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Will Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter Stop Meaning Anything When Climate Change Hits?

Sandra Steingraber, Orion Magazine — Mon, 20 May 2013 14:00:00 -0700

My kids and their friends and everyone roughly their age will, in fact, be the last human beings to remember a stable, predictable procession of seasons.

This article first appeared at Orion Magazine under the title "The Discontent of Our Winter." You can enjoy future Orion articles by signing up to the magazine's free trial subscription program.

My children have snow anxiety. For the record, this started in the winter of 2011–12 when no snow fell—at all—and sleds, saucers, skis, and snowball makers sat dejectedly on the porch, unused, next to the irrelevant and despondent snow shovel. Week after week, month after month, Faith and Elijah scanned the skies and studied the forecast. When June-like temperatures hit in March, the sight of the toboggan filled them with so much despair that they wordlessly dragged it back to the barn and put it in storage.

Which did not go unnoticed by their dad and me. When had our kids ever put stuff away without being asked? It was as unprecedented as a snowless winter in upstate New York. Nobody had ever experienced that either.

During the unfrozen winter of 2011–12, the grown-ups all walked around saying, “This is crazy!” True enough. When the temperature in the mudroom hits eighty degrees before the daytime:nighttime ratio hits parity, some synonym for insane is what the thesaurus should take you to. But “This is crazy!” also implies that we possess no rational explanation for June arriving in March. And I noticed that my son and his friends never said things like that to each other. They spoke more grimly, along the lines of, Global warming. It’s here. Now we can’t go sledding. Probably ever. So what do you want to do, dude?

When snow and ice finally fell in April—hard enough and fast enough to cancel school—it fell on tulip and magnolia petals and killed off the entire cherry crop.

The toboggan stayed in the barn.

But wishful thinking springs anew in the hearts of children, even in the face of permanent catastrophe, so, after a cherryless summer and a fall with few apples, Faith and Elijah conferred hopefully about the upcoming winter. Last year was a global warming winter. But maybe global warming winters come only every other year. Maybe this year would be normal.

The snow fell. The sleds came out. The snow melted.

The snow fell again. And turned to rain. The ground thawed and great lakes of water filled the low areas, and the sleds that had been parked at the bottoms of sledding hills across the county bobbed around like flotillas of small boats at harbor.

The sight of floating sleds made the adults say, “It’s crazy!” all over again.

The kids just gave up. Let the record show that in February 2013, the children of Trumansburg, New York, gave up on winter. As a season, it was no longer reliable. You could wake up in the morning to a wonderland—snowflakes dutifully falling, the front yard all white, perfect, hushed, squeaky—and by the time school let out in the afternoon, the miraculous world had already reverted back to brown, gray, mushy, yucky.

“Don’t get excited,” said Faith to Elijah right before Valentine’s Day when he looked out the window at first light and announced a fresh snowfall. “It won’t last.”

My children were born just before and after the turn of the century. They are old enough to reminisce about the days before winter went bad and became the crazy uncle in the seasonal family. Faith’s fashionable friends discuss the clothes they used to wear—month after arctic month—when they were little and the snow was piled high from November to March. Kids today, they note with disinterested interest, just don’t have the same relationship to their snow pants.

I think I’m on to something here, and I’d like to make a prediction. I predict that the cohort of kids who are now ten to fifteen years old are going to have a very different worldview than those born just a few years after them. My kids and their friends and everyone roughly their age will, in fact, be the last human beings to remember a stable, predictable procession of seasons.

Let me put a finer point on this. My kids, who are in middle school, know that winter is supposed to be cold and that January pond ice should be thick enough for skating. They possess snowman-making techniques, snow-fort construction skills, and an elaborate ethos about exactly what kind of snowballs can and can’t be used for ambushing the friends of one’s sibling and what body parts are and are not off-limits (no ice balls, never in the face). They have methods for assessing the slide-ability and pack-ability of any given snowfall. They know which methods of tucking snow pants into snow boots work and which leak. They have strong opinions on gloves versus mittens and the proper way to make a snow angel. And yet, for the last two years, they have had almost no opportunity to exercise this knowledge.

Meanwhile, a friend calls to tell me that her otherwise very bright granddaughter, who is of nursery-school age, is having trouble learning the names of the seasons. They make no sense to her. “But grandma, you said that winter was cold!” Winter, when she said it, wasn’t. And there was the added problem of the forsythias. They bloomed this year during a warm spell that spanned the twelve days of Christmas. April showers bring May flowers. When the nursery rhymes no longer match the empirical evidence, what’s a three-year-old to think?

Here are two more stories for the record. Because of climate change, Elijah gave up on Little House in the Big Woods. He liked the first half. But the episodes involving horse-drawn sleighs and maple-syrup snow cones were too painful. He refused to read on. “It’s not that way anymore, Mom,” he said matter-of-factly, and set the book aside.

I was stunned. But then it happened to me. While rereading the poem “Corsons Inlet” by A. R. Ammons—“I went for a walk over the dunes again this morning / to the sea, / then turned right along / the surf”—which had once been the subject of my own master’s thesis, I found that I couldn’t go on. It’s not that way anymore, Archie. And how come, in 1965, you didn’t see it coming? Corson’s Inlet, a last undeveloped stretch of beach in New Jersey, was destroyed during Hurricane Sandy.

I set the book aside. Matter-of-factly.

Not to say that our hearts have all turned to stone around here. Here’s my other story: After days of wild, record-breaking weather, our village winter festival was canceled because of rain and flood warnings. When I told Elijah the bad news on the walk home from school, he began to cry. I told him I was sorry.

He said, “I’m not upset about the festival. I’m upset because the planet’s dying. I know this is all because of global warming.”

This is what I heard myself say: “Look, Mom is on the job. I’m working on it. I’m working on it really hard, and I promise I won’t quit.”

And then I cried. And not only because my son believes himself to be alive on a dying planet, but because all the generations of parents before mine have been unable to deal with the facts and mount a response of sufficient scale to solve the problem, meaning that all of us now have a monumental task before us. I cried because keeping my promise makes me arise before dawn to get on buses, puts bullhorns in my hand in faraway cities, may yet land me in jail, and, in these and other ways, takes me away from my children so that I can prove them wrong.

This article first appeared at Orion Magazine under the title "The Discontent of Our Winter." You can enjoy future Orion articles by signing up to the magazine's free trial subscription program.

Moyers/Winship: Corporate Greed Is Poisoning America — Literally

Bill Moyers, Michael Winship, BillMoyers.com — Mon, 20 May 2013 13:26:00 -0700

As long as there are insufficient checks and balances on big business and its powerful lobbies, we are at their mercy.

From BillMoyers.com:

At the end of a week that reminds us to be ever vigilant about the dangers of government overreaching its authority, whether by the long arm of the IRS or the Justice Department, we should pause to think about another threat—the threat of too much private power obnoxiously intruding into public life.

Think of inadequate inspections of food and the food-related infections which kill 3,000 Americans each year and make 48 million sick. A new study from Johns Hopkins shows elevated levels of arsenic—known to increase a person’s risk of cancer—in chicken meat. According to the university’s Center for a Livable Future, “Arsenic-based drugs have been used for decades to make poultry grow faster and improve the pigmentation of the meat. The drugs are also approved to treat and prevent parasites in poultry… Currently in the U.S., there is no federal law prohibiting the sale or use of arsenic-based drugs in poultry feed.”

And here’s a story in The Washington Post about toxic, bacteria-killing chemicals used in poultry plants to clean more chickens more quickly to meet increased demand and make more money. According to Amanda Hitt, director of the Government Accountability Project’s Food Integrity Campaign, “They are mixing chemicals together in these plants, and it’s making people sick. Does it work better at killing off pathogens? Yes, but it also can send someone into respiratory arrest.”

So far, the government has done next to nothing. No research into the possible side effects, no comprehensive record-keeping on illnesses. “Instead,” the Post reports, “they review data provided by chemical manufacturers.” What’s more, the Department of Agriculture is about to allow the production lines to move even faster, by as much as 25 percent, which means more chemicals, more exposure, more sickness.

Think of that and think of the 85,000 industrial chemicals available today – only a handful have been tested for safety. Ian Urbina writes in The New York Times, “Hazardous chemicals have become so ubiquitous that scientists now talk about babies being born pre-polluted, sometimes with hundred s of synthetic chemicals showing up in their blood.”

Think, too, of that horrific explosion of ammonium nitrate in the Texas fertilizer plant. Fifteen people were killed and their little town devastated. The magazine Mother Jones noted, “Inspections are virtually non-existent; regulatory agencies don’t talk to each other; and there’s no such thing as a buffer zone when it comes to constructing plants and storage facilities in populated areas.” For years, the Fertilizer Institute, described as “the nation’s leading lobbying organization of the chemical and agricultural industries,” resisted regulation and legislators went along. People can lose their lives when federal or state government winks at bad corporate practices — 4,500 workplace deaths annually at a cost to America of nearly half a trillion dollars.

As Salon’s columnist and author David Sirota observes, “If all this data was about a terrorist threat, the reaction would be swift — negligent federal agencies would be roundly criticized and the specific state’s lax attitude toward security would be lambasted. Yet, after the fertilizer plant explosion, there has been no proactive reaction at all, other than Texas Republican Gov. Rick Perry boasting about his state’s ‘comfort with the amount of oversight’ that already exists.”

Finally, consider this story from ProPublica’s investigative reporter Abrahm Lustgarten about a uranium company that wanted a mining project in Texas that threatened to pollute drinking water. The EPA resisted — until the company hired as its lobbyist the Democratic fundraiser and fixer Heather Podesta, a favorite of the White House. Her firm was paid $400,000, she pulled the strings, and presto, the EPA changed its mind and said yes, go ahead and do your dirty work. In fact, ProPublica found that “the agency has used a little-known provision in the federal Safe Drinking Water Act to issue more than 1,500 exemptions allowing energy and mining companies to pollute aquifers, including many in the driest parts of the country.”

Of course, in a free society we’ll always be debating the role of government and its agencies. What are the limits, when is government oversight necessary and when is it best deterred? But it’s not only government that can go too far. As long as there are insufficient checks and balances on big business and its powerful lobbies, we are at their mercy. Their ability to buy off public officials is an assault on democracy and a threat to our lives and health. When an entire political system persists in producing such gross injustice, it is making inevitable wholesale defiance.

It's Time to Step Up and Help the Workers of Bangladesh

Jodie Gummow, AlterNet — Mon, 20 May 2013 15:52:00 -0700

A planned demonstration at Gap Inc's shareholder meeting in San Francisco aims to get Gap to sign on to fire and building safety regulations in Bangladesh.

The Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh in April, the world’s worst garment industry catastrophe which killed over 1,000 people, has sparked intensive debate over who is to blame for the devastation.

Many have pointed the finger at global corporations’ failure to provide adequate fire and building safeguards for factory workers. Such controversy has resulted in pressure upon the major retailers to sign a legally binding agreement aimed to improve conditions in the country, which to date has the support of 19 corporations.

However, only one company, PVH -- which owns brands including Tommy Hilfiger, Calvin Klein and Van Heusen -- is American. The Gap and Walmart, two of the major producers in Bangladesh, continue to resist signing any agreement that is legally binding or enforceable. Instead, Walmart has said it will conduct its own investigations into its supplier factories.

The question that remains is what can we as consumers do to ensure that a tragedy of this magnitude does not happen again? Merely sitting back as bystanders and depending on the corporate moguls to solve a problem which has been proliferating over decades is not the answer.

As shoppers, we have an ability and opportunity to honor our values to promote the rights of workers and advocate for change in an effort to ensure that these types of disasters do not occur again. We can do this by joining and supporting a demonstration on May 21 in San Francisco at the Gap shareholder meeting to sign the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh.

Take Action, Be Vocal

According to Liana Foxvog of International Labor Rights Forum (ILRF), the most important thing that consumers can do is to get involved and provide a voice. “There are not many sources where workers rights are respected in the global garment industry so we are urging consumers to be more than just consumers and raise their voices,” she said.

Foxvog told AlterNet that it is vitally important that consumers pay attention to how companies are treating workers in Bangladesh and that global companies know that consumers will not accept unsafe practice or the repression of worker’s rights to unionize.

“Taking action is the most important step for consumers and this can be done either in the form of attending protests, writing letters to store managers and foreign companies and signing petitions,” she said.

A number of petitions calling for better working conditions in Bangladesh have been circulating since the April tragedy. The Gap “death traps” is an example of a petition instigated by ILRF which has been gaining momentum across the US and calling on consumers to take action across the country.

Foxvog argues that it’s time for companies to make a change from the past to work together on programs in agreement with global and Bangladeshi unions in order to protect workers lives and ensure safety mechanisms are in place.

Selective Shopping

As consumers, we have the power to control where and how we spend our money. There are a number of consumer shopping guides that are available in order to search for union-made clothing shops.

While an outright boycott of the industry seems like an obvious and highly desirable option, unions and activists have expressed reluctance at taking such extreme measures.

As Muhammud Yanus, Bangladeshi Nobel Peace Prize winner explains, such actions would drastically affect the social and economic future of the Bangladeshi workers.

“We cannot allow this industry to be destroyed. Rather, we have to be united as a nation to strengthen it,” Yanus said.

A less radical but equally effective approach consumers can take is to make a conscience effort to shop only at those companies that have agreed to sign the legally binding agreement to improve working conditions in Bangladesh.

Investing in corporations that support fair working rights rather than companies that are guilty of exploitation, sends a clear message to anti-union corporations such as Walmart and the Gap that consumers will not tolerate unfair labor practices and thus provide some incentive for these corporations to amend their practices.

At the end of the day, we want to generate concrete action so that corporations are pressured to undertake necessary repairs to make these factories safe. For these reasons, it is important the consumers make informed choices about where to shop.

Promote Transparency Through Social Media

Social media is a powerful tool to create change and rally support against unfair labor practices. Through social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and news blogs, consumers can increase awareness of the garment industry practices through naming and shaming those guilty of exploitation – whether it be global corporations, local governments or factory owners – while keeping the issue at the forefront.

These measures not only push those culpable in the industry toward affirmative action, but pressure corporations to disclose the locations and addresses of their manufacturers thereby promoting transparency and preventing companies from hiding behind the corporate veil.

Join Civil Action Groups

For those of us who want to get more involved, joining a civil action movement targeted at improving rights for workers is another way to make a difference.

By campaigning against anti-union companies, it is envisioned that retailers that profit from low wages in Bangladesh will be compelled by consumers to pay high prices to factories and accordingly undertake the necessary repairs in compliance with local building codes.

Such an example of civil action campaigning is evidenced by the efforts of USAS, together with human rights groups and the ILFP who will be holding a demonstration in front of the Gap shareholder meeting on May 21 in San Francisco as a means to call upon the company to sign the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh.

“The only thing that is going to change conditions in Bangladesh is companies stepping up and deciding to put money on the table to renovate the factories and include workers and their unions as part of the solution…that is why we are asking people to put pressure on the Gap,” Garrett Strain, International Campaigns Coordinator with United Students Against Sweatshops, stressed.

Do Not Turn a Blind Eye

As Angelo Young reported in the International Business Times citing a study into human behavior titled, "Sweatshop Labor Is Wrong Unless The Shoes Are Cute," a major problem with consumers is that despite our strong convictions that we do support fair labor markets, there is a huge disparity between what we say as consumers, and what we actually do.

Young argues that the more desirable an item is the more likely a consumer will cognitively disregard his moral stance on unethical labor practices thereby perpetuating its increasing demand. In this sense, a shopper is able to reconcile the bad labor practices by choosing to ignore the realities of exploitation. Therefore, it is important that we recognize and acknowledge that as consumers, we are both part of the problem and the solution.

Death Toll Continues to Rise After Devastating Oklahoma Tornado

AFP — Mon, 20 May 2013 18:33:00 -0700

The Oklahoma medical examiner's office gave the latest death toll, which was carried by all the major US television networks, which said the number of fatalities was expected to rise.

WASHINGTON — At least 37 people were killed when a powerful tornado with winds of up to 200 miles (320 kilometers) per hour pulverized an Oklahoma City suburb, hitting at least two schools and wiping out blocks of homes. [Editor's note: since publication the AP has reported the death toll is at 51.]

The Oklahoma medical examiner's office gave the latest death toll, which was carried by all the major US television networks, which said the number of fatalities was expected to rise.

"Our first responders are stretched," Oklahoma City Mayor Mick Cornett told CNN. "The state, the National Guard are going to be involved."

Reporters for KFOR-TV saw pupils as young as nine being "pulled out" of the school in Moore, a residential community of 55,000 just south of Oklahoma's state capital.

Anxious parents were being kept at a distance while search and rescue workers scrambled to free the pupils.

A second elementary school, Briarwood, was also hit but did not immediately appear to have sustained casualties. Early reports indicated that many students survived.

From its news helicopter, KFOR's cameras captured scenes of widespread destruction, with street after street of single-story homes in Moore stripped of their roofs and cars piled atop each other like toys.

Utility lines were down and gas lines exposed, triggering localized fires. The Moore Medical Center was evacuated after it sustained damage, a spokeswoman for the hospital told CNN.

The National Guard was called out to help rescue efforts.

Storm spotters estimated the wedge-shaped tornado, which struck in mid-afternoon, to be as big as two miles (3.2 kilometers) wide. It briefly dissipated, only to recycle to the east, threatening the town of Meeker.

"We anticipate that these storms are going to continue to build around Oklahoma," a grim Governor Mary Fallin told CNN, while the National Weather Service urged residents to take cover.

On Twitter, the National Weather Service gave the tornado a preliminary rating of EF-4, indicating that it packed winds of 166 to 200 miles per hour (267-322 km/h) -- more severe than a category five hurricane.

In downtown Oklahoma City, tornado sirens went off at least three times Monday afternoon, and the Interstate 35 highway -- a busy north-south artery through the American heartland -- was closed to all but emergency vehicles.

In Moore, live images from KFOR showed people wandering among the debris and even a couple of untethered horses from a local stables that somehow managed to survive the punishing storm.

"I had no idea it was coming," said a stable worker, who told how he survived the "unbearably loud" twister by taking cover in one of the stalls.

Monday's tornado followed roughly the same west-to-east track as a May 1999 twister that killed 44 people, injured hundreds more and destroyed thousands of homes in Moore and the south of Oklahoma City.

Tornadoes frequently touch down on Oklahoma's wide open plains, but the fact that Monday's twister struck a populated urban area raised fears of a high casualty toll.

Because of the hard ground, few homes are built with basements in which residents can take cover.

Oklahoma City lies well inside the so-called "Tornado Alley" stretching from South Dakota to central Texas that is particularly vulnerable to tornadoes.

On Sunday, a powerful storm system churning through the US Midwest spawned tornadoes in Iowa, Kansas and Oklahoma, destroying homes and killing at least two people, US media reported.

Fallin declared a state of emergency Sunday for 16 Oklahoma counties due to tornados, severe storms and flooding over the weekend.

In Washington, a White House official said President Barack Obama was getting updates "as information come in from the ground" and that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) stood ready to provide assistance.

"The administration continues to urge all those in affected or potentially affected areas to follow the direction of state and local officials as this severe weather continues," the official added.

Horrifying New Trend: Posting Rapes to Facebook

Mary Elizabeth Williams, Salon — Mon, 20 May 2013 17:10:00 -0700

Three Chicago teens are charged with a horrible sexual assault. They allegedly posted the video on social media.

It’s yet another story of how social media can apparently become a tool for abuse — and evidence of it. But the lesson seems all wrong. In Chicago this weekend, prosecutors announced three teenaged boys will tried as adults for aggravated criminal sexual assault after allegedly raping a 12-year-old girl — and posting a video of the attack on Facebook.

Prosecutors say the girl went to the home of Scandale Fritz last December and, “after she declined his demands for sex, he raped and sodomized her,” and then “demanded the girl have sex with the other two boys” while he recorded it. Chillingly, prosecutors add that Fritz’s companion Kenneth Brown can be seen holding a gun in the video. After the incident, the girl filed a police report and was examined at a local hospital. Two days after the alleged assault, the video appeared on all three boys’ Facebook pages. Prosecutors say that Fritz has already provided “a handwritten statement to his involvement.”

This is just the latest in a demoralizing spate of stories involving sexual assault as porny entertainment. Last year, Jared Len Cruise was convicted of sexual assault in a brutal gang rape of an 11-year-old Texas girl — a crime that was recorded on a cell phone and circulated around the girl’s school. In April, 17-year-old Halifax student Rehtaeh Parsons committed suicide 18 months after allegedly being raped — and having a photo of the event distributed among her classmates. After her death, her mother wrote on her Facebook page, “Rehtaeh is gone today because of the four boys that thought that raping a 15-year-old girl was OK and to distribute a photo to ruin her spirit and reputation would be fun.” Local authorities had found “insufficient evidence to proceed with charges,” despite the fact that the image alone would be considered child porn under Canada law.

And in Steubenville, Ohio – perhaps the most infamous example — Trent Mays and Ma’lik Richmond were convicted in March of raping a classmate and then sharing images from the night and “hundreds of text messages from more than a dozen cell phones.” It was a collection of gleeful, callous boasting that the judge later declared “profane and ugly.”

The Chicago story is still unfolding, but here’s what is known so far: It involves a young man, who prosecutors say admits to making a video, and a 12-year-old child. Yet again, it wasn’t enough to just do something awful. It had to be documented; it had to become a trophy to be shown off. In an interview with Business Insider last month, psychology professor and sexual violence expert Dr. Rebecca Campbell noted that, “Sexual assault is a crime of power and dominance. By distributing images of the rape through social media, it’sa way of asserting dominance and power to hurt the victim over and over again.”

It’s an act of brazen aggression, and one that says the victim’s experience is just a show to be shared. That it can also become a tool of justice, evidence of a crime, seems only now to be becoming more evident. Yet whether it makes any difference in stopping assault — or merely the covering up of it — remains to be seen. When he sentenced the Steubenville rapists earlier this year, Judge Thomas Lipps warned other teens to “to have discussions about how you talk to your friends, how you record things on the social media so prevalent today.” The lesson in all of it still doesn’t seem to be about rape. Rather, it’s not to get caught bragging about it.

Elderly Woman Dies in Court "Gasping for Breath" After Sheriff's Deputies "Callously" Refused to Give Her Medication, Daughter Claims

Iulia Filip, Courthouse News — Mon, 20 May 2013 15:36:00 -0700

The deceased, who was fighting a traffic ticket, suffered from asthma -- but deputies accused her of faking, suit filed in court argues.

MONTGOMERY, Ala. (CN) - A woman died on a courthouse floor because Alabama sheriff's deputies refused to give her her medicine - after arresting her for an old traffic ticket, the woman's daughter claims in court.

Ayunna Johnae London sued St. Clair County Sheriff Terry Surles, jail administrators Austin Nash and Terry Marcrum, Southern Healthcare Partners, and its employee Jennifer Eisel, in Federal Court.

London claims her mother, Dwana Voncia London-Richardson, died gasping for breath in court after callous and unconstitutional treatment from the defendants.

Richardson suffered from asthma and other serious health problems, but the defendants refused to give her her medication, accused her of faking, and let her die in the courtroom, her daughter claims.

Southern Healthcare Partners, which provided medical care to inmates at the St. Clair County Jail, failed to treat her mother properly, London says.

Her 45-year-old mother died in May 2011 at the St. Clair County Courthouse while in the sheriff's custody.

Richardson was arrested on May 19, 2011, in Tarrant City, Ala., for failing to pay a 2008 traffic ticket. She was sent to the St. Clair County Jail.

London claims that when she visited her mom in jail two days later, her mother could hardly walk, had trouble breathing and complained of pain in both legs.

London claims the jail staff refused to give her mom her asthma medication and stopped other inmates from helping her.

"Ms. Richardson told Ayunna that she was sick, that both her legs were hurting her so badly that she could not walk to the tray area to pick up her food, and that they would not give her her medicine," the complaint states.

"Ms. Richardson told Ayunna that several of the inmates were trying to help her out by going to get her tray for her, since she could hardly walk, but the jailers told them that they were 'babying' her, and moved Ms. Richardson to a different area in the jail, away from the inmates that were trying to help her."

Jail staff refused to take Richardson to the hospital, despite her worsening condition, her daughter says.

On May 23, deputies took her mother to court and ignored her need for medical care until it was too late, London says.

"Ayunna headed to the St. Clair County Courthouse early that morning," the complaint states. "She could not locate where court was being held. She saw deputy (or jailer) John Doe standing at the fire station, talking to a firefighter so she pulled into the station to ask where court was being held.

"When she pulled into the fire station, she saw her mother lying on the ground next to the police car with her legs extended under the police car.

"She asked them what had happened and her mother told her that she did not know, that she had just passed out. Ms. Richardson was sweating and struggling breathing.

"Ayunna had one of her mother's asthma pumps in her car so she asked if her mother could sit in her car and get some air.

"Ayunna gave her mother the asthma pump but it was not working. Her mother's breathing continued to get worse."

London says the deputies still refused to take her mom to the hospital, and said would be locked up if she didn't keep her court date.

"Ms. Richardson was unable to walk," the complaint states. "Deputy (or jailer) Doe obtained an office chair from the courthouse and they used it to wheel Ms. Richardson to the courtroom.

"Ayunna set beside deputy (or jailer) Doe and her mother, fanning her mother, whose breathing continued to get worse.

"After sitting in the courtroom waiting for about twenty minutes, Ms. Richardson stated that she 'could not take anymore,' and she told deputy/jailer Doe that she needed help.

"Ayunna also pleaded with deputy/jailer Doe to get someone to help her mother.

"Deputy/jailer Doe responded as though he believed Ms. Richardson was just putting on.

"Ms. Richardson then stated 'I need to lay down.'

"Ms. Richardson laid down on the courtroom floor and her body started to shaking.

"Deputy/jailer Doe took no action to assist Ms. Richardson or to clear the courtroom.

"Everyone in the courtroom watched as Ms. Richardson died in court, on the courtroom floor.

"Ayunna stayed beside her mother trying to do CPR to bring her back for about twenty minutes, but she failed."

Emergency personnel arrived 45 minutes later and took Richardson, who was unresponsive, to the hospital.

London says her mother was pronounced dead within 5 minutes of arriving at the hospital.

She seeks punitive damages for constitutional violations, wrongful death and negligence.

She is represented by Charles Tatum Jr. of Jasper, Ala

80-Year-Old North Carolina Educator: Why I Got Arrested Protesting Right-Wing Agenda for Schools

Barbara Parramore, AlterNet — Mon, 20 May 2013 12:06:00 -0700

A lifelong educator joins the Moral Mondays protests in Raleigh to fight GOP education agenda.

Update: Barbara Parramore was taken into police custody Monday evening. She was part of a crowd of hundreds of peaceable citizens (the highest count yet) gathered at the North Carolina Legislature buidling to protest right-wing policies pushed by GOP lawmakers. The Moral Mondays protests, launched by the NC chapter of the NAACP, is now in its fourth week. The number of protesters arrested for May 20th is estimated at 60, bringing the total count of citizens taken in by police over the last several weeks to nearly 160.

Today I am participating in a non-violent and peaceful protest called Moral Mondays. I join ministers, students, teachers, and other concerned citizens in Raleigh because I am deeply concerned about the legislation of this session of the North Carolina General Assembly. In my judgment, many laws and pending laws that will guide public policy and practice are not in the public interest, and in many instances, will have a negative effect on the future of our state. Children and youth, who are our future, need schooling and health that fosters the best of citizenship as well as preparation for living and working in our society. I am most concerned about the bills affecting the public schools and opportunities of post-secondary education. Families and women’s health issues also relate to and affect educational opportunities.

I was born in 1932 and am a child of the Great Depression and World War II. My oldest brother went into the army in January 1942 and I knew many older brothers of my friends who did not survive. Part of my DNA is being concerned about family and neighbors and helping each other whenever we could. It was fathers and daughters who kept farms going; indeed, a neighborhood girlfriend and her father were with my dad and me in a field working when someone came along to tell us that the war in the Pacific had ended. My brother was on the Pacific high seas that very day, and he got to come home safely, thank goodness.

Back then, neighbors and citizens knew how to care about each other, which brings me to my concern about what is happening right now to families and communities around the state. The list of bills proposed by one or both houses of the North Carolina General Assembly in spring of 2013 is long. Too many of these proposals appear to be poorly thought out. As a citizen who has never missed the opportunity to vote in local, state and national elections, I now have the feeling that my voice is not being considered. Participating in a protest is my way of letting members of the General Assembly know that there are other voices that they need to hear.

My career in public education began in the fall of 1954, following the Brown v. Board of Education decision, which made it unlawful to deny black children the same opportunities as white children in our public schools. For the next 40 years I served as an elementary teacher, middle-school mathematics and science teacher, school counselor, elementary school principal, and as a teacher of future teachers and administrators at North Carolina State University.

Six years as principal of Wiley Elementary School in Raleigh, North Carolina were a major influence in all that I have accomplished. Calvin H. Wiley, for whom the school was named, was the first state superintendent of schools. He convinced the governor not to divert school funds to the Civil War effort, among other important achievements. At Wiley School I learned firsthand how effective teachers are and the extent to which they go beyond their duties to not only teach, but to establish a climate for learning that makes a difference in their students’ lives. Not only were the three Rs essential but also music and art. We considered our school a “workshop for learning.”

Inequalities in education have always been in the forefront of my work. In the early years in public schools, there were two important changes underway: the desegregation of schools and the special education movement. Change comes slowly; for example, Wiley and another Raleigh school (Murphey) had the very first teachers in special education in the state. My teacher’s salary for that first year was provided by the Woman’s Club of Raleigh because there were no funds available. The next year, local school supplement funds were used to pay the teacher, and eventually the state began funding special education instructors. When I was principal, the teachers and I spent weeks prior to the first day of school working out transportation for students coming from all across the city.

Fortunately, the rights of special needs students are very different today. Progress in education is occurring -- and I don’t want the legislature and the governor to slow it down, which various legislative proposals will surely do.

In the late 1960s, I was on a statewide committee’s researcher for the legislation establishing kindergartens in North Carolina. Here, again, local funds were already supporting kindergarten classes as the state began to do so. More recently, preschool education has focused attention on preparing children for kindergarten. I salute the state's early childhood teachers, whose work is as important as the teachers of doctoral students at the university. Society loses when either level is neglected. All teachers warrant our respect and support. When conducting curriculum audits in school districts across the state during which I and members of my team visited all schools in a district, my respect increased. Teachers deserve praise, not threats.

It seems to me that the members of the General Assembly need to “make haste slowly” and not introduce and pass laws that appear too often to be an effort to cater to special interests rather than to foster education. Unintended consequences of such action may be more troublesome than addressing the motivation for such laws. Here is a list of specific bills that are pending and need to be defeated:

Senate Bill 337. Creating an independent board to manage charter schools is a bad idea from all perspectives, especially in diluting the State’s responsibility to assure a quality education for all. One board for public elementary and secondary education is sufficient along with the elected school superintendent. Both reflect the people of the State in ways two separate boards cannot. Also, more information is needed before having the State pay for charter school teachers who do not have a teacher license; caution is required to safeguard students’ right to reliable and responsible instruction.
House Bill 969 has a good feature in having the state paying for students’ advanced placement exam fees, but linking teachers’ bonuses to students’ high scores is not. Too many variables make such a practice unfair to both students and teachers. An unintended consequence can be more selective students thereby fostering the higher scores whereas more students should be challenged to seek the AP status thereby benefiting from the challenge.
Senate Bill 189 and House Bill 230 in expanding the definition of home schools, should it pass, will require more oversight in assuring students; rights to quality education. Transparency is essential; this may be where tying students' test scores to teacher effectiveness might be revealing.
Senate Bill 236. Providing for county commissioners to take over school construction is another bad idea. School building plans need decision-making close to the users. Duplication of offices and staffs would occur as both school boards and boards of commissioners would need to collaborate. The justification for this law escapes me.

I could go on to deplore many proposed laws that tend to turn back the clock on gains made for greater equality and opportunity for citizens and their families. Employers, private and public, benefit from strong families and communities. I devoted my entire career to making sure that all of our children get the very best education possible, and I am willing to be arrested today to make my voice heard to the North Carolina General Assembly.

Barbara Parramore is professor emeritus at North Carolina State University.

The Long, Sordid History of the American Right and Racism

Robert Parry, Consortium News — Mon, 20 May 2013 11:39:00 -0700

Other factors have come and gone for the Right, but racism has always been there.

Racism has been a consistent thread weaving through the American Right from the early days when Anti-Federalists battled against the U.S. Constitution to the present when hysterical Tea Partiers denounce the first African-American president. Other factors have come and gone for the Right, but racism has always been there.

Though definitions of Right and Left are never precise, the Left has generally been defined, in the American context, by government actions – mostly the federal government responding to popular movements and representing the collective will of the American people – seeking to improve the lot of common citizens and to reduce social injustice.

The Right has been defined by opposition to such government activism. Since the Founding, the Right has decried government interference with the “free market” and intrusion upon “traditions,” like slavery and segregation, as “tyranny” or “socialism.”

This argument goes back to 1787 and opposition to the Constitution’s centralizing of government power in the hands of federal authorities. In Virginia, for instance, the Anti-Federalists feared that a strong federal government eventually would outlaw slavery in the Southern states.

Ironically, this argument was raised by two of the most famous voices for “liberty,” Patrick Henry and George Mason. Those two Virginians spearheaded the Anti-Federalist cause at the state’s ratifying convention in June 1788, urging rejection of the Constitution because, they argued, it would lead to slavery’s demise.

The irony of Henry and Mason scaring fellow Virginians about the Constitution’s threat to slavery is that the two men have gone down in popular U.S. history as great espousers of freedom. Before the Revolution, Henry was quoted as declaring, “Give me liberty or give me death!” Mason is hailed as a leading force behind the Bill of Rights. However, their notion of “liberty” and “rights” was always selective. Henry and Mason worried about protecting the “freedom” of plantation owners to possess other human beings as property.

At Virginia’s Ratification Convention, Henry and Mason raised other arguments against the proposed Constitution, such as concerns that Virginia’s preeminence might not be as great as under the weak Articles of Confederation and that population gains in the North might erode Virginia’s economic welfare.

But the pair’s most potent argument was the danger they foresaw regarding the abolition of slavery. As historians Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg wrote in their 2010 book, Madison and Jefferson, the hot button for Henry and Mason was that “slavery, the source of Virginia’s tremendous wealth, lay politically unprotected.”

The Slavery Card

At the center of this fear was the state’s loss of ultimate control over its militia which could be “federalized” by the President as the nation’s commander in chief under the new Constitution.

“Mason repeated what he had said during the Constitutional Convention: that the new government failed to provide for ‘domestic safety’ if there was no explicit protection for Virginians’ slave property,” Burstein and Isenberg wrote. “Henry called up the by-now-ingrained fear of slave insurrections – the direct result, he believed, of Virginia’s loss of authority over its own militia.”

Henry floated conspiracy theories about possible subterfuges that the federal government might employ to deny Virginians and other Southerners the “liberty” to own African-Americans. Describing this fear-mongering, Burstein and Isenberg wrote:

“Congress, if it wished, could draft every slave into the military and liberate them at the end of their service. If troop quotas were determined by population, and Virginia had over 200,000 slaves, Congress might say: ‘Every black man must fight.’ For that matter, a northern-controlled Congress might tax slavery out of existence.

“Mason and Henry both ignored the fact that the Constitution protected slavery on the strength of the three-fifths clause, the fugitive slave clause, and the slave trade clause. Their rationale was that none of this mattered if the North should have its way.”

At Philadelphia in 1787, the drafters of the Constitution had already capitulated to the South’s insistence on its brutal institution of human enslavement. That surrender became the line of defense that James Madison, a principal architect of the new governing structure, cited in his response to Mason and Henry.

Burstein and Isenberg wrote, “Madison rose to reject their conspiratorial view. He argued that the central government had no power to order emancipation, and that Congress would never ‘alienate the affections five-thirteenths of the Union’ by stripping southerners of their property. ‘Such an idea never entered into any American breast,’ he said indignantly, ‘nor do I believe it ever will.’

“Madison was doing his best to make Henry and Mason sound like fear-mongers. Yet Mason struck a chord in his insistence that northerners could never understand slavery; and Henry roused the crowd with his refusal to trust ‘any man on earth’ with his rights. Virginians were hearing that their sovereignty was in jeopardy.”

Despite the success of Mason and Henry to play on the fears of plantation owners, the broader arguments stressing the advantages of Union carried the day, albeit narrowly. Virginia ultimately approved ratification by 89 to 79. However, the South’s obsession over perceived threats to its institution of slavery remained a central factor in the early decades of the Republic.

Arming Whites

Though today’s Right pretends that the Second Amendment was devised to give individual Americans the right to own and carry any weapon of their choice – so they can shoot policemen, soldiers and other government representatives in the cause of anti-government “liberty” – it was primarily a concession to the states and especially to the South’s fears that were expressed at the Virginia convention.

Approved by the First Congress as part of the “Bill of Rights,” the Second Amendment explained its purpose as the need to maintain “the security of a free State,” an echo of Mason’s concerns about “domestic safety,” i.e. a Southern state’s ability to maintain slavery by force and defend against slave uprisings.

As the amendment emerged from various committee rewrites, it stated: “A well-regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” But that right, of course, did not extend to all people, not to people of color.

The Second Congress put substance to the structure of state militias by passing the Militia Acts, which specifically mandated that “white men” of military age obtain muskets and other supplies for participation in state militias. At the time, the concerns were not entirely over rebellious slaves, but also over rebellious poor whites.

Part of the backdrop of the Constitutional Convention in 1787 had been Shays’ Rebellion in western Massachusetts in 1786-1787, an uprising of white farmers led by a former Continental Army officer, Daniel Shays. After ratification of the Constitution, the first significant use of federalized militias was in 1794 to crush an anti-tax revolt in western Pennsylvania led by poor whites known as the Whiskey Rebellion.

That uprising was treated as an act of treason as defined by the U.S. Constitution, although President Washington used his pardon power to spare rebel leaders from execution by hanging. Similar mercy was not shown when Southern states confronted actual or suspected slave revolts. In 1800, Virginia Gov. James Monroe called out the militia to stop an incipient slave uprising known as Gabriel’s Rebellion. Twenty-six alleged conspirators were hanged.

Jeffersonian Influences

Of course, slavery and racism were not the only defining characteristics of the Right during the country’s early years, as economic interests diverged and political rivalries surfaced. James Madison, for instance, had been a key protégé of George Washington and an ally of Alexander Hamilton during the fight for the Constitution.

Madison had even advocated for a greater concentration of power in the federal government, including giving Congress the explicit power to veto state laws. However, after the Constitution was in place, Madison began siding with his Virginian neighbor (and fellow slave-owner) Thomas Jefferson in political opposition to the Federalists.

In the first years of the constitutional Republic, the Federalists, led by President Washington and Treasury Secretary Hamilton, pushed the limits of federal power, particularly with Hamilton’s idea of a national bank which was seen as favoring the financial interests of the North to the detriment of the more agrarian South.

The Jeffersonians, coalescing around Jefferson and Madison, fiercely opposed Hamilton’s national economic planning though the differences often seemed to be driven by personal animosities and regional rivalries as much as by any grand ideological vision regarding government authority. The Jeffersonians, for instance, were sympathetic to the bloody French Revolution, which made a mockery of the rule of law and the restraint of government power.

Nevertheless, history has generally been kind to Jefferson’s enthusiasm for a more agrarian America and his supposed commitment to the common man. But what is left out of this praise for “Jeffersonian democracy” is that Jefferson’s use of the word “farmers” was often a euphemism for his actual political base, the slave-owning plantation aristocrats of the South.

At his core, despite his intellectual brilliance, Jefferson was just another Southern hypocrite. He wrote that “all men are created equal” (in the Declaration of Independence) but he engaged in pseudo-science to portray African-Americans as inferior to whites (as he did in his Notes on the State of Virginia).

His racism rationalized his own economic and personal reliance on slavery. While desperately afraid of slave rebellions, he is alleged to have taken a young slave girl, Sally Hemings, as a mistress.

Jefferson’s hypocrisy also surfaced in his attitudes toward a slave revolt in the French colony of St. Domingue, where African slaves took seriously the Jacobins’ cry of “liberty, equality and fraternity.” After their demands for freedom were rebuffed and the brutal French plantation system continued, violent slave uprisings followed. Hundreds of white plantation owners were slain as the rebels overran the colony. A self-educated slave named Toussaint L’Ouverture emerged as the revolution’s leader, demonstrating skills on the battlefield and in the complexities of politics.

The ‘Black Jacobins’

Despite the atrocities committed by both sides of the conflict, the rebels – known as the “Black Jacobins” – gained the sympathy of the American Federalists. L’Ouverture negotiated friendly relations with the Federalist administration under President John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton, a native of the Caribbean himself, helped L’Ouverture draft a constitution.

But events in Paris and Washington soon conspired to undo the promise of Haiti’s emancipation from slavery. Despite the Federalist sympathies, many American slave-owners, including Jefferson, looked nervously at the slave rebellion in St. Domingue. Jefferson feared that slave uprisings might spread northward. “If something is not done, and soon done,” Jefferson wrote in 1797, “we shall be the murderers of our own children.”

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the chaos and excesses of the French Revolution led to the ascendance of Napoleon Bonaparte, a brilliant and vain military commander possessed of legendary ambition. As he expanded his power across Europe, Napoleon also dreamed of rebuilding a French empire in the Americas.

In 1801, Jefferson became the third President of the United States – and his interests at least temporarily aligned with Napoleon’s. The French dictator wanted to restore French control of St. Domingue and Jefferson wanted to see the slave rebellion crushed. President Jefferson and Secretary of State Madison collaborated with Napoleon through secret diplomatic channels. Napoleon asked Jefferson if the United States would help a French army traveling by sea to St. Domingue. Jefferson replied that “nothing will be easier than to furnish your army and fleet with everything and reduce Toussaint [L’Ouverture] to starvation.”

But Napoleon had a secret second phase of his plan that he didn’t share with Jefferson. Once the French army had subdued L’Ouverture and his rebel force, Napoleon intended to advance to the North American mainland, basing a new French empire in New Orleans and settling the vast territory west of the Mississippi River.

Stopping Napoleon

In 1802, the French expeditionary force achieved initial success against the slave army, driving L’Ouverture’s forces back into the mountains. But, as they retreated, the ex-slaves torched the cities and the plantations, destroying the colony’s once-thriving economic infrastructure. L’Ouverture, hoping to bring the war to an end, accepted Napoleon’s promise of a negotiated settlement that would ban future slavery in the country. As part of the agreement, L’Ouverture turned himself in.

But Napoleon broke his word. Jealous and contemptuous of L’Ouverture, who was regarded by some admirers as a general with skills rivaling Napoleon’s, the French dictator had L’Ouverture shipped in chains back to Europe where he was mistreated and died in prison.

Infuriated by the betrayal, L’Ouverture’s young generals resumed the war with a vengeance. In the months that followed, the French army – already decimated by disease – was overwhelmed by a fierce enemy fighting in familiar terrain and determined not to be put back into slavery. Napoleon sent a second French army, but it too was destroyed. Though the famed general had conquered much of Europe, he lost 24,000 men, including some of his best troops, in St. Domingue before abandoning his campaign. The death toll among the ex-slaves was much higher, but they had prevailed, albeit over a devastated land.

By 1803, a frustrated Napoleon – denied his foothold in the New World – agreed to sell New Orleans and the Louisiana territories to Jefferson, a negotiation handled by Madison that ironically required just the sort of expansive interpretation of federal powers that the Jeffersonians ordinarily disdained. However, a greater irony was that the Louisiana Purchase, which opened the heart of the present United States to American settlement and is regarded as possibly Jefferson’s greatest achievement as president, had been made possible despite Jefferson’s misguided – and racist – collaboration with Napoleon.

“By their long and bitter struggle for independence, St. Domingue’s blacks were instrumental in allowing the United States to more than double the size of its territory,” wrote Stanford University professor John Chester Miller in his book, The Wolf by the Ears: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery. But, Miller observed, “the decisive contribution made by the black freedom fighters … went almost unnoticed by the Jeffersonian administration.”

Consequences of Racism

Without L’Ouverture’s leadership, the island nation fell into a downward spiral. In 1804, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the radical slave leader who had replaced L’Ouverture, formally declared the nation’s independence and returned it to its original Indian name, Haiti. A year later, apparently fearing a return of the French, Dessalines ordered the massacre of the remaining French whites on the island. Jefferson reacted to the bloodshed by imposing a stiff economic embargo on Haiti. In 1806, Dessalines himself was brutally assassinated, touching off a cycle of political violence that would haunt Haiti for the next two centuries.

Even in his final years, Jefferson remained obsessed with Haiti and its link to the issue of American slavery. In the 1820s, the former president proposed a scheme for taking away the children born to black slaves in the United States and shipping them to Haiti. In that way, Jefferson posited that both slavery and America’s black population could be phased out. Eventually, in Jefferson’s view, Haiti would be all black and the United States white.

While the racism of Jefferson and many of his followers may be undeniable, it is not so easy to distinguish between Right and Left in those early years of the American Republic. Though Hamilton was more open-minded toward freedom for black slaves, there were elements of his government intervention on behalf of the fledgling financial sector that might today be regarded as “pro-business” or elitist as there were parts of Jefferson’s attitude toward greater populism that might be seen as more “democratic.”

Stumbling toward War

Yet, as the first generation of American leaders passed away and the nation expanded westward, the issue of slavery remained a threat to America’s unity. The South’s aggressive defense of its lucrative institution of slavery opened violent rifts between pro-slave and pro-free settlers in territories to the west.

The modern distinctions between America’s Right and Left also became more pronounced, defined increasingly by race. The North, building a manufacturing economy and influenced by the emancipationist movement, turned increasingly against slavery, while the South, with a more agrarian economy and much of its capital invested in slaves, could see no future without the continuation of slavery.

Politically, those distinctions played out not unlike what Anti-Federalists George Mason and Patrick Henry had predicted at Virginia’s ratification convention in 1788. The North gradually gained dominance in wealth and population and the South’s barbaric practice of slavery emerged as a hindrance to America’s growing reputation in the world.

So, a key divide of U.S. politics between Right and Left became the differences over issues of slavery and race. The racist aspects of the Anti-Federalists and the “Jeffersonian democrats” became a defining feature of the American Right as captured in the argument for “states’ rights,” i.e., the rights of the Southern states either to nullify federal laws or to secede from the Union.

Though the concentration of power in Washington D.C. gave rise to legitimate questions about authoritarianism, the federal government also became the guiding hand for the nation’s economic development and for elimination of gross regional injustices such as slavery. Federal action in defense of national principles regarding justice eventually helped define the American Left.

But the slave-owning South would not go down without a fight. After the election of Republican Abraham Lincoln in 1860, 11 Southern states seceded from the Union and established the Confederate States of America with the goal of perpetuating slavery forever. It took four years of war to force the Southern states back into the Union and finally bring slavery to an end.

However, the Southern aristocracy soon reclaimed control of the region’s political structure and instituted nearly a century more of racial oppression against blacks. During this Jim Crow era, racism – and the cruel enforcement of racial segregation – remained central elements of the American Right.

An Anti-Government Coalition

In the latter half of the Nineteenth Century and the early Twentieth Century, other political and economic factors bolstered the Right, particularly a class of Northern industrialists and financiers known as the Robber Barons. Their insistence on laissez-faire economics in the North – and their opposition to reformers such as Theodore Roosevelt – dovetailed with anti-federal attitudes among the South’s white aristocracy.

That coalition, however, was shattered by a string of Wall Street panics and other economic catastrophes culminating in the Great Depression. With millions of Americans out of work and many facing starvation, Franklin Roosevelt’s administration initiated the New Deal which put people back to work building national infrastructure and imposing government regulations on the freewheeling ways of Wall Street.

Under Roosevelt, laws were changed to respect the rights of labor unions and social movements arose demanding greater civil rights for blacks and women. The Left gained unprecedented ascendance. However, the old alliance of rich Northern industriasts and Southern segregationists saw dangers in this new assertion of federal power. The business barons saw signs of “socialism” and the white supremacists feared “race-mixing.”

After World War II – with the United States now a world superpower – the continued existence of institutionalized racism became an embarrassment undermining America’s claim to be a beacon of human freedom. Finally, spurred on by Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights activists, the federal government finally moved against the South’s practice of segregation. That reignited the long-simmering conflict between federal power and states’ rights.

Though the federal government prevailed in outlawing racial segregation, the Right’s anger over this intrusion upon Southern traditions fueled a powerful new movement of right-wing politicians. Since the Democratic Party led the fight against segregation in the 1960s, Southern whites rallied to the Republican Party as their vehicle of political resistance.

Opportunistic politicians, such as Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, deftly exploited the white backlash and turned much of the Dixie-crat South into solid Republican Red. This resurgence of white racial resentments also merged with a reassertion of “libertarian” economics as memories of the Great Depression faded. In essence, the late Nineteenth Century alliance between segregationist whites in the South and laissez-faire businessmen in the North was being reestablished.

This right-wing collaboration reached a new level of intensity in 2008 after the election of the first African-American president whose victory reflected the emergence of a multi-racial electorate threatening to end the historic white political domination of the United States. With the election also coming amid a Wall Street financial collapse – after years of reduced government regulation — Barack Obama’s arrival also portended a renewal of federal government activism. Thus, the age-old battle was rejoined.

Yet, given the cultural tenor of the time, the Right found it difficult to engage in overt racial slurs against Obama, nor could it openly seek to deny voting rights to black and brown people. New code words were needed. So Obama’s legitimacy as an American was questioned with spurious claims that he had been born in Kenya, and Republicans demanded tighter ballot security to prevent “voter fraud.”

Today’s Right also recognized that it could not simply emphasize its Confederate heritage. A more politically correct re-branding was needed. So, the Right shifted its imagery from the “Stars and Bars” battle flag of the Confederacy to the “Don’t Tread on Me” flag of the American Revolution. That way, Americans who don’t overtly see themselves as racist could be drawn into the movement. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Right’s Re-Branding: 1860 to 1776.”]

However, the historical narrative that the Right constructed around the nation’s Founding was not the one that actually happened. In seeking to present themselves as the true defenders of the Constitution, the Right had to air-brush out the failed experiment with the Articles of Confederation, which had made the states “sovereign” and “independent” with the central government just a “league of friendship.”

The Constitution represented the nation’s greatest transfer of power into federal hands in U.S. history, as engineered by Washington, Madison and Hamilton. Indeed, Madison favored even greater dominance by the central government over the states than he ultimately got in the Constitution.

However, in the Right’s revisionist version, the Articles of Confederation are forgotten and the Framers were simply out to create a governing system with strong states’ rights and a weak federal government. That fabrication played well with an uneducated right-wing base that could then envision itself using its Second Amendment rights to fight for the Framers’ vision of “liberty.”

As this right-wing narrative now plays out, Barack Obama is not only a black Muslim “socialist” oppressing liberty-loving white Christian Americans but he is a “tyrant” despoiling the beautiful, nearly divine, God-inspired Constitution that the Framers bestowed upon the nation — including, apparently, those wonderful provisions protecting slavery.

Nerds, Jocks and Jailed Dissidents: Inside the World of Israel’s High School War Resisters

Sarah Lazare, YES! Magazine — Fri, 17 May 2013 09:31:00 -0700

High school's tough enough without having to face prison time for refusing to serve an occupation you know is wrong.

When the 19-year-old Israeli war resister Noam Gur attends weekly demonstrations against the occupation of Palestine, the soldiers who suppress the protestors—with tear gas, stun grenades, and occasionally live fire—aren’t just strangers in uniform. Among them are her former high school classmates, who have been conscripted into the Israeli army.

Gur was supposed to serve, too, but instead joined the shministim. This is a Hebrew term meaning high school students in their senior year, who face conscription into the army. But the word is also used to refer to students who publicly refuse conscription on ethical grounds.

“All my friends from high school are in the army,” Gur explains. “Now I see them at demos. It is really weird and complicated.”

With a shrug of her shoulders, Gur describes the process that led to her refusal of conscription. “I found out that what they taught me in school was different from this reality. I went to the West Bank to protests and saw the occupation. I started to realize I didn’t want to serve.”

Gur, who has cropped hair and a shy smile, was supposed to be a soldier before she was out of her teens, like most Israeli youth. But instead she served 20 days in prison for refusing orders. Now an anti-occupation activist who supports other young people questioning military service, she is one of many young Israelis who are saying no to the army. They are part of growing number of Israeli movements working to end the occupation from the inside.

Letters of resistance

To understand what it takes to become a shministi—the singular form of shiministim—it’s important to understand the powerful grip of the Israeli military on society. Israel’s occupation of Palestine and aggressive stance toward many of its neighbors requires a highly militarized society. The country devotes almost one fifth of its national budget to military spending, 18 percent of which is paid for by the United States. Israel’s military spending as a percentage of GDP is one of the highest in the world, and it boasts a larger military than any of its neighbors. The country maintains a stash of nuclear weapons and is the world's eighth largest arms exporter.

Meanwhile, children are prepared for compulsory service from an early age by constant military presence in educational settings, including “teacher soldiers” in some schools. Walking through Israeli cities and towns, one encounters streets filled with soldiers carrying M4 and M16 rifles, many of them in plain clothes.

“There is always a military background here,” Gur says.

While the Israeli army is preeminent in society, it is not invincible. Public draft resistance began in 1970, when a handful of students penned an open letter to then-Prime Minister Golda Meir, in which they explained their refusal to serve in territories seized and occupied in the 1967 war. In 1982, a group of army reservists refused to serve in the Lebanon War, founding the group Yesh Gvul, whose name means “there is a limit.” The movement of letter-writing and refusal by high school seniors grew during the early 2000s, prompting the military to crack down and sentence each of the five shministim from the class of 2002 to two years in prison.

By 2008, when almost 100 people signed public letters resisting conscription, prison terms for shministimhad become standard. The army makes it nearly impossible to get a discharge based on conscientious objector status, and many shministim escape conscription only by claiming mental unfitness, often after serving multiple prison sentences. The 19-year-old shministi Nathan Blanc is currently serving his eighth consecutive prison term for refusing army service in protest of second-class rights for Palestinians.

In addition to those who publicly resist, an unknown number engage in “gray resistance,” quietly applying for discharges on mental, physical, and religious grounds. As of 2008, about half of all potential conscripts did not enlist due to various exemptions, according to Israeli army officials.

Sahar Vardi, a shministi from the class of 2008, wants to encourage this type of resistance. She is a member of the Israeli feminist demilitarization group New Profile, which offers consultation and support to youth questioning military service. The organization reaches 2,000 people who are seeking to resist military service each year, she says.

Saying no to conscription and occupation

Gur, who grew up in Nahariya, a town just north of Haifa, had a sister in the border police in Gaza at the time of her refusal. Despite her family’s objection to her resistance, she penned her public letter in 2012. In it, she explained her unwillingness to serve in an army that has, she wrote, “been engaged in dominating another nation, in plundering and terrorizing a civilian population that is under its control.” After receiving two successive prison terms for refusing orders, she was finally released after claiming mental unfitness.

The number of public shministim has been shrinking in recent years, with just three 12th graders, including Gur, publicly declaring their draft refusal in 2012. Yet Electronic Intifada reports that the number of resisters among the Druze, an ethnic minority from the country’s north, is on the rise, with Druze musician Omar Saad publicly refusing conscription last year. Furthermore, New Profile consultants say that the number of gray resisters continues to increase.

Regardless of its size, Israeli anti-occupation organizers insist that the tradition of refusing conscription remains a relevant force, in conjunction with other demilitarization efforts. “Breaking the consensus on occupation is important,” says Netta Mishley, a shministi from the class of 2009. “It allows people to feel more free speaking their minds.”

Gur, who also supports the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment, and sanction of Israel, says that that draft resistance is one tactic among many, and it is difficult to tell how effective it is. Nonetheless, she argues that refusal is important to encourage. In a society where graduates fresh out of high school are required to participate directly in military occupation at an early age, saying no can be a way of showing another path is possible, and retrieving one's humanity in the process.

Sarah Lazare wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas and practical actions. Sarah is a writer and organizer in U.S. anti-war and anti-militarist movements, and is a member of The Civilian-Soldier Alliance and War Times. She co-edited PM Press book About Face: Military Resisters Turn Against War, and her work has appeared in publications includingThe Nation, Truthout, and Al Jazeera English.

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A Real Pro-Israel Policy Helps Palestine, Too
Stephen Zunes argues that a truly pro-Israel policy is one that is also a pro-Palestine and pro-peace.
Only the People of the United States Can End Israel's Occupation
Many progressives breathed a sigh of relief when last month’s Israeli elections set the stage for a centrist coalition and not a far-right one. Yet peace will remain out of reach until the American people pressure the Obama Administration to end Israeli impunity.

Our Govt. Is Turning into a Surveillance State That's Almost Impossible to Stop

Murtaza Hussain, Al Jazeera English — Mon, 20 May 2013 15:20:00 -0700

The US government extensively monitors its citizens' internet activities, with dangerous effects on personal liberties.

The most egregious rights violations tend to happen against the voiceless; those who have neither the platform nor resources to articulate their grievances to the broader world.

Last week, however, the US Department of Justice was caught in a very public transgression against the freedom of an influential and empowered private organisation when it was revealed that it had engaged in a spying campaign against the Associated Press (AP) - one of the country's largest news agencies.

In what has been described as a "massive and unprecedented intrusion", AP revealed that Obama's Department of Justice had engaged in a surveillance campaign targeting its reporters and editors. This campaign included the covert acquisition of phone records from AP staff; including from their home and personal cell numbers.

In a public letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, AP President Gary Pruitt said the surveillance would:

Reveal communications with confidential sources and disclose information... that the government has no conceivable right to know.

It would seem, however, that soliciting such confidential knowledge was just what the government was after, as it sought to obtain information regarding AP's reporting on CIA operations in Yemen. Indeed, far beyond this incident of spying on the press, it has been demonstrated over the past several years that the US government under Obama has developed a seemingly insatiable appetite for its citizens' private information. Furthermore - and to the detriment of the American right to privacy - they have shown few qualms about the means they are willing to employ to acquire such data.

Digital documentation

In 2010, the Washington Post's landmark report "Top Secret America" - an investigative effort to document the rapidly expanding and unaccountable security apparatus developing in the country - uncovered a stunning fact about the depth of surveillance Americans today find themselves under.

According to the report:

Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications.

In a world where such media have become the primary means of communication for millions of citizens, this level of undisclosed documentation is incredibly significant. Government spying on citizens' internet activities is not simply an intrusion into their external communications, but in many ways it represents surveillance of a significant chunk of their mental lives as well.

Never before has such an immense repository of information been available to a state - but without so much as public disclosure, this huge trove of knowledge is being created by the US government for purposes that have never been properly articulated.

A particularly insidious example of how Americans have been robbed of their right to privacy can be seen ingovernment monitoring of social media and email platforms. When services such as Twitter, Facebook and Gmail first launched and millions of Americans rushed to take part in what seemed to be another opportunity for benign internet socialising, they could not have been expected to know that they were sharing intimate private thoughts and information not just with friends and family, but with the state as well.

In 2010, the Department of Homeland Security quietly began a programme to monitor social media in conjunction with the military contractor General Dynamics. This programme - disclosed only after privacy organisations filed lawsuits that revealed its existence - casts its surveillance net broadly enough that any internet user who uses certain keywords (some apparently as innocuous as "wave", "pork" and "Mexico") would be considered suspicious and subject to more intensive investigation. Of course, the rationale for these designations continues to remain as opaque as the programme itself.

Earlier this year, Google released its semi-annual report on online transparency and specifically cited the US government as among the worst culprits for its requests to view the private data of internet users. While theoretically law enforcement and other government agencies should require warrants to search through sensitive private information such as emails, recent investigations by the ACLU suggest that theFBI has been circumventing these requirements and reading individuals' email accounts without specific legal authorisation.

Furthermore, companies such as Facebook and Google may now face monetary fines if they refuse to share client data and consent to wiretaps requested by government agencies. In a world where people increasingly use the ample cloud-memory space afforded by services such as Gmail as a storage locker for information, the apparent belief on the part of government that individuals' email accounts do not qualify as "private" is deeply troubling.

Big data, big brother

A glimpse into what the future of domestic surveillance may entail can be seen in a new type of software developed by the defence firm Raytheon. Better known in the public imagination for its production of cruise missiles and air warfare simulators, Raytheon has begun to branch out into the creation of surveillance products as well with the development of its new "Riot" software.

The programme - demonstrated in a report by The Guardian's Ryan Gallagher - mines individuals' social media usage in order to track their movement and even predict their future behaviour. In a video with Raytheon's "principal investigator" Brian Urch, he demonstrates in amazing detail how the programme can be used to track and predict the future location of one of the company's own employees.

As Ginger McCall of the Electronic Privacy Information Centre told Gallagher regarding the implications of the programme:

Users may be posting information that they believe will be viewed only by their friends, but instead, it is being viewed by government officials or pulled in by data collection services like the Riot search.

It is unlikely that any individual operating a Twitter and Facebook account to connect with loved ones would imagine their posts could one day be used by the employees of a government defence contractor to predict their future behaviour; but incredibly enough, such a scenario is becoming increasingly possible.

Another sign of increasing government commitment to the use of "Big Data" to keep tabs on online and telephone communication is the creation of a massive $2bn data centre in Utah under the aegis of the National Security Agency (NSA). The sprawling complex built in the remote Utah desert is intended tocapture and store all types of online data, including "private emails, mobile phone calls, Google searches, travel itineraries and purchases", towards the goal of achieving "total information awareness".

What this will mean in the long-term for the average citizen - whose personal privacy has already been hopelessly compromised by technological monitoring, and who will now be subject to a massive and open-ended programme of Big Data analytics - is as yet unclear. What is clear, however, is that the post-9/11 environment of fear has allowed huge amounts of resources to be committed to projects such as this, which will empower the US government with a level of information about its citizens unprecedented in human history.

The human impact of surveillance

When considering the implications of the massive digital Panopticon being developed today, it is important to reflect upon the impact upon individual liberty which even crude, old-fashioned surveillance causes. With the revelation that the New York Police Department had been conducting blanket-spying on Muslimsliving in New York City and its environs - using methods such as paid informants, wiretapping, detailed cataloguing of Muslim neighbourhoods, documentation of Muslim-owned businesses, infiltration of houses of worship, and many other invasive tactics, it can be observed what effects intensive monitoring can have on ordinary individuals.

Throughout six years of spying on entire communities for no other reason than their religion, not a single lead or terrorism investigation was generated by the programme. Nonetheless, the damage done to the psyches of individuals who knew their community was deeply infiltrated was palpable. Communities and personal relationships were torn apart by government-induced suspicion and paranoia, as people became too afraid to speak or even associate with one another. As documented in AP's report on the programme:

"Interviewees stress that the ever-present surveillance chills - or completely silences - their speech."
"Every other store on this street could be an informant. You start wondering about each one: how did this person get his liquor license so quickly?"
"'Nobody will trust you with things that they did trust you with before... Trust is gone. My own neighbor - he doesn't say it, obviously no one says it. But I feel like it's on their faces."

Given what relatively crude means of surveillance can do to a community, what long-term effect will a pervasive, technologically-advanced, multi-billion dollar national spying programme have on the fabric of society? One means of combatting seditious and unwanted speech is to simply make ordinary people too afraid to speak and commiserate with each other whatsoever, and the surveillance state being built today may ultimately accomplish this goal.

As much as is still possible, citizens should seek to jealously guard their personal information and to be judicious with what they share on seemingly-innocuous social media outlets. One thing that can be assured is that the infrastructure exists to document - allegedly in the minutest detail - an increasing amount of private data, and until citizens begin to lobby government for safeguards upon their privacy the surveillance state will only continue to grow.

The potential consequences for individual liberty cannot be overstated, and it is incumbent upon those who wish to protect Constitutionally enshrined personal freedoms to make sure that government surveillance becomes an issue of urgent public scrutiny and oversight.

Murtaza Hussain is a Toronto-based writer and analyst focused on issues related to Middle Eastern politics.

Soda Industry Cashes In on Govt. Food Assistance Programs to Tune of $4 Bilion a Year

Stan Cox, AlterNet — Tue, 07 May 2013 16:03:00 -0700

The debate over dropping junk food from the nation’s biggest nutrition program cuts across the political spectrum in unpredictable ways.

As Congress resumes its wrangling over a long-overdue Farm Bill, conservatives are once again attacking their long-time bête noire, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. They’re threatening SNAP (formerly known as the Food Stamp Program and by far the biggest item in the Farm Bill) with everything from mandatory work requirements for participants to deep program-wide budget cuts.

Once the Farm Bill has passed and all the political flatulence has cleared, though, budget hawks and Tea Partiers are unlikely to have succeeded in undermining SNAP. With the economy stagnating, unemployment and inequality festering, employers refusing to pay living wages, and one American in six now facing food insecurity, the bulk of public opinion is behind beefing up food assistance rather than gutting it.

But even among its fans and beneficiaries, there is recognition that SNAP could use some updating, especially with regard to its nutritional impact. So state governments from South Carolina to Maine to Wisconsin are considering legislation that would prohibit the purchase of soft drinks or other junk foods with SNAP credits.

Proposals for deploying food assistance as a tool to influence consumers’ buying decisions are deeply controversial. And the debate over whether or not to drop nutrition-free items from the nation’s biggest nutrition program cuts across the political spectrum in often unpredictable ways.

A sweet deal for Big Soda

Calls for an end to the soft-drink subsidy are coming from academia as well as from statehouses. A 2011 commentary last year in the Journal of the American Medical Association argued,

The government purchases millions of servings of sugar-sweetened beverages for SNAP participants each day. This practice arguably erodes diet quality and promotes chronic illness among individuals who are at increased risk of obesity-related disease because of limited financial resources.

Around the same time, a white paper from the Arizona State School of Nutrition and Health Promotion included this statement:

Restricting options for purchase of unhealthy foods can be a powerful strategy for improving diets of SNAP recipients. There is strong scientific evidence for a restrictive strategy, and there is precedence from other federal programs such as WIC [the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children and NSLP [the National School Lunch Program], which limit benefits to the purchase of foods that are considered healthy.

Michael Jacobson of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, which has long advocated tight controls on the soft-drink industry, wrote last year, “To do nothing—while sugary drinks fuel an epidemic of obesity and other expensive diseases—would be reckless from a public health and fiscal standpoint.” Meanwhile, Daphne Hernandez, an assistant professor in the Human Development Department at Penn State, stated the case even more bluntly: “Continuing the use of taxpayer dollars to fund the purchase of soda through SNAP undermines the goal of SNAP.”

Advocates for limiting the range of products that benefits can buy have generally focused their efforts on carbonated drinks. For one thing, the sweet sodas make a nice fat target; the manufacturers rake in an estimated $4 billion per year from SNAP sales alone. Their products have a hefty impact, both nutritional and economic, and they could be easily identified and segregated automatically at checkout through SNAP’s electronic benefit transfer (EBT) card.

Joining the chorus of demands for restrictions are some right-wing activists and legislators—people who would not seem to have the nutritional status of SNAP participants uppermost in their minds. Accusing soda manufacturers of “SNAPping up welfare dollars,” David Alamasi of the National Center for Public Policy Research, a scandal-ridden antigovernment group, asserted last month that although he’s “a vocal proponent of Coca-Cola's right to sell any and all of its products,” he doesn’t want them being purchased with what he regards as his money. “When it comes to public assistance,” he stated in a press release, “I want people buying what they need with my money and not what they desire."

Republican legislative proposals in Wisconsin, Florida, and some other states have taken aim at all processed foods that contain more negative than positive nutrition. State senator Ronda Storms introduced Florida’s bill last year. It would have barred consumers from using SNAP benefits to buy "nonstaple, unhealthy foods." Storms told the Los Angeles Times, "If we're going to be cutting services across the board, then people can live without potato chips, without store-bought cookies, without their sodas."

Despite support from the ideological Right, Storms’ bill failed thanks to fierce corporate lobbying. The big soft-drink manufacturers, of course, work hard against all such legislation, but so do other corporate interests that rake in SNAP profits. The bill was attacked by lobbyists for the Snack Food Association, Corn Refiners of America, Florida Petroleum Marketers, the Convenience Store Association, and the Frozen Potato Products Institute.

When it comes to nutritional criteria for SNAP-eligible products, both support and opposition can span the full range of political ideologies. Proposed restrictions have been condemned by many food banks and economic-justice organizations, who argue that it’s paternalistic and unfair for the government to try to dictate the food purchases of low-income families while everyone else is left to choose freely. They argue that such reforms would take us back to the bad old days before the EBT card, when people using federal food coupons faced a potentially humiliating ordeal with every trip through the checkout line. Regarding proposed restrictions on Wisconsin’s SNAP-funded program, a food-bank executive argued, "Rather than creating hurdles, the state should make healthy food more affordable."

Most of the opposition to a soda ban among food-rights groups is indeed aimed at protecting the interests of SNAP participants. But in some cases, motives appear to be more problematic. In a 2011 report, the Washington, D.C.-based Food Research and Action Council maintained that purchasing restrictions would have many harmful impacts, among them an increase in “confusion and stigma at grocery check-out, potentially causing a decline in SNAP participation that could worsen food insecurity.” But FRAC, a consistently strong defender of food assistance, itself receives funding from a who’s-who of SNAP’s agribusiness and corporate food beneficiaries, among them the Coca-Cola Company, Pepsico, Inc., Mars Incorporated, the Sara Lee Foundation, and Walmart.

Meanwhile, the US Department of Agriculture, which administers federal food programs, has resisted any further tightening of food eligibility, on the grounds that classifying tens of thousands of types of food and keeping up with a constant deluge of new products would be a bureaucratic nightmare. Department researchers claim that “there are no widely accepted standards to judge the ‘healthfulness’ of individual foods”; that the “ingenuity of the food industry to develop new ones (for example, a prohibited candy bar adapted into a chocolate ‘granola bar’)” would always keep junk food a step ahead of any attempted regulation; and that “responsibility for enforcing compliance would rest in the hands of employees at check-out counters in 160,000 stores across the nation,” something considered unworkable.

USDA cites its own studies showing that dropping soda from SNAP would not significantly reduce consumption by low-income families. Most SNAP recipients use cash to buy a portion of their monthly food supply, and if restrictions were imposed, argues USDA, people would simply shift junk food over into their cash budget.

Who’s buying all that junk anyway?

It’s important to note that brisk sales of soda and other junk foods are not linked exclusively or even primarily to poverty. Households with incomes above $70,000 spend about 35 percent more each month on fruits, vegetables, meats, grains, and dairy products than do the lowest-income households; however, they also spend almost 80 percent more on what USDA calls “other foods” – a category that includes mostly less nutritious foods: “frozen prepared meals, ... packaged prepared foods, snack foods, ... , sugar and other sweets, fats and oils,” and, of course, soft drinks.

USDA’s figures show that middle- and upper-income Americans are 14 percent more likely to consume sweets daily and 23 percent more likely to consume salty snacks every day than are food-stamp recipients. Thus, says USDA, “the basis for singling out low-income food stamp recipients and restricting their food choices is not clear.”

But in other contexts, USDA apparently does believe in singling out low-income people. The second and third largest food assistance programs after SNAP—NSLP and WIC—both are designed to steer their recipients toward more nutritious diets. Smaller programs include the SNAP Nutrition Education program; a Community Food Projects Grant Program for low-income areas; the Healthy Urban Food Enterprise Development Center, aimed at extending access to nutritious food into urban “food deserts”; and expansion of electronic SNAP benefits in the Farmers’ Market Promotion Program.

Finally, under USDA’s Healthy Initiatives Pilot project, SNAP participants in Hampden County, Massachusetts are having 30 cents added to their monthly benefit for every dollar they spend on fruits and vegetables. There is talk, broadly supported, of extending this incentive to all SNAP participants.

Yet none of these federal nutrition programs is popular with hardline conservatives, because they all would expand food assistance rather than shrinking or eliminating it, and they encourage consumption of healthful foods without explicitly discouraging consumption of unhealthful ones.

“Informal rationing”

People living in poverty today are having to spend a punishing 37 percent of their income just to feed their families. That compares with 9 percent spent by households earning $70,000 or more. For millions of families, losing SNAP would mean coming up short in their struggle to cover rent or house payments, utility bills, transportation costs, and other necessary expenses.

But the fact that more than 15 percent of Americans now depend on SNAP has raised the blood pressure of right-wing lawmakers who resent having to spend tax dollars to help keep Americans fed and housed. The 2013 budget proposed by House Budget Committee chair Paul Ryan (R-WI) would strip $135 billion from the program over the next ten years. But such crippling cuts are unlikely. Farm-state members of Congress and their friends in agribusiness, who have been crucial to keeping the program alive for almost fifty years, will continue to protect USDA’s two dozen food assistance programs, among which SNAP is the biggest. SNAP also receives unconditional political support from the big banks, led by JPMorgan Chase, whom the states grant contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars to administer the EBT system.

Blocked from completely gutting SNAP, conservatives are resorting to harassment of those who participate in the program. Congressional Republicans are pressing for mandatory enforcement of a work requirement that would apply to all SNAP recipients--this in an economy that is already incapable of providing enough jobs. The Pennsylvania legislature reinstated an "asset test" that would drop from the SNAP rolls low-income recipients who have modest savings. A bill was introduced recently in the North Carolina statehouse that would require criminal background checks on applicants. And the right-wing media are trying to undermine SNAP by falsely claiming that the Obama administration "is promoting food stamps in Mexico."

All of this is part of campaign by Republican lawmakers to hamstring federal assistance programs—an attempted repeat of what they accomplished in the two decades leading up to the 2008 financial crash, when the government erected a series of increasingly stringent bureaucratic hurdles the purpose of which, according to legal scholar David Super, was to achieve “informal rationing” of benefits through the “personal choice model.” In other words, the government makes it such a hassle to obtain assistance that eligible applicants will just decide it's not worth it.

But the deepening of poverty and food insecurity over the past five years prompted the federal government to start tearing down many of those obstacles. For example, most states relaxed SNAP’s eligibility rules, in order to catch families before they fall below the poverty line and exhaust all of their savings. States have developed “SNAP outreach plans” and hired recruiters to let poor and borderline poor families know they are eligible. And some states are allowing food-stamp purchases at farmers' markets.

Alternatives to the soda subsidy

It is those efforts to strengthen food security that are so upsetting to Republicans, and that position puts them badly at odds with public opinion. A study published in last December’s issue of the journal Public Health Nutrition estimates that 77 percent of Americans would like to see SNAP funding either increased or kept steady. When people were asked about a range of possible policy changes, the most popular, with the support of 82 percent of respondents (including 76 percent of Republicans and 86 percent of SNAP participants), was “a proposal to provide additional money to SNAP (Food Stamp) participants that can only be used on fruits, vegetables or other healthful foods.”

A proposal to make sugary drinks ineligible for SNAP purchase was supported by 69 percent of all respondents and by 54 percent of SNAP participants themselves. If the soda ban was linked to a financial incentive to buy more fruits and vegetables, a whopping three-quarters of SNAP participants were in favor of it.

While many economically stressed parents might be relieved to have a new way to deal with their sugar-happy kids—by telling them, “No, don’t put that Mountain Dew in the cart, because our card doesn’t cover it” —people will probably tolerate only so much government intrusion into shopping decisions. And some of the more drastic health-promotion initiatives now under discussion might cross that line.

For example, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine recommends that SNAP benefits pay only for a prescribed list of 28 specific food items. According to PCRM, “SNAP beneficiaries who limit their food purchases to these Healthy Basics and eat no other foods at all can easily achieve nutrition that is complete and superior to that of average Americans.” They are probably right about their list’s healthfulness, but it appears to have been compiled solely on the basis of nutrient concentrations and is bizarrely idiosyncratic. PCRM’s plan would permit SNAP to cover only five grain products: high-fiber bread, brown rice, quinoa, rolled oats and whole-wheat pasta. The only allowable legumes would be black or garbanzo beans, dried red lentils, and (no joke) frozen edamame. But not to worry: balsamic vinegar and cinnamon would also be allowed.

Other groups, in particular the D.C.-based Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress, have suggested some much more practical enhancements to SNAP that would amplify the benefits of a soda or junk-food ban.

Protect and, if necessary, augment the program’s current funding.

Make children’s health a stronger focus (an approach suggested by the fact that an astonishing one out of every two young Americans will receive SNAP benefits at some point before turning nineteen).

Expand SNAP access at farmers’ markets, and encourage it by providing free or subsidized wireless terminals to handle the transactions (preferably without a subsidy to JPMorgan).

Reduce the prices of nutrient-dense foods and provide incentives to buy them.

Require stores, if they want to be certified as SNAP retailers, to stock more healthful foods and to market them more effectively.

There is little reason to expect any of these reforms to be adopted in the upcoming Farm Bill; Congressional SNAP supporters will be wholly focused on defending current benefits against cuts. But if individual states continue to propose creative experiments in improved nutrition, expanded access to farmers’ markets, and cutting predatory corporations out of the food chain—and if the feds don’t block those initiatives—more Americans will have a chance to stay better fed until our food economy can be transformed in more fundamental ways.

Bill Moyers: 12 Ways You Can Avoid Toxic Chemicals

Lauren Feeney, Bill Moyers — Sun, 19 May 2013 12:29:00 -0700

Lead, flame retardants, and BPA are everywhere, but you can limit your exposure.

After watching this week’s interview with Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner, you’ll probably be wondering what you can do to protect yourself and your family from toxic chemicals. Perhaps the most important thing you can do is become politically involved – join the fight against both chemicals in our environment and money in our political system. In today’s world, it’s virtually impossible to avoid dangerous chemicals, even in your own home, but here are a few simple steps you can take to limit your exposure to known toxins like lead, flame retardants and BPA.

Lead

If you think that lead poisoning is a problem of the past, or one that only affects the urban poor, think again. While it’s true that lead paint has been illegal since the 70s and leaded gasoline was phased out in the 80s, the highly toxic substance still lurks in old homes, parking lots, water pipes, and in products imported from countries that don’t have the same regulations. And while lead poisoning no longer the killer it once was, miniscule amounts of lead can cause neurological damage and behavioral problems in children. According to the CDC, there are currently half a million children with elevated levels of lead in their blood. Here’s what you can do to protect your family from lead poisoning:

1) Find out if there’s lead in your water. A good place to start is with your local government. website. At NYC.gov, for example, you can order a free testing kit. You can also try contacting your local water company, your landlord or a private lab. You may also want to install an NSF-certified water filter on your water tap. Though the EPA has mandated that water systems be tested for lead since 1991, your home’s own internal plumbing could still contain lead, particularly if you live in an older building.

2) Replace old windows. Though lead paint has been illegal since 1978 and has largely been removed from old buildings, in some cases, it was seen as too costly to replace the windows. To have your windows replaced (or to do any sort of renovation on a building that may still contain lead paint), contact an EPA-certified renovator who has been trained to follow lead safety practices. In some cases, your local government may cover the costs.

3) Throw out colorfully-painted toys that were made outside the U.S. or Europe. They may look innocent, but toys, crayons, ceramic and jewelry, particularly those manufactured in China or Mexico, may contain lead, and as any parent knows, children are likely to put these things in their mouths.

4) Dust or vacuum regularly. Even without any obvious source of lead in your home, there may still be lead in the air, particularly if you live in an industrial area or if a neighbor has been renovating an old home. Dust particles containing lead are especially dangerous to babies who crawl around on the floor. It’s also important to keep toys and hands clean.

5) Test the soil. Urban and suburban yards can still contain contaminants from the days when lead paint and gasoline were widespread. Before planting a garden or even letting your kids run around in the yard, make sure the soil is lead-free. Your local public health department may offer free testing; you can also contact a private or university-run lab.

Flame Retardants

The hazards of flame retardants have been known for some time — brominated tris was banned from children’s pajamas back in 1977. And yet, similar chemicals can still be found in everything from couch cushions to television sets. Studies have linked one group of flame retardants, polybrominated diphenyl ethers, or PBDEs, to lower IQs, behavioral problems, early puberty and fertility issues. And the fire-safety benefits of these chemicals are debatable. Here’s what you can to keep toxic flame retardants out of your home:

1) Check the labels on your furniture. The California Furniture Flammability Standard essentially requires that cushioned furniture, children’s car seats, diaper-changing tables and other products containing polyurethane foam are dipped in toxic chemicals. (Don’t breathe a sigh of relief just because you live in one of the other 49 states — because of California’s size, most mass-produced furniture is designed to meet California’s standard). Check the tags for the familiar notice: This article meets the flammability requirements of California Bureau of Home Furnishings Technical Bulletin 117. (The tag is not required though, so just because you don’t see it doesn’t mean it’s safe.) Fortunately, California has proposed changing the rule; until that happens, you can look for products made with wool, cotton or polyester filling instead of polyurethane foam. And if you can’t afford all new eco-friendly furniture, be sure to dust, vacuum and wash your hands regularly — most of the toxins enter the body by swallowing contaminated dust.

2) Check the labels on electronics, too. Flame retardants have long been used in electronic equipment like computers and television sets. Thankfully, that’s slowly changing. As of 2008, the following companies had committed to phasing out all brominated flame retardants: Acer, Apple, Eizo Nanao, LG Electronics, Lenovo, Matsushita, Microsoft, Nokia, Phillips, Samsung, Sharp, Sony-Ericsson, and Toshiba. To find flame retardant-free versions of everything from refrigerators to nose-hair clippers, check this list created by ChemSec, an environmental non-profit based in Sweden.

3) Beware of fleece pajamas. Though one flame retardant, brominated tris, was banned from children’s pajamas, some sleepwear is still treated with another flame retardant called PROBAN which has been linked to genetic abnormalities and cancer. Check the label — children’s pajamas that DO NOT contain flame retardants must have a tag that reads: “For child’s safety, garment should fit snugly” (the snug fit limits the flow of oxygen in order to prevent fire from spreading, an approved alternative to chemical flame retardants). Cotton and polyester products rarely contain flame retardants, but look out for those cozy fleece footed pajamas — they usually do.

BPA

Bisphenol A, or BPA, has been linked to cancer,asthma, obesity and reproductive issues. And yet, until recently, the chemical was found in, among other things, baby bottles. The FDA finally banned the use of BPA in baby bottles and children’s sippy cups in 2012 — three years after major manufacturers had voluntarily stopped using it. But BPA is still found in other hard plastic containers, the lining of metal cans and the paper that receipts are printed on. It’s difficult to completely avoid BPA — 90 percent of Americans have traces of the chemical in their urine. But here are some things you can do to limit your exposure:

1) When purchasing plastic products — particularly those that come into contact with your food, such as food storage containers, plastic plates and cups, look for those that are clearly marked BPA free. Thanks to vocal consumers, many companies are now manufacturing BPA-free products and marketing them as such.

2) Avoid food containers marked with recycling codes 3 or 7, which may be made with BPA. If your food does come in a container marked 3 or 7, don’t microwave it in that container – chemicals are more likely to leak into your food at high temperatures.

3) Limit your consumption of canned foods, or look for cans marked BPA free — they are rare, but do exist. Eden Organic cans have been BPA free since 1999.

4) BPA is often used in the thermal paper that receipts are printed on. Since it’s impossible to know whether or the receipt you’re being handed has contains BPA, don’t take receipts that you don’t need. If you operate a business that uses receipts, switch to a BPA-free paper manufacturer, such as Appleton Paper, which went BPA-free in 2006.

12-Year-Old Girl Raped, Video Posted to Facebook by Alleged Attackers

Alex Kane, AlterNet — Mon, 20 May 2013 09:49:00 -0700

Three teenagers are accused of raping a 12-year-old girl and then posting the attack on Facebook.

Did three Chicago youth attack and rape a young girl and then videotape it for the world to see? That’s what prosecutors in Illinois are alleging.

The Associated Press reports that three teenagers are accused of raping a 12-year-old girl and then posting the attack on Facebook.

Three boys--15-year-old Kenneth Brown and 16-year-old Justin Applewhite and Scandale Fritz--allegedly brought the girl down to the basement of Fritz’s home. Fritz was identified because his face showed up in the video taken.

The video was first posted on Brown’s Facebook account, but was eventually posted to all three of the boys’ pages. They were ordered to be held last Friday for aggravated criminal sexual assault.

Corporations Are Stealing Billions in Tax Breaks, While the Confused, Screwed Citizenry Turn On Each Other

Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog — Mon, 20 May 2013 07:54:00 -0700

International corporations have no national allegiance, they care only for profit. Meanwhile, people all over the world are becoming increasingly nationalistic and xenophobic.

As global capital becomes ever more powerful, giant corporations are holding governments and citizens up for ransom — eliciting subsidies and tax breaks from countries concerned about their nation’s “competitiveness” — while sheltering their profits in the lowest-tax jurisdictions they can find. Major advanced countries — and their citizens — need a comprehensive tax agreement that won’t allow global corporations to get away with this.

Google, Amazon, Starbucks, every other major corporation, and every big Wall Street bank, are sheltering as much of their U.S. profits abroad as they can, while telling Washington that lower corporate taxes are necessary in order to keep the U.S. “competitive.”

Baloney. The fact is, global corporations have no allegiance to any country; their only objective is to make as much money as possible — and play off one country against another to keep their taxes down and subsidies up, thereby shifting more of the tax burden to ordinary people whose wages are already shrinking because companies are playing workers off against each other.

I’m in London for a few days, and all the talk here is about how Goldman Sachs just negotiated a sweetheart deal to settle a tax dispute with the British government; Google is manipulating its British sales to pay almost no taxes here by using its low-tax Ireland subsidiary (the chair of the Parliamentary committee investigating this has just called the do-no-evil firm “devious, calculating, and unethical”); Amazon has been found to route its British sales through a subsidiary in low-tax Luxembourg, and now receives more in subsidies from the British government than it pays here in taxes; Starbucks’ tax-avoidance strategy was so blatant British consumers began boycotting the firm until it reversed course.

Meanwhile, At a time when you’d expect nations to band together to gain bargaining power against global capital, the opposite is occurring: Xenophobia is breaking out all over.

Here in Britain, the UK Independence Party — which wants to get out of the European Union — is rapidly gaining ground, becoming the third most popular party in the country, according to a new poll for The Independent on Sunday. Almost one in five people plan to vote for it in the next general election. Ukip’s overall ratings have risen four points to 19 per cent in the past month, despite Prime Minister David Cameron’s efforts to wrest back control of the crucial debate over Britain’s relationship with the European Union.

Right-wing nationalist parties are gaining ground elsewhere in Europe as well. In the U.S., not only are Republicans sounding more nationalistic of late (anti-immigrant, anti-trade), but they continue to push “states rights” — as states increasingly battle against one another to give global companies ever larger tax breaks and subsidies.

Nothing could strengthen the hand of global capital more than such breakups.

The 4 Big Ways That Insatiable Corporate Hunger for Profits Has Devastated American Life -- and the World Along with It

Paul Buchheit, AlterNet — Sun, 19 May 2013 20:11:00 -0700

Big business is making its way around the world like a modern-day Attila the Hun, pillaging and despoiling the planet.

The damage caused by the relentless corporate drive for profits has become more clear in recent years. In the most important areas of American life, devastating changes have occurred:

Health Care: Almost half of the working-age adults in America passed up doctor visits or other medical services because they couldn't afford to pay. The system hasn't supported kids, either. A UNICEF study places the U.S. 26th out of 29 OECD countries in the overall well-being of its children.

Education: Student loan balances increased by 75% between 2007 and 2012.

Household Wealth: Median wealth fell by 66% among Hispanic households and 53% among black households between 2005 and 2009, mainly because of the mortgage banking collapse. Almost half of Americans have ZEROwealth, with their assets surpassed by debt.

Water and Food: Life-giving seeds and drinking water have been increasingly treated as products to be bought and sold.

All these areas of life have been degraded by a free-market system that has thrived on publicly-funded research, infrastructure, and defense. Yet in a brazen show of hypocrisy, major corporations have ignored all the problems they've caused, choosing instead to cut their taxes in half despite doubling their profits, to hold 60% of its cash offshore, to eliminate workers rather than create jobs, and to reduce the pay of their remaining employees.

An Apple executive explained: "We don't have an obligation to solve America's problems."

Calling Themselves 'Multinationals': No Allegiance to Anyone

Big business has found its Utopia, a world in which millions of people are willing to work for a fraction of U.S. salaries.

In this dream world of global capitalism, young people are going from zero income on the farm to a few dollars a day on a 12-hour factory shift, and as a result, based on the World Bank's poverty threshold of $1.25 per day, they're no longer "in poverty." So the media piles on praise for free markets. The Economist proclaimed that "poverty is declining everywhere." The Washington Post gushed that "a billion people have been lifted from poverty through free-market competition."

But the reality is very different. Inequality continues to grow, both between and within countries. Poverty levels haven't changed much in 30 years, with almost half of humanity, up to three billion people, living on less than $2.50 a day. A quarter of the world's children - over 170 million kids under age five - are growing up stunted because of malnutrition.

The World Bank estimates the total cost for a successful attack on malnutrition would be approximately $10.3 to $11.8 billion annually. Apple alone underpaid its 2012 taxes by $11 billion, based on a 35% rate.

It may be time to update the company's quote: "We don't have an obligation to solve the world's problems."

Even if there were no obligation to help solve the world's problems, there IS an obligation to pay for global energy consumption and infrastructure usage and industrial pollution. Yet a review of 25 multinational companies shows clear negligence in meeting that responsibility. The 25 companies, with almost a half-trillion dollars in 2011-12 income, paid just 8% in taxes to the U.S. and 9% to foreign countries. A 35% tax -- paid to ANY country or countries -- would have generated another $90 billion over two years, four times the amount needed to battle malnutrition.

Even Worse Than Not Paying: Making the World Pay for Them

A recent study estimated that toxic pollution affects the health of more than 100 million people, shortening their productive life spans by 12.7 years on average. A related study concluded that in 2010 over 8 million individuals were at risk of exposure to industrial pollutants at 373 toxic waste sites in three low-income countries (India, Indonesia, and the Philippines).

Some of our largest multinational companies hold top positions on the federal contractor misconduct list, which recognizes corporate environmental, ethics, and labor violations. Oil spills are common. Underdeveloped countries like Nigeria have been ravaged by oil production. Big firms are buying up farmland in more than 60 developing countries. Most perversely, multinationals are working hard to pass trade agreements, such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which would actually dismantle environmental protections.

Absurd as it once seemed, a 1991 quote from the World Bank's Larry Summers now comes back to haunt us: "Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging more migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs (lesser developed countries)?...I've always thought that underpopulated countries in Africa are vastly under polluted."

And as big business makes its way around the world like a modern-day Attila the Hun, pillaging and despoiling, it has the U.S. military covering its back with 900 overseas bases in 130 nations. If one of the countries kicks up a fuss, the corporations can just move on to the next one.

Smashing the Absurd Myth That More Guns Make Us Safer

Sean McElwee, AlterNet — Wed, 15 May 2013 12:32:00 -0700

Why “more guns, less crime?” is the wrong question to ask.

Gun rights advocates are jumping at recent polls showing that gun violence has decreased, and the public is unaware of this phenomenon. Rush Limbaugh argues that, “as America arms up, gun violence goes down,” parroting the infamous book by Dr. John Lott, More Guns, Less Crime. Emily Miller argues in the Washington Times that, liberals have been “muzzled” by the news. But, in fact, research shows that those who oppose gun control ask the wrong questions.

Let’s begin with the question of declining violence and the public’s unawareness of this decline (which has been chalked up to the “liberal media”). It should be chalked up to “media.” As Steven Pinker notes in The Better Angels of Our Nature violence has been declining everywhere, and yet few people are aware because, as much as a despise cliché “if it bleeds, it leads.” People drastically overrate the possibility of their children being kidnapped, for example, because of prominent media coverage. They underrate their child’s chance of drowning in a pool. Sadly, since gun violence is still sexy, it will dwarf coverage of other deaths. All violence has declined, but gun violence still amounts to a good portion of it. And being an economist, it represents a sort of violence which is easy to decrease on the margin: something we can easily reduce without significant harm to society because nothing has addressed it as of yet.

But let’s dig deeper, into the assumption of the gun rights advocates. Do more guns mean less crime? Is the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun? As Jon Stewart brilliantly points out, identifying a bad guy is nearly impossible without gun control. Furthermore, much gun violence is committed by “normal guys” in a violent passion.

Let’s start with Dr. Lott's work, which is still cited and published without even a cursory investigation of its widely known flaws. The research the formed the basis of More Guns, Less Crime has been entirely discredited. In 2005 the National Research Council made up of policy heavyweights including Charles Wellford, James Q. Wilson, Joel Horowitz, Joel Waldfogel, and Steven Levitt, issued its wide ranging report in 2005 concluding that the data provided no reliable and robust support for Lott’s conclusion. Other studies have found that Lott’s research was plagued by simple coding errors. Recent research, performed by Abhay Aneja, John J. Donohue III and Alex Zhang found simple coding errors and flaws Lott’s econometric models. For instance, Lott failed to control for incarceration rates and the size of the local police force. When Aneja et al ran the correct numbers, they concluded that, “with the current evidence it is not possible to determine that there is a causal link between the passage of right-to-carry laws and crime rates.”

Still, is “More guns, less crime” the question we should really be asking? Most gun control advocates simply want commonsense measures, like getting rid of the gun show loophole, universal background checks and high capacity magazine bans have almost universal public support, especially among responsible gun owners. They have such support for good reason: they actually work.

We know because tons of other countries have reduced their gun violence by reducing guns; Australia is the most recent example. Having a gun in your home makes you vastly more likely to take your own life. A 2006 study published in Public Health finds that, “the proportion of firearm suicides decreased simultaneously with the proportion of households owning firearms. This result is in line with the well-established association between availability of firearms at home and risk of firearm suicide.”

But, in fact, the aggregate number of guns in society isn’t really what we want to control: we want to keep guns out of the hands of those who are violent, criminal or mentally challenged. I don’t have a problem with responsible citizens using guns that they have obtained with a permit, after undergoing a background check and using a gun with only a small magazine capacity. So the real question is not, do more guns lead to more crime, but, do stricter regulations reduce crime? In fact, they do. Here’s a chart from a recent study by the Center for American Progress.

Their finding: “While many factors contribute to the rates of gun violence in any state, our research clearly demonstrates a significant correlation between the strength of a state’s gun laws and the prevalence of gun violence in the state.”

So certainly, violence is down, and often, high levels of gun ownership can exist with low levels of crime (just not often). The real question is: does gun control work. The evidence is in. Now let’s hope the politicians listen.

Teen Girl Faces Felony Charge Over Lesbian Relationship, Mom Blames "Religious Zealot Parents"

Alex Kane, AlterNet — Mon, 20 May 2013 07:02:00 -0700

Kaitlyn Hunt is facing felony charges of sexual “battery” after the parents of her 15-year-old girlfriend pressed charges.

The case of a Florida teenager being prosecuted after she was in a same-sex relationship with a girl three years younger is generating outrage. Kaitlyn Hunt, an 18-year-old student, is facing felony charges of sexual “battery” after the parents of her 15-year-old girlfriend pressed charges. The case has sparked Internet petitions and and a statement from Anonymous.

Hunt began dating her girlfriend when she was 17. The relationship was reportedly well-known to both sets of parents. When Hunt turned 18, her girlfriend’s parents went to the police and she was arrested on felony charges of “sexual battery on a person 12-16 years old,” according to Think Progress.

Hunt’s mother says the charges are motivated by anti-gay bias on the part of the girlfriends’ parents. “They were out to destroy my daughter, they feel like my daughter ‘made’ their daughter gay. They are bigoted, religious zeolites [sic] that see being gay as a sin and wrong, and they blame my daughter,” Hunt’s mother wrote on Facebook.

Hunt has also run into trouble at the school she attends alongside her girlfriend. The girlfriends’ parents had her expelled, according to Hunt’s mother, despite the fact that a judge refused to order the expulsion. The school board made the decision to keep Hunt out of school for the remaining weeks of her senior year. Hunt is now forced to attend an alternative school for the remainder of the year, though she can attend special senior events at Sebastian River High School.

The state attorney’s office has offered the 18-year-old a plea deal. The deal would result in two years of house arrest and a year of probation, charges that would stay on her adult record. But Think Progress reports that Hunt’s father said his daughter is only willing to plead to a misdemeanor, and that if the State Attorney’s position doesn’t change, “Kaitlyn and her family are prepared to go to trial.”

Facebook groups and Change.org petitions have sprouted up in response to the case. The hacker group Anonymous has also spoken out. They sent a statement to the State Attorney’s office that reads: “Kaitlyn Hunt is a bright young girl who was involved in a consensual, same-sex relationship while both she and her partner were minors. She has a big future ahead of her and there are people, thousands of people in fact, that have no intention of allowing you to ruin it with your rotten selective enforcement.”

Hunt’s mother told a local ABC affiliate that she hopes the outrage will increase the pressure on the State Attorney’s office to drop the charges.

“She's scared to death, she can't sleep,” the mother told the news outlet.

Tourists Encouraged to Gawk At, Mock Poor in Horrifying "GHETTO" Bus Tour in Bronx

Alex Kane, AlterNet — Mon, 20 May 2013 10:37:00 -0700

A Bronx bus company is offering tours billed as a “a ride through a real New York City ‘GHETTO.’"

A Bronx bus company is offering tours billed as a “a ride through a real New York City ‘GHETTO’,” the New York Post reports.

The company, Real Bronx Tours, has taken largely white foreign tourists around the Bronx. The tour guide was caught mocking the Bronx by Post reporter Candice Giove.

“Last week, on the first stop of the $45 tour, guide Lynn Battaglia, from Pittsburgh, pointed out a housing project. She then mocked the Grand Concourse, modeled after a Parisian boulevard,” reports Giove. “‘Do you feel like we’re on the Champs-Elysées?’ she teased a couple from Paris.”

The tour also included a drive near a food pantry at a church. Battaglia wondered out loud, “I don’t know what that line’s about, but every Wednesday we see it. We see them go in with empty carts, and we see them come out with carts full.”

The tour guide warned of the dangers of going to a park in the Bronx, and also gave inaccurate information about the origin of the word “pig” to describe a police officer. While Battaglia claimed the word came from the Bronx, in reality it originated in London.

The Bronx Borough President harshly criticized the guide and the tour.

The guide is “the biggest fool on the planet,” said Ruben Diaz, the borough president. “To have foreigners come and gawk at a long line of people who are less fortunate than they are and to make money off of that and to view them as they are some sort of entertainment is pretty disgusting.”

GOPer Who Got Millions in Farm Subsidies Thinks the Poor Should Starve Rather Than Get Food Stamps

Justin Doolittle, Daily Kos — Mon, 20 May 2013 10:43:00 -0700

Tennessee congressman Stephen Fincher is very angry that the federal government is committed to preventing poor people from starving to death:

Stephen Fincher, a deranged Republican congressman from Tennessee, is very angry that the federal government is committed to preventing poor people from starving to death:

Republican Congressman Stephen Fincher of Tennessee, who supports cuts to the program, had his own Bible verse from the Book of Thessalonians to quote back to Vargas: “The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat,” he said.

The program in question is SNAP, better known as food stamps. Fincher and his ultra-right-wing friends in the House are furious about the fact that the worst economic crisis in 80 years has resulted in more Americans needing food stamps. The whole point of programs like SNAP and other automatic stabilizers, of course, is that they kick in when the economy is struggling and people need help. Fincher is shocked and horrified by this heinous policy of ensuring that poor people and their children don't starve. Food is to be earned! Sure, this is the richest country in the history in the world, but if we provide our citizens with food to eat, then freedom is obviously dead.

He fulminates about people who are allegedly "unwilling to work" sucking off the government teat with impunity. This is a patently dishonest representation of the SNAP program. Most people who receive food stamps cannot be dismissed as losers who are "unwilling to work." Nearly half (47%) of all food stamp recipients are children. Another 8% are 60 years of age or older. The "working poor" - people who live in a household with income from work - represent another 41%. Between children, the elderly, the working poor, and people who want a job but cannot find one - someone should tell Fincher that there are still more than 3 unemployed job seekers for every 1 opening - that leaves very few people who can be accurately described as being "unwilling" to work. It's also worth noting that the average monthly SNAP benefit is a whopping $287. It takes a deeply disturbed person to crusade against providing this class of people with food to eat, when the economy is this battered, and when the broad economic benefits of the program have been so well established (at least in the reality-based community).

Now, this would not normally be worthy of mention. Hardly a day goes by without some Republican sadist expressing fury that poor people have it so good. Devising new ways to make the peasants suffer is what makes Republicans wake up in the morning. What's fascinating about this particular case, though, is Fincher's background.

The reason this is even more egregious than the usual Republican class warfare is that Fincher himself is a poster boy for government dependency. It's not just that he's benefited here and there from some government help. That sort of low-level hypocrisy is almost to be expected from these types. But Fincher has received millions - $3.2 million as of June 2010 - in federal crop subsidies. The people who refer to themselves as Tea Partiers threatened to derail his candidacy over this, but then they realized that they have no principles, and supported him anyway. He's now a member of the "Tea Party Caucus," which, amazingly, is something that actually exists. Fincher's brother and father also snatched another $6.7 million in subsidies as Stephen geared up to run for Congress on a platform of eliminating "wasteful government spending." The "wasteful spending" that he had in mind, of course, was that which serves policy aims with which he disagrees, such as keeping poor people alive.

House Republicans are on a mission to slash the SNAP program by $20 billion over the next decade. A Senate committee, just last week, voted to cut it by "only" $4 billion. If some sort of vicious "compromise" is reached between the sociopaths in the House who are demanding human sacrifice on a massive scale, and the "moderates" in the Senate who are only comfortable with letting some people starve, it will not be pretty. This is not hyperbole, either. SNAP really does keep poor people, including millions of children, from going hungry, and it's under attack from ultra-right-wing ideologues. This program deserves the support and activism of progressives as much as any government program in existence.

Justin Doolittle blogs at www.justindoolittle.net He has a master's in public policy from Stony Brook and a bachelor's in political science from Coastal Carolina.

Virginia GOP Nominee For Attorney General Would Force Women To Report Their Miscarriages To Police -- Or Face 1 Year in Jail

Ian Millhiser, Think Progress — Mon, 20 May 2013 08:09:00 -0700

Virginia GOP nominee for Attorney General would force women to report their miscarriages to police.

If a woman in Virginia has a miscarriage without a doctor present, they must report it within 24 hours to the police or risk going to jail for a full year. At least, that’s what would have happened if a bill introduced by Virginia state Sen. Mark Obenshain (R) had become law.

And yet, the Virginia Republican Party wants to make Obenshain into the state’s top prosecutor. This weekend, Virginia Republicans selected Obenshain as their nominee to replace tea party stalwart Ken Cuccinelli (R) as the state’s attorney general.

Under Obenshain’s bill, which was introduced in 2009,

When a fetal death occurs without medical attendance upon the mother at or after the delivery or abortion, the mother or someone acting on her behalf shall, within 24 hours, report the fetal death, location of the remains, and identity of the mother to the local or state police or sheriff’s department of the city or county where the fetal death occurred. No one shall remove, destroy, or otherwise dispose of any remains without the express authorization of law-enforcement officials or the medical examiner. Any person violating the provisions of this subsection shall be guilty of a Class 1 misdemeanor.

Under Virginia law, a Class 1 misdemeanor carries a maximum sentence of “confinement in jail for not more than twelve months and a fine of not more than $2,500,” so Obenshain’s bill could lead to a woman who decides to take a day to grieve the loss of a pregnancy she’d hoped to carry to term spending a year of her life in jail for that decision.

Even without Obenshain’s bill, Virginia law already treats many miscarriages as potential crimes. Under existing Virginia law, “[w]hen a fetal death occurs without medical attendance upon the mother at or after the delivery or abortion or when inquiry or investigation by a medical examiner is required, the medical examiner shall investigate the cause of fetal death and shall complete and sign the medical certification portion of the fetal death report within twenty-four hours after being notified of a fetal death.” Obsenshain, however, would treat many women as if they were criminal suspects at the moment they are confronted with a deep personal tragedy — and imprison them if they would rather deal with that tragedy privately with their family than share the vulnerable moment after a miscarriage with law enforcement.

Former "Hero" Cop Accused of Raping Women at Gun Point

AlterNet — Mon, 20 May 2013 07:00:00 -0700

DeCoatsworth was honored for his valor by the White House.

A former Philadelphia police officer honored by the White House in 2009 faces charges of rape and other crimes, after allegedly forcing women to perform sexual acts at gunpoint.

In 2009, Richard DeCoatsworth was chosen by Vice President Joe Biden to sit next to first lady Michelle Obama during a Presidential address. The officer was praised for his valor. He was shot in the face during a routine traffic stop, but chased down his assailent despite his heavy injury. He retired on disability in 2011, reports WCAU-TV.

DeCoatsworth appears to be charged in two seperate incidents. According to the Daily Mail:

In one case, DeCoatsworth, 27, is accused of holding two women hostage and forcing them to take drugs and engage in sexual acts at gunpoint. In the other case, he’s accused of abusing his girlfriend, police said.

Local Philadelphia news outlets report that DeCoatsworth has been in trouble before. The Philly Post points out that in 2010 University professor Marc Lamont Hill accused DeCoatsworth of violating his civil rights during a traffic stop. Describing his experience, Lamont Hill movingly wrote about the larger significance of his encounter with the former "hero" cop:

Since the incident, I’ve thought about DeCoatsworth. I’ve wondered if he regretted that night, wishing he could take back his actions now that he has been afforded the luxury of time and reflection. I’ve wondered whether his tragic shooting has put him in a permanent state of trauma, causing him to find danger where there is none. I’ve wondered if he was a good cop at heart, who became cynical and overly aggressive after spending a few short years trying to navigate a broken system.

DeCoatsworth also faced charges of witness intimidation, following allegations that he had, "kidnapped, assaulted, and robbed a Port Richmond man who lived two blocks from him over an unpaid debt," according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Too Soon to Tell: The Case for Hope, Continued

Rebecca Solnit, TomDispatch.com — Sun, 19 May 2013 13:01:00 -0700

If you take the long view, you’ll see how startlingly, how unexpectedly but regularly things change -- not by magic, but by countless acts of courage, love, and commitment.

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Ten years ago, my part of the world was full of valiant opposition to the new wars being launched far away and at home -- and of despair. And like despairing people everywhere, whether in a personal depression or a political tailspin, these activists believed the future would look more or less like the present. If there was nothing else they were confident about, at least they were confident about that. Ten years ago, as a contrarian and a person who prefers not to see others suffer, I tried to undermine despair with the case for hope.

A decade later, the present is still contaminated by the crimes of that era, but so much has changed. Not necessarily for the better -- a decade ago, most spoke of climate change as a distant problem, and then it caught up with us in 10,000 ways. But not entirely for the worse either -- the vigorous climate movement we needed arose in that decade and is growing now. If there is one thing we can draw from where we are now and where we were then, it’s that the unimaginable is ordinary, and the way forward is almost never a straight path you can glance down, but a labyrinth of surprises, gifts, and afflictions you prepare for by accepting your blind spots as well as your intuitions.

The despairing of May 2003 were convinced of one true thing, that we had not stopped the invasion of Iraq, but they extrapolated from that a series of false assumptions about our failures and our powerlessness across time and space. They assumed -- like the neoconservatives themselves -- that those neocons would be atop the world for a long time to come. Instead, the neocon and neoliberal ideologies have been widely reviled and renounced around the world; the Republicans’ demographic hemorrhage has weakened them in this country; the failures of their wars are evident to everyone; and though they still grasp fearsome power, everything has indeed changed. Everything changes: there lies most of our hope and some of our fear.

I’ve seen extraordinary change in my lifetime, some of it in the last decade. I was born in a country that had been galvanized and unsettled by the civil rights movement, but still lacked a meaningful environmental movement, women’s movement, or queer rights movement (beyond a couple of small organizations founded in California in the 1950s). Half a century ago, to be gay or lesbian was to live in hiding or be treated as mentally ill or criminal. That 12 states and several countries would legalize same-sex marriage was beyond imaginable then. It wasn’t even on the table in 2003. San Francisco’s spring run of same-sex weddings in 2004 flung open the doors through which so many have passed since.

If you take the long view, you’ll see how startlingly, how unexpectedly but regularly things change. Not by magic, but by the incremental effect of countless acts of courage, love, and commitment, the small drops that wear away stones and carve new landscapes, and sometimes by torrents of popular will that change the world suddenly. To say that is not to say that it will all come out fine in the end regardless. I’m just telling you that everything is in motion, and sometimes we are ourselves that movement.

Unstoppabilities

Hope and history are sisters: one looks forward and one looks back, and they make the world spacious enough to move through freely. Obliviousness to the past and to the mutability of all things imprisons you in a shrunken present. Hopelessness often comes out of that amnesia, out of forgetting that everything is in motion, everything changes. We have a great deal of history of defeat, suffering, cruelty, and loss, and everyone should know it. But that’s not all we have.

There’s the people’s history, the counterhistory that you didn’t necessarily get in school and don’t usually get on the news: the history of the battles we’ve won, of the rights we’ve gained, of the differences between then and now that those who live in forgetfulness lack. This is often the history of how individuals came together to produce that behemoth civil society, which stands astride nations and topples regimes -- and mostly does it without weapons or armies. It’s a history that undermines most of what you’ve been told about authority and violence and your own powerlessness.

Civil society is our power, our joy, and our possibility, and it has written a lot of the history in the last few years, as well as the last half century. If you doubt our power, see how it terrifies those at the top, and remember that they fight it best by convincing us it doesn’t exist. It does exist, though, like lava beneath the earth, and when it erupts, the surface of the earth is remade.

Things change. And people sometimes have the power to make that happen, if and when they come together and act (and occasionally act alone, as did writers Rachel Carson and Harriet Beecher Stowe -- or Mohammed Bouazizi, the young man whose suicide triggered the Arab Spring).

If you fix your eye on where we started out, you’ll see that we’ve come a long way by those means. If you look forward, you’ll see that we have a long way to go -- and that sometimes we go backward when we forget that we fought for the eight-hour workday or workplace safety or women’s rights or voting rights or affordable education, forget that we won them, that they’re precious, and that we can lose them again. There’s much to be proud of, there’s much to mourn, there’s much yet to do, and the job of doing it is ours, a heavy gift to carry. And it’s made to be carried, by people who are unstoppable, who are movements, who are change itself.

Too Soon to Tell

Ten years ago I began writing about hope and speaking about it. My online essay “Acts of Hope,” posted on May 19, 2003, was my first encounter with Tomdispatch.com, which would change my work and my life. It gave me room for another kind of voice and another kind of writing. It showed me how the Internet could give wings to words. What I wrote then and subsequently for the site spread around the world in remarkable ways, putting me in touch with people and movements, and deeper into conversations about the possible and the impossible (and into a cherished friendship with the site’s founder and editor, Tom Engelhardt).

For a few years, I spoke about hope around this country and in Europe. I repeatedly ran into comfortably situated people who were hostile to the idea of hope: they thought that hope somehow betrayed the desperate and downtrodden, as if the desperate wanted the solidarity of misery from the privileged, rather than action. Hopelessness for people in extreme situations means resignation to one’s own deprivation or destruction. Hope can be a survival strategy. For comfortably situated people, hopelessness means cynicism and letting oneself off the hook. If everything is doomed, then nothing is required (and vice versa).

Despair is often premature: it’s a form of impatience as well as certainty. My favorite comment about political change comes from Zhou En-Lai, the premier of the People’s Republic of China under Chairman Mao. Asked in the early 1970s about his opinion of the French Revolution, he reportedly answered, “Too soon to tell.” Some say that he was talking about the revolutions of 1968, not 1789, but even then it provides a generous and expansive perspective. To hold onto uncertainty and possibility and a sense that even four years later, no less nearly two centuries after the fact, the verdict still isn’t in is more than most people I know are prepared to offer. A lot of them will hardly give an event a month to complete its effects, and many movements and endeavors are ruled failures well before they’re over.

Not long ago, I ran into a guy who’d been involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement, that great upwelling in southern Manhattan in the fall of 2011 that catalyzed a global conversation and a series of actions and occupations nationwide and globally. He offered a tailspin of a description of how Occupy was over and had failed.

But I wonder: How could he possibly know? It really is too soon to tell. First of all, maybe the kid who will lead the movement that will save the world was catalyzed by what she lived through or stumbled upon in Occupy Fresno or Occupy Memphis, and we won’t reap what she sows until 2023 or 2043. Maybe the seeds of something more were sown, as they were in Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring of 1968 and Charter 77, for the great and unforeseen harvest that was the Velvet Revolution of 1989, the nonviolent overthrow of the Soviet totalitarian state in that country.

Second, Occupy began to say what needed to be said about greed and capitalism, exposing a brutality that had long been hushed up, revealing both the victims of debt and the rigged economy that created it. This country changed because those things were said out loud. I can’t say exactly how, but I know it mattered. So much that matters is immeasurable, unquantifiable, and beyond price. Laws around banking, foreclosure, and student loans are changing -- not enough, not everywhere, but some people will benefit, and they matter. Occupy didn’t cause those changes directly, but it did much to make the voice of the people audible and the sheer wrongness of our debt system visible -- and gave momentum to the ongoing endeavors to overturn Citizens United and abolish corporate personhood.

Third, I only know a little of what the thousands of local gatherings and networks we mean by “Occupy” are now doing, but I know that Occupy Sandy is still doing vital work in the destruction zone of that hurricane and was about the best grassroots disaster relief endeavor this nation has ever seen. I know that Strike Debt, a direct offshoot of Occupy Wall Street, has relieved millions of dollars in medical debt, not with the sense that we can fix all debt this way, but that we can demonstrate the malleability, the artifice, and the immorality of the student, medical, and housing debt that is destroying so many lives. I know that the Occupy Homes foreclosure defenders have been doing amazing things, often one home at a time, from Atlanta to Minneapolis. (Last Friday, Occupy Our Homes organized a “showdown at the Department of Justice” in Washington, D.C.; that Saturday, Strike Debt Bay Area held their second Debtors' Assembly: undead from coast to coast.)

Fourth, I know people personally whose lives were changed, and who are doing work they never imagined they would be involved in, and I’m friends with remarkable people who, but for Occupy, I would not know existed. People connected across class, racial, and cultural lines in the flowering of that movement. Like Freedom Summer, whose consequences were to be felt so far beyond Mississippi in 1964, this will have reach beyond the moment in which I write and you read.

Finally, there was great joy at the time, the joy of liberation and of solidarity, and joy is worth something in itself. In a sense, it’s worth everything, even if it’s always fleeting, though not always as scarce as we imagine.

Climates of Hope and Fear

I had lunch with Middle East and nonviolence scholar Stephen Zunes the other day and asked him what he would say about the Arab Spring now. He had, he told me, been in Egypt several months ago watching television with an activist. Formerly, the news was always about what the leaders did, decided, ordained, inflicted. But the news they were watching was surprisingly focused on civil society, on what ordinary people initiated or resisted, on how they responded, what they thought. He spoke of how so many in the Middle East had lost their fatalism and sense of powerlessness and awoken to their own collective power.

This civil society remains awake in Egypt and the other countries. What will it achieve? Maybe it’s too soon to tell. Syria is a turbulent version of hell now, but it could be leaving the dynasty of the Assads in the past; its future remains to be written. Perhaps its people will indeed write the next chapter in its story, and not only with explosives.

You can tell the arc of the past few years as, first, the Arab Spring, then extraordinary civil society actions in Chile, Quebec, Spain, and elsewhere, followed by Occupy. But don't stop there.

After Occupy came Idle No More, the Canada-based explosion of indigenous power and resistance (to a Canadian government that has gone over to the far right and to environmental destruction on a grand scale). It was founded by four women in November of 2012 and it’s spread across North America, sparking new environmental actions and new coalitions around environmental and climate issues, with flash-mob-style powwows in shopping malls and other places, with a thousand-mile walk (and snowshoe) by seven Cree youth this winter. (There were 400 people with them by the time they arrived at Canada’s Parliament in Ottawa.)

Idle No More activists have vowed to block the construction of any pipeline that tries to transport the particularly dirty crude oil from the Alberta tar sands, whether it heads north, east, or west from northern Alberta. Each of those directions takes it over native land. This is part of the reason why tar sands supporters are pushing so hard to build the Keystone XL pipeline from Alberta to the U.S. Gulf Coast.

Thankfully, the push back is also strong. Our fate may depend on it. As climate scientist James Hansen wrote a year ago, “Canada’s tar sands, deposits of sand saturated with bitumen, contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire history. If we were to fully exploit this new oil source, and continue to burn our conventional oil, gas, and coal supplies, concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere eventually would reach levels higher than in the Pliocene era, more than 2.5 million years ago, when sea level was at least 50 feet higher than it is now.”

The news just came in that we reached 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, the highest level in more than five million years. This is terrible news on a scale that eclipses everything else, because it encompasses everything else. We are wrecking our world, for everyone for all time, or at least the next several thousand years. But “we” is a tricky word here. Some of the people I most love and admire are doing extraordinary things to save the world, for you, for us, for generations unborn, for species yet to be named, for the oceans and sub-Saharan Africans and Arctic dwellers and everyone in-between, for the whole unbearably beautiful symphony of life on Earth that is imperiled.

Part of what sustains me in the face of this potential cataclysm is remembering that, in 2003, there hardly was a climate movement. It was small, polite, mostly believed the troubles were decades away, and was populated with people who thought that lifestyle changes could save the planet -- rather than that you have to get out there and fight the power. And they were the good ones. Too many of us didn’t think about it at all.

Only a few years later, things have changed. There’s a vibrant climate movement in North America. If you haven’t quite taken that in, it might be because it’s working on so many disparate fronts that are often treated separately: mountaintop coal removal, coal-fired power plants (closing 145 existing ones to date and preventing more than 150 planned ones from opening), fracking, oil exploration in the Arctic, the Tar Sands pipeline, and 350.org’s juggernaut of a campus campaign to promote disinvestment from oil, gas, and coal companies. Only started in November 2012, there are already divestment movements underway on more than 380 college and university campuses, and now cities are getting on board. It has significant victories; it will have more.

Some countries -- notably Germany, with Denmark not far behind -- have done remarkable things when it comes to promoting non-fossil-fuel renewable energy. Copenhagen, for example, in the cold gray north, is on track to become a carbon-neutral city by 2025 (and in the meantime reduced its carbon emissions 25% between 2005 and 2011). The United States has a host of promising smaller projects. To offer just two examples, Los Angeles has committed to being coal-free by 2025, while San Francisco will offer its citizens electricity from 100% renewable and carbon-neutral sources and its supervisors just voted to divest the city’s fossil-fuel stocks.

There are so many pieces of the potential solution to this puzzle, and some of them are for you to put together. Whether they will multiply or ever add up to enough we don’t yet know. We need more: more people, more transformations, more ways to conquer and dismantle the oil companies, more of a vision of what is at stake, more of the great force that is civil society. Will we get it? I don’t know. Neither do you. Anything could happen.

But here’s what I’m saying: you should wake up amazed every day of your life, because if I had told you in 1988 that, within three years, the Soviet satellite states would liberate themselves nonviolently and the Soviet Union would cease to exist, you would have thought I was crazy. If I had told you in 1990 that South America was on its wayto liberating itself and becoming a continent of progressive and democratic experiments, you would have considered me delusional. If, in November 2010, I had told you that, within months, the autocrat Hosni Mubarak, who had dominated Egypt since 1981, would be overthrown by 18 days of popular uprisings, or that the dictators of Tunisia and Libya would be ousted, all in the same year, you would have institutionalized me. If I told you on September 16, 2011, that a bunch of kids sitting in a park in lower Manhattan would rock the country, you’d say I was beyond delusional. You would have, if you believed as the despairing do, that the future is invariably going to look like the present, only more so. It won’t.

I still value hope, but I see it as only part of what’s required, a starting point. Think of it as the match but not the tinder or the blaze. To matter, to change the world, you also need devotion and will and you need to act. Hope is only where it begins, though I’ve also seen people toil on without regard to hope, to what they believe is possible. They live on principle and they gamble, and sometimes they even win, or sometimes the goal they were aiming for is reached long after their deaths. Still, it’s action that gets you there. When what was once hoped for is realized, it falls into the background, becomes the new normal; and we hope for or carp about something else.

The future is bigger than our imaginations. It’s unimaginable, and then it comes anyway. To meet it we need to keep going, to walk past what we can imagine. We need to be unstoppable. And here’s what it takes: you don’t stop walking to congratulate yourself; you don’t stop walking to wallow in despair; you don’t stop because your own life got too comfortable or too rough; you don’t stop because you won; you don’t stop because you lost. There’s more to win, more to lose, others who need you.

You don’t stop walking because there is no way forward. Of course there is no way. You walk the path into being, you make the way, and if you do it well, others can follow the route. You look backward to grasp the long history you’re moving forward from, the paths others have made, the road you came in on. You look forward to possibility. That’s what we mean by hope, and you look past it into the impossible and that doesn’t stop you either. But mostly you just walk, right foot, left foot, right foot, left foot. That’s what makes you unstoppable.

Rebecca Solnit’s first essay for Tomdispatch.com turned into the bookHope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, since translated into eight languages. Portions of this essay began life as the keynote speech at the National Lawyers' Guild gala in honor of attorney and human rights activist Walter Riley, whose own life is a beautiful example of unstoppability. Solnit’s latest book,The Faraway Nearby, will be published in June.

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