Just Jake

Supreme Court denies justice

2009-07-10T10:51:00.000-07:00

The façade of the Supreme Court building proclaims: “Equal Justice for All.” But the Roberts Court metes out justice for just some.

Lady Justice is blind but she shouldn’t be deaf and dumb too. The most egregious decision in the 2008-2009 court term: rejection of the right of prisoners to DNA testing to prove their innocence.

Chief Justice Roberts admitted as much in his opinion for the court, noting the unparalleled ability of DNA evidence to prove innocence.

But in one of the most bizarre rationales in the history of the court, Roberts said that this does not mean that “every criminal conviction involving biological evidence is in doubt.”

The five reactionaries interpret the Constitution as they want: let defendants be electrocuted. As Justice Stevens said in dissent: “There is no reason to deny access to the evidence and there are many reasons to provide it.”

Another lamentable decision by the Backward Five eroded the exclusionary rule prohibiting prosecutors from using evidence obtained in an improper police search.

It was an un-American decision. Justice Holmes in a dissent in Olmstead (1928) knew what it meant to be an American. He wrote: it is a lesser evil “that some criminals should escape than that the government should play an ignoble part.”

The Baleful Five also undermined the Sixth Amendment right to counsel, declaring it wasn’t always essential. Stevens bitterly dissented, rightly declaring that defendants must have counsel at every stage of prosecution.

In all three cases the vote was 5-4. In each case Justice Kennedy was the fifth man. Kennedy is the most powerful jurist in America, so often determining the law of the land. But being powerful doesn’t mean dispensing justice.

The Supreme Court constantly overrules decisions by the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the 9^th Circuit, the most liberal court in America, Unfortunately, the reactionary Supreme Court has the last word.

And that means environmentalists lost all five cases, including undercutting the Clean Water Act to allow a company to fill an Alaskan lake with mine waste. Kennedy, writing for the majority, said deference must be accorded the company. Justice Ginsburg shot back in dissent: what about paying deference to the Clean Water Act?

In another dreadful ruling, the Five Horsemen of Reaction weakened legal protection against age discrimination. An anguished Stevens acidly dissented: “I disagree not only with the court’s interpretation of the statute but also with its decision to engage in lawmaking.”

In another despicable opinion, the Puritanical Five backed the FCC ban on airwaves expletives. Justice Scalia in his opinion for the court denounced the words fuck and shit uttered by Cher in a televised awards ceremony. (The priggish Scalia played the silly newspaper game of referring to the f-word and s-word.)

Scalia should read the dissent by Justice Brennan in FCC v. Pacifica (1978): “There are many who think, act and talk differently from the members of this court and who do not share their fragile sensibilities. It is only an acute ethnocentric myopia that enables the court to approve the censorship of communications solely because of the words they contain.”

Expletives deserve First Amendment protection. Stevens in dissent noted the irony of curbing harmless four-letter works while allowing commercials for Viagra, Cialis and Levitra.

On the positive side, the strip search of an Arizona middle school girl was ruled unconstitutional. Justice Souter, writing for an 8-1 court, called it “embarrassing, frightening and humiliating.”

Dissenting Justice Thomas, clinging to the law of the past, said public schools must preserve “order, discipline and safety.” Troglodyte Thomas is probably the worst justice in history. He certainly is the most archreactionary.

Also applaud the court for upholding a grievance of white firefighters in New Haven, Conn. They sued when they passed a test but were denied promotion because black and Latino candidates did poorly. Kennedy, speaking for the court, labeled what it was: reverse discrimination.

Learned Hand, one of the best judges who never reached the Supreme Court, said he would open every session of court with the words of Cromwell: “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, to think it possible you may be mistaken.”

Justice Brandeis made the same point. Dissenting in the obscure 1932 New State Ice case, Brandeis warned the court about its enormous power of judicial review: “In the exercise of this high power we must be ever on our guard lest we erect our prejudices into legal principles.”

But that is precisely what the Supreme Court has been doing for decades, making its biases legal principles.

Plundered Latins fighting back

2009-07-09T13:54:00.001-07:00

After 150 years of being subjected to American imperialism, gunboat diplomacy and exploitation, Latin American countries are rearing up to tell Yanqui to stay home.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez spearheads that drive for independence, emboldening Latins to surge to the Left. He set the example by pronouncing Venezuela socialist.

Chavismo and populism forever! He called Bush 43 the devil (he was) and urged Americans to read social critic Noam Chomsky (they should).

Examples of the new Latin America defiance of Uncle Sam:

• President Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous president, nationalized the tin, gas and oil industries. He is trying to stem capitalist greed. He vows to close the “open veins of Latin America,” a reference to the title of a book by Eduardo Galeano.

• In Chile, President Bacheter waves the banner of socialism. She often reminds Chileans of the right-wing coup in 1973 that toppled Allende, a golpe engineered by the United States.

• In Paraguay, Lugo won the presidency, exorcising the ghost of Stroessner and his 35-year dictatorship. A former Catholic bishop, Lugo is now the bishop of the poor and the downtrodden.

• In Brazil, President da Silva is a former metalworker who battles for the working class.

• In Ecuador, President Correa has kicked the Yanks off their air base at Manta.

• In Salvador, Funes is the country’s first leftist president.

• In Nicaragua, the president is Ortega of Sandinista fame.

• In Honduras, the army overthrew leftist President Zelaya, particularly angering Argentinians, Brazilians and Chileans with their bitter memories of human rights abuses by the military in 1960 and 1970.

• In Cuba, de facto president Fidel Castro got an abrazo from the Organization of American States. The OAS voted to lift the ban on Cuban membership. (Cuba was expelled in 1962 because its Marx-Leninism was deemed incompatible.)

The U.N. General Assembly passed resolution after resolution for 17 years condemning the U.S. embargo of Cuba. Larry Wilkerson, former chief of staff for Colin Powell, rightly called the embargo “the dumbest policy on the face of the earth.”

Despite the lingering dumb policy, most Latin American nations are now declaring for people over profits, for equality over gross injustice.

But the United States strenuously objects. It hates socialism and deplores the unhinging of its hegemony. As Daphne Eviatar writes in The Nation: it is “as if representing the interests of the majority were inherently deserving of scorn.”

America historically has supported right-wing Latin dictators. It gave the despicable Pinochet regime in Chile $290 million in 1976. It endorsed Cuban dictator Batista who got enormously rich from the Mafioso in Havana.

Washington has railed at Cuba for 60 years, always “winning” the argument by uttering the dread word communism. No democrat defends dictatorship. But democratic socialism is a worthy goal.

President Teddy Roosevelt boasted that he had seized the canal from Panama. President Taft proclaimed: “The whole hemisphere will be ours soon…by virtue of our superiority of race and morality.”

Does history record a more arrogant statement to support colonialism and imperialism?

In 1935 after a 33-year career in the Marines, Gen. Smedley Butler admitted the plunder of Latin America:

“I spent most of my time being a high-class muscleman for Big Business and Wall Street…I was a racketeer for capitalism…I helped make Mexico safe for American oil interests. I helped make Haiti and Cuba profitable for National City Bank…I helped save the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests. I helped make Honduras safe for American fruit companies.”

Or, as Galeano puts it: “the Imperium sends forth its Marines to save its monopolists’ dollars.” No wonder the United States has been the biggest enemy of Latin America.

It stole half of Mexico under the banner of manifest destiny. It seized Cuba, Puerto Rico Rico and the Philippines, making them colonies while building an empire. President McKinley hailed the seizure as ushering in “civilization and humanity.”

The United States role in Cuba is shameless. The Platt Amendment permitted U.S. intervention. It sealed the theft of Guantánmo.

Galeano writes passionately in “Veins” of how the great wealth of Latin nations has been appropriated by capitalist imperialists: gold, silver, sugar, coffee, rubber, cocoa, cotton and bananas.

United Fruit, an American corporation now called Chiquita, ravaged Central and South America. Emily Biuso in The Nation recently tells how: strong arming, destroying natural habitat to build banana plantations, enslaving the local people in low-wage and suppressing labor movements.

“Any attempt by the workers to assert their rights was met with harsh consequences,” Galeano writes.

But Latin America, now blessedly under new management, will no longer tolerate gringo dominance.

Gays still face blatant bias

2009-06-21T07:32:00.000-07:00

It is both stunning and enraging that the last two Democratic presidents have promised great changes but delivered the same centrist pablum on many important issues. The villains: Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

Obama, like Clinton, promised while campaigning to abolish the ignominious anti-gay military policy of don’t ask-don’t tell. In office Clinton and Obama reneged. Now Obama defends indefensible bigotry and discrimination.

He calls the policy “rationally related to the government’s legitimate interest in military discipline and cohesion.” He buys the military argument that gays undermine morale and esprit de corps.

Under the anti-gay policy the Pentagon has discharged 12,000 soldiers. About 800 of those let go were especially valuable as specialists in Arabic.

The policy wastes talent. It also wastes money training people to be fired.

The Supreme Court is also obtuse, refusing to review a case of discrimination against Army Capt. Jim Pietrangelo. Pietrangelo, fired under the policy, served six years in the Army and fought in Iraq.

“This decision is an absolute travesty of justice,” Pietrangelo pointed out. “The justices should be ashamed of themselves. It is nothing short of rubber-stamping legalized discrimination.”

If the military is so worried about sexuality it should focus on the shocking number of rapes women soldiers suffer from men soldiers.

Boobus Americanus

We hear much blather from politicians about the “wisdom” of the people. The truth is otherwise. The people are so often wooden-headed.

Case in point: the voters of California enacted an absurd law that someone goes to jail for life after committing a third felony, even if that “third strike” is as harmless as stealing a few videos. Murderers, on the other hand, are often paroled after 10 to 15 years in jail.

Or take gay marriage. The people of California voted it down. The votes was un-Christian, opposing love and happiness.

The California Supreme Court, after first ruling that gay marriage was constitutional, reversed itself. It ruled 6-1 to sustain the “wisdom” of the people.

Judge Carlos Moreno had it right in dissent. He wrote that the majority “places at risk the state constitutional rights of all disfavored minorities. It weakens our state Constitution as a bulwark of fundamental rights for minorities protected from the will of the majority.”

There you have it: that dread tyranny of the majority. In a democracy the people rule. The people, however, are often asses.

As Moreno noted in his dissent: Proposition 8 requiring “discrimination against a minority group…strikes at the core of the promise of equality” in the state Constitution.

Or look at referendums in Colorado and Maine where the voters approved anti-gay and lesbian laws.

Nevertheless, the worldwide trend is to approve gay marriage. Norway is the most recent nation to become enlightened on the issue. But tradition-bound America, arguing against a fundamental right, might take 50 years to come to its senses.

A recent poll by the New York Times and CBS shows just 42 percent of Americans approving same-sex marriage. But it is never a question of what polls show. The point is what is right. Gay marriage is right.

Katha Pollitt in a Nation article wrote: “All this fussing about stabilty and children are smokescreens for deep emotional, irrational aversion to homosexuality.” She is so right.

Julian Bond, distinguished battler for black rights for decades, was angered by the California vote. He wrote:
“The state that proudly declares ‘the future starts here’ took a backward step while reinforcing the truism that minority rights should never be subject to a popular right…What is at issue is the arbitrary denial of a civil right to some people.”

Obama turncoatism

On this issue too Obama is crushingly disappointing. He strongly favored gay marriage while campaigning. Yet now his administration files a brief in support of the Defense of Marriage Act. The brief falls back on the hoary argument that hetrosexual marriage is the “traditional and universally recognized form of marriage.”

Gays are understandably outraged at Obama turncoatism. As Joe Solmonese, president of the Human Rights Campaign, puts it: “I cannot overstate the pain that we feel as human beings…when we read an argument…implying that our own marriages have no more constitutional standing than incestuous ones.”

Obama threw a tiny bone to gays, extending benefits to same-sex partners in federal jobs. But: he left out the more important health and retirement benefits. Obama, the Man of Hope, is as retrograde on gayism as G.W. Bush.

Lotteries, torture and partisan press

2009-06-14T05:37:00.000-07:00

States once thought it sinful to gamble even in such innocuous ways as playing the numbers. But they overcame such scruples when they realized that gambling was a painless way to fill state coffers.

Here in the Silver State many Nevadans who crave the numbers game have to cross the California border to satisfy their urges. Lotteries are forbidden in Nevada. The casino lobby won’t allow them.

Oh, we hear in the Legislature that lotteries are regressive, preying on the poor. Or, opponents argue that owners of small gambling halls would face ruinous competition. Or, we hear wails that lotteries would have an unfair advantage over casinos because they can operate with fewer employees.

But those are all smokescreens. The truth is that not one Nevada lawmaker has the guts to take on Big Gambling. It, like mining, corporations and businesses, get away with tax murder. They are the third rail of Nevada politics: untouchable.

Torture-loving judge
Don Gladstone was the last “hanging judge” in Nevada, disgracing the Sparks Municipal Court until ousted by voters in 1995.

Today another judge with roots in Nevada disgraces the judiciary: Judge Jay Bybee of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. (The 9th, with headquarters in San Francisco, hears appeals of federal cases originating in Nevada.)

Unfortunately, voters cannot remove Bybee. He has a lifetime appointment. He can be impeached by the House and removed from office by the Senate but that is quite unlikely.

Bybee, chief White House legal counsel in 2002, signed memoranda approving waterboarding, sleep deprivation, wall-slamming and box-confinement amid bugs.

Steve Sebelius, editor of CityLife in Las Vegas, rightly castigates Bybee for abandoning the rule of law, disregarding international treaties and disavowing his own humanity.

Bybee’s memo said: “Physical pain amounting to torture must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious personal injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily functions or even death.”

Hardly a glowing recommendation for the Boyd law school in Las Vegas where Bybee taught before consorting with the Bush criminals.

Partisan media
We have a partisan media in America today. The shouters and ranters of the hard-right flood the airways with their bilge, drowning out the softer and saner voices of liberalism.

But a partisan press is hardly a new thing in America. Almost from the beginning of the republic political discourse was full of lies, hyperbole and absurdities. The Partisan Press era was woefully irresponsible.

The Jeffersonian republican press (pro-French and antimonarchial) declared that the honorable George Washington had debauched the nation, that he was evil, a great deceiver, the source of all the nation’s woes.

When Jefferson ran for president in 1800 the anti-republican Federalists said he would close all the churches, burn all the Bibles, abolish marriage, toss women into brothels and encourage murder, rape, adultery and incest.

Obviously gross falsities. Yet we find similar absurdities being mouthed today by right-wing madmen. They denounce President Obama as a socialist, a communist who will fly the hammer and sickle over the White House.

Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Yahoo from Kentucky, calls Obama “a threat to this country.” And the Rabid Right declares that Obama should rename the Democratic Party the “Democrat Socialist Party.”(Note the sneer. The proper adjective is Democratic.)

Great ignorant hope
The Republican Party has been reduced to irrelevancy. Sarah Palin, the Great Ignorant Hope from Alaska, flamed out. Now the GOP mantle has fallen on Rush Limbaugh. God save the mark!

Limbaugh enthralls right-wingers with his medieval mind, shouting hoary shibboleths. Even Michael Steele, reactionary chairman of the GOP national committee, calls Limbaugh’s broadcasts incendiary and ugly.

Still, torturemeister Dick Cheney embraces Limbaugh and repudiates Colin Powell, the one class guy in the Bush administration.

Cheney, like the rest of the GOP, opposes everything good for Americans like universal national health and card-signing unionism. He favors everything bad for Americans like deregulation and tax cuts for the rich.

Editor Sebelius rightly deplores the GOP hatred of unions: “Republicans hate anything that puts power in the hands of individuals over the corporation, the poor over the wealthy.”

Lapsed Unitarian

After Phil Altick, University of Nevada, Reno, physics professor, died several months ago, Professor Frank Tobin of the foreign language department, remarked at the memorial service that Altick was a lapsed Unitarian.

Funny line. But the best thing Altick said was expressed after he came back from a semester teaching abroad. He was asked what he thought about teaching in London.

“They know more than we do,” Altick replied.

“About physics?”

“No, about everything.”

Sotomayor’s ‘crime’: mild liberalism

2009-06-14T05:35:00.001-07:00

Benighted Republican senators, angry because President Obama did not pick a Genghis Khan or an Attila the Hun for the Supreme Court, have trained their ire on poor Judge Sonia Sotomayor.

Her crime? A smattering of liberalism in her decisions on the 2^nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Never mind that the Supreme Court is already packed with reactionaries, constantly voting 5-4, 5-4, 5-4, to strike down anything decent and humane and to uphold anything indecent and inhumane.

Jeffrey Toobin, in a recent New Yorker article, limned the Five Horsemen of Reaction led by Chief Justice Roberts. It sides “with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislature and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff.” It defers “to the existing power relationships in society.”

Justice Souter nailed Roberts when dissenting from an opinion the chief justice wrote. Souter said Roberts’ opinion reminded him of Anatole France’s observation that “the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal bread.”

Obama as an Illinois senator voted against confirmation of Roberts, correctly declaring that Roberts uses “his formidible skills on behalf of the strong in opposition to the weak.”

“I will seek someone who understands that justice isn’t about some abstract legal theory or footnote in a casebook,” Obama said. “It is also about how our laws affect the daily realities of people’s lives.”

Which is where Judge Sotomayor is perfect. She understands the struggles of so many Americans. Roberts in his ivory tower and smug comfort will never understand that reality.

Sotomayor was born in the Bronx, New York, to Puerto Rican parents. She was brought up in a housing project, providing the empathy that Obama seeks.

However, her understanding of the Little People gets her into trouble with GOP troglodytes. In a 2001 speech, Sotomayor said: “a wise Latina with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”

She is being reviled as racist for speaking the truth. Roberts, in contrast, epitomizes nearly all lawyers and judges: howling conservatives.

Supreme Court history is full of reactionary decisions favoring business and property against the needs of people and the humanism of civilized nations. It has so often blinked at reality and found its retrograde politics in the Constitution.

Just a few examples among so many: 1) Dred Scott [1857] held that slaves were property, inferior beings and “had no rights the white man was bound to respect.” 2) In Adkins [1923] the court struck down a Washington, D.C., minimum wage.

3) In Coppage v. Kansas [1915] the court called yellow-dog contracts--forced vows not to join a union--constitutional. The court gleefully noted that “some people have more property than others,” “the right of private property” was paramount and that “inequalities of fortune” are just.

4) In Hammer v. Dagenhart [1918] the court declared child labor constitutional. 5) In two years it struck down 10 major New Deal laws--judicial nullification without parallel in U.S. history. 6) In Bush v. Gore [2000] the court, in a partisan political decision that had nothing to do with the law. stopped the Florida recount to hand the presidency to G.W. Bush.

Sotomayor would bring much more to the court then mere knowledge of the underside of life. She is smart, compassionate and thoughtful.

Roberts, at 54 a young man as Supreme Court justices go, could plague the country for decades. But at least Sotomayor would inject the same compassion shown by Justices Stevens, Ginsburg and Souter in their heated dissents.

On the appeals bench, Sotomayor ruled for baseball players, not the owners. She ruled that homeless people must be paid the minimum wage. She held that an inmate could sue a corporation operating a halfway house for federal prisoners.

She ruled that a broker who held stocks because of misleading information could sue. She wrote that the Environmental Protection Agency cannot use cost-benefit calculations to preserve aquatic species.

She dissented when her appeals court upheld the legality of strip searches for girls at a juvenile detention center in Connecticut. She called it what it was: embarrassing and humilating.

Nevertheless, Sotomayor is hardly a flaming liberal. She was wrong to side with New Haven, Conn., when it rejected results of a firefighter promotion test because blacks and Latinos performed poorly. Her abortion position is unclear, having decided few pro-choice cases and all those on the fringes of Roe.

But no justice ever scores 100 percent. Sotomayor is a good choice to replace the retiring Souter.

Obama: fresh air but, but…

2009-05-30T16:52:00.000-07:00

The change is wonderful: from the reactionaryism of G.W. Bush on everything to the progressivism of President Obama on many things.

He reversed Bush policies favoring corporations over people. He eliminated funding for the absurd Bush abstinence-only sex education. His Food and Drug Administration has overturned the right-wing stance under Bush, letting 17-year-olds use a contraceptive pill without a doctor’s prescription.

Obama’s White House released graphic torture memos written by Bush’s so-called Justice Department. His Labor Department will enforce regulations on worker safety, grossly neglected in the Bush administration. His Justice Department will enforce antimonopoly laws. Bushites never did.

Obama seeks to end the racial disparity in sentencing for crack (blacks) and cocaine (whites). His drug czar will ease the bogus war by stressing treatment rather than prison. Obama scrapped Bush plans to open the coasts to oil and gas drilling. He is halting the Bush rules easing power plant pollution.

He urges better car mileage and higher emissions standards, blocked by Bush pooh-poohing of global warming. He has overturned the Bush policy of more timber-cutting and ever more roads in national forests.

The Obama adminstration will no longer prosecute dispensers of medical marijuana, ending Bushite raids. Obama wants science to rule in medical matters, not ideology.

All of these Obama actions and plans are commendable. But Obama is a half-a-loaf specialist, a tergiversator. Instead of giant strides, he take baby steps.

Obama is not the “radical communist,” as the frenzied Right bleats. Nor is he the “blatant socialist” as the less frenzied call him. Obama is a liberal-leaning centrist.

Obama wanted to shut the Guantânamo prison but discovered an old truism: presidents propose but Congress disposes. Nevertheless, Obama wants to keep the secret military jail at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan. And, to the outrage of civil libertarians, his administration will try alleged terrorists by a kangaroo court (military commission).

Obama proposed funding for stem cell research from embryos at fertility clinics only, gutlessly ruling out lab research. Obama lifts travel restrictions to Cuba. Good. But he does nothing about the shameful policies of embargo and nonrecognition.

He promised Planned Parenthood to sign an abortion rights bill but now puts such legislation on the back burner. He seeks to block a lawsuit on behalf of former CIA agent Valerie Plame, who was outed by Bushies because her ambassador husband exposed a spurious reason for war in Iraq.

But the biggest disappointment is Obama’s foolish pursuit of losing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Bush wars have become the Obama wars. A hundred surges in Afghanistan won’t subdue the Taliban, the warlords, al-Qaida and the poppy growers.

Pete Seeger sang: “We were neck deep in the Big Muddy and the big fool said to push on.” Obama is no fool. But he forgets the folly of Vietnam and the wisdom of Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Obama’s Pentagon lifted the ban on coverage of the war dead--but half-bakedly. He is letting families decide. As DeWayne Wickham, USA Today columnist, writes: “Our free press is still being stage-managed by those who run the wars...News organizations shouldn’t let family wishes dictate how they cover war news.”

Obama listens to the military too much. He is back-pedaling on gays in the military. He resists court orders to release photos documenting the abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Obama circles himself with permanent war party advisers.

CIA drones pound Pakistan, Obama’s third war. To pursue that war he wants to build a superembassy in Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan, garanteeing a long-term commitment.

Obama insists in “moving forward” rather than having a Truth Commission investigate the abuses of the Bush-Cheney criminals. But revealing crimes of the past are essential cleansing.

Obama surrounds himself with Jewish lobbyists who will defend Israel à outrance. He runs scared of the gun lobby, refusing even to fight for a ban on assault weapons. He vowed to usher in a “new era of openness in our country.” But in office Obama continues the discredited state secrets policy of Bush.

Obama will keep polar bears off the endangered species list as Bush did despite the rapid melting of the Arctic Sea. He promised to reverse of the heinous Bush policy allowing mountain-top mining that dumps rock and dirt into streams. But now his Environmental Protection Agency says it’s OK.

On the hustings Obama offered withering criticism of signing statements by President Bush. In office Obama issues signing statements. He opposes gay marriage so he refuses to exert moral leadership against prejudice.

Obama, the Great Compromiser, tarnishes a promising presidency.

Progressives delude themselves

2009-05-23T16:32:00.000-07:00

MADISON, Wis.--Panelists here at the recent conference celebrating the 100th anniversary of the founding of Progressive magazine were overwheliming optimistic. They are doomed to overwhelming disillusionment.
These wonderful optimists talk about organizing, solidifying and exhorting. They extol the power of labor. They urge pressure on politicians. They demand speaking truth to power. They talk about the wave of the future.
Their hearts are in the right place but they refuse to face reality.

That reality was exemplified by the Wisconsin State Journal, Madison’s only daily newspaper. It did not print a line about the two-day convention attended by 500 delegates nationwide and celebrities like Robert Redford, Jesse Jackson and Cindy Sheehan.
Reality. Progressives and leftists make up a miniscule part of the population, maybe 100,000 out of 310 million. Their agenda has so few adherents. Progressive magazine has a paltry 55,000 circulation.
Reality. The system will not allow profound changes. Corporations and lobbyists, with their money, rule America. They get what they want. The bulk of the people suck hind tit.
Reality. America does not have a democracy. Four Republican senators from Wyoming and Alaska have power far beyond the number of their constituency of 1 million.
Wyoming, with 500,000 people, has two senators. The District of Columbia, with a population 100,000 greater, has none. California has 36 million people but just two senators.

The Senate with its archiac rules is woefully undemocratic, requiring 60 votes to halt a filibuster. This means it can override the will of the majority on such progressive measures as universal health and card-signing unionism.
One mossback senator, the rebarbative Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, can singlehandedly hold up funding for national parks for one year. And: that same one man amends a credit card reform bill to allow loaded weapons in national parks, a totally unrelated measure.
The antiquated Electoral College has given the presidency four times to the loser in the popular vote.
Reality. Americans are innoculated with capitalistic abundance. They love it. The schools, the media and society inculate the American Way.
Nevertheless, the conference was enlived by panelists like Joan Claybrook and Ron Hayes with stiff doses of radicalism.
Claybrook, Public Citizen head for 25 years, offered 12 sensible reforms for corporations, among them: chartering of corporations, ability to revoke those charters, overturning the egregious Supreme Court ruling in 1886 giving citizen rights to corporations, closing corporate tax loopholes, eliminating tax-free outsourcing, setting up a corporate investigating commission and establishing a corporate criminal court.
Hayes, advocate for worker construction safety, declared: “We must make corporate misdemeanors the felonies they should be when workers are killed on the job.”

Sheehan impressed. She denounced President Obama for his warmongering in office after sounding anti-war notes on the hustings.
One panel noted that the civilized countries of Europe have measures uncivilized America does not: universal health, family allowances, maternity leaves, sick pay, longer vacations and strong unions.
Naomi Klein, author of the leftist bestseller, “The Shock Doctrine,” called the two-party system the fraud it is.
She demanded a much-needed Truth Commission to investigate the abuses of the Bush thugs. She correctly denounced Obama for wanting to bury the past, to look forward instead of cementing the past in America’s “historic memory.” She rightly denounced capitalism but never said socialism is the solution.
A sports panel endorsed the “Beer and Circus” of college sports. The panelists embroidered that view by telling amusing stories. But never once did they point out that sports don’t belong in universities. Never once did they observe that sports has become the opiate of the masses.

The conference had its frustrations: microphone-hogging questioners who delivered five-minute speeches, panel moderators who yaked and yaked when the delegates wanted to hear the panelists, standing ovations, self-adulation, preaching to the choir and cheers for commonplace statements.
And, oy vey, the many panelists who simply could not utter simple sentences without that terrible speech mannerism “you know.”
Nevertheless, Progressive deserves accolades. For 100 years it has fought the power of greedy corporations and predatory banks, exposed the plight of workers, battled for the environment, opposed war and decried empire-building. The magazine has denounced racism, sexism and homophobia.
As the weekly Madison Cap Times put it: “It has cherished our civil liberties and defended them against the Joe McCarthys, the Richard Nixons and the Dick Cheneys who would eliminate them.”
But overall the conference lacked the radicalism of Marx. He wrote in the “Theses on Feuerbach” in 1888: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world…the point…is to change it.”
Marx’s vision of change for justice will never be fulfilled in conservative America.

Souter: star amid dim constellation

2009-05-15T12:20:00.001-07:00

Justice David Souter could probably walk into a popular Washington, D.C., restaurant and not be recognized by 49 out of 50 diners.

In this celebrity-conscious land, the Supreme Court justices rank well below Britney Spears, Paris Hilton and The Simpsons in public recognition. The Supreme Court itself is a virtually unknown body unless it hands down decisions stirring outrage on issues like abortion and flag-burning.

Souter will happily retire this summer, going counter to the dictum of Jefferson that few in power die and none resign.

Souter had no flash, no dash, no flamboyance. He was quiet and unassuming, But he was a sterling man and a fine justice. He was decent and humane, so unlike the Five Horsemen of Reaction who control the court today.

Souter refused to join the court politicians who turn their prejudices into legal principles. He refused to join them in ruling for corporations, property and business. He chose the side of the angels: people, consumers and justice.

Adam Liptak, Supreme Court reporter for the New York Times, has written supercilious stories declaring that Souter was a careful, “a low-impact justice.” Liptak compounded the insults by writing that Justice Scalia has a judicial philosophy while Souter has none, that Scalia is highly quotable while Souter is not.

Memo to Establishment journalist Liptak: 50 Scalias are not worth one Souter.

The Supreme Court has had 110 justices. None wrote as well as Oliver Wendell Holmes whose opinions are studded with aphorisms and wonderful philosophical asides. But most of the justices have been poor writers, including the outstanding Justice Brennan.

What counts is decisions, not how well justices write or how much they are quoted.

Perhaps Souter’s most memorable decision was Casey, reaffirming the constitutional right to abortion. He led the court in reversal of a black man’s conviction of killing a white woman because the jury was nearly all white. He cast the pivotal fifth vote to uphold affirmative action.

But it was in dissent that Souter stood out. When the court upheld the notorious three-strikes-and-you’re-out law, Souter dissented. He noted the absurdity of sending a man to jail for life for a third felony like stealing a golf bag.

He dissented when the court struck down the Violence Against Women Act, calling the ruling a woeful misreading of the Constitution. When the economic royalists killed the overtime pay provision of the Labor Standards Act, Souter dissented. He denounced the violation of civil liberties and equal protection.

When the court killed a provision of the Americans with Disabilities Act, Souter complained in dissent about the court’s “crabbed version” of the law. When the court upheld a law requiring the National Endowment of the Arts to take into account so-called decency, he rightly dissented.

He was dismayed when the court overturned an effort by schools in Louisville, Ky., to prevent resegregation. His dissent called the ruling profoundly unhistorical.

When the court ruled that public schools must be open to Bible study groups, Souter dissented because of the clear violation of the wall between church and state. When the Unholy Five smashed that wall by saying that the University of Virginia must subsidize an evangelical magazine, Souter dissented. He decried the violation of the First Amendment in approval of state funding for religion.

However, Souter was clearly wrong about one thing: cameras in the Supreme Court. He insisted that “the day you see a camera coming into our courtroom it’s going to roll over my dead body.”

The courtroom is a sacred place. But the “nine old men” adamantly refuse to enter the Digital Age. The Supreme Court is an appellate court. It studies the facts and decisions of lower courts.

Unlike jurors, the justices are not persuaded by emotions, by the tricks and pyrotechnics of trial lawyers. The Supreme Court deals with substantive constitutional issues. It would enlighten citizens to see and hear the oral arguments presenting the pros and cons of an issue, the fierce questioning by the justices.

Skelly Wright, the late, great appeals court judge, rightly argued that televising oral arguments would “be a matchless lesson in the meaning of our constitutional rights and principles.”

Justice is supposed to be blind--but not invisible.

Finally, a confession. I wrote after Souter’s appointment that nothing in his background indicated he would rise above mediocrity. So much for the omniscience of columnists!

Souter had a marvelous capacity for growth, a quality alien to the “brilliant” Scalia. Souter became a bright star among a dim constellation of reactionaries.

Cheers and jeers for Glick

2009-05-15T12:12:00.001-07:00

Milton Glick has had an easy path to approval as president of the University of Nevada, Reno. His odious predecessor, John Lilley, may have been the worst president UNR ever had.

But Glick looks fine in his own right. Assessments of his nearly three-year stewardship are good. Typical comments:

“A decent, personable guy. A straight shooter. He has greatly improved faculty morale which sagged badly in the Lilley era”…“Self-deprecating. Hides little. Quick study who does not miss much.”

Joe Crowley, former UNR president, said Glick is doing an excellent job.

He has “deftly established himself as the most influential president in the system,” Crowley said. “Regents like him personally and admire him professionally…He is methodical, willing to listen, intent on staying open and in touch.”

Crowley said Glick is good in the Carson City corridors of power. “He understands the demands of politics and participates effectively in the political game,” Crowley concluded. “He represents the university so well in the political arena, meeting with key legislators regularly, knowing how to twist elbows and mold minds.”

But some are not so impressed.

One knowledgeable source says Glick is a politician who will not rock the boat. “He’s a straight talker when it comes to insignificant matters. But when it comes to important things, Glick is just another CEO.”

Or, to put it in the vernacular: he protects UNR’s ass.

Glick is too defensive about legitimate complaints. Whistleblowers should be praised, not fired. His dismissal of Professor Hussein Hussein, a celebrated animal nutritionist, was autocratic. It still rankles.

Glick insists that Hussein was a plagiarist and should have been fired. But Judge Peter Breen, retired from the Washoe District Court, ruled that he saw no evidence of plagiarism. Just one of four members of the investigating faculty panel recommended dismissal.

Another complaint is that Glick keeps people in key posts who should be gotten rid of. In other words, politics as usual in the supposedly hallowed halls of a university.

More politics: a dean of the College of Science was hired even though that person wasn’t a finalist. Bypassed were highly qualified candidates from the Desert Research Institute and a scientist from the University of California.

Nevertheless, most sentiment about Glick on “university hill” is upbeat. During a recent conversation in his office, Glick repeatedly called me Jake, often smiled and was the soul of amiability.

Doubtless the Glick charm offensive. But it is typical of how he wins over people. He considers himself, as he should, the first among equals, quite the opposite of the autocratic, imperious and grandiose Lilley.

Glick got off to a terrible start at UNR in 2006, engineering a raise for the basketball coach. But now, facing a budget calamity, he realistically envisions a need to slash the athletic department by up to $700,000. He called the $53,000 sports budget cut proposed by Gov. Jim Gibbons ridiculously low.

Glick is also rejects the winning-is-everything attitude about sports in higher ed. “We will not tolerate criminal behavior,” he says emphatically.

He is convinced that the governor’s draconian higher ed budget will not be enacted, a prophecy likely to prove true. He calls the proposal to cut faculty pay illegal, a violation of the contract that professors sign with the university.

He is agreeable to restructuring the UNR Faculty Senate, which is badly malapportioned to favor of administrators over professors. “The very heart of a university is the teaching faculty,” Glick insists.

He doesn’t miss teaching (he taught chemistry for 17 years at Wayne State University in Detroit). Besides: “As president I can teach the whole university.”

He admits he was not a great researcher. (His research area was X-ray crystallography, an abstruse field having something to do with crystal structure.)

Incredibly for a Ph.D., he extols the value of writing while admitting that Ph.D.s can’t write. “Writing is essential whatever the discipline,” he notes. “Writing is so important.”

He opposes beer drinking at Wolf Pack football games. “I don’t like it but a survey showed that people want it.” (The people are right for a change. Prohibition was the worse social experiment the nation ever undertook.)

Glick is also wrong when he urges students to graduate in four years. UNR has a working student body. Students sometimes put in 40-hour weeks, ruling out graduation in four years.

Glick, a dapper man, lightly bearded, is charming guy, a good guy. He is the best college president in Nevada.

Despite the horrendous budget woes facing higher education in Nevada, Glick feels “very fortunate to be president. I love being here.”

Most UNR faculty, administrators and alums love having him here.

Pandering to Reno Aces

2009-04-29T15:43:00.001-07:00

A newspaper should have no friends.

--Joseph Pulitzer

The Reno Gazette-Journal coverage of the recent home debut of the Reno Aces was shameless boosterism.

When the Aces, the new Triple-A professional baseball team in the Truckee Meadows, opened their season recently in downtown Reno, the Gazette-Journal treated it as if it were the second-coming of Christ.

Its page one headlines: “A new downtown ballpark captures our hopes and imagination…Triple-A experience is so much more than baseball at today’s opening game.”

That day’s page one index had seven items, including “GAME DAY BLOG” and “ARE YOU ON TWITTER?” On page one the day after the opener the G-J carried an index of seven breathless items, including “MEET THE FIRST FANS THROUGH THE GATE” and “THE HOTTEST TICKET IN TOWN.”

The only thing missing after each blurb was an exclamation point.

Alongside those embarrassing second-day gushes appeared a column headlined: “How are we going to top this?”

Dennis Myers, news editor of the Reno News & Review and media watchdog, was appalled by this complete disregard of any pretense of objectivism.

The G-J and TV stations gave the impression that they owned the Aces with their “reverential and admiring coverage,” Myers wrote.

He decried failure to do a probing report on how the ballpark was financed and “the implications of that financing for the city’s taxpayers.” Myers asked: “Where was the scrutiny of the Reno Aces corporation along with the bubbly, adoring ‘news coverage’? ”

Local news departments have become PR firms, totally ignoring the Pulitzer dictum that a newspaper should have no friends.

The G-J, rapidly decending from a subpar newspaper to a bad one, is now carrying a special section called “Good News.” The very nature of so much news is bad.

The media do regularly run good news. It was good news that the Las Vegas Sun won a Pulitzer Prize last month for public service. The Sun was honored for articles describing lack of construction safety regulations leading to high death tolls. The jurors saluted the courageous reporting of Alexandra Berzon.
It was precisely what newspapers should be doing, not boosting the home town.

In hailing the award, the Las Vegas CityLife expressed the hope that Las Vegas would soon produce another Pulitzer winner. I nominate CityLife columnists Steve Sebelius and Hugh Jackson. They write the hardest-hitting, toughest public affairs journalism in Nevada.

Unfortunately, their kind of commentary is not likely to win a Pulitzer. Newpaper jurors, very much part of the Establishment, prefer safe and sound columnists, not guys like Sebelius and Jackson who tell the naked truth.

Cheering a disgrace

The oldest cry from the Right is that the media are liberal. Would it were so. After President Bush held a farewell press conference, White House reporters gave him a standing ovation.

A standing ovation is highly unprofessional for supposedly neutral journalists. Moreover, how could any reporter applaud the sordid eight-year record of 43?

Prudish New York Times

The New York Times, publishing in the 21st century but with 19th century prudishness, recently ran a story about Supreme Court arguments on the use of the word “fuck” in broadcasts.

“You know the word I mean,” Adam Liptak of the Times coyly wrote.

This is 2009. Sophisticated Times readers can handle that word without blinking.
Another Establishment speaker

I have endured Scripps dinner speakers for nearly three decades at the University of Nevada, Reno, journalism school. All are Establishent to the core.

The speaker this spring was no exception. Edie Lederer, an Associated Press veteran, entertainingly described how she covered wars from Vietnam to Afghanistan. But she never gave the faintest suggestion that these wars were unjust, uttered not a word about U.S. empire-building and gave nary a hint that U.S. provocations led to the 9/11 attacks.

Just say it plain
The Associated Press reported that a basketball player had “a torn anterior cruciate ligament and torn meniscus.”

Surely there is a more felicitious way of writing that so it can be understood by readers who are neither doctors nor medical students.

Paul Mitchell, journalism professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, and a sports authority, learnedly explains the injury:

“The ligament acts as a stablizer for the knee (keeps it in place). The meniscus is a fleshy tissue that acts as a shock absorber.” If the parts wear out, “the athlete risks rubbing bone on bone in the knee joint.“

But, Paul, why couldn’t the AP simply say the player had a knee injury? Newspapers are written for general readers, not specialists.

Failure of moral leadership

2009-04-29T15:40:00.000-07:00

Politicians cannot get too far ahead of their constituents. If they do, they will not get elected or re-elected. But for Men and Women of God not to be ahead of their parishioners is reprehensible.

Martin Luther King is a sterling example of a church leader who led the nation into paths of righteousness on race. In contrast, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, is a lame follower. He will not lead his Anglican flock to higher moral ground on gays and lesbians.

Williams refused to invite U.S. Bishop Gene Robinson to the 2008 Lambeth Conference, a once-a-decade meeting of bishops in the Anglican communion. Robinson was uninvited because he is the first openly gay Anglican bishop.

Paul Elie pointed out in a profile of Williams in the March issue of Atlantic that “the prohibitions against homosexuality are theologically unsound.” Strictures against homosexuals in Genesis and in the letters of Paul are un-Christian. So are church teachings insisting that the only place for sex is within orthodox marriage and that the purpose of sex is to bear children.

Williams is an accommodationist. He does not want to alienate those conservatives who oppose gay and lesbian clergy and who find gay marriage abhorrent. On the other hand, he does not want to lose progressives who espouse the Christian viewpoint.

Williams’ via media is to abdicate leadership on the supreme church moral crisis of the day.

The middle way is a cowardly way. Williams has traded truth for unity. He has failed to fulfill the hope he stirred in many of the 80 million Anglican-Episcopal adherents when he was elevated to archbishop in 2002.

Fluoride bill doomed to die

A fluroide bill has been tossed into the legislative hopper in Carson City for decades. For decades it has been defeated. So often state lawmakers don’t know what is good for their constituents.

Backers of a new bill to fluoridate Washoe County water rightly declare that fluoridation will improve dental health.

But foes say it is unnecessary and too expensive. They say fluoride is a toxic chemical. They probably think fluoridation is a death-dealing plot by al-Qaida.

Sparks Councilman Mike Carrigan, chairman of the Truckee Meadows Water Authority board, takes the fatuous position that the people have voted it down so the TMWA should also oppose the plan.

Such thinking is endorsement of tyranny of the majority. Yes, the majority rules in a democracy. But the voters often are not smart. They often oppose their best interests and the best interests of society. If form holds, the people will “win” again.

Lucky teachers

Teaching is a privilege. With that privilege goes a huge responsibility. Teachers can have a great influence on young people.

Teaching at the University of Nevada, Reno, J school, I try to do more than instruct students in the skills of journalism. I try to instill a lifelong reverence for learning, the Baconian idea of taking all knowledge to be their province.

I stress love of ideas and the play of the mind. I hope to open minds that might never have opened.

I encourage student cultural enrichment, to love literature, classical music, art, great films and theater. And I stress the importance of constant reading, books both literary classics and books on the major issues of the day.

I read students the challenging lines from Whitman: “He that by me spreads a wider breast than my own proves the width of my own, / He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher.”

Glad to be alive

Sometimes we pause to realize how fortunate we are to be alive. Such a moment occurred recently when I looked out my office window at UNR.

Above, in a crystal blue sky, I saw a red-tailed hawk, soaring and turning, with striking black wing tips and white underwings gleaming in the sun. What a wonderful sight!

Later, while listening to the Saturday Metropolitan Opera broadcast on WCPE in Chicago over the Internet, I heard the meditation theme from Massenet’s “Thaïs.”

Beautiful. Then I heard several reprises of that lovely theme. How bereft would we be without music.

It us a sad commentary on the campus radio station, KUNR, that I must listen to the glories of opera on an out-of-town station. I have listened, enjoyed and cried over Met performances on KUNR for decades. But the Philistines there now bury the Met at 9 p.m. Sundays.

Progressive: 100 years for justice

2009-04-17T14:09:00.001-07:00

Much of the history of the United States in the past century has been told by The Progressive. It pages resonate with some of the greatest leftist writers and reformers in American history.

That honor roll includes Philip Berrigan and Louis Brandeis, Theodore Dreiser and Martin Luther King, Norman Thomas and Ralph Nader, Helen Keller and Jane Addam, Hugo Black and Bill Douglas, Sinclair Lewis and Upon Sinclair, and Noam Chomsky and Edward Said.

Those names glorify the 100^th anniversary issue of Progressive published this month. The magazine was founded in 1909 by Fighting Bob La Follette, great progressive senator from Wisconsin.

The anniversary will be marked by a conference in Madison, Wis., May 1 and 2. The lineup of speakers includes Barbara Ehrenreich and Naomi Klein, Katha Pollitt and Katrina vanden Heuvel, Jesse Jackson and Dennis Kucinich, Jim Hightower and Robert McChesney, Amy Goodman and Howard Zinn, and George McGovern and Russ Feingold.

Matt Rothschild, Progressive editor, lists its main causes: championing civil liberties, combating corporate power, opposing war and empire and fighting for women’s rights and civil rights, human rights and labor rights.

Rothschild, in his anniverary issue column, writes sadly of unfulfilled goals that Progressive battled for.

“It is disconcerting to read about the need for universal health care by Jane Addams in 1909,” Rothschild writes. “It is eerie to stumble on an article demanding an end of the corrupting influence of money in politics from 1909. It is frustrating to read article after article against the death penalty, starting with Tolstoy’s in 1910.”

Some of the significant issues Progressive fought for over the past century:

Sen. George Norris in 1922 called for abolition of the Electoral College. (It still exists as a mockery of democracy.)

La Follette in 1927 deplored the armed invasion of Nicaragua. “The inevitable result of this harsh, bullying and unjustifiable action is to set the nations of South and Central America against us.”

La Follette in 1942 ridiculed Churchill, that Great Reactionary, for refusing to “preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.” Norman Thomas in 1946 lamented that 3,200 Americans were jailed for the “crime” of conscientious objection to war.

Philip Randolph in 1948 flayed Jim Crow as an “unmitigated evil” and pointed out the absurdity of a segregated army. Douglas decried the Red Scare in 1952. “Character assassinations have become common...Fear runs rampant.”

In 1949 Stuart Chase declared that Hiroshima was unnecessary, citing a study predicting that Japan would probably surrender in 1945. “The 80,000 children, women and men slaughtered at Hiroshima would thus be alive today if the men who dropped the bomb” had listened to the study group (Foreign Morale Analysis Division).

Martin Luther King in 1960 lauded Southern black college students for their sit-ins at lunch counters while facing “hoodlums, police guns, tear gas and jail sentences.”

In 1963 King wrote that moving classic, “A Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” He excoriated the “vicious lynch mobs” and “hate-filled policemen” who “curse, kick, brutalize and even kill.” He denounced white and colored signs in the South. He noted the indignity of being called “nigger” or “boy,” left with “a degenerating sense of ‘nobodiness.’ ”

Wayne Morse in 1964 pilloried the U.S. role in Vietnam. “We are pursuing neither law nor peace in Southeast Asia. We are not even pursing freedom.” (America, having learned nothing from history, is doing likewise today in Iraq and Afghanistan.)

Noam Chomsky in 1982 deplored the fact that Washington “continues to underwrite Israeli encroachment into the occupied territories.” He denounced the U.S. commitment “to an Israeli Sparta as a ‘strategic asset’ that frustrates the international consensus on a political settlement.” (Nothing changes. Israeli horrors continue with American backing.)

Robert Fisk in 1999 denounced NATO folly in the Balkins, breaking “international law in attacking a sovereign nation without seeking a U.N. mandate and killing “hundreds of innocent Serb civilians.”

Bernie Sanders wrote in 2004 of the yawning gap between the rich and the poor. He called unacceptable that “the 13,000 wealthiest families in this country earn more income than the bottom 20 million families.”

Howard Zinn in 2005 deplored the scourge of nationalism, calling it “one of the great evils of our time, along with racism and religious hatred.”

Alas, America rarely listens to The Progressive and its prophets. Prophets like McGovern who wrote in 1973: “America can accomplish far more by the power of example than by the power of bombing.”

Unfeeling GOP, sappy Tuesdays

2009-04-10T13:40:00.000-07:00

“This Land Is Their Land.” By Barbara Ehrenreich (Metropolitan Books, 235 pp., 2008).

Any sensitive soul who reads this book will never vote Republican again. But perhaps that is an oxymoron. No Republican is sensitive.

“The Republicans’ most reliable trick, distraction, is beginning to wear thin,” Ehrenreich writes. “Distraction was the way to get people to vote against their own economic self-interest…The real threats to well-being, people were told, are abortionists, stem cell researchers and matrimonially minded gays.”

She enumerates many of the sins of capitalism: privatizing and profiteering, taking away workers’ pensions and benefits, downsizing workforces, refusing to insure those who might ever make a claim, falsifying records to avoid paying overtime, using child labor and Veblen’s conspicuous consumption.

She deplores “the upward distribution of wealth” built on the low-wage labor of the poor.” She cites the despicable Wal-Mart, “a union-busting, low-wage retail empire” with a $65 billion family fortune.

Ehrenreich rightly decries the fact that health insurance companies are running businesses, “the purpose of which is not to make people healthy but to make money.” They are doing that exceedingly well.

One rebarbative physician, Dr. Prem Reddy, owns eight hospitals in southern California so he naturally disdains the medical needs of the poor. He says patients “may simply deserve only the amount of care they can afford.” He “dismisses as ‘an entitlement mentality’ the idea that everyone should be getting the same high quality care.”

Indeed, Ehrenreich correctly writes that “economic issues are moral issues. Poverty is a moral issue. Forty-seven million Americans without health insurance is a moral issue.”

America remains an immoral nation while so many of its citizens mutter about God and are “noisely committed to Christian values.”

•

“Tuesdays with Morrie.” By Mitch Albom (Broadway Books, republished with an afterword, 199 pp., 2007).

I have read tons of books over the course of my long life but I do not believe I have ever read a worse book.

The hero, Professor Morrie Schwartz, is dying of Lou Gehrig’s disease. Death is no laughing matter. But the book grows so wearisome that you wonder if Schwartz is worth venerating.

Moreover, you begin to think that Albom, a sports columnist at the Detroit Free Press, has a third-rate mind. (Schwartz was Albom’s professor at Brandeis.)

The author never makes a contradictory point, never even questions “the Great Man’s wisdom.” He is an excellent stenographer.

Originally published in 1997, the book was “a runaway best seller.” It was proclaimed a book that “touched millions of lives.” Well, if the masses applaud it must be bad.

The book is syrupy, sappy and cloying. It belabors the obvious, offers nonsense and repeats that nonsense.

Some of the nonsense uttered by Schwartz: “No one really believes they’re going to die.” Untrue. Schwartz says men are not supposed to cry. Untrue.

“Once you learn how to die, you learn how to live.” Please. If you don’t learn how to live until you are dying, you have wasted your life. “Love always wins.” Not when a loved one dies.

Schwartz, who couldn’t understand why labor disputes aren’t settled by communication, revealed a woeful lack of understanding that working people cannot communicate with money-mad fiends. Even Albom doesn’t realize that scabs are a subhuman species.

Schwartz talks about the fear of aging. No one fears aging. Aging people just lament that their vigor is fading.

Schwartz on God: “This is too harmonious, grand and overwhelming a universe to believe it’s all an accident.” The professor knew little history and nothing about the world and human nature. Reincarnation? The professor said it was possible.

He says it’s a wonderful thing to see his “body slowly wilt away to nothing” because it gives him long goodbyes. Oh, for a Dylan Thomas to “rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

Why did I persist in reading such a wretched book? Because it was recommended to me by a former student and longtime friend.

The reason he was so enthusiastic about the book was that it made him realize that his frantic 15-hour-a-day pursuit of money was a terrible mistake.

One other truth in the book is a quote from Henry Adams: “A teacher affects eternity. He can never tell where his influence stops.”

But overall, “Morrie” is merely one of those self-help, feel-good books. It is not fetching but retching.

Bile for rich, love for nature

2009-04-06T06:28:00.000-07:00

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.

--F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Rich Boy”

INDIAN WELLS, Calif.--This is a column that you hope a friend never hears about from another friend who runs across my blog. The reason is simple: it is biting a generous hand.

My wife and I recently vacationed in Indian Wells, staying with an old family friend. Call her Dorabella. She is one of the finest people I have ever ever known: ebullient, politically savvy, a rabid liberal Democrat, the epitome of the happy warrior.

My problem is that Dorabella lives in a gated community. Let me hasten to point out that she is not rich. The reason she can afford this lavish place is that she owned a home near the beach in Southern California for four decades.

She sold that valuable property three years ago, moving here in the Coachella Valley desert. As they say in the real estate business: “location, location, location.”

The name of Dorabella’s community name speaks volumes: Dorado Villas. It is a complex of 10 condominium areas each with its own swimming pool, hot tub and tennis court.

The complexes are surrounded by date palms. The lawns are as carefully manicured as the magnificent Masters golf course in Augusta, Ga. The silence is often eerie, broken only by lawn mowers, airplanes and the twittering of mockingbirds.

The owner of one villa near Dorabella lives there just one week a year. A nearby gated community may be the poshest in America. Bill Gates owns a home there so he can play golf without being bothered by the hoi polloi.

I cannot help detesting such wealth. I have always resented the rich and their huge houses. It seems grossly unfair that they should have it so cushy while so many people struggle to make ends meet.

Gated communities, offensive from the perspective of this once poor kid, reveal such an enormous gap between the Haves and Have Nots. They symbolize the class warfare launched by President Reagan, polished by President Bush II and abetted by soulless Republicans and Democrats who betray their class.

Not even the Democrats have the cojones to note that class war is rampant in America. But The Nation as usual tells the truth: “Concentrations of wealth in America approach Gilded Age levels…America has become a nation of Wal-Mart wages for the many and private jets for the few.”

Giving our hearts away

“The world is too much with us; late and soon, /

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: /

Little we see in Nature that is ours; /

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!”

--Wordsworth

This desert country is paradise for the nature lover, a heaven-on-earth I all too seldom visit. So it is particularly wonderful to commune with nature, to roam the Great Outdoors

In the surrounding Mojave Desert, we visited Joshua Tree National Park, home of the twisted, spike-leafed Joshua.

In the park is Keys View (5,458 feet) with a fine view of the San Andreas Fault--or it has if there is no smog. The fault, the ever sliding boundary between the Pacific and the North American plates, runs from near the Mexican border to northern California.

Mormon pioneers are said to have called them Joshuas because they seemed like the Old Testament prophet, Joshua, waving them toward the promised land.

On another day we drove to the nearby Living Desert park in Palm Desert. The first stop is mandatory: a butterfly cage. The beautiful creatures are so unhurried. Watching them is like the restfulness of seeing fish in a tank. Hummingbirds grace the cage, their reds, purples and greens gleaming in the sunlight.

One day I drove to the Salton Sea, an inland body of saline water south of Indian Wells. The shoreline of the lake, 226 feet below sea level, teems with gulls, pelicans, grebes and stilts.

Nothing new to add to my life list. But it is ever fascinating to watch an egret hunt. The bird stands stock still for a long time then darts its spear bill at prey.

The biggest birding delight of the vacation was to watch a roadrunner scurry across Dorabella’s lawn. Once it carried a twig to its nest in a lime, pausing below the tree, its tail alternately touching the ground and slowly rising above its back.

No wonder the roadrunner is a comic favorite in the American Southwest, delighting birders and nonbirders alike.

Loneliness lauded, colonialism decried

2009-03-30T11:34:00.000-07:00

Capsule reviews of books recently crossing this columnist’s desk:

“The Best of Grammaticus.” Writings of Professor E.M. Blaiklock. Edited by David More. Wilson & Horton, Auckland, New Zealand. 1994.
It is doubtful whether more than five out of 300 million Americans ever heard of E.M. Blaiklock. Which is a pity.
Blaiklock, whose penname was Grammaticus, was an essayist of the type that no longer exists in this noisy, cluttered, fast-paced, Digital Age. His columns appeared in the New Zealand press for more than 40 years.
His style was simplicity personified: soft, gentle, thoughtful, wise, literary and historical. He was “a thinking reed,” in Pascal’s phrase. Un homme sérieux. Blaiklock, a professor of Latin and Greek at the University of Auckland, wrote with a clarity and brevity that is beyond most academics. His interests were broad. He easily discussed Housman, Dickens, Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Tennyson, Kipling, Masefield, FitzGerald, Carlyle and Hans Christian Anderson.
Poetry pleased him, quoting it often. “But where are the snows of yesteryear” (Villon). “Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments” (Shakespeare).
Grammaticus wrote: “Poetry sometimes reaches truth by a shorter path than prose.” He extolled “the blessings of solitude.” “Something has died in the soul of a man when to be alone is terrifying or irksome,” he wrote. “I see no disadvantage in being an only child and no harm in loneliness…I have always enjoyed work and can imagine no fate worse than to be denied absorbing activity.”
On seeing a spider’s web, he observed: “It was a structure of wondrous symmetry and beauty. There are few sights so remarkable in nature.” On academic meetings: “It has been my fate to sit weary hours in committee meetings which, if wordiness is an indication, some seemed, incomprehensively, to enjoy.” (So true. Take it from an academic who detests time-wasting faculty meetings with their endless talk, talk, talk.) Grammaticus, who died in 1983, loved literature, nature and intellectual jousting. Such a man is never really lonely.

“Black Skin, White Masks” (1952) and “The Wretched of the Earth” (1961). By Frantz Fanon. Grove Press, New York.
“Black Skin” outlines the psychological damage inflicted on colonized people, especially inferiority complexes. Just as Frederick Douglass, great American abolitionist, knew that plantation owners tried to keep slaves from learning to read and write, so Fanon noted that “the black man who quotes Montesquieu must be watched.”
Or: “When a black man speaks of Marx, the first reaction is: ‘We educated you and now you are turning against your benefactors. Ungrateful wretches.’ ”
Fanon pointed out about racism: “The collective unconscious is quite simply the repository of prejudices, myths and collective attitudes of a particular group.” It is cultural, an acquired habit disdaining reason.
Fanon’s last book, “The Wretched of the Earth,” had a profound influence on black radicals like Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver, Angela Davis, Bobby Seale and Huey Newton. To the Black Panthers, Fanon was a prophet.
This “Bible of decolonialism” limned the gross exploitation of colonialism. It rightly raged at racism. It railed against colonial masters who argued that if they left their colonies, Africans “would regress into barbarism, degradation and bestiality.” Jean-Paul Sartre wrote an introduction to “Wretched” with this command: “Have the courage to read it primarily because it will make you feel ashamed. And shame, as Marx said, is a revolutionary feeling.” Colonists plundered Africa, stealing its wealth, nationhood and manhood. They kept the natives “penned in apartheid” and “scarred by the whip.”
“The church in the colonies is the white man’s church, a foreigner’s church,” Fanon declared. “It does not call the colonizeds to the ways of God but to the ways of the white man, to the ways of the master, the ways of the oppressor.”
Douglass had the same problem. He tells of attending a Methodist communion in the North, the blacks clustered near the back door. After all the whites had been served, the minister exclaimed: “Come up, colored friends, come up! You know that God makes no distinction among people.” Douglass never went to church again.
The New York Review of Books aptly described Fanon in 1966 as a “black Rousseau…His call for national revolutions is Jacobin in method, Rosseauist in spirit and Sartrian in language--altogether as French as can be.”
Fanon: doctor, intellectual and humanist. He urged the overthrow of barbaric capitalism and its replacement by humane socialism. He was right. But that may take centuries in America where mammon comes first.

Exploding media, college myths

2009-03-14T15:18:00.001-07:00

The answer to the enduring question, “Are the media liberal or conservative?” is easy: it depends on where you stand politically.
To conservatives, the media are liberal. To liberals, the media are conservative. If you are a leftist, the media are center-right and Establishment to the core.
But one thing often forgotten in the argument: the Bushites who broadcast on Fox and MSNBC have ever so much more influence on American public opinion than the sophisticated New York Times.
Another persistent myth: universities are swarming with lefties, poisoning the minds of youth by inculcating socialism. It simply is untrue.
Of the 608 fulltime professors at the University of Nevada, Reno, no more than a handful are leftists.
The board of the Nevada Faculty Alliance, an advocacy group for UNR professors, has 14 members. Liberals all, probably, but not a leftist among them except this columnist.
The NFA refuses to call itself a union. Unions are for “lowly” workers, not “lofty” professors.
The UNR journalism school has 15 faculty members. Most of them are liberals--but just barely. Radicalism? “Sensible” people don’t think Left.
Just as the media in America represent the Establishment, so do journalism schools.
Situational ethics
I have endured many mediocre journalism speakers, panelists and events since I began teaching at UNR in 1981. In all those decades I cannot recall a better and more applause-worthy speaker than Lynne Dale.
Dale, who spoke during the recent UNR journalism week, and her ABC colleagues broke the Food Lion scandal on “Primetime Live” in 1992.
She showed nauseating film footage: meat and fish marinated in Clorox to hide the smell, rotten spots cut out, outdated food masked with baking soda, and mouldy products relabeled with new expiration dates.
Some of the professorial “ethicists” complained that the ABC exposé resulted from undercover techniques. Yes, Dale had a camera hidden under her wig. Yes, she got the job as a food wrapper in the Red Lion superchain outlet in Pickens, N.C., by lying.
But ethical, smethical. ABC was doing precisely what the media should be doing: exposing corruption. It served the greater public good.
Purists deride what ABC did as “whim ethics.” No, it is situational ethics. Something is right or wrong depending on whether the public must know. The ends justify the means when it comes to infiltration reporting.
As the San Francisco Chronicle editorialized: “The fraud was committed on customers by Food Lion, not on viewers by the network.”
P.S.: Food Lion did not sue ABC for libel because truth is an absolute defense in libel suits. The jury in the U.S. district trial court, not allowed to see the horror film, found for Food Lion. But justice triumphed when a U.S. appeals court ruled for ABC.
Undercover muckraking is an old and honorable journalistic tradition. Nellie Bly of the New York World feigned insanity to get herself commited to an insane asylum in 1887. She wrote a devastating exposé.
Upton Sinclair in “The Jungle” revealed the horrors of Chicago meatpacking with rigorous research, extensive interviews--and by masquerading as a plant worker. The novel led to the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906.
In 1971 the historic Pentagon Papers were purloined from Defense Department files by Daniel Ellsberg. The Chicago Sun-Times set up a bar to expose bribe-taking Chicago officials.
Life magazine exposed a quack doctor by gaining access to his house under false pretenses, surreptitiously recording conversations and clandestinely taking photographs. CBS’s “60 Minutes” went undercover to reveal that medical lab kickbacks were a way of life in inner city Chicago.
The Cincinnati Enquirer ran an 18-page investigative report detailing the unethical and illegal practices of Chiquita banana. Sure, one of the Enquirer reporters gleaned some information from illegally obtained voice messages. But the greater benefit accured to the public.
All writers need editors
Everyone who writes needs an editor, including this columnist. I am a careful writer, striving for accuracy and grammatical excellence. But this “Homer” sometimes nods.
Nevertheless, my aim is the same as Franklin put it in an essay for the Junto, an intellectual club in colonial Philadelphia: writing must be “smooth, clear and short.”
Ben’s excellent advice has never been adopted by academics. Their writing is muddy, wordy, repetitious.
As editor of the Nevada Faculty Alliance newsletter I shudder at their terrible prose. It’s the worst editing job I ever had.
Oh, the academics are learned. But they should be compelled to take a journalism writing course before getting that glorious PhD.

Dorothy Day: diaries of a saint

2009-03-13T14:14:00.000-07:00

THE DUTY OF DELIGHT. The Dairies of Dorothy Day. Edited by Robert Ellsberg, Marquette University Press, Milwaukee, Wis. 654 pp. 2008.

David O’Brien wrote in the Catholic magazine Commonweal that Dorothy Day was “the most significant, interesting and influential person in the history of American Catholicism.”
These dairies support that judgment. Indeed, they make a compelling case for her sainthood. Her life shows an extraordinary example of the gospels in action.
Ellsberg, former managing editor of The Catholic Worker, writes in the introduction that Day had an “abiding commitment to social justice.”
That commitment began in 1932 with coverage for Commonweal of the communist-launched hunger march of the jobless in Washington, D.C.
Six months later Day and Peter Maurin started The Catholic Worker, a newspaper for “the man in the street.” It carried Maurin’s essays and Day’s reporting of “poverty and destitution, homelessness and unemployment.”
The two quickly expanded the Catholic Worker Movement, opening the first hospitality house for women. Today there are 185 Catholic Worker hospitality houses in 37 states and 10 nations.
The Catholic Worker still publishes monthly and still charges $1. It is supported by people like me who donate a “widow’s mite” periodically because it really is The Catholic Radical that Maurin wanted to name the paper.
The Catholic hierarchy often disapproved of Day’s Christlike deeds. In 1949 the Catholic Worker supported cemetery workers on strike against the archdiocese of New York. Cardinal Spellman denounced the strikers, declaring that they were under the influence of communist agitators.
In the late 1960s a cardinal was in Vietnam blessing U.S. airplanes. Day was incensed by this pact with the devil. She raged:
“What a confusion we have gotten into when Christian prelates sprinkle holy water on scrap metal to be used for obliteration bombing and name bombers for the Holy Innocents, for our Lady of Mercy. Prelates who bless a man about to press a button which releases death to 50,000 human beings, including babies, children, the sick and the aged.”
Day was arrested at the age of 75 for picketing with the United Farm Workers. She was so often arrested for civil disobedience that a New York City jail kept “a Dorothy Day suite.”
Day spent an unsaintly youth before converting to Catholicism in 1927. Colman McCarthy, a columnist for the National Catholic Reporter, writes:
“She bibbed (drank) with playwright Eugene O’Neill and critic Malcolm Cowley…reveled with Greenwich Village bohemians, had an abortion, gave birth to a daughter and left a common-law marriage.”
But her passion for social justice and Left causes never flagged. McCarthy adds: she “interviewed Trotsky, went to jail with suffragette Alice Paul, was on the barricades with the socialists, read anarchist Peter Kropotkin, Tolstoy and Jack Reed.”
October 1944: “I read St. Teresa’s treatises on prayer…I labored at watering the garden of my soul…the greatness of the Little Flower…She let loose powers, consolations, a stream of faith…How much richer we are because of her.”
Introducing readers to the fifties, Ellsberg writes: “Dorothy’s willingness to stand beside the communists and other targets of the Red Scare was not lost on FBI boss Hoover.
“In a note in her files Hoover observed that Dorothy Day ‘has engaged in activities which strongly suggest that she is consciously or unconsciously being used by communist groups.’ ”
Nov. 13, 1959: “A priest who reviewed my book (“The Long Loneliness”) insinuated that there was something morbid in my love for the poor. Strange criticism.”
All diarists can empathize with Day when she writes: “Always in my life I have found that writing about problems, putting them down on paper, can lift the burden from my heart.” (This columnist has kept a diary since 1947. Diaries are cathartic.)
Sometimes Day’s piety gets excessive. She writes: “Man’s first duty is to praise God, to adore him, to thank him.”
Sometimes Day exasperates by having nothing to say about books, authors or people. “Reading Debs book on prisons.” What does she think about book? About Debs? Nothing.
Oct. 16, 1973: “Kissinger gets Nobel Peace Prize.” Day’s comment? Nothing. The great satirist Tom Lehrer, however, was spot on: “Satire died the day they gave Kissinger the peace prize.”
And sometimes Ellsberg should have edited with a scalpel when the diary descends to trivia. Example: “Lily over tonight and we played Scrabble.”
But Day rightly rages at the ceaseless wars of America. March 5, 1973: “The hideousness of burying thousands of dead in wars.”
If all Catholics, like all believers of any religion, acted like Dorothy Day it would be a far better world.
Day was a socialist and pacifist. A voice of conscience even though often crying in the wilderness. A true servant of God. A saint.

2 books savage media

2009-03-07T12:47:00.000-08:00

Mini-reviews of books crossing the desk of this columnist recently:
“No Time to Think” by Howard Rosenberg and Charles Feldman. The book makes it clear why you should never watch TV news and its shouting pundits.
The shallowness is appalling. Such “shows” are more entertainment than news. People who watch them let blowhards do their thinking.
The authors are also trenchant about the media being all about personalities rather than offering understanding and enlightenment.
About opinion disguised as news and analysis. About “five grams of news and 10 grams of speculation.” About the 24-hour news cycle “when fast and faster, brief and briefer” are essentials.
As for citizen journalism, it is amateur journalism. Producer Don Hewitt of “60 Minutes” says sarcastically that he also favors citizen brain surgery.

• “Static” is not the kind of book reviewed by the New York Times. It is far too critical of the Times, the media and American policies.
The Times, the epitome of Establishment journalism, runs reviews of a seven or eight run-of-the-mill novels in the Sunday book section. It seldom reviews important nonfiction books--and none like “Static.”
Written by the sister and brother team of Amy and David Goodman, “Static” hammers the Establishment media for cheerleading for the late, unlamented Bush administration and for bowing to power rather than fighting for people.
Amy Goodman is host of the popular radio program, “Democracy Now!” She is a muckraker in the glorious tradition of Upton Sinclair and Lincoln Steffens in the 19th century and George Seldes and I.F. Stone in the 20th.
Unfortunately, her program is not available in Nevada, one of the most retrograde states in the nation.

• “Neck Deep” by Robert, Sam and Nat Parry. The subtitle says it in a nutshell: “The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush.” It’s another nonfiction work you won’t see reviewed in the august New York Times.
The Parrys denounce the expansive vision of Bush regarding executive powers: “detention without trial of ‘enemy combatants,’ coercive techniques to extract information and confessions… assertion of the president’s right to wage war with or without congressional approval and the notion that the commander in chief’s authority for the ‘war on terror’ knows no limits.”
They write about Bush’s frat boy mentality: “extensive dabbling in instant gratifications from his playboy lifestyle that included evading military service in Vietnam, heavy drinking and illicit drug use.”
They rip Bush foreign policy as having had “the same characteristics as 19th century European imperialism: military garrisons, economic penetration and control, support for leaders, no matter how brutal and undemocratic as long as they obey the imperial power, and exploitation and depletion of natural resources.”

• “Head and Heart” by Garry Wills notes the frequent hypocrisy of Christians in America, from the Puritans to the un-Christian Christians in the apartheid South, to Father Coughlin whose 1930s radio show drew 30 million listeners despite his virulent anti-Semitic diatribes.
America is one of the most Christian countries in the world. Yet its religious history is full of yes-buts. Examples abound:
Anne Hutchinson was expelled from the Bay Colony for purported heresy. A Cambridge pastor said her tolerance of other religions was “the foundation of all other errors and abominations in the churches of God.”
After Hutchinson was killed by Indians, Gov. John Winthrop exulted that “God had made a judgment on her.”
Pat Robertson thinks along those lines. Robertson, one of the most rebarbative religious leaders in U.S. history, is the wacko who attributed 9/11 to the moral collapse of America because of harboring gays and allowing abortions.
Another example of gross hypocrisy. School kids are taught that the Pilgrims and Puritans came to America to escape religious oppression in Britain. What they are seldom told are the hangings of religious people (Quakers) or expulsion of individuals (Roger Williams) who disagreed with them.
Thomas Paine, author of one of the greatest polemics ever written, “Common Sense,” thought it simply common sense to believe in God.
Paine, like most of the Founders, espoused deism, that “halfway house” between theism and atheism. He was reviled for his devastation of the Bible in “The Age of Reason.” But Paine had a failure of intellect when it came to belief in God.
Jefferson and John Adams also believed in a deity. Jefferson held the view that old friends would meet again in an afterlife.
Even great men sometimes utter nonsense.

Heroic prof during McCarthy terror

2009-03-02T14:29:00.001-08:00

Ever hear of James E. Schevill? Probably not. But he was a hero while McCarthyism was ravaging America.
Schevill, a courageous professor when many people trembled with cowardice, died recently in Berkeley at 88. He was a poet, critic and playwright.
But his greatest glory was refusing to sign a loyalty oath as a prerequisite for teaching at the University of California, Berkeley.
He wrote a letter in 1950 to university president Robert Sproul declaring that he had searched his conscience for several days. The result: he could not sign.
“To me loyalty is not a matter of signature but of heart and action,” he wrote.
He assailed the Red Scare haunting America. He noted that the envelope bearing his loyalty oath carried the number 78025.
“Men are turning into numbers all over the world,” he noted. Schevill refused to be a number.
He pointed out that his father had taught at Berkeley for many years, years during which his father “helped to build the university into the world reputation for free thought that it has enjoyed.”
Now, he lamented, many of his father’s friends had been fired “as if their years of service meant nothing.” He added: “I cannot bring myself to betray the devotion with which my father served a free university.”
He concluded with a ringing plea for academic freedom: “In this suffused atmosphere of questioned loyalties, which reminds me more and more every day of the half-comic, half-tragic world of Kafka’s novels, I cannot agree to the debasement of the free exchange of ideas.”
After rejecting the McCarthyite oath, Schevill taught at the California College of Arts and then at San Francisco State. From 1968 to 1985 he taught creative writing at Brown University.
The loss to Berkeley students was great. But the greater tragedy was nationwide. As Edward R. Murrow said in his 1954 telecast exposing McCarthy:
“No one man can terrorize a whole nation unless we are all his accomplices. If none of us ever read a book that was ‘dangerous,’ had a friend who was ‘different’ or joined an organization that advocated ‘change,’ we would all be just the kind of people Joe McCarthy wants.”
Communist witch hunts hit California particularly hard. The California state committee ot un-American Activities persuaded the University of California to adopt its infamous loyality oath. Thirty-one Berkeley professors were fired for refusing to sign even though they were not communists.
Across the nation more than 100 professors were fired. Even the American Association of University Professors, which loudly proclaimed the importance of academic freedom, did not condemn the outrage.
McCarthy’s ugly tentacles reached into Hollywood. Two hundred actors and screen writers were blacklisted, unable to get jobs in the movie industry. Red-baiters circulated Red Channels, a publication that denied jobs in radio and TV to anyone with the remotest radical connections.
The soft-on-communisn smear resonated throughout the country after Nevada Sen. Pat McCarran pushed the McCarran Act through Congress in 1950. The measure required the Communist Party to register and disclose the names of its members.
President Truman rightly vetoed the McCarran bill as a violation of the First Amendment. But many so-called liberals joined conservatives to overide the veto.
However, it was Truman himself who started the despicable red-baiting three years before Senator McCarthy sounded a bogus warning that there were 205 communists and spies in the State Department.
Truman required federal employees to sign loyalty oaths in 1947. This heinous measure soon spread to state and local government--and even to private employers.
Columnist Dennis Myers noted that Reno’s Cal-Neva forced 105 employees to sign or resign. Myers added sardonically: the “atomic spy candidates” included dealers, pit bosses, waiters and janitors.
Frank McCulloch, the best journalist ever to come out of Nevada, as editor of the weekly Nevada State News in Reno, denounced such absurdities. But such absurdities plagued the University of Nevada during the Reign of Intellectual Terror.
Al Higginbotham, head of the UNR journalism department, signed a loyality oath swearing he was “not a member of the Communist Party.”
The American Civil Liberties Union, the staunchest defender of free speech in the land, got weak-kneed during the McCarthy era. It endorsed a bill to limit picketing at federal courthouses to prevent “communists from intimidating the courts,” as Christopher Finan put it in his book, “From the Palmer Raids to the Patriot Act.”
Worst of all, the ACLU refused to support Paul Robeson, great singer, actor and leftist, when the State Department revoked his passport. His crime? He refused to sign an affidavit denying that he was a communist.
McCarthyism was a terrible blot on the American escutcheon.

Books: ‘Dark Side’ to bawdy Bard

2009-02-25T08:49:00.000-08:00

Capsule reviews of books that have recently crossed this columnist’s desk:
• “The Dark Side” is a book that president-elect Obama should read. The author, Jane Mayer, pens a scathing indictment of the Bush administration while urging the recovery of America’s soul.
Count one: “For the first time in its history, the United States sanctioned government officials to physically and psychologically torment U.S.-held captives…torture is abhorrent to American laws and values.”
Count two: “Rather than seeing the American legal system as the country’s greatest strength, it was regarded as a burden.”
Count three: It rarely discussed “the legal, moral, ethical and rightness” of its policies.
Count four: It “nonchalantly dismissed international law, suggesting that the president could abide by it or not.”
Count five: It outsourced torture and condoned CIA torture of prisoners using sense deprivation, sleep deprivation, waterboarding, temperature extremes and stress positions.
Count six: It endorsed Abu Ghraib “with its American soldiers taunting naked, hooded prisoners.”
Count seven: Its “nightmarish secret underworld of America’s war on terror.”
Count eight: Guantánamo. Yet “another plunge into the dark side” with its further erosion of U.S. moral standing, its gulag of detainees, its Nazi-like “experiments.”
The Bush administration ignored the order of General Washington to his troops “to treat British soldiers with humanity and let them have no reason to complain of us copying the brutal manner of the British army…we should be very cautious of violating the rights to conscience in others.”
Mayer doesn’t say this expicitly but count nine could be an indictment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney as war criminals. Bush started two unnecessary wars and Cheney was the Vice President of Torture.

• “The Ordeal of Mark Twain” is an interpretive biography by Van Wyck Brooks first published in 1920 then updated. It is still worth reading because its portrait of a giant of American literature is devastating. That view: Twain as immature, infantile, childish, irresponsible, henpecked and with arrested development.
Money was always more important to Twain than a literary career. He yielded to the conventional for fear of losing popularity. And, worst of all, he allowed his books to be censored by his wife and himself.
Twain was afraid to publish his bitter “What is Man?” because it would destroy his image as a funny man and cause sales of his books to plummet. He suppressed the book for seven years despite a nagging conscience. Twain finally published it--anonymously.
Twain became a rich bourgeoise. As Brooks writes: “Success, prestige and wealth had become his gods.”
The great American satirist, the Voltaire, the Swift of the Gilded Age, Twain sold out.

• “The Age of American Unreason” by Susan Jacoby denounces the know-nothingism of boobus Americanus. Her litany is extensive:
“Ignorance, anti-rationalism and anti-intellectualism…widespread American credulity regarding the supernatural (ghosts, angels, demons and miracles)…Nearly two-thirds of Americans want creationism and evolution taught…a significant portion of Christians harbor a deep suspicion of any learning…the restless American tendency to found new churches with the manifestation of any new vision in the woods.”
American ignorance of simple political matters is enormous. “42 percent think that the Constitution explicitly states that ‘the first language of the United States is English.’ ” Or, “25 percent believe that Christianity was established by the Constitution as the official government religion.”
Jacoby approvingly quotes the title of the Arthur Schlesinger essay, “History and National Stupidity.” Excerpt: “the stupidity of our leadership, the stupidty of our culture and our ‘national stupidity’ of repeatedly fighting unwinnable wars,” in first Vietnam and now in Iraq and Afghanistan.

• “Filthy Shakespeare” by Pauline Kiernan describes the sexual allusions and puns abounding in Shakespeare. She boldly prints the sexual gallery of words: dildos, boobs, balls, fucking, wanking, cock, prick, cunt, cunnilingus, fellatio and buggery.
No wonder Thomas Bowdler came out in 1818 with a 10-volume edition of Shakespeare in which those words and expressions were omitted that “cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family.”
Many of the allusions escape modern readers but the Elizabethans knew what the Bard meant. For Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, life boiled down to tumescence and detumescence.
But Shakespeare was writing ever so much more than “dirty” plays and sonnets.
As Kiernan writes: “His towering greatness resides in his matchless understanding of the human condition, his profound insights into the…psychology, philosophy and politics and the greed, fear, jealousy, hatred, friendship, sex and love in all its many hues.”

Speech Obama should give

2009-02-16T07:43:00.000-08:00

President Obama’s centrist cup runneth over. So, alas, he will not give this speech:
My fellow citizens. As you know, the Bush administration has left this nation with Augean Stables. I am not Hercules. I cannot divert rivers to cleanse the eight-year filth and stench. But I can offer suggestions to make this a better nation.
The first thing we must do is end our two disastrous, unwinnable wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They are costing the nation too much blood and money and sapping our morality.
They are quagmires, wars that will go down in history as Bush’s follies. They can achieve nothing but more disaster. Moreover, rebuilding in the two countries is costing billions.
We also must put an end to global hegemony. Our military budget is bloated, the Pentagon spending $1 trillion a year. I propose closing scores of unnecessary military bases.
The Israel-Palestine tragedy is not just intractable, it may be insolvable. It certainly will never be solved as long at the United States blindly backs Israel as it has for six decades. Nor will peace come if Israel occupies Palestinian land--and continues to steal ever more.
The overreaction of Israel to Hamas rocket fire gets a tsk-tsk from the world. So does Israel’s seizure of a ship carrying food and medicine to Gaza. Israeli checkpoints and separation wall add humiliation to injury.
Our Cuban policy is a dinosaur. We should return to Cuba the naval base at Guantanamo. America obtained it by coercion in 1903 after its unjust war with Spain. We should end our cruel boycott, open diplomatic relations and ease travel restrictions.
Latin American policy must be reversed. No wonder Latins hate America for its constant invasions and interventions, colonizations and coups. We should scrap all vestiges of the Monroe Doctrine.
In domestic matters, it is a disgrace that the United States, the richest and most prosperous nation on the globe, does not have universal national health. Civilized countries do. Britain approved it in 1945 and Canada in 1966.
The federal tax system should be drastically overhauled. Tax cuts for the wealthy should be rescinded. The once progressive tax code must be restored. Fifty years ago corporations paid 60 percent of all federal taxes. Today? 16 percent.
Something long needed in this country is compulsory national service. All citizens should serve at least one year in these kind of endeavors: the Peace Corps, AmeriCorps, Teach for America, YouthBuild, teaching abroad, the military or the establishment of a modern-day equivalent of the Roosevelt Civilian Conservation Corps.
That is why I support the bipartisan Serve America Act introduced by Senators Kennedy, Massachusetts Democrat, and Orrin Hatch, Utah Republican.
I urge prompt passage in Congress of a bill allowing card-signing unionization. Republicans bleat about the sacred right to vote. The truth is that voting to unionize means pressure and harassment, intimidation, threats of job losses and threats of plant closings, and the firing of workers who dare campaign for a union.
Labor is not the enemy. Management is.
Another crying need is free college education for anyone who qualifies. An educated population makes a better population. College is far too important to work parttime, go to school half-time and fall into debt big-time.
I want every K-12 school in America to teach Darwinian evolution. That is solid science. All those antediluvian views such as so-called creationism, repackaged as intelligent design, have no place in our high school curricula.
Our nation must continue what the Founders demanded: a rigid separation of church and state. Faith is for church. It is not for government.
The civilized countries of Europe are banning advertising for all tobacco products. We should too. But America, including the retrograde Supreme Court, would rather kill people than give up the immense profits. Money is far more important than the 450,000 cancer-caused deaths annually in the United States.
We should legalize drugs. To do so would be an enormous tax source. We should also legalize prostitution in all states. That too would reap enormous tax income for the badly strapped states.
The nation faces so many other problems. One is the military’s policy of don’t ask-don’t tell. It should be abolished. To argue that the gays are a threat to national security or a danger to military discipline is to laugh. Sexual orientation is not the business of the military.
We should end the death penalty in all 50 states, legalize gay and lesbian marriages nationwide, raise the pitiful minimum wage, grant funding for federal elections to end legalized bribery and pass a congressional law rescinding a Supreme Court ruling that money is speech.
My fellow citizens, all these steps are necessary to make America the best and freest nation in the world.

3 books denounce capitalism

2009-02-06T16:33:00.000-08:00

Mini-reviews of books that have crossed the desk of this columnist in recent months:
• “The Shock Doctrine” by Naomi Klein says it all in the subtitle: “The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.”
One example of disaster capitalism: Iraq. Destroy the country then rebuild it by paying the Bechtels, Blackwaters and Halliburtons huge sums.
Klein ridicules the notion that America had an “immaculate conception” and never “sinned.”
She shows the ugly truth of American history: unprovoked wars, wars to save capitalists and the ever-lasting stain of slavery and Jim Crow laws.
And under Bush? Use of electric shock and torture, rendition for torture abroad and years of imprisonment without charges.
Klein illustrates how the dominant ideology in America for four decades has been a Milton Friedman free market economy, repeatedly fueled by frightful shocks and violence to implement reactionary politics.
“The Bush team, Friedmanite to the core,” exploited the 9/11 aftershock by successfully promoting its backward vision “in which everything from war fighting to disaster response was a for-profit venture,” she writes.
Klein says the enemy is “ruthless capitalism.” She’s right. Her bleak thesis leaves the reader full of despair. The evils of depressing capitalism: greed, deregulation, privatization, union-busting and riches for the few, economic scrambling for most people.
Yes, this a fervent cry for socialism. But, sadly, the U.S. Left is so minuscule. There hasn’t been a strong Left in America since Gene Debs 90 years ago.
In the unlikely event that the Left ever rises again in America, Naomi Klein should be canonized as an anti-capitalist saint.
• “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man” by John Perkins. Economic hit men are consultants to developing nations. They “cheat nations of trillions of dollars by fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex and murder.”
Perkins should know. He was one of them.
On the Reign of Genocide in Indonesia under Suharto, Perkins writes: “We were promoting U.S. foreign policy and corporate interests. We were driven by greed rather than any desire to make life better for the vast majority of Indonesians.”
Above all, the economic hitmen were saving Indonesia “from the clutches of communism.” So what if one million people were killed over 30 years? It was realpolitick, aided and abetted by the CIA.
On Ecuador: the people “had suffered a long line of dictators and right-wing oligarches manipulated by U.S. political and commercial interests.”
But so what? America is a corporatocracy with profits über alles. The people be damned.
Perkins tells of “chickens coming home to roost” in 9 /11, retaliation for the CIA overthrow of Iran’s socialist Mossadegh in 1954.
• “The Soul of Capitalism” by William Greider portrays dehumanizing capitalism, a capitalism without soul, without a human face and without regard for the social contract.
In contrast, Greider writes: “Socialists in western Europe, while they did not succeed in replacing capitalism with state ownership, created a much gentler version of capitalism than America.”
Humaneness? In America, 20,000 workers are fired each year for union-organizing. Labor law? “It confines workers rather than liberates them.” Social responsibility? Retrograde economic guru Friedman proclaimed that “irresponsibility is what makes capitalism succeed.”
Capitalism meets the demands of the market but never yields to the demands of humanity.
• “What Orwell Didn’t Know,” a collection of 20 essays about Orwell edited by András Szåntó.
The 1946 Orwell essay, “Politics and the English Language,” is a classic. Political language, Orwell wrote, “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable and to give an appearance of solidity to mere wind.”
The Bush administration was masterful at inventing euphemisms. It disguised torture abroad as extraordinary rendition, a bill drafted by polluters was cloaked as a clear skies initiative, tax cuts for the wealthy were masked as tax relief, a tax on estate inheritance carried the propaganda title of death tax, a spurious argument to oppose evolution was dubbed intelligent design, a medically necessary late-term abortion was skillfully labeled partial birth, and the hunger struggle by 36 million of the nation’s poor was described as food insecurity.
The pièce de résistance of euphemism, however, was created by the Reagan administration: death squads in Nicaragua were called freedom fighters.
One essayist, Drew Westen, called the Bush years the most Orwellian of American democracy. Noting the constant repetition of the mantra war on terror after 9/11, Westen writes: “The Bush administration carefully crafted this phrase to maximize its fear appeal and to equate legitimate efforts to combat radical Islamic terrorism with the Iraq war.”
Language goes to war too.

From Lincoln to Obama

2009-01-31T12:24:00.000-08:00

“The great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night / I mourn’d and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.”
--Whitman in “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” on Lincoln’s death

As a young man I idolized Napoleon. He reverenced knowledge and learning. He sailed to war in Egypt with an entourage of scientists, mathematicians, inventors, artists, writers and other savants.
He studied the lives of conquerors and famous men of antiquity, “in search of his own image,” as one of his biographers put it. Moreover, Napoleon was a brilliant, front-line general.
But the truth of Napoleon soon dawned on me: he was a monstrous killer, depleting the blood of France and Europe for his own egomaniacal glorification and empire-building.
In contrast, I never tire of reading about Lincoln. He was the greatest president the nation ever had. Indeed, it could be argued that Lincoln is the greatest man America ever produced.
In 11 days the nation will celebrate the bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth. Just 13 days ago America inaugurated its first black president. The symbolism is magnificent. Lincoln the Great Emancipator, Obama the black White House liberator.
The day after the inauguration the New York Times reported that aides of G. W. Bush found the inaugural address ungracious. Au contraire. It was far too gracious. Obama thanked Bush “for his service to our nation.” Actually, Bush did a great disservice to America and the world for eight interminable years.
One of the great things about Lincoln was his character. The word has fallen into disuse. But oldtimers will know what it means: integrity, honesty, compassion, sensitivity, kindness and decency. Lincoln had a powerful conscience with a fervor for justice.
Another great attribute of Lincoln was his magnanimity, a quality that Doris Kearns Goodwin found in her “Team of Rivals.” She called it unprecedented “to incorporate his eminent rivals” into his cabinet and cited it as evidence of a profound self-confidence.
Eric Foner, Columbia University historian, calls Lincoln “the politician whose greatness lay in his capacity for growth.” Lincoln opposed abolition until well into the Civil War. But he finally adopted the positions the abolitionists had staked out much earlier.
I have sought my own image in the life of Lincoln. Countless stories have been told about him, some of them probably untrue in fact but true in spirit. The Lincoln stories, like those of Jesus in the New Testament, instruct us on how to live.
One of my favorite Lincoln stories is of him clerking in a grocery store in New Salem, Ill. He overcharged a customer a few cents and hiked miles to return the overcharge. True or not, the lesson is exemplary.
Then you have Lincoln reading by firelight the King James Bible and the works of Shakespeare, both with rich cadences that find echoes in Lincoln’s marvelous speeches.
Obama showed his own self-confidence by choosing Hillary Clinton as secretary of state. That confidence was evident from the very start of his first 100 days.
He issued a flurry of executive orders overturning heinous Bush policies: closing the notorious Guantanamo Star Chamber, shuttering CIA secret black site prisons, halting “extraordinary rendition” of detainees for torture, and prohibiting the torture of waterboarding. (Portia says in “The Merchant of Venice”: “Ay, but I fear you speak upon the rack / Where men enforced do speak anything.”)
Obama halted the baleful secrecy of the Bush administration, ordering transparency in government. He directed federal regulators to apply California’s strict standards for tailpipe emissions and fuel efficiency. He reaffirmed a woman’s right to choose abortion. He lifted the odious gag that Bush put on international family planning groups. He abolished four Bush anti-union directives.
Obama restored science to its exalted place over ideology. He will sign a children’s insurance bill twice vetoed by Bush. He signed a fair pay law to overrule a frightening decision by Supreme Court reactionaries approving sex discrimination. He allowed populist anger to burst through his cool façade at the obsceneness of Wall Streeters getting $18 billion bonuses after a bailout.
Above all, Obama has forever removed the second-class citizenship of blacks. They now can realistically aspire to the presidency.
As a black woman from Atlanta exulted at the inauguration: “Today we become Americans for the first time…All the dignity, all the respect and all that comes with being a U.S. citizen.”
For a century and a half hundreds of Americans, black and white, battled magnificently for black civil rights. Among them: King and Malcolm, Douglass and Garrison, Thoreau and Paine, Thurgood Marshall and John Brown, Robeson and Robinson, Du Bois and Garvey, Tubman and Sojourner, Lincoln and LBJ, Jackson and Booker T.
President Obama has achieved King’s dream.

Hefty Nevada tax increases essential

2009-01-24T08:47:00.000-08:00

Wanted: a Nevada politician with the courage to tell voters that taxes must be raised steeply and why. The state can no longer bumble along with nickel-and-diming while rending the social fabric.
For years Nevada boasted that it had no corporate, individual, inheritance and gift taxes. It is this free-lunch mentality that rightly enrages education Chancellor Jim Rogers. (Rogers has become a common scold but he is so often so right.) In a recent report, Rogers said:
“Monies generated by newcomers created a Ponzi-scheme economy. Those coming in subsidized those already in Nevada. Over time, neither long-timers nor new residents were required to pay any substantial taxes, causing necessary services, including education, to suffer.”
Gov. Jim Gibbons has proposed a devastating budget: cutting higher education by 36 percent, reducing salaries of state workers 6 percent and slashing state employee health benefits. To call this shameful is putting it mildly. It is nothing less than the destruction of higher education.
The need for a state income tax has been apparent for two decades, long before the new Depression pummeled Nevada. The state is facing a grim $2.4 billion budget deficit in the next biennium.
This is the 21st century but Nevada remains mired in the 19th. It relies heavily on the sales tax, an unreliable source of income.
The sales tax is regressive, the poor paying proportionately as much as do the rich. An income tax would be--or should be--progressive. Wealthier people would pay in proportion to their income.
Another urgent need for Nevada is a great increase in casino taxes. Nevada’s tax on the gambling industry is pitiful, the lowest in the nation. It has a maximum tax of 6.75 percent. In Michigan the rate is 24 percent, Missouri 20 percent and New Jersey 9.25 percent.
Mining too is getting away with grand larceny. CityLife of Las Vegas revealed that industry revenues have been up 13 percent in the past three years yet it has a maximum tax rate on such windfall profits of just 5 percent.
CityLife columnist Hugh Jackson noted that gold mining corporations made $25.5 billion from 2000 to 2007 yet paid taxes to Nevada of just $125.3 million, a gross tax rate of one-half of 1 percent.
The tax code is riddled with mining deductions. The Grant era mining law supports land grabs and giveaways. A corporate profits tax would do wonders for the state’s budget.
A third important source of income would be a state lottery. Yes, administrative costs can eat up to 70 percent of the take. But the 30 percent gained is a boon to straightened state budgets.
A lottery is painless. Say the supermarket bill is $120. It’s so easy to spend another dollar--or five--for a lottery ticket. People nearly never win but it’s an affordable loss. Hope springs eternal. It’s the hope that counts far more than payoffs.
Forty-two states and the District of Columbia have lotteries. But the Nevada gambling industry always defeats lotteries, pretending that a lottery would be unbearable competition. All three of these revenue sources are ignored because no politician has the courage, integrity and vision to campaign for them.
Nevada now has a one-note governor: no new taxes. Never. Ever. His head-in-the-sand adamancy could get him re-elected but it is not governing, it is not leading.
The gambling industry rules the state, getting what it wants, defeating what it does not want. It is concerned solely with its own profits not the good of the state.
This is a vast disservice to Nevada citizens. But the state has no political figure with the guts to say that the state must have hefty new sources of revenue—immediately.
Raising taxes is doubtless a losing position politically. But it is far better to lose over a matter of profound principle than win by being unprincipled, by showing an unconcern about Nevada’s desperate plight.
Everyone wants essential services but no one wants to pay for them. So Nevada is stuck with an archaic system. Education is suffering terribly. Social services have been cut severely. The infrastructure is deteriorating badly.
The state is already near the bottom in things that matter: 44th among the states for student proficiency in reading, math and graduation rates, and failing grades in higher education.
But the governor doesn’t care that Nevada is backward. He will increase that backwardness.
The Nevada Sagebrush, student newspaper at the University of Nevada, Reno, has called for the impeachment of Gibbons. Such feistiness is marvelous. But the Nevada Constitution gives just two grounds: misdemeanor or malfeasance. Maladministration and blockheadness do not qualify.

Obama pragmatism hardly change

2009-01-16T12:13:00.000-08:00

President-elect Obama will never please the pitifully few leftists in America. But does he have to whore after the right-wing?
Take the case of Rev. Rick Warren. Surely any administration that boasts of change would not pick an adamant foe of abortion to give the inaugural invocation.
And not just any foe. Warren endorsed intolerance and discrimination in the California Constitution, urging a ban on gay marriage. He compares same-sex marriage with incest, pedophilia and polygamy.
That is yesterday thinking, not tomorrow thinking.
Or take the Obama choices as military and diplomatic leaders and advisers: mostly hawks and recycled Clintonites. They are the very people who got the nation into two wars.
It’s as if people voted for Obama in disdain for John McCain and got McCain. Obama is keeping Republican Bob Gates as secretary of defense and naming Gen. Jim Jones as national security adviser. Jones, a close friend of McCain, would resume the Cold War by expanding NATO.
Indeed, you know Obama’s choices are bad if right-wingers like Karl Rove and Rush Limbaugh pronounce them good.
Then there is hawkish Hillary Clinton as secretary of state. And Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s chief-of-staff designate, who pushed the disastrous NAFTA in the Clinton White House.
The story is the same on the economic front. Tim Geithner as treasury secretary and Larry Summers as head of the National Economic Council are old Clinton hands. They are corporate Democrats who espoused deregulation and boosted globalization.
Enough of pragmatic politics. The nation needs boldness, not pragmatism, not business as usual, not the same-old, same-old. Obama needs backbone to stifle the absurd reactionary bleats of “lurching to the left.”
Even Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a soi-disant progressive, says “the country must be governed from the middle.” Straight out of the Democratic Leadership Council playbook!
And how about Eric Holder, attorney general-designate? He has endorsed extension of the heinous provision of the Patriot Act allowing federal agents to demand library and bookstore records.
Ken Salazar at Interior? Too much of a dealmaker. After eight years of environmental devastation under Bush, the country needs an environmentalist not a business tradeoff guy.
Sure, all the Obama appointments are bright. So were “The Best and Brightest,” the sardonic title of David Halberstam’s book about the men who led the nation into the morass of Vietnam. Intelligence is worthless without wisdom.
Obama has so many decisions to make to undo the horror of the Bush regime. But the No. 1 priority should be ending the nation’s two costly, endless and hopeless wars.
People out of work and struggling to buy food and medication may feel differently. But withdrawal from the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan is essential to restore the worldwide faith in and moral authority of America.
Chris Hedges of the online Truthdig calls the wars state-sponsored terrorism, defying “every ethical and legal code.” America is the real rogue nation.
Paul Roberts in Progressive rightly urges the halting of gratuitous wars and a slash of “unnecessary military spending, which exceeds that of the rest of the world combined.”
On the up side, the Obama choice for labor secretary, Hilda Solis, is a keeper. She has been an unfailing advocate of workers’ rights, fighting to increase the paltry minimum wage. As a California congresswoman she voted for card-signing unionizing.
Solis is everything Bush was not.
Obama’s green team sounds like another keeper, one that will reverse the rabid Bush anti-environmentalism. Obama chose Steven Chu, Nobel physicist, to run the Energy Department and Carol Browner to coordinate energy and climate-change policies.
Leon Panetta as CIA director? California Sen. Dianne Feinstein complains that he lacks intelligence-gathering experience. Actually, that is a plus. The nation needs a director to abandon spying, torturing, assassinating and overthrowing governments in favor of its original mission of collecting intelligence.
Obama needs courage to do what is right. Among them are rapprochement with Cuba: lifting the embargo, extending diplomatic recognition and ending travel restrictions by Americans.
To end forever the one-sided, pro-Israel policies of America, including the daily outrages toward the Palestinians. He needs steel to forge a two-nation policy, demanding an end to the occupation of Palestinian lands while facing down the potent Jewish lobby.
On his first full day in office Obama needs to end the military’s stupid policy of don’t ask, don’t tell.
None of this is to gainsay the hope that Obama brings to the White House: putting science over Bush politics, putting intelligence over Bush boobishness and putting competence over Bush cronyism.
But, overall, too many of his choices have the stench of centerism for a guy who had promised hope, change and fresh thinking. Obama had to run to the center to win the nomination. As president, he does not -- and should not.