Cover via Amazon

Published on Wednesday, July 28, 2010 by Creators.com

Truth and Irony in Agriculture Fiascos

by Jim Hightower

The Shirley Sherrod Story started innocently. It was a beautiful anecdote of redemption and personal growth, which she related last year at a meeting of the Georgia NAACP.The story told by this black Agriculture Department official would have ended there, unnoticed by the rest of us. But it was caught up by a malicious political wind that swept it all the way to Washington. There, it sucked up an enormous volume of political hot air, then burst into the national news like a furious tornado, ripping the roofs from several big houses of power to reveal a mess of ugliness within.
Ugly Number One is Andrew Breitbart, a notorious far-right-wing blogger who is striving for his 15-minutes of infamy by intentionally distorting, manipulating and lying about the actions of unsuspecting people to create explosive political tales. He used a two-minute, crudely edited clip from a video of Sherrod's 45-minute Georgia speech, perverting her message to make her sound as if she had intentionally discriminated against a white farmer 24 years ago. Breitbart distributed the distorted video as "proof" that she and the NAACP are racists. The guy is a disgusting creep.
Ugly Number Two are the Becks, Hannitys, O'Reillys and other foam-at-the-mouth Fox TV blatherers. These shameless media muggers gleefully and unquestioningly grabbed Breitbart's crap and hurled it across America as "truth."
Ugly Number Three is the Barack Obama White House, which swallowed the Breitbart-Fox false story whole and immediately dismissed Sherrod from her federal job. They literally tracked her down in her car and forced her to phone in her resignation, without letting her tell the true story!
To me, the Obama ugiliness is the worst, for it reveals a shameful lack of loyalty, fairness and feistiness. Like ACORN and Van Jones before, Sherrod was under vicious and false attack from Obama's enemies - but the Obamites are so afraid of right-wing smear artists that they instantly run from them, cravenly abandoning their friends. Hello - if you don't stand for your friends, who'll stand for you?
In the same week that Sherrod was falsely accused of anti-white racism, the US Senate actually compounded the insult with its own act of anti-black racism. At issue was payment of a billion-dollar legal settlement owed to thousands of African-American farmers who for decades were illegally denied essential crop loans from the ag department.
The settlement of the farmers' lawsuit was agreed to way back in 1999 - yet, for more than a decade, Washington has refused to pay. African-American farmers - including Sherrod's father - were routinely and grossly discriminated against. How gross? USDA loan officials spit at them, threw their loan applications in the trash and caused thousands to lose their farms.
To make matters worse, in 1983, the Ronald Reagan administration actually eliminated funding for the division of the USDA that was supposed to investigate these farmers' claims of discrimination. No investigators, no investigations, no loans, no justice - neat.
This year, however, justice was finally to be delivered to the farmers, for President Obama set aside $1.2 billion in his budget to make good on the government promise. But, no go, for congressional Republicans have furiously fought the payments.
Of course, the GOP solons insisted that they certainly support racial justice, but alas, they wailed, the bloated federal deficit now compels them to cut spending. Never mind that they are the chief bloaters! In the past decade, they eagerly and recklessly added trillions of dollars to the national debt with unwarranted wars, tax cuts for the rich, bailouts for Wall Street and subsidies for enormously profitable corporations.
Indeed, these very lawmakers continue to support $4 billion a year in needless giveaways to Big Oil - but they abruptly turn into tightwad on a single billion-dollar allocation owed to America's black farmers.
So while pundits and politicos were vilifying Sherrod for an act of discrimination that did not occur, Senate Republicans cut the payments for thousands of official acts of actual discrimination. How's that for bitter irony? Yet Republican leaders wonder why they get practically no black support in elections.

© 2010 Creators.com

National radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and author of the book, Swim Against The Current: Even A Dead Fish Can Go With The Flow, Jim Hightower has spent three decades battling the Powers That Be on behalf of the Powers That Ought To Be - consumers, working families, environmentalists, small businesses, and just-plain-folks.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Stewart cautions liberals not to trust Breitbart tapes (videocafe.crooksandliars.com)
• Sherrod Still Mulling USDA Job Offer (cbsnews.com)
• Donald Carr: The Bitter Ironies in USDA's Firing of Shirley Sherrod (huffingtonpost.com)
• Four Ways To Avoid Future Shirley Sherrod Debacles (huffingtonpost.com)
• Lessons from the Shirley Sherrod affair (cbc.ca)
• How Shirley Sherrod Could Save America (theroot.com)
• Sherrod: Obama Admin Too Sensitive to the Right (cbsnews.com)
• NAACP Says It Was "Snookered" By Breitbart, Fox On Shirley Sherrod Story (outsidethebeltway.com)
• You: Agriculture secretary to review resignation of USDA worker - CNN (news.google.com)

Down With the People Blame the childish, ignorant American public—not politicians—for our political and economic crisis.

By Jacob WeisbergUpdated Saturday, Feb. 6, 2010, at 7:07 AM ET
In trying to explain why our political paralysis seems to have gotten so much worse over the past year, analysts have rounded up a plausible collection of reasons including: President Obama's tactical missteps, the obstinacy of congressional Republicans, rising partisanship in Washington, the blustering idiocracy of the cable-news stations, and the Senate filibuster, which has devolved into a super-majority threshold for any important legislation. These are all large factors, to be sure, but that list neglects what may be the biggest culprit in our current predicament: the childishness, ignorance, and growing incoherence of the public at large.

Anybody who says you can't have it both ways clearly hasn't been spending much time reading opinion polls lately. One year ago, 59 percent of the American public liked the stimulus plan, according to Gallup. A few months later, with the economy still deeply mired in recession, a majority of the same size said Obama was spending too much money on it. There's nothing wrong with changing your mind, of course, but opinion polls over the last year reflect something altogether more troubling: a country that simultaneously demands and rejects action on unemployment, deficits, health care, climate change, and a whole host of other major problems. Sixty percent of Americans want stricter regulations of financial institutions. But nearly the same proportion says we're suffering from too much regulation on business. That kind of illogic—or, if you prefer, susceptibility to rhetorical manipulation—is what locks the status quo in place.

At the root of this kind of self-contradiction is our historical, nationally characterological ambivalence about government. We want Washington and the states to fix all of our problems now. At the same time, we want government to shrink, spend less, and reduce our taxes. We dislike government in the abstract: According to CNN, 67 percent of people favor balancing the budget even when the country is in a recession or a war, which is madness. But we love government in the particular: Even larger majorities oppose the kind of spending cuts that would reduce projected deficits, let alone eliminate them. Nearly half the public wants to cancel the Obama stimulus, and a strong majority doesn't want another round of it. But 80-plus percent of people want to extend unemployment benefits and to spend more money on roads and bridges. There's another term for that stuff: more stimulus spending.

The usual way to describe such inconsistent demands from voters is to say that the public is an angry, populist, tea-partying mood. But a lot more people are watching American Idol than are watching Glenn Beck, and our collective illogic is mostly negligent rather than militant. The more compelling explanation is that the American public lives in Candyland, where government can tackle the big problems and get out of the way at the same time. In this respect, the whole country is becoming more and more like California, where ignorance is bliss and the state's bonds have dropped to an A- rating (the same level as Libya's), thanks to a referendum system that allows the people to be even more irresponsible than their elected representatives. Middle-class Americans really don't want to hear about sacrifices or trade-offs—except as flattering descriptions about how ready we, as a people, are, or used to be, to accept them. We like the idea of hard choices in theory. When was the last time we made one in reality?

The politicians thriving at the moment are the ones who embody this live-for-the-today mentality, those best able to call for the impossible with a straight face. Take Scott Brown, the newly elected Senator from Massachusetts. Brown wants government to take in less revenue: He has signed a no-new-taxes pledge and called for an across-the-board tax cut on families and businesses. But Brown doesn't want government to spend any less money: He opposes reductions in Medicare payments and all other spending cuts of any significance. He says we can lower deficits above 10 percent of GDP—the largest deficits since World War II, deficits so large that they threaten our future as the world's leading military and economic power—simply by cutting government waste. No sensible person who has spent five minutes looking at the budget thinks that's remotely possible. The charitable interpretation is that Brown embodies naive optimism, an approach to politics that Ronald Reagan left as one of his more dubious legacies to Republican Party. A better explanation is that Brown is consciously pandering to the public's ignorance and illusions the same way the rest of his Republican colleagues are.

I don't mean to suggest that honesty is what separates the two parties. Increasingly, the crucial distinction is between the minority of serious politicians in either party who are prepared to speak directly about our choices, on the one hand, and the majority who indulge the public's delusions, on the other. I would put President Obama and his economic team in the first group, along with California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Republicans are more indulgent of the public's unrealism in general, but Democrats have spent years fostering their own forms of denial. Where Republicans encourage popular myths about taxes, spending, and climate change, Democrats tend to stoke our fantasies about the sustainability of entitlement spending as well as about the cost of new programs.

Our inability to address long-term challenges makes a strong case that the United States now faces an era of historical decline. Our reluctance to recognize economic choices also portends negative effects for the rest of the world. To change this story line, we need to stop blaming the rascals we elect to office and start looking to ourselves.

Civil Liberties Still Under Attack

Glenn Greenwald
Sunday, Jan 31, 2010 07:32 EST
Nostalgia for Bush/Cheney radicalism
By Glenn Greenwald

(updated below)

As has been voluminously documented here, one of the most notable aspects of the first year of the Obama presidency has been how many previously controversial Bush/Cheney policies in the terrorism and civil liberties realms have been embraced. Even Obama's most loyal defenders often acknowledge that, as Michael Tomasky recently put it, "the civil liberties area has been [Obama's] worst. This is the one area in which the president's actions don't remotely match the candidate's promises." From indefinite detention and renditions to denial of habeas rights, from military commissions and secrecy obsessions to state secrets abuses, many of the defining Bush/Cheney policies continue unabated under its successor administration.

Despite all that, there is substantial political pressure from all directions for Obama to reverse the very few decisions where he actually deviated from Bush/Cheney radicalism in these areas. In the wake of extreme political pressure, mostly from Democrats, the White House just forced Eric Holder to retreat on his decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in New York City, and numerous Democrats now appear prepared to join with the GOP to cut-off funding for civilian trials altogether, forcing the administration to try all Terrorists in military commissions or just hold them indefinitely. The administration has created a warped multi-tiered justice system where only a select few even get civilian trials -- those whom they know in advance they can convict -- yet there are growing signs that the President will abandon even that symbolic, piecemeal nod to due process.

Meanwhile, The Washington Post is publishing demands from former Bush CIA and NSA Chief Michael Hayden -- who presided over the blatantly criminal warrantless eavesdropping program -- that Obama must even more closely model his Terrorism policies on Bush's, as though the architects of Bush's illegal policies are our Guiding Lights when deciding what to do now. Even Obama's own top intelligence official criticized the Justice Department's decision to treat Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab as what he is -- a criminal -- and accord him normal due process. And an internal Justice Department investigation which -- under Bush -- had concluded that John Yoo and Jay Bybee committed ethical violations in their authoring of the "torture memos" and should be investigated by their state bars has now, under Obama, reportedly been changed -- whitewashed -- to conclude that they acted appropriately (even if their written opinions exhibited "poor judgment").

In sum, there is clearly a bipartisan and institutional craving for a revival (more accurately: ongoing preservation) of the core premise of Bush/Cheney radicalism: that because we're "at war" with Terrorists, our standard precepts of justice and due process do not apply and, indeed, must be violated. To relieve ourselves of guilt and of the bad lingering taste left from having such discredited and unpopular leadership for eight years, we collectively pretended for a little while to regret the excesses of the Bush/Cheney approach to such matters. But it's now crystal clear that the country, especially its ruling elite, is either too petrified of Terrorism and/or too enamored of the powers which that fear enables to accept any real changes from the policies that were supposedly such a profound violation "of our values." One can only marvel at the consensus outrage generated by the mere notion that we charge people with crimes and give them trials if we want to lock them in a cage for life. Indeed, what was once the most basic and defining American principle -- the State must charge someone with a crime and give them a fair trial in order to imprison them -- has been magically transformed into Leftist extremism.

To see how radical our establishment consensus in this area has become, just consider two facts. First, look at the Terrorism policies of what had previously been the most right-wing administration in America's history: the Reagan administration. In this post yesterday, Larry Johnson does quite a good job of documenting how Terrorism by Islamic radicals had been a greater problem in the 1980s than it is now. There was the 1983 bombing of our Marine barracks in Lebanon, a 1982 and 1984 bombing of Jewish sites in Argentina, numerous plane hijackings, the blowing up of a Pan Am jet, the Achille Lauro seizure, and what the State Department called "a host of spectacular, publicity-grabbing events that ultimately ended in coldblooded murder" (many masterminded by Abu Nidal).

Despite that, read the official policy of the Reagan Administration when it came to treating Terrorists, as articulated by the top Reagan State Department official in charge of Terrorism policies, L. Paul Bremer, in a speech he entitled "Counter-Terrorism: Strategies and Tactics:"

Another important measure we have developed in our overall strategy is applying the rule of law to terrorists. Terrorists are criminals. They commit criminal actions like murder, kidnapping, and arson, and countries have laws to punish criminals. So a major element of our strategy has been to delegitimize terrorists, to get society to see them for what they are -- criminals -- and to use democracy’s most potent tool, the rule of law against them.

It was also Ronald Reagan who signed the Convention Against Torture in 1988 -- after many years of countless, horrific Terrorist attacks -- which not only declared that there are "no exceptional circumstances whatsoever" justifying torture, but also required all signatory countries to "ensure that all acts of torture are offences under its criminal law" and -- and Reagan put it -- "either to prosecute torturers who are found in its territory or to extradite them to other countries for prosecution." And, of course, even George W. Bush -- at the height of 9/11-induced Terrorism hysteria -- charged attempted shoe bomber Richard Reid with actual crimes and processed him through our civilian courts.

How much clearer evidence can there be of how warped and extremist we've become on these matters? The express policies of the right-wing Ronald Reagan -- "applying the rule of law to terrorists"; delegitimizing Terrorists by treating them as "criminals"; and compelling the criminal prosecution of those who authorize torture -- are now considered on the Leftist fringe. Merely advocating what Reagan explicitly adopted as his policy -- "to use democracy’s most potent tool, the rule of law against" Terrorists -- is now the exclusive province of civil liberties extremists. In those rare cases when Obama does what Reagan's policy demanded in all instances and what even Bush did at times -- namely, trials and due process for accused Terrorists -- he is attacked as being "Soft on Terror" by Democrats and Republicans alike. And the mere notion that we should prosecute torturers (as Reagan bound the U.S. to do) -- or even hold them accountable in ways short of criminal proceedings -- is now the hallmark of a Far Leftist Purist. That's how far we've fallen, how extremist our political consensus has become.

Second, consider the company we keep, specifically where our mentality falls on the spectrum that defines the rest of the world. Countries which have been victimized by horrific terrorist attacks over the last several years -- Britain, Spain, India, Indonesia -- have tried and convicted the perpetrators as criminals in their civilian court system, right in their normal courthouses, in the heart of the cities that were the target of the attacks. These countries -- which aren't protected by oceans and (in the case of India and Indonesia) aren't bordered by friendly countries -- didn't invent special military commissions to abridge due process or simply imprison the accused without a trial. They didn't pour water down their throats, freeze them, disorient them with sleep deprivation, or hang them naked from the ceiling. Instead, they followed the Reagan administration's policy for dealing with Terrorists -- "use democracy’s most potent tool, the rule of law against them" -- despite the fact that they had suffered deadly attacks.

By contrast, look at what Libya is doing. The U.S. has, for decades, harshly criticized Libya as one of the most tyrannical and uncivilized regimes on the planet. In 2008, the State Department not only amazingly condemned that country for "torture" (which included such U.S.-embraced methods as "depriving detainees of sleep, food, and water; hanging by the wrists; suspending from a pole inserted between the knees and elbows . . . . threatening with dog attacks"), but also for indefinitely detaining people without trials ("The law stipulates that detainees can be held for investigation after being arrested up to eight days. In practice security services can hold detainees indefinitely. Although the law requires that detainees be informed of the charges against them, it was not enforced in practice. The law states that in order to renew a detention order detainees must be brought before a judicial authority at regular intervals of 30 days, but in practice security services detained persons for indefinite periods without a court order").

Consistent with those abuses, Libya just announced its new policy for how it will treat accused Al Qaeda Terrorists -- a policy that should sound quite familiar to all Americans:

Libya will hold up to 300 al Qaeda members in jail indefinitely after they have completed their prison terms to stop them staging fresh attacks, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi said on Thursday.

"These people are heretics. They are followers of (Osama) Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri. They killed a number of civilians and police," Gaddafi told a gathering of his top legislative body, referring to al Qaeda's two global commanders.

"It is a necessity to keep them in prison. They are very dangerous as they are ready to resume killing people in our streets here or travel to Algeria or Egypt or elsewhere to stage attacks," he said in remarks broadcast on state television and monitored in Rabat.

At least Libya seems to be indefinitely imprisoning those who were at one time convicted; the U.S., by contrast, is doing so with regard to detainees who have never been charged, let alone convicted, of anything. Saudi Arabia has a similar policy of simply imprisoning people in the name of Terrorism without trials or due process.

So that's where the American consensus now lies. The practices used by Britain, Spain, India and Indonesia (and the Reagan administration) of treating Terrorists as criminals and convicting them in normal courts -- with due process -- is too fringe Leftist for the United States, which has spent decades sermonizing to the rest of the world about the need for due process and the evils of arbitrary detention. Instead, our political and media establishment demands that we replicate the policies of Libya and Saudi Arabia: simply hold accused Terrorists without trials or, at most, invent special due-process-abridging military tribunals to ensure they are convicted.

George Bush and Dick Cheney ended up as two of the most despised American political leaders of the last 100 years, so our establishment had to pretend that they, too, found their policies to be distasteful and extreme. But that was clearly a pretense. In those very rare instances where Obama and his Attorney General try to deviate, they're accused (including by leading members of their own party) of accommodating "the Far Left" and being "Soft on Terror." The undeniable truth is that our establishment craves Bush/Cheney policies because it is as radical as they are. That one is automatically accused of being too Leftist merely by literally reciting Reagan administration policy on Terrorists (in words if not deeds) -- and that one can be "centrist" only by standing with the due-process-denying practices of Libya and Saudi Arabia -- reflects just how far the American spectrum has regressed.



UPDATE: According to Mitch McConnell, it's not only Ronald Reagan, but also George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, who were too far to the Left when it came to the treatment of accused Terrorists. McConnell said today on CNN that Bush's mistakes were giving civilian trials to some accused Terrorists and releasing too many people from Guantanamo. McConnell likely speaks for the bi-partisan establishment, as he confidently predicts that there are more than enough votes -- from both parties -- for cutting off funds for trying accused Terrorists in civilian courts.

Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush: Far Leftist Civil Libertarian Extremists.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Obama Needs to Take His Inside Politics Outside: Albert R. Hunt (businessweek.com)
• US 'torture memo' authors cleared of misconduct (guardian.co.uk)
• White House: No decision yet on moving 9/11 trial (cnn.com)
• John Yoo: Obama Is A Continuation Of Bush On Executive Powers (huffingtonpost.com)

Wasserman Criticizes Washington Post Nuke Coverage

Image via Wikipedia

Published on Friday, November 27, 2009 by CommonDreams.org

The WaPo's "Nuclear Power Regains Support" is a Big Lie

by Harvey Wasserman

Yet another "perfectly safe" release at Three Mile Island has irradiated yet another puff of hype about alleged "green" support for new reactors.
The two are inseparable.
In 1979, when TMI's brand new Unit Two melted, stack monitors and other critical safeguards crashed in tandem. Nobody knows how much radiation escaped, where it went or who it harmed. Cancers, leukemia, stillbirths, malformations, asthma, sterility, skin lesions and other radiation-related diseases erupted throughout central Pennsylvania. Some 2400 families sued, but never got a full public hearing in federal court.
Unit Two had operated just three months when it melted. By a 3-1 margin, three central Pennsylvania counties then voted that TMI-One, which opened in 1974, stay shut. But Ronald Reagan tore down that wall.
This week TMI's owners were forced to evacuate 150 workers when radioactive dust "unexpectedly blew out of a pipe being cut by workers." Exelon was "trying to determine exactly how and why it happened."
As always, official announcements emphasize that the public was "in no danger." That was an epic lie in 1979. This time Exelon's Ralph DeSantis said things were rapidly "back to normal."
DeSantis then said radiation could be quickly wiped off protective outfits, while "it takes two to three days for radiation to naturally leave the body of anyone who breathed it in."
This is a ghastly lie. Among other isotopes, alpha and beta emitters - especially from radioactive dust - can easily lodge in the lungs and other internal organs long enough to damage cells and cause numerous forms of cancer, often lethal.
Ditto the hype about alleged green support for new reactors. Latest is a carefully contrived piece of industry fluff from one Anthony Faiola, whose "Nuclear Power Regains Support" has just been featured atop the Washington Post. This wafer thin installment in the "former environmentalists deem nukes green" series features a Brit named Stephen Tindale who recently left Greenpeace under strained circumstances.
Greenpeace is as anti-nuke as ever. Like Patrick Moore, another former Greenpeacer now hiring out to the nuclear industry, Tindale's tenure with the organization was stormy, and his defection unsurprising to many still with the group.
But once again the turn of a single activist was a sufficient hook on which to hang a breathless feature.
Faiola cites "only muted opposition" to new reactors in the US while ignoring the inconvenient reality that none are yet licensed for construction. The thousands of No Nukes arrests in the 1970s and ‘80s came at reactor sites like Seabrook, New Hampshire and Diablo Canyon, California, where construction was already under way.
In fact, today's safe energy opposition is far beyond corresponding stages when the first reactors were just being proposed. Its decisive advantage comes from true green renewable and efficiency technologies that are four decades further along, and that have all but priced atomic energy wholly out of the marketplace. Only this media-based stab at federal handouts keeps the prospect of new reactors on life support.
Faiola crows that the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission "is reviewing applications for 22 new nuclear plants from coast to coast." Unmentioned is Toshiba-Westinghouse's flagship AP-1000 design, which the NRC says can't withstand an earthquake, hurricane or tornado. Also missing are devastating safety critiques from regulators in Finland, France and Great Britain of the "standardized" reactor being pushed by France's taxpayer-financed AREVA.
Failoa does cover Al Gore's harsh assaults on the economic and proliferation problems of atomic energy. He briefly mentions the catastrophic AREVA fiasco at Finland's Olkiluoto, where construction costs have soared by at least $3 billion. That project is also more than three years behind schedule, with no firm completion date in sight.
Failoa omits the escalating Texas-sized turmoil in San Antonio, whose city council was set to sign on to the construction of a new nuke when it learned the price had jumped by $4 billion - long before the license has been granted.
The story completely skips the DC-based Nuclear Information & Resource Service, which sponsored a statement signed by more than 850 other environmental groups opposing new reactor construction as a proposed means of addressing the climate crisis.
Like this vast core of green groups, Moody's, Standard & Poor, Citibank and a powerful cohort of financial analysts see atomic power as a horrific investment that can only be described as, well, radioactive. The risks of building a new reactor, says a recent Citibank report, "are so large and variable that individually they could each bring even the largest utility company to its knees."
But as sure as radiation continues to pour from Three Mile Island, the hype about "green" support for atomic power will continue to spew, while the core of the environmental movement remains staunchly anti-nuke, especially as the price of Solartopian technologies continues to plummet.
"We can meet climate goals with efficiency and renewable technologies that are cheaper and much less risky than new reactors," says Michele Boyd of Physicians for Social Responsibility.
Nuclear power, adds Anna Aurilio of Environment America, "takes us backward."

Harvey Wasserman's SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH, A.D. 2030, is at www.solartopia.org. He is senior advisor to Greenpeace USA and the Nuclear Information & Resource Service, and writes regularly for www.freepress.org, where this article first appeared.