: from the legal voting age, to official retirement, to age categories for sporting events. The International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) is enforcing its rules no less arbitrarily, but those happen to be the known rules for international competition.

The debate about racism or sexism is pitched as being about accepting predefined stereotypes and labels, not about chucking them in the bin.  Race is an arbitrary measure of human difference.  So is gender.  Yet we don’t throw away the labels, we just force people into them and then demand tolerance of people because of those labels.  Isn’t that discrimination as well?

The real hope of this current row over the gender of one person is that maybe we can start accepting people for what they are, rather than in stereotyping people and then choosing whether to accept or reject those stereotypes.

[Cross-posted from Africagenome.com]

Further reading

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex

http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2008/jul/30/olympicgames2008.gender

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_differentiation

http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2009/aug/23/caster-semenya-athletics-gender

http://www.thetimes.co.za/News/Article.aspx?id=1055314

• ACCCE hired Bonner, but didn’t notify Congress of forgeries when they were discovered
• Cash for Clunkers doesn’t do much for climate
• National Academy of Sciences: we need independent GHG emission confirmation
• Climate disruption may, or may not, make disease worse

Before the House voted on the American Climate and Energy Security Act (ACES) earlier this year, someone hired Bonner & Associates (hereafter Bonner) to manufacture some grassroots opposition against ACES. At least one employee did so by forging letters from non-existent people to Representative Tom Perriello of Virginia. These letters were discovered, Bonner claims to have fired the employee, and a partner at Bonner apologized to the two minority groups from which the letters were supposedly sent. The apologies were, it’s fair to say, emphatically not accepted.

Since the Bonner story broke last Friday, there have been a lot of new information about who hired them, whether there were other Congresspeople who received forged letters, the legality or lack thereof, and an official response from a House committee with subpoena powers.

We now know that Bonner sent at least 12 letters to three different Congresspeople – the aforementioned Rep. Perriello, Rep. Kathy Dahlkemper, and Rep. Christopher Carney, both of Pennsylvania. We also know that these 12 letters were identified by Bonner and brought to the attention of the clients. And, as of Wednesday, we also know that two more letters have turned up in Rep. Perriello’s office – these forged on letterhead belonging to the Jefferson Area Board for Aging and the American Association of University Women. We don’t presently know if these two additional letters are part of the 12 discovered by Bonner or whether they represent two additional letters, for a total of 14 forged letters.

We also know that the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE) was the end client (via another PR company, the Hawthorn Group, which has released its own statement) who had hired Bonner to create the grassroots backlash against ACES – they admitted so in a statement by ACCCE president Stephen L. Miller on their Website. It reads, in part:

We are outraged at the conduct of Bonner and Associates. Bonner and Associates was hired by the Hawthorn Group – our primary grassroots contractor – to do limited outreach earlier this year on H.R. 2454. Based upon the information we have, it is clear that an employee of Bonner’s firm failed to demonstrate the integrity we demand of all our contractors and subcontractors. As a result, these egregious actions led to falsified letters being sent to Members of Congress.

ACCCE has always maintained high ethical and professional standards. In this case, the standards and practices that we require for grassroots advocacy outreach were not adhered to by Bonner and Associates. In this sense, the community groups involved, the Members of Congress who received the fraudulent letters, as well as ACCCE, were all victimized by this misconduct.

However, we also know that the ACCCE knew about the forgeries at least two days before the House vote and did not inform Congress of that fact. This comes from an ACCCE document describing the relationship between the ACCCE and Bonner:

Based upon information ACCCE received from the Hawthorn Group, it was Bonner & Associates’ own internal that identified these false letters and it was Mr. Bonner who first brought this to the attention of the Hawthorn Group. ACCCE was then made aware of the situation by Hawthorn on July 24, 2009.

The House Roll Call vote on ACES occurred on July 26, 2009.

The Sierra Club announced on Monday that it had mailed a letter to Attorney General Holder asking the Department of Justice to investigate whether Bonner’s actions were legal or not. The letter from Patrick Gallagher, Sierra Club Legal Counsel, reads in part:

First, the Department of Justice should ascertain whether forged letters were sent to other Representatives or Senators…. Second, the Department of Justice should investigate whether other community organizations were similarly misrepresented…. Finally, the Department of Justice should pursue criminal charges against Bonner & Associates.

At a minimum, Bonner & Associates, acting through its employees or representatives, appears to have violated 18 U.S.C. 1343 (”Fraud by wire, radio, or television”) and 19 U.S.C. 1346 (”Definition of ’scheme or artifice to defraud’”).

Representative Edward Markey, Chairman of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, sent a letter to Jack Bonner with a list of 14 questions to be answered by August 12, 2009. S&R obtained a copy of the letter – you can read it here. Some of the more interesting questions from the letter can be summarized as follows:

1. Who did you do your lobbying for, is your client a registered lobbying firm, and how much did did they pay you?
2. Did Bonner lobby other Congresspeople on ACES and for what clients?
3. Give us details (compensation, contractor vs. employee status, etc.) about the employee you claim to have fired.
4. If you script your employees, give us copies of those scripts.
5. We want copies of all faked letters Bonner sent to any Congressperson, and we also want to know how you got ahold of actual letterhead from the two minority groups from which letters were forged.
6. Explain how you caught the fakes and what methods you used to ensure that you found all the faked letters and their recipients, and if you destroyed anyting, we want to know that too.

Rep. Markey has also sent a letter to the ACCCE demanding answers to questions similar to those posed to Bonner. S&R has also obtained a copy of this letter and you can read it here. It says, in part:

Press reports indicate that ACCCE may not have told the other affected offices that they too had received fraudulent letters until Monday, August 3, 2009.

The deliberate inaction prior to the House vote and the extended silence after the House vote – some 40 days after the ACCCE knew what had happened – raises serious concerns.

This story is still developing, and S&R will bring you periodic updates as the become available.

———-

Cash for Clunkers doesn’t do much for climate

According to an Associated Press article, Cash for Clunkers (C4C) has not had an appreciable effect on U.S. consumption of oil or its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. According to the article, C4C reduced oil consumption by about 72 million gallons of gas per year, or the amount of gasoline consumed by Americans every 4.5 hours. Similarly, the GHG savings equates to about saving 57 minutes of GHG emissions per year.

The problem is that the estimated number of clunkers removed from the roads is only 250 thousand, compared to at total of approximately 260 million cars in the U.S.

There are certainly benefits to this program, but according to the individuals interviewed for the AP story, the benefits aren’t GHGs. Instead, the benefits are to the economy as a whole and the reduction of standard pollutants like sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and carbon monoxide. But two climate experts interviewed for the article had this to say about it:

“As a carbon dioxide policy, this is a terribly wasteful thing to do,” said Henry Jacoby, a professor of management and co-director of the Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change at MIT. “The amount of carbon you are saving per federal expenditure is very, very small.”

and

“It’s not that it’s a bad idea; just don’t sell it as a cost-effective energy savings method,” [Michael Gerrard, director of the Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University,] said. “From an economic standpoint it seems to be a roaring success. From an environment and energy perspective, it’s not where you would put your first dollar.”

It’s also entirely possible that these complaints are actually the tip of the metaphorical iceberg. As S&R reported last month, GHG and pollution emissions vary with the total lifecycle of that transportation method. For this reason, replacing “clunkers” that aren’t truly clunkers could actually increase GHG and pollution emissions as a result of the emissions created in the process of manufacturing the new vehicle.

Whether this is actually so remains for someone else to determine.

———-

National Academy of Sciences: we need independent GHG emission confirmation

Last week, the National Academy of Sciences’ (NAS) Committee on Methods for Estimating Greenhouse Gas Emissions and the National Research Council sent NASA administrator Charles Bolden a letter expressing their support for the replacement of the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) that failed to reach orbit earlier this year. The letter says that a replacement OCO is necessary for independent verification of carbon emissions reports that are presently self-reported by nations on an irregular basis.

National emission inventories, required under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, are self-reported and are not required regularly for all countries. Verification requires checking these self-reported emissions estimates. However, independent data against which to verify the statistics used to estimate CO2 emissions, such as fossil fuel consumption, are not available.

In addition, while the Japanese GOSAT has the ability to monitor CO₂, the letter claims that GOSAT’s spatial resolution is too low and it’s accuracy insufficient to measure the emissions of a power plant against the background CO₂.

The letter points out that, while OCO’s short on-orbit lifetime and poor global coverage makes OCO unsuitable to observe trends, but that OCO would be an ideal testbed for the technologies that could monitor the entire globe for years or decades at a time. And given the significant limitations of terrestrial monitoring of GHGs, satellites will be necessary to confirm the self-reported national emissions.

———-

Climate disruption may, or may not, make disease worse

It’s long been a tenet of climate disruption that increasing global temperatures will result in a wider range for tropical diseases and thus greater incidence of disease. But a feature article in Conservation Magazine asks a number of questions about the accuracy of this understanding and ultimately concludes that there are too many unknowns at this point to really know how diseases will respond to a warming world.

The basic problem is this: when there are so many other possible factors in the spread of disease, how can you accurately attribute the wider spread of a disease to climate disruption? The examples provided in the article illustrate this difficulty.

According to the article, tick-borne encephalitis (TBE) increased in the Baltics at the same time that the region warmed up significantly. But the Soviet Union collapsed over the same period as well, and the rate of poverty rose as a result. Since poorer people are less likely to get vaccinated and are more likely to forage for food in areas where ticks are more common, TBE researcher, Sarah Randolph concluded that “the disease surge probably had far more to do with human actions than planetary changes.”

Mosquitoes are some of the most prolific disease vectors in the world, spreading malaria and West Nile Virus among dozens of other pathogens and parasites. According to the article, West Nile cases in the U.S. appear to have more to do with the lifecycles of the mosquitoes that carry the virus than with climate change. Specifically, in the western U.S., West Nile cases spike the year after a dry year, while West Nile cases spike in wet years in the eastern U.S. These differences result from the relationship between different mosquitoes and their predators. Hot years in the West kill off mosquito predators and the mosquitoes recover before the predators do, leading to an increase in mosquitoes and accompanying West Nile cases. In the East, however, mosquitoes breed in standing water (water-filled tires, for example), and so rainier years produce more mosquitoes and more West Nile cases.

However, the data is only over a few short years, and whether this relationship holds for longer periods is, as yet, undetermined. But the observed reaction of West Nile to precipitation and heat illustrates that whether the disease gets more common and widespread or not will vary from region to region.

The questions are not limited just to human disease and parasites – how animal parasites, and the animals afflicted, will change as a result of climate disruption is also uncertain. According to the article, monarch butterflies are often afflicted by a parasite that makes the butterflies less able to fly long distances. Because so many monarchs migrate to Mexico, the migrating butterfly population remains healthy. But non-migrating monarchs in Florida have a much higher incidence of parasite infection than the migrating monarchs do. And so it’s possible that, if monarch wintering sites move further north out of Mexico and into Texas, the incidence of parasitic infection in monarch butterflies could rise.

But other parasites, such as those that infect musk ox in the Arctic, may respond differently, according to the article. The parasites infect the musk ox via accidental ingestion of slugs. If climate disruption kills off the slugs, then musk ox may actually get healthier as a result of climate disruption.

At this point there’s not enough information to know.

Image credits:
PhotoCarsOnline.com
NASA/JPL

Q: Let’s say you’re sick with a potentially deadly disease. Who do you want for a doctor?
A: The smartest, most experienced and highly qualified expert in the field.

Q: You’re looking to invest your life savings. Who do you trust to handle your money?
A: The brightest, most agile financial mind I can find.

Q: You’ve been selected to participate in a “private citizens in space” program. Who do you want in charge of building the rocket?
A: The most brilliant and reliable engineers in the nation.

So far, so good. One more.

Q: You live in a time of unimaginable complexity and danger. Who do want to be the leader of the free world?
A: Somebody I can have a beer with. You know, a regular guy, a Joe Sixpack.

It’s said that people tend to get the leaders they deserve, and I can’t imagine better proof than the United States. At present we’re watching as a new president attempts to arm-tackle an array of national political and economic crises of evil supervillain jailbreak proportions, and at this early stage it’s far from clear that he’s Rushmore-bound.

• He may or may not get health care reform passed, and if he does it may or may not be as comprehensive as the programs pursued by previous arch-progressives Richard Nixon and Dwight Eisenhower.
• He may or may not bog us down in a vastly expanded quagmire in Afghanistan, although at present only an idiot would bet on him meeting his campaign promises regarding getting the heck out of Iraq.
• He may or may not decide to honor the pledges he made to the gay community.
• He may or may not spearhead a green revolution that saves the species from itself.
• And his economic policies may boost us to new, unprecedented levels of universal prosperity. Or they may plummet us nards-first into a meat grinder of a global recession so epic it will make the Great Depression look like a weekend in the Hamptons.

So the jury is still out on Mr. Obama. But… While past performance is no guarantee of future results, there’s also that thing about those who don’t understand history being doomed to repeat it. And America’s history of electing dolts, buffoons, scoundrels, knaves, low-jackers, pig-fuckers, gomers, dog-whistlers, Kloset Klansmen, recidivists and sheep pimps to the Highest Elected Office in the Land does not make one optimistic about the prospects for Barackapalooza. I’d love to be wrong, but let’s be honest. An indicator that can pick a loser 100% of the time is every bit as valuable to the shrewd investor as one that always picks the winner, and the Electoral College is as reliable a Finger of Doom as the world has ever seen.

Let’s review, shall we?

George W. Bush: Worst president ever? Dumbest president ever? Hard to say for certain, although put me down for “hell, yes.” The nation apparently elected a string of semi-housebroken wombats in the 1800s, and contemporary polling feels obliged, in the name of “balance,” to humor the estimations of conservative “scholars” who rate him the sixth-best ever. For my money, that opinion alone is sufficient for the credentialing institution to revoke the PhD, but such is the price we pay for the privilege of living in an society that not only tolerates fools gladly, it gives them television shows.

Bill Clinton: In so many ways, Clinton was the archetypal president of our age. He was the distilled, undiluted essence of the modern political animal. He was like everything in Washington, only moreso. And I don’t mean that in the good way.

Bubba may not be the man who invented the Republican wing of the Democratic Party, but he was damned sure the one who established it as the only wing that mattered. The irony, of course, was that he was reviled by the GOP. I’ve always wondered if the source of that rage was that Clinton was a better Republican than they were.

In addition, he cheapened the office at every turn: whether renting out the Lincoln Bedroom to the highest bidder, pardoning Marc Rich or “hiking the Appalachian Trail” like mink freebasing Viagra, it seemed as though his every action left us feeling the need for a shower. From the poor house to the penthouse to the whore house, we’ve never seen anything like him. God willing, we never will again.

George HW Bush: It’s still hard to fathom how this mealy-mouthed little wimp stumbled into the White House. All the Democrats had to do in 1988 was find a candidate with a pulse. Instead, they trotted out Mike Dukakis, a man with all the charisma and passion of an accountant on a phenobarbital drip.

Bush the Elder was the latest incarnation of an established and thoroughly corrupt dynasty, and between him and his fuckwit kids there is no better argument, could be no better argument, in favor of a 100% inheritance tax. If they’d had to earn anything on their own merit their only entree into a country club would be as assistant assistant assistant greenskeepers reporting to Carl Spackler at Bushwood.

Ronald Reagan: Wow. Where to start. Back in the 1960s Marshall McLuhan, in writing about where television was taking the culture, predicted Reagan in terms so accurate that you’d think you were reading a history instead of a precognition. The only thing missing was the name and home address. The failing in McLuhan’s analysis, if there was one, was this: as cynical as he was, the reality turned out to be even worse than he feared.

Ronnie was as anti-intellectual a leader as we could have imagined prior to Dubya. A man who somehow managed to remain immensely popular despite the fact that most Americans disagreed with his policies. One of the most corrupt collections of advisors, staffers and appointees in history. And the man who represented the grand triumph of years and years of scheming by wealthy conservatives bent on by god rolling the rich-poor gap back to feudal levels. An intellectually void, amoral cesspool of a human being who will nonetheless go down as one of our “great” presidents.

Jimmy Carter: Carter has the distinction of being one of the very few politicians that Hunter Thompson ever said anything nice about, and his record since leaving the White House has made clear what an outstanding statesman and humanitarian Carter really is. History will not mark him down as the most adept practitioner of the presidential arts, however, and for those who bemoan the erosion of the line between church and state, let’s remember just how very publicly Baptist Jimmy was. Now, thanks in part to him, we’ll never get the smell of the fundamentalists out of the furniture. (Which reminds me – Phish is playing four dates at Red Rocks, so those of us who live in downtown Denver are hoping the wind isn’t blowing straight west-to-east for the next few days.)

Gerald Ford: Nice enough guy, seemed like. For a politician and all. But he wasn’t ever elected.

Richard Nixon: Please tell me we don’t really need to talk about this one.

Lyndon Johnson: Ever heard of Vietnam? It’s hard to recall the last time somebody took an idea so bad and managed to make it even worse. He does get credit for important civil rights legislation, at least.

Still, in the final analysis he was a president from Texas with a lust for illicit, unwinnable wars. If that reminds you of somebody else, don’t blame me. I’m just reporting the facts.

John F. Kennedy: He invaded Cuba, and once the troops started landing he changed his mind. He nearly got us into a hot nukular shooting war. Then there was that Vietnam thing – he and LBJ can share this honor. Marilyn Monroe was either a plus or a minus, depending on where you stand with respect to the marital infidelity issue.

Ultimately, though, the only thing that saved his legacy was death. Had he lived to serve out his term(s) he’d be judged today based on his record, which falls somewhat short of the legend.

So, when was the last time America elected a president it could be proud of? By today’s standards Ike isn’t looking bad at all, and his two predecessors, FDR and Truman, also score high marks.

If you look at that chart in the link above, it seems like maybe the country’s ability to elect somebody half decent runs in cycles.

Let’s hope that’s the case, and that the wheel is turning back in our direction. Because damn, America is due.

If you happen to be the owner of a unique piece of art, say the Mona Lisa, and you decide to set fire to it, then that is a terrible tragedy, but it is your property.  No government should ever have the right to intervene.

Apartheid in South Africa was a crime against humanity.  You can argue the reasons.  Some say that it was racial prejudice translating into attempted genocide.  Others that it was a violation of human rights of equality and justice.

My take is that Apartheid got its start with the denial of property rights; that one group of people gave themselves a greater right to property than they did to others.  This spurious belief was used to boot black South Africans off their land and replace them with politically chosen beneficiaries of “land reform”.

The new South African government, after 1994, began a tortuous process of their own “land reform” in which the original owners of land – often dispersed and with limited proof of title – would be able to receive a fair hearing and just compensation.  So far so good.

However, the new government, at pains to bring about a transformation of the economy, chose to use this process as a way of ensuring that the majority of agricultural land should be owned by black people in toto.

The government is purchasing land for this purpose and then settling people on it.  Instead of just receiving restitution for the property that was stolen from them, victorious claimants were set up as small-scale cooperative farmers.  These new farmers are not allowed to sell the land they have been given.  They have no title to it and have become no more than indentured peasant farmers; slaves at the pleasure of the state.

The government pegged their success on the financial success of these subsistence farms.  It has been an abject failure.

The people being settled on these farms are now several generations away from the original land-owning farmers.  They have no experience of agriculture, or of how technical the profession has become.  Many of them don’t even want to be there.

“More than 21 properties in the Empangeni and Eshowe districts, and reportedly many more across KZN bought by the land affairs department, lie fallow, producing only weeds, dead trees and choked sugar cane,” according to the Natal Mercury.

The response from the Minister of Agriculture, Lulu Xingwana, has been total fury.  “I have instructed my directors-general to implement, with immediate effect, the principle of use it or lose it,” Xingwana.  “Those who do not use the land must immediately be removed and the land must be given to emerging farmers and co-operatives.”

In other words, people who had their land stolen from them by one government, who decided that they weren’t deserving enough of their property, are to have their land stolen from them again by another government which has decided that they are still “not worthy”.

The first and only objective of land restitution is just recompense for people who had their property stolen.  It was a mistake forcing land as compensation on people who did not want to own land.  They should have been given money.  Whatever they chose to do with that money would have been their own choice.

Instead of accepting the restitution process for what it is, government wants a trophy.  They demand that beneficiaries of the process demonstrate their gratitude to the state by performing and delivering successful agricultural businesses.

That is an outrageous demand and entirely unacceptable.  What’s next?  Snatching private businesses from entrepreneurs who fail to employ an appropriate number of people?

Enough.  Government made the mistake of conflating two independent objectives and is now compounding their error by abusing property rights.  Farmers will always be in the minority of both businesses and land-owners.  Whether those properties are owned by black-skinned people or white-skinned people is immaterial, and should be immaterial to a liberal democracy.

The only matter of importance is whether their property was acquired without force or fraud.  Something that governments are supposed to ensure.

He shouldn’t have, because he’s right.

Anyone who would support curtailing the civil rights of a minority group is un-American. Codifying discrimination in a state constitution or in the U.S. Constitution is un-American. And supporting people who aim to curtail civil rights and codify discrimination, as the LDS Church did with regard to Prop-8, is un-American.

And I’ll say this to anyone who supported Prop-8 – you acted un-American too.

The Truth Commission was unlike any trial the world had ever seen.  In exchange for complete disclosure about all past crimes, both known and unknown, claimants would be given complete absolution.  In the case of this one sweaty white man, his victim had asked that he demonstrate how he had tortured him.

Waterboarding has become famous.  Place a thick, heavy and wet fabric over your victim’s head, and then hold them stationary.  It causes no lasting physical damage, but gives a very real sense of drowning.  Anyone who has ever had a similar experience knows it is terrifying.

That was the least of what the Apartheid government authorised in the name of keeping their power.  “Red Dust”, the film of Gillian Slovo’s seminal book, details one such hearing into the brutal torture and murder of a small-town activist.  If you can find a copy of the film, please watch it, for the ordinariness of the people involved.  The opening music alone will make you weep.

And so we come to the nub.  We expect authoritarian regimes to torture and abuse people.  The violence is there, not to gain knowledge from conspirators, but to terrify the millions, as Mao would have it.

But what to make of it when liberal democracies declare that torture is essential if they are to protect that society?  George W Bush would have you believe that torture has saved thousands of Americans by allowing torturers to extract information in order to prevent future terrorist attacks.

Maybe this is true.  Maybe the only way to find out the exact details of when a train will be bombed, or an airline hijacked and flown into a building, is by beating the shit out of someone who knows.

But have you thought about the consequences of such an allowance?

Who would be your torturer?  Who would break fingers, electrify genitals, smash bones and teeth; not out of rage or passion, but as job?  What sort of person is this?

And do you really want to create a society where such a job is ordinary?

For then you will discover what South Africa discovered, that once the law is extended to allow such people a place, then such people congregate.  If torture is legal, then torturers proliferate.  The law is distorted to honour torturers, to encourage their indoctrination and training.  And your society becomes a dark and evil place.

There is no middle ground.  Either you decide that torture is inexcusable under any circumstances, and accept the consequences of that choice.

Or you choose torture.  For everyone.

In a pair of recent opinion pieces, Lind asserts that we shouldn’t let women and gays in the armed services because if we do, “men who want to prove they are real men will not join.”

Lind’s relative manliness doesn’t necessarily add to or subtract from his opinion’s validity, but unnamed sources who knew him when assure me that the closest he ever came to wearing a uniform was dressing his G.I. Joe doll in one.

Gays and Dolls

As one might expect a social conservative to do, Lind laces his positions with a number of intellectual subterfuges, not the least of which is filing gay men and women in the same pigeon hole. The go-to argument against women serving in the military is that they are, on average, smaller and weaker than their male counterparts and they can get pregnant, a consideration that doesn’t apply to gay men.

If you think that gay men are intrinsically less physically capable than their heterosexual counterparts, and you want to take a trip to the emergency room, I invite you to walk up to a homosexual member of the American Ballet Theater and call him a faggot. I doubt if there’s a segment of the population more physically prepared for direct placement into elite commando training than male dancers. (There are such things as heterosexual male dancers, by the way, and they generally don’t lack for the companionship of women who wouldn’t give either Lind or me the time of day).

But there’s more required of a fighter than physical toughness, according to Lind. “Throughout history,” he prates, “some armies have fought a lot harder than others. The specific reasons vary widely, but one way or another they all come down to human factors.” The most important human factor, Lind assures us, “is that men fight to prove they are real men.” Their membership in fighting organizations is a “badge of honor” that says, “We’re not sissies or pansies. We are men who fight, serving alongside other men who fight.” An infusion of sissies and pansies among the company of real men, Lind warns, could damage “military unit cohesion.”

Mr. Lind has a selective sense of military history and/or a blind notch in his Doppler gay-dar.

As a carrier skipper I served with said when President Bill Clinton enacted the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, “Sailors have been rubbing heinies since Sinbad reported to boot camp.” Soldiers have been sharing pup tents just as long.

The ancient Greeks believed that physical love between soldiers improved morale, bravery and overall battle efficiency. Plato, the philosophical father of the American political right, considered it utter stupidity to ban physical relationships between soldiers. “Wherever, therefore, it has been established that it is shameful to be involved in sexual relationships with men,” he wrote, “this is due to evil on the part of the rulers, and to cowardice in the part of the governed.”

In a song honoring the Lelantine War, Plato’s pupil Aristotle wrote that, “love…thrives side by side with courage.”

The Roman historian Plutarch noted that tribal ties were of little value “when dangers press, but a band cemented by friendship grounded upon love is never to be broken.”

Lind cautions that gay and straight men can’t mix in “very close quarters” without “serous friction.” I’ve got news for Lind: gay and straight men have been mixing in very close quarters in the American military without serious friction since forever, including those World War II John Wayne types that conservatives like Lind have such a school girl crush on.

They’re queer, Bill. They’re here, Bill. Now drop and give me fifty pushups (heh).

G.I. Jane

The notion of women serving in the military is hardly new either. Plato favored it. He wrote in Republic that women must be taught the “art of war, which they must practice like men.”

“Is she capable of sharing either wholly or partially in the actions of men, or not at all?” he asked. “And is the art of war one of those arts in which she can or can not share?” Then “let [women] share in the toils of war and the defense of their country… Only in the distribution of labors the lighter are to be assigned to the women, who are the weaker natures, but in other respects their duties are to be the same.”

Lind’s specific objection to letting women serve is that they might be allowed into “ground combat arms.” I’m not sure what he means by that. Women are and will be assigned to war zones in combat support capacities. So what? He may suppose that women inherently lack the “right stuff” for combat, but those Israeli Security Force babes who pull the trigger on those remote control machine guns along the Gaza Strip don’t appear to be lacking anything in the killer instinct department. If Lind is worried that women will elbow their way into Delta Force, he is, in Plato’s words, “plucking a fruit of unripe wisdom.” I don’t know of anyone who is seriously trying to make women into commandos, or of anyone who would take the notion seriously. Maybe Lind is confusing that movie where Demi Moore becomes a Navy SEAL with reality. Confusion about reality is, after all, a leading occupational hazard of conservatism.

I don’t claim that integrating women in the military has been a tribulation-free experience. In my day, the incidence of young single sailor girls getting themselves pregnant to get out of duties they didn’t care for was completely out of hand. We developed a pretty good solution though; all the single mommy strikers got discharged and sent home.

I’ve also known a fair number of female officers who benefitted from reverse discrimination, but not nearly as many as the number of male officers I knew who got where they got thanks to Uncle Admiral or Governor Grandpa or a godfather who had a village in the old country named after him. And never forget that whatever wartime leadership qualities George S. Patton possessed that allowed him to get away with his vainglorious shenanigans, he was also one of the richest dudes in the Army.

Lind’s bottom line isn’t that women and homosexuals serving in the military will impair America’s war making capability. He’s concerned about “cultural Marxism,” which is a code phrase narrow shouldered white male bigots intone when they sense that cultural Darwinism is about to bust them another pay grade or two down the social pyramid. By Lind’s criteria, emancipation was cultural Marxism, as was the ban on feeding Christians to lions.

There may be good arguments for barring women and gays from military service, but Lind doesn’t make them, and I haven’t heard any that make an ounce more sense than his do.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword . Jeff’s novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance, is on sale now. Also catch Scott Horton’s interview with Jeff at Antiwar Radio.

A person consists both of their being and of the works that their being produces. Whether those works are physical or as intangible as the time spent on a particular task.

A traditional Westminster approach to politics, with a typical Left / Right political duopoly, has become the gold standard of democratic representation. It is also conflicted and inherently incapable of resolving its core contradiction.

The way it is supposed to work is that Left-leaning parties are the parties of Collectivism while Right-leaning parties are the parties of Individualism.

Collectivism implies redistribution of wealth to look out for the marginalised or neglected members of society, and to ensure that everyone has equal opportunity.

Individualism implies innovation, uninhibited originality, wealth creation on an epic scale and each person rising to their own level of accomplishment.

The structure of the dynamic tension between the two political schools is designed to constrain the nightmare extreme scenarios of each approach. For Collectivism, that is the worst excesses of forced equality which impoverishes a nation and flattens innovation. For Individualism, it is the worst excesses of concentrated wealth that abandons a frustrated underclass to perpetual poverty in violent ghettos. A duality of parties that remains true to this ideal and recognises the threat from extremism of both their own and the other’s ideals is a very powerful social temper.

It provides its own feedback loop. As society twists one way, politics can twist the other, holding society in balance.

However, no more.

Each party is now hopelessly contradicted and the upshot is that neither side is capable of reconciling their objectives.

Parties of the Right have approached their mandate by supporting the rights of businesses, but not of individuals. As if you can accept the microwaves, toasters and high-definition televisions of the world, but not the people who made them.

Parties of the Left are no better, supporting the rights of people but bemoaning business. As if people have merit, but their works have none.

The Right provide bailouts and subsidies to businesses, while the Left provides entitlements and benefits to people. Somewhere in this has become cemented the belief that people – individuals – are separate from their works. That the works should be held accountable for their own existence and that people are the innocent victims of such works.

Labels, like “business” and “rich” and “poor”, are thrown around as if they’re not just distinct definitions, but unconnected, unrelated objects.

The truth will always be that they are not. It is impossible to promote individuals without also promoting their works.

A political party that promotes people may find that it cannot control their works, or the way that such works concentrate wealth. Spurts of inequality are an inevitable result of the innovation that results from individual freedom. A political party that promotes business may find that it cannot control the personal expressions, or social interactions, of the people who produce. An increasing space for alternative lifestyles is a natural consequence of business freedom to create consumer choice.

These inherent contradictions have become so entrenched that it is scarcely surprising that the most passionate devotees of either side sound so peculiarly detached and unhinged.

Until leaders reconcile these two contradictory approaches they will never return to the dynamic tension which enabled the innovation that built their societies in the first place.

Agents will be allowed to use informants to infiltrate lawful groups, engage in prolonged physical surveillance and lie about their identity while questioning a subject’s neighbors, relatives, co-workers and friends.

[The EPA is] expected to issue a final rule that would make it easier for coal-fired power plants to locate near national parks in defiance of longstanding Congressional mandates to protect air quality in areas of special natural or recreational value. Interior also is awaiting E.P.A.’s concurrence on a proposal that would make it easier for mining companies to dump toxic mine wastes in valleys and streams.

Existing law allows doctors and nurses to refuse to participate in an abortion. These changes would extend the so-called right to refuse to a wide range of health care workers and activities including abortion referrals, unbiased counseling and provision of birth control pills or emergency contraception, even for rape victims.

At the time I wondered why he didn’t just wait until after the election to push through these draconian orders. It turns out he was trying to sneak in under the deadline so that these changes can’t be easily reversed.

Apparently, regulations that aren’t finalized, meaning signed as an executive order within the last 60 days, can be easily reversed by Congress in an unfilibustable up-or-down vote. Since Democrats have a strong hold on both houses, that could be easily done. But orders that are issued beyond that 60 day limit can only be undone after investigations, comment periods, reviews, committees and sub-committees and the like, which could take years.

But hold on to your official White-House-branded pen – that’s not all she wrote. A clause in the Congressional Review Act of 1996 that Clinton signed into law stated that “any regulation finalized within 60 legislative days of congressional adjournment is considered to have been legally finalized on the 15th legislative day of the new Congress, likely sometime in February. Congress then has 60 days to review it and reverse it with a joint resolution that can’t be filibustered in the Senate.”

That means that Executive Orders signed within the last six months can be eliminated with a quick party-line vote. This even applies to regulations that have already been enacted.

So you don’t have to worry about all that scary quote block above you, or any future lame moves that duck might do. The only thing left for Bush is figure out how many pardons to give out.

Update: It looks like the MSM is picking up on this. Here is the Associated Press’s take on it.

As I was saying, I’m already tired of hearing about how Obama’s election was historic. Not because it’s not true, but rather because it’s already overdone. I lost count of the number of times I heard the phrase “historic election” even before President-elect Obama took the stage in Chicago election night, never mind all the times I’ve heard it on the radio and read it on nearly every webpage, blog, and news site I’ve visited since election night.

There’s another reason I’m sick of the phrase, too. It’s not enough.

It’s not enough to just elect the first black man to be President. It’s not enough to elect the first biracial man to be President. It’s not enough to elect someone who actually knows what it’s like to live on food stamps. It’s not enough to elect a compentent President after 8 years of rank presidential incompetence. It’s not enough that Obama organized the youth of this country into a force to be reckoned with. In fact, no matter how historic Obama’s election is, it’s not enough.

Enough already with the “historic election”. The election of Barack Obama was only the first step. In 10 or 20 years, what will define whether President Obama’s election was truly historic won’t be that he was black, or mixed race, or anything else I mentioned above. Instead, it will be what he does during his administration.

If Obama gets the U.S. out of Iraq without leaving a mess we’ll have to re-invade to fix later, that will be historic.

If Obama puts an end to the Taliban and al Qaeda in the tribal regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan without provoking a war with Pakistan, that will be historic.

If Obama keeps the country from slipping into a second depression, that will be historic.

If Obama puts the U.S. onto a path of oil independence without relying on environmentally destructive shale and coal-to-liquids programs, that will be historic.

If Obama leads the U.S. to a renewable energy standard and strips away market-distorting carbon fuel subsidies, that will be historic.

If Obama leads the country in upgrading our collapsing water, transportation, and energy infrastructure, that will be historic.

If Obama helps Congress develop a solution to the linked problems of entitlements, defense spending, and national debt, that will be historic.

If Obama can rebuild our relations with the rest of the world, that will be historic.

If Obama can cut U.S. carbon emissions in the short time the best science available says we have, and can get the rest of the world to do the same, that will be historic.

If Obama can reduce the costs of health care, provide health care to the millions of Americans who lack it at present, and maintain the quality and freedom our health care system provides at present, that will be historic.

If Obama can implement all the economic, regulatory, scientific, technological, social, cultural, and diplomatic changes required to do everything I just listed off, at the same time, and still deal with all the other things that will come up, that will be historic.

President-elect Barack Obama will always be the first black President. No-one will ever be able to take that from him, and no one should try. But there will come a time when our next President’s “blackness” will be an important historical footnote. And when that happens, when Obama’s race has been relegated to the status of a footnote by the accomplishments of his presidency, that too will be historic.

It will also, ultimately, be enough.

“If the polls are right, if it don’t rain and the creek don’t rise, the winner of the presidential election is sure to be . . . Lyndon Baines Johnson. When he signed the epochal Civil Rights Act of 1964, Johnson knew he was also signing away the South and, with it, much of the white vote elsewhere as well. “We have lost the South for a generation,” he supposedly said back then.

A significant number of southern whites, even men, figure to vote for Barack Obama. Cohen cites blacks who have excelled in high-profile fields like politics and entertainment. Since most southern and conservative white men don’t care about politics and are unmoved by Oprah and Denzel Washington, what would make them vote for a black man?

Consider where they might have interacted with or observed blacks in positions of authority? Some no doubt have been supervised by blacks on jobs. But that’s more likely to build resentment than respect.

But there are four other positions accorded unalloyed respect, where blacks are found more and more often these days: 1. Drill sergeants. 2. High school quarterbacks and coaches. 3. NFL quarterbacks (especially the toughest, like Steve McNair). 4. NFL coaches, like Art Shell and Tony Dungy.

Serving under and observing blacks in military and sports leadership positions — and learning that they’re at least as capable as whites of leading them to success — has probably done more to soften up conservative whites to consider voting for Obama as much as anything.

James Dobson and the Christian Right activists at Focus on the Family seem to have forgotten that scriptural promise.  Then again, there is a great deal of the Bible they seem to have forgotten, or chosen to blatantly ignore.  Their real “focus” is on scare tactics to frighten conservative evangelicals away from any flirtation with voting for Barack Obama, who may as well be the devil incarnate masquerading beneath a veneer of seductive charisma.

The latest instrument in this campaign of emotional intimidation is a “Letter from 2012 in Obama’s America,” [download PDF at website] produced by Focus on the Family Action, the PAC arm of Dobson’s organization.  The document is so over the top that it’s garnered the usual media buzz, which is the goal of the group’s media strategy, according to Focus senior vice president Tom Minnery.  Unfortunately, the press finds such extremism more riveting than the message of a Christian political organization like Matthew 25 that supports Obama and candidates who are likely to promote the moral values expressed in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, and which takes as its scriptural mandate Jesus’ words in Matthew 25:40, “I tell you the truth, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.”

Whoever crafted the 15-page letter clearly had a creative heyday while indulging paranoia at an unprecedented level.  The letter, which is as likely to amuse as to appall most Christians who are more moderate and rational than Dobson’s devotees, outlines a world so transformed in just four years that it has become unrecognizable.  Consider these 15 (and the letter contains more) “natural” outcomes if Obama is elected, most of which are fomented after a 6-3 liberal majority takes over the U.S. Supreme Court:

• Boy Scouts disband after refusing to allow homosexual scoutmasters to sleep in the same tent as young boys

• First-graders get “compulsory training in varieties of gender identity,” and parents can no longer opt out of school-based sex ed for their kids

• Churches are declared “public accommodations” and forced to offer marriage ceremonies for homosexual couples

• Military must offer “sensitivity training” for troops forced to accept enlisted homosexuals

• The Supreme Court declares that “proselytizing speech” does not have the same protection as other speech, and Christian ministries are banned from college campuses

• Nurses who do not wish to participate in abortions will lose their jobs, and doctors who deliver babies at hospitals must perform abortions or lose their licenses

• The FCC nullifies all restrictions on obscene speech or visual portrayals on TV, and it’s now a 24-hour non-stop diet of explicit porn

• States are allowed to ban guns, and illegal gun-owners face stiff fines or prison terms

• Home-schoolers are forced to use state-approved curricula, and rather than do so, many emigrate to New Zealand or Australia where they may teach without restrictions

• The U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq prompts a take-over by Al Qaeda, which in turn has carried out terrorist attacks on four U.S. cities

• Russia reclaims most of the old Soviet bloc, including the Baltic states, Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic and Bulgaria while UN & NATO fail to take action

• Latin America topples toward communism as the U.S.’s pro-Chavez policies give Venezuela more weight

• A single-payer national health care system has banned hospital admissions for anyone over 80

• Periodic blackouts are the norm after a moratorium is instituted on new oil drilling, nuclear plants and CO2-emitting coal power plants

• Business owners and entrepreneurs have moved overseas in droves to avoid higher taxes, with a huge loss of U.S. jobs

Wow, that’s one efficient administration.  Even when G.W. Bush had both houses of Congress, a majority of Supreme Court appointees, and two-thirds of federal judgeships in his court, the American political and cultural landscape held relatively steady.  That’s not to say that another four years of Republican control wouldn’t instigate a significant shift farther right – or that change won’t happen under Obama — but a scenario like the one Focus paints in this letter is as ridiculous as it is underhanded in its efforts to exploit the worries of religious conservatives who are beholden to fear rather than faith.

And to push the insult further, it turns out that some Christians themselves will be to blame.  As the letter’s author, “A Christian in 2012,” states in an effort to explain how all this happened, “In 2008 many evangelicals thought that Senator Obama was an opportunity for a ‘change,’ and they voted for him. They simply did not realize Obama’s far-left agenda would take away many of our freedoms as a nation, perhaps permanently…[allowing] the law, in the hands of a liberal Congress and Supreme Court, to become a great instrument of oppression.”

As a result of these naïve voters’ ignorance, the country has become a pawn in the takeover by “the agenda of the ACLU, the agenda of liberal activist judges in their dissenting opinions, the agenda of the homosexual activists, the agenda of the environmental activists, the agenda of the National Education Association, the agenda of the global warming activists, the agenda of the abortion rights activists, the agenda of the gun control activists, the agenda of the euthanasia supporters, the agenda of the one-world government pacifists, [and] the agenda of far-left groups in Canada and Europe.”  Heaven help us.  That’s a lot of agendas.

Capitalizing on fear has been a mainstay in the religious right’s persuasion tactics, just as absolutist governments have perpetuated through history.  Fear has always been the most powerful weapon tyrants have utilized to engineer consent to power, or to mobilize people into attacking other nations, races, ethnic groups or cultures. It is always fear that precedes fascism.  And it is ironic that in trumpeting the threats to freedom posed by this litany of “leftist” agendas, Focus on the Family and its ilk would seek to replace existing freedoms with a form of government that leans dangerously toward theocracy.

But the greater irony is that the “gospel” of Jesus translates to “good news,” not “be afraid.”  The Book of Matthew tells the story of the good news Jesus brings to the poor, the grieving, the hungry, the persecuted, the meek, the merciful, the pure of heart, and the peacemakers.  It is these, the scriptures say, who will be blessed, comforted, satisfied, and who shall see God.

Not once does the Jesus of the New Testament express concern over homosexuality as the greatest threat to the Kingdom of God.  Rather – as is made clear in the more than 2,000 verses in the Bible critiquing the love of money – it is being consumed with materialism and one’s own well-being at the ignorance and expense of others.

In Matthew 25:42-45, Jesus says, “For I was hungry, and you gave me no meat.  I was thirsty, and you gave me no drink.  I was a stranger, and you took me not in; naked, and you clothed me not; sick, and in prison, and you did not visit me.  Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when did we see you hungry, thirsty, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto you?  He answered them, saying, I tell you the truth: inasmuch as you did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not to me.”

Imagine a letter from 2012 in which genuine Christian values – an agenda for “the least of these” – were to prevail.  Now that would be a transformed world.  In the meantime, Dobson and his supporters would do well to heed the words of David in the Psalms: “The Lord is my Shepherd, whom shall I fear?”  Indeed, the most frequently expressed command in the Bible is “be not afraid “ or “do not fear.”  Focus on the Family’s political agenda is thus neither Christian, nor right.

There’s a rising tide on the rivers of blood
But if the answer isn’t violence, neither is your silence

- Pop Will Eat Itself, “Ich Bin Ein Auslander”

When all is said and done, nothing communicates the racism and knee-buckling stupidity of all-too-wide swaths of our nation quite like video. So if you don’t trust me to tell the truth about these folks, maybe you’ll trust their own words.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here, for your copying-and-pasting convenience, is a transcription of some of what you just heard:

“I’m afraid if he wins, the blacks will take over. He’s not a Christian! This is a Christian nation! What is our country gonna end up like?”

“When you got a Nigger running for president, you need a first stringer. He’s definitely a second stringer.”

“He seems like a sheep – or a wolf in sheep’s clothing to be honest with you. And I believe Palin – she’s filled with the Holy Spirit, and I believe she’s gonna bring honesty and integrity to the White House.”

“He’s related to a known terrorist, for one.”

“He is friends with a terrorist of this country!”

“He must support terrorists! You know, uh, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it must be a duck. And that to me is Obama.”

“Just the whole, Muslim thing, and everything, and everybody’s still kinda – a lot of people have forgotten about 9/11, but… I dunno, it’s just kinda… a little unnerving.”

“Obama and his wife, I’m concerned that they could be anti-white. That he might hide that.”

“I don’t like the fact that he thinks us white people are trash… because we’re not!”

As I always told my writing students: show, don’t tell.

Clearing a Low Bar

Welcome to a state where the politics of hate
Shout loud in the crowd “Watch
them beat us all down.”

At this point, I’m trying to imagine what I can add that isn’t superfluous. That racism still exists, in tragic amounts, isn’t a revelation to anyone with more than six or seven functioning brain cells, although being confronted anew with this kind of evidence is still jarring.

What’s different, though, is what I said back in June.

Make no mistake, in the coming months you’re going to see the ugliest artillery that our nation’s drooling, inbred hatemongers have at their disposal. The looming prospect of a nigra in the White House is going to bring the vermin out of the woodwork, out from under their rocks and out into the light. It’s going to incite the well-heeled country club elite to crank up the meme machine with every sort of subtle, codemongering dogwhistle it can manufacture. The truly ignorant and hateful are going to be liquored up on rhetorical bile of the lowest sort and those who live further up the social ladder are going to be provided with a variety of messages that let them vote white without having to admit to themselves that they’re fundamentally just like the snuff-suckers in the trailer park across the tracks.

This is a good thing. Let me say that again: this is a good thing.

It’s a good thing because we’ll never defeat an enemy that can safely hide from scrutiny. This is a disease that’s only going to be cured with copious amounts of very bright light.

We will not fear your mask. Because what we believe in doesn’t need to hide.

In this election campaign, let’s invite the Klan and its fellow hate groups out into the light. Let’s get their hoods off of them. Let’s show all their videos. Let’s make sure that everybody gets to read their brochures and visit their Web sites. Let’s hand the microphone to their most eloquent speakers and stand aside. Let’s get them front and center and make sure America sees, in all its slack-jawed, toothless glory, precisely what racism looks like.
…
And above all, when we hear racist code masquerading as legitimate, issues-based messaging, let’s not be afraid to say “excuse me, but will you take off your hood?”

It’s decision time, and I’m ready for a referendum on hate. How about you?

Regardless of what happens on Election Day, we won’t have triumphed finally and completely over ignorance. Our culture is, at its very core, anti-intellectual and frighteningly tolerant of the willfully stupid. We fetishize shallowness and vote on whether or not we’d like to have a beer with the candidate. We mock “elites,” sort of. We’re too thick to recognize real elitism when we see it, but we can be relentless in our abuse of those born to meager means who, through little but their own intelligence and hard work, rise up to make something of themselves. Our ability for self-deception is unmatched in the entire civilized world.

But an Obama victory (which looks more likely by the day) would nonetheless mark a milestone: we would have arrived at a point where a man of non-white (or half non-white, as the case may be) heritage can be elected to our highest office. As my colleague Whythawk has observed, that actually says something pretty good about America, given how few of our fellow industrialized nations can say the same.

“We suck less,” though, isn’t the sort of shining-city-on-the-hill standard America has traditionally prided itself on setting (even if only rhetorically), and while being the first to clear a very low bar is something to note, it’s not something to get too puffed up over. This is especially true when we have millions of citizens howling for the corpse of Barack Obama. It’s especially true when our media institutions ignore the filthiness happening right before their eyes. It’s especially true when these disgusting public spectacles are funded by a hyper-rich power elite that’s willing to spend whatever it takes to keep us ignorant and at each other’s throats.

As for the premise that McCain is no racist, well … racist is as racist does, don’t you think? He got his back up at the suggestion that he was somehow like George Wallace, but in what conceivable way is that charge less fair and valid than the slanders his campaign has slung in Obama’s direction?

And why should we taken seriously McCain’s late-to-the-dance attempts to rein in the hate that’s been committed in his name? His actions in recent years have made clear that he’s willing to do whatever it takes to win the White House, Bob Dolizing himself to a degree that Dole himself could hardly have imagined. Tack this way on the advice of advisers, pander to the Right to shore up the base, let Karl Rove bully you out of your VP preference, let slip the dogs of Race War… Why would I or you or any other thinking American regard this as anything besides a tactical maneuver driven by research showing that undecided voters are turned off by it?

None of Us Are Free

In “None of Us Are Free” (written by Barry Mann, Brenda Russell and Cynthia Weil), Solomon Burke sings

None of us are free.
None of us are free.
None of us are free, one of us is chained.
None of us are free.

Clearly, large portions of America remain chained. Our Cracker Problem persists, and what ought to be most disconcerting is that it not only exists in the heart of Georgia, in Outback Ohio, in pro-America Virginia or in a Republican Women’s club in California. It not only thrives in the minds of elderly whites who preferred Jim Crow to Martin Luther King. It’s not only alive and well in organizations like Stormfront and the League of the South.

No, the problem is that racism, racemongering and race-baiting are alive and well at the very highest, most public levels of our democracy: our presidential election process. And it was put there, on full display, and sanctioned by one of the only two parties that ever really stands a chance in any national election.

On November 4th, let’s hope for an epic thrashing of those who seek to profit by trading in hate and ignorance. Let’s further hope that those who can’t and won’t evolve get the message loud and clear: crawl back underneath your rocks and remain quiet until it’s finally your time to die.

But whatever we do, let’s not confuse winning a battle with winning the war. Our Cracker Problem will be with us for awhile longer, and November 5th will be the beginning, not the end.

And when they come to ethnically cleanse me
Will you speak out? Will you defend me?
Or laugh through a glass
eye as they rape our lives
Trampled underfoot by the Right on the rise…

Click here to view the embedded video.

Previously: Ich Bin Ein Auslander

Listen to the victim, abused by the system
The basis is racist, you know that we must face this

In 1991 Pop Will Eat Itself produced one of the most damning comments on racism in society in the history of popular music. “Ich Bin Ein Auslander” was specifically aimed at anti-immigrant racism in Europe, but over the past 17 years it’s been impossible for me to hear the song without mapping its penetrating, undeniable truth onto our American context. Our black auslanders aren’t recent arrivals (although many of our brown ones are), but they nonetheless remain social, political, economic and cultural outsiders, and whatever progress they may have made in the several hundred years since they first arrived in shackles, only a fool can believe that the basis is no longer racist.

I said some time back, as the presidential election lurched into overdrive, that the heavy racist stuff was coming. Not that it necessarily took Nostradamus to predict that, of course – as staggering prognostications go this one ranked right up there with “the sun will rise in the East.” Still, the predictability and magnitude of racism in America, the absolute certainty of it, matters.

Welcome to a state where the politics of hate Shout loud in the crowd
“Watch them beat us all down.”
There’s a rising tide on the rivers of blood
But if the answer isn’t violence, neither is your silence

So I collected the bits and pieces of evidence as they began flying across the transom. As Obama’s lead solidified. As McCain became more desperate. As the ignorant and hateful on the Right were whipped into a lynch-ready lather by Rush, Hannity, O’Reilly, by the Coulters and Savages and their legions of local market disciples. As they were egged on by the silence of a gutless old man who’d sold what little soul he had to start with; and by the photogenic perkiness of the former beauty queen he chose as his running mate: finally realized, Dan Quayle and Marilyn all rolled into one, witch doctor-approved, and so far to the right politically and theologically that even Pat Robertson has to be thinking “that bitch is crazy.” And of course, by their cynical proxies, who have read enough history to know a thing or two about the value of a good “other” when the scapegoating hour arrives.

Slowly, but all too surely, Cracker America began to realize that its most horrific of spectres is taking corporeal form: the White House is about to become the Black House. One of the greatest truisms of human nature is this: crisis reveals character. Or, in this case, lack of character. If you want to know what people are all about, at their core, back them into a corner. The truth will soon reveal itself, for good or ill.

The Code of Real America

“Take a look around at the cities and the towns.”
See them hunting, creeping, sneaking
Breeding fear and loathing with the lies they’re speaking

I said I had been collecting evidence. Let’s have a look, shall we?

• A Virginia county GOP chair wasn’t content to play the race card – he played the whole race deck:
  

  You need to read this column to believe it. In “humor” he accuses Obama of wanting to paint the White House black, supporting reparations, changing the national anthem to the “black national anthem”, teaching “black liberation theology in all churches”, and replacing the flag with a “star and crescent logo”.

  That he resigned is good, but it hardly excuses anything.

• While we’re talking about Virginia, what do you think Virgil Goode means by “politically correct loans”? Hmmm. Far be it from me to accuse someone of Mr. Goode’s stature of employing code, but as someone on one of my political lists points out, it’s worth noting that if you Google the term, the top result is … illuminating.
• When it comes to deciding whether a particular person is a racist, it’s hard (despite Mr. Bush’s claims of omniscience regarding Harriet Miers) to know his or her heart. Still, we might infer something useful from looking at the company the person in question keeps. With this in mind, Sarah Palin’s political associations should certainly raise a couple questions, don’t you think?
• In our current climate – which I guess we’ll call semi-actualized – it’s no longer acceptable or prudent for a candidate to stand up and shout something as inflammatory as “lynch the nigger!” So when you want people who are open to that message to hear it without you actually saying it, some sleight of tongue is required. At the moment, when we hear the word “terrorist” we tend to think of people who are … how to put this? … not white. We don’t think of Timothy McVeigh or Eric Rudolph, for some odd reason, nor do we think of the Irish Republican Army or the fine folks who advocate bombing Planned Parenthood clinics and murdering doctors who perform abortions (although we do get exercised about Bill Ayers, a man nobody cared about until he became a vague acquaintance of Obama’s; dare I suggest that he wasn’t a real terrorist until he was found in the company of negroes?) So when we hear Palin linking “Obama” and “terrorist” the way she’s fond of doing, we shouldn’t be surprised to hear people in the crowd stepping up for their portion of the call-and-response with “terrorist!” and “kill him!” You may argue that there’s nothing racist about this at all, and if it existed in a vacuum, if it were isolated from any larger context, I might have to cede the point that this was simply about a general ignorance of the facts. But there’s a lot of if in that equation, and those showing up to see Palin certainly seem capable of connecting the dots.
  

  At a McCain rally on Monday, television stations caught audio of a crowd member calling Obama a “terrorist,” while Dana Milbank reported that “[o]ne Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, ‘Sit down, boy.’” Also on Monday, at a Palin rally, one member of the audience yelled, “Kill him!”

  So I don’t see any of us benefiting from playing stupid.

  

• But, you say, it’s not the fault of McCain and Palin that there are a few yahoos in the crowd. True. I’m not responsible for your stupidity. However, I am responsible for my reactions to that stupidity. If you yell “nigger” in a crowded Republican rally and I, the candidate, say nothing, how can I be seen as doing anything but endorsing it? As Solomon Burke sings in “None of Us Are Free,” “if you don’t say it’s wrong, then that says it’s right.”
• By the way, I’m having a hard time understanding why the Secret Service isn’t hauling people out of these rallies and charging them with whatever the charge is when you incite/advocate murdering a Senator. Just saying….
• The above assumes, for the sake of argument, that the campaign’s racist tone and tactics aren’t by design. As last week’s Frank Rich column illustrates, though, we can’t possibly assume anything of the sort.
  

  From the start, there have always been two separate but equal questions about race in this election. Is there still enough racism in America to prevent a black man from being elected president no matter what? And, will Republicans play the race card? The jury is out on the first question until Nov. 4. But we now have the unambiguous answer to the second: Yes.

  McCain, who is no racist, turned to this desperate strategy only as Obama started to pull ahead. The tone was set at the Republican convention, with Rudy Giuliani’s mocking dismissal of Obama as an “only in America” affirmative-action baby. We also learned then that the McCain campaign had recruited as a Palin handler none other than Tucker Eskew, the South Carolina consultant who had worked for George W. Bush in the notorious 2000 G.O.P. primary battle where the McCains and their adopted Bangladeshi daughter were slimed by vicious racist rumors.

  No less disconcerting was a still-unexplained passage of Palin’s convention speech: Her use of an unattributed quote praising small-town America (as opposed to, say, Chicago and its community organizers) from Westbrook Pegler, the mid-century Hearst columnist famous for his anti-Semitism, racism and violent rhetorical excess. After an assassin tried to kill F.D.R. at a Florida rally and murdered Chicago’s mayor instead in 1933, Pegler wrote that it was “regrettable that Giuseppe Zangara shot the wrong man.” In the ’60s, Pegler had a wish for Bobby Kennedy: “Some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter his spoonful of brains in public premises before the snow falls.”

  This is the writer who found his way into a speech by a potential vice president at a national political convention. It’s astonishing there’s been no demand for a public accounting from the McCain campaign. Imagine if Obama had quoted a Black Panther or Louis Farrakhan — or William Ayers — in Denver.

• McCain’s campaign co-chair employed a pretty nifty code-swarm when he worked “guy of the street,” “cocaine” and “Jeremiah Wright” into a conversation with Dennis Miller. “Guy of the street.” Hmmm. Granted, this steps away from all that “elitist” bullshit, which is nice. But if you’re black, your choices are now “uppity” or “street thug”? Lordy, how far our darkies have come from the days of “field negro” vs. “house negro”…
• We haven’t talked about Virginia in a few bullet points, so how about this: Obama = Osama. And again, let’s remember – we’re all smart enough to see the big picture and understand the larger context, especially in light of the fact that we now know this wasn’t a one-off – it’s part of the sewage that campaign workers are being trained to spew.
• By Virginia, of course, we’re referring to real Virginia. You know, Macaca Virginia, which we assume to be part of pro-America America. Just to make sure we’re all on the same page.
• There’s not only a “real Virginia,” there’s a real America. This FiveThirtyEight analysis takes a good, hard look at Palin’s ideal America (based on her rhetoric and the places she’s chosen to appear lately) and guess what? Real America is significantly whiter than … unreal? … America.
• In Fairfield, Ohio, Halloween is evidently being celebrated by hanging Obama in effigy. If you’re a little confused by the Star of David on his head, join the club. I imagine black and Jew are all pretty much the same thing in some people’s minds.
• By the way, you know that whole “Obama is a Muslim” thing? Read up on the piece of work who fabricated it here. Turns out he don’t like them dirty Jews, neither. And that’s not the half of it.
• You may be thinking – how have I gotten this far without once mentioning FOX “News”? I think this item will reward your patience. Up until now Colin Powell’s negrocity has been tolerated, but yesterday he forgot his place and endorsed Obama. Which means he’s fair game for stuff like this: “Colin Powell has his dancing shoes on, fueling speculation that he’s gearing up to do the Obama Two-Step.” I guess we should be grateful that they stopped at “two-step” (I was expecting “shuffle”) and that they didn’t deliver the story in blackface.
• Lest you think that racism is confined to the South and Midwest, this entry hails from the Great State of California. Where, apparently, them jigaboos loves them some fried chicken and watermelon. Of course, the perpetrator apologized because, you know, she didn’t mean to offend nobody.
• Want more? We got more. Check out the gallery of stupid over at Pam’s House Blend, where you’ll find:
  * More fun in post-racial America
  * John McCain forced to denounce racist, homophobic member of Virginia leadership team
  * Kentucky, I know you can do better than this
  * FL: middle school teacher uses ‘nigger’ to describe Barack Obama
  * Palin praised racist writer who called for RFK’s assassination
  * Values at the Values Voter Summit – Obama as a Muslim Aunt Jemima
  * Westmoreland stands by ‘uppity’ remark about Obama
  * White supremacists: Obama’s boosting our movement
  * John McLaughlin: Obama fits the ‘Oreo’ stereotype
  * Georgia: publication features Obama in crosshairs on cover for article on white supremacist threat
  * Bigot eruption: GOP House member refers to Obama as ‘boy’
  * South Carolina: black reporter attacked by white family (on camera!)

As the song says:

Freedom of expression doesn’t make it alright
Trampled underfoot by the rise of the right.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Next: None of Us Are Free