Thom Hartmann here – on the news…

You need to know this. Next month, the Senate will vote on gun control legislation, but provisions that the majority of voters support won’t be in the bill. Yesterday, California Senator Diane Feinstein’s assault weapons ban was pulled from the legislation, despite a Pew Research poll showing 55% of Americans support the ban. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said he will allow the weapons ban to be offered as an amendment, but he will only introduce one measure, which increases the charges and penalties for gun trafficking. As Republicans would mount fierce opposition to the ban on military-style weapons, Mr. Reid said he felt sympathy for Diane Feinstein, but that her bill did not have the 60 votes needed to prevent a filibuster. The final bill may also include provisions to strengthen background checks, but it could be weighed down with pro-gun amendments from the other side of the isle. According to the New York Times, if that happens, the bill meant to strengthen gun regulations could turn into one that actually enhances guns rights. In an interview with reporters, Feinstein said, “How many assault weapons do you need circulating? To have these mass killings is such a blight on everything that America stands for.” So, the gun lobby wins again, and modest legislation, which would help keep military-style weapons out of criminals’ hands, can’t even be put up for a vote. The American people deserve to know which side their representatives stand on. Either Senators are with the majority of Americans that want these weapons off the street, or their with the gun lobby. As President Obama said in his State of the Union, “they deserve a vote,” and now is the time for that vote to happen.

In screwed news… In the five years since the 2008 financial meltdown, nearly every state in our nation has reduced funding for public universities. According to a new report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, only North Dakota and Wyoming are investing in our future leaders at the same level they were before the Great Recession. The Think Progress Blog points out that some states have made these drastic cuts to education funding only to preserve tax breaks, leaving students on the hook for the skyrocketing tuition costs. Students in Arizona have been hit the hardest, with a 78% increase in college costs just since 2008 – all to preserve a $538 million corporate tax break enacted in 2011. So, while corporations in that state enjoy a 4.9% tax rate, students suffer with closed campuses, eliminated courses, inadequate school resources, and they pay nearly double the cost to obtain a degree. This is immoral… and extremely unwise. Our nation is 16th in the world at educating our future leaders, and huge cuts and ballooning tuition costs will only push us down further on that list. We must start investing in an educated workforce. If we’re supposed to be the greatest country in the world, why don’t we guarantee the right to a world-class education? This has to change.

In the best of the rest of the news…

Senator Elizabeth Warren is a warrior for the middle class. And in between taking on the banksters, and calling Republicans out for the pro-1% policies, Warren is also working on a book to document the battles she’s fought on behalf of working people of our nation. In an interview with the Associate Press on Tuesday, Sen. Warren said the new book, called “Rigged,” will tell the story of her time on a Congressional Oversight Panel, how she helped set up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and how she ran a successful senate campaign to defeat Scott Brown. Warren said, “the title refers to how the economic system is too often rigged against families that work hard and play by the rules. The story is national, but it’s also personal.” Leave it to Senator Elizabeth Warren… not only does she fight everyday for the middle class, but manages to find time to document the story.

Next time you hear the Republican talking point about the U.S. having the highest corporate tax rate in the world, remember this: In 2012, some of our nation’s largest corporations actually got huge refunds. For instance, General Electric made $81 billion dollars in profits last year, yet received a whopping $3 billion dollar tax refund. Bank of America is another tax-dodger, as the company earned over $75 billion last year, yet wrote off so many legal settlements the company was eligible for a tax refund of over $1 billion. It is a privilege to do business in our nation, and to make huge profits off of hard-working American citizens, yet we’re actually paying corporations to be here. If Republicans are so worried about the debt and the deficit, they should be putting an end to this corporate welfare. If companies want to use our commons to make huge profits off our fellow citizens, let’s demand they start paying their fair share.

And finally… The Westboro Baptist Church has a new neighbor. About six months ago, Aaron Jackson, a founding member of a charity organization called Planting Peace, bought the house directly across the street from the anti-gay group. The purchase is part of a new nonprofit he calls “Equality House.” Mr. Jackson found out the house while playing around on Google Earth, and was struck with a brilliant idea. He said that as soon as he saw it was for sale he thought, “Oh my gosh, I could buy a house in front of the [Westboro Baptist Chuch]! And I’m going to paint that thing the color of the pride flag.” And yesterday, that’s exactly what he did. Out front of the newly-painted rainbow exterior, Mr. Jackson also flies the pride flag, and he is already working on the next steps in his fight for LGBT equality. Congrats to Aaron Jackson for standing up to Fred Phelps and his homophobic, hate group. In the words of Jesus, “love thy neighbor, as thy self.” I wonder if that includes neighbors living in a rainbow covered house…

And that’s the way it is today – Wednesday, March 20, 2013. I’m Thom Hartmann – on the news.

A couple of years ago, the journalist Nicholas Shaxson published a fascinating, chilling book titled “Treasure Islands,” which explained how international tax havens — which are also, as the author pointed out, “secrecy jurisdictions” where many rules don’t apply — undermine economies around the world. Not only do they bleed revenues from cash-strapped governments and enable corruption; they distort the flow of capital, helping to feed ever-bigger financial crises.

“Who is going to end up making all the money in the end if Obamacare continues to be in place?” Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus growled Monday on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show. “It’s going to be the big corporations, right? And who gets screwed? The middle class.”

The Republican Party makeover is breathtaking. Now, suddenly, instead of accusing Democrats of being “redistributionists,” the GOP is posing as defender of the middle class against corporate America — and it’s doing so by proposing to do away with the most progressive piece of legislation in well over a decade.

Paul Ryan’s new budget purportedly gets about 40 percent of its $4.6 trillion in spending cuts over ten years by repealing Obamacare, but Ryan’s budget document doesn’t mention that such a repeal would also lower taxes on corporations and the wealthy that foot Obamacare’s bill.

According to an analysis by the non-partisan Tax Foundation, Obamacare redistributes income from the wealthy to the middle class. This is mainly because it hikes Medicare taxes on the top 2 percent (singles earning more than $200,000 and couples earning more than $250,000, including their investment income).

This year, for example, families in the top 1 percent will be paying about $52,000 more in Medicare taxes, on average, than they paid in 2012.

And where will the money go? Not to pay for the healthcare of poor families; most of them already receive Medicaid. The rich will be helping middle and lower-middle class Americans.

Obamacare also imposes some taxes and fees on insurance companies, drug makers, and manufacturers of medical devices. Here again, most of this will be borne by affluent Americans, who own most shares of stock (assuming the taxes and fees come out of corporate profits). And, again, beneficiaries are in the middle and lower-middle class.

In other words, Mr. Priebus has it exactly backwards. If Obamacare were repealed, who would end up making all the money? Big corporations and the wealthy. Who would get screwed? The middle class.

The rest of Ryan’s budget plan also runs counter to the new Republican thematic. Not only does it turn Medicare into vouchers (“premium support” in Republican-speak) whose value can’t possibly keep up with rising healthcare costs but it also dramatically reduces spending on education, infrastructure, and much else the middle class depends on.

Meanwhile, it redistributes upward, cutting the top tax rate for individuals down to 25 percent — a bigger tax cut for the top than even Mitt Romney proposed — and the corporate tax rate down to 25 percent, from 35 percent today.

Ryan would pay for these tax cuts by “closing tax loopholes,” but — where did we hear this before? — his budget doesn’t say which loopholes, or even hint at what it would do with rates on capital gains and dividends. Like Romney’s plan, it leaves all the heavy lifting to Congress.

The reality, of course, is that the only possible way Ryan could pay for his proposed tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations would be to raise taxes on the middle class.

Don’t expect the Chairman of the Republican National Committee, or other Republicans reading from the same talking points, to admit any of this.

But if you look at what they’re proposing rather than what they’re saying, the GOP isn’t really interested in balancing the budget at all. It’s out to redistribute income and wealth — to the best-off Americans, from everyone else.

If any party is into redistribution, it’s the Republicans. And Paul Ryan is leading the charge.

(Image: Prison fence via Shutterstock)If, as Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote, “the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons” then we are a nation of barbarians. Our vast network of federal and state prisons, with some 2.3 million inmates, rivals the gulags of totalitarian states. Once you disappear behind prison walls you become prey. Rape. Torture. Beatings. Prolonged isolation. Sensory deprivation. Racial profiling. Chain gangs. Forced labor. Rancid food. Children imprisoned as adults. Prisoners forced to take medications to induce lethargy. Inadequate heating and ventilation. Poor health care. Draconian sentences for nonviolent crimes. Endemic violence.

Bonnie Kerness and Ojore Lutalo, both of whom I met in Newark, N.J., a few days ago at the office of American Friends Service Committee Prison Watch, have fought longer and harder than perhaps any others in the country against the expanding abuse of prisoners, especially the use of solitary confinement. Lutalo, once a member of the Black Liberation Army, an offshoot of the Black Panthers, first wrote Kerness in 1986 while he was a prisoner at Trenton State Prison, now called New Jersey State Prison. He described to her the bleak and degrading world of solitary confinement, the world of the prisoners like him held in the so-called management control unit, which he called “a prison within a prison.” Before being released in 2009, Lutalo was in the management control unit for 22 of the 28 years he served for the second of two convictions—the first for a bank robbery and the second for a gun battle with a drug dealer. He kept his sanity, he told me, by following a strict regime of exercising in his tiny cell, writing, meditating and tearing up newspapers to make collages that portrayed his prison conditions.

“The guards in riot gear would suddenly wake you up at 1 a.m., force you to strip and make you grab all your things and move you to another cell just to harass you,” he said when we spoke in Newark. “They had attack dogs with them that were trained to go for your genitals. You spent 24 hours alone one day in your cell and 22 the next. If you do not have a strong sense of purpose you don’t survive psychologically. Isolation is designed to defeat prisoners mentally, and I saw a lot of prisoners defeated.”

Lutalo’s letter was Kerness’ first indication that the U.S. prison system was creating something new—special detention facilities that under international law are a form of torture. He wrote to her: “How does one go about articulating desperation to another who is not desperate? How does one go about articulating the psychological stress of knowing that people are waiting for me to self-destruct?”

The techniques of sensory deprivation and prolonged isolation were pioneered by the Central Intelligence Agency to break prisoners during the Cold War. Alfred McCoy, the author of “A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, From the Cold War to the War on Terror,” wrote in his book that “interrogators had found that mere physical pain, no matter how extreme, often produced heightened resistance.” So the intelligence agency turned to the more effective mechanisms of “sensory disorientation” and “self-inflicted pain,” McCoy noted. [One example of causing self-inflicted pain is to force a prisoner to stand without moving or to hold some other stressful bodily position for a long period.] The combination, government psychologists argued, would cause victims to feel responsible for their own suffering and accelerate psychological disintegration. Sensory disorientation combines extreme sensory overload with extreme sensory deprivation. Prolonged isolation is followed by intense interrogation. Extreme heat is followed by extreme cold. Glaring light is followed by total darkness. Loud and sustained noise is followed by silence. “The fusion of these two techniques, sensory disorientation and self-inflicted pain, creates a synergy of physical and psychological trauma whose sum is a hammer-blow to the existential platforms of personal identity,” McCoy wrote.

After hearing from Lutalo, Kerness became a fierce advocate for him and other prisoners held in isolation units. She published through her office a survivor’s manual for those held in isolation as well as a booklettitled “Torture in United States Prisons.” And she began to collect the stories of prisoners held in isolation.

“My food trays have been sprayed with mace or cleaning agents, … human feces and urine put into them by guards who deliver trays to my breakfast, lunch, and dinner… ,” a prisoner in isolation in the Wabash Valley Correctional Facility at Carlisle, Ind., was quoted as saying in “Torture in United States Prisons.” “I have witnessed sane men of character become self-mutilators, suffer paranoia, panic attacks, hostile fantasies about revenge. One prisoner would swallow packs of AA batteries, and stick a pencil in his penis. They would cut on themselves to gain contact with staff nurses or just to draw attention to themselves. These men made slinging human feces ‘body waste’ daily like it was a recognized sport. Some would eat it or rub it all over themselves as if it was body lotion. … Prisoncrats use a form of restraint, a bed crafted to strap men in four point Velcro straps. Both hands to the wrist and both feet to the ankles and secured. Prisoners have been kept like this for 3-6 hours at a time. Most times they would remove all their clothes. The Special Confinement Unit used [water hoses] on these men also. … When prisons become overcrowded, prisoncrats will do forced double bunking. Over-crowding issues present an assortment of problems many of which results in violence. … Prisoncrats will purposely house a ‘sex offender’ in a cell with prisoners with sole intentions of having him beaten up or even killed.”

In 1913 Eastern State Penitentiary, in Philadelphia, discontinued its isolation cages. Prisoners within the U.S. prison system would not be held in isolation again in large numbers until the turmoil of the 1960s and the rise of the anti-war and civil rights movements along with the emergence of radical groups such as the Black Panthers. Trenton State Prison established a management control unit, or isolation unit, in 1975 for political prisoners, mostly black radicals such as Lutalo whom the state wanted to segregate from the wider prison population. Those held in the isolation unit were rarely there because they had violated prison rules; they were there because of their revolutionary beliefs—beliefs the prison authorities feared might resonate with other prisoners. In 1983 the federal prison in Marion, Ill., instituted a permanent lockdown, creating, in essence, a prisonwide “control unit.” By 1994 the Federal Bureau of Prisons, using the Marion model, built its maximum-security prison in Florence, Colo. The use of prolonged isolation and sensory deprivation exploded. “Special housing units” were formed for the mentally ill. “Security threat group management units” were formed for those accused of gang activity. “Communications management units” were formed to isolate Muslims labeled as terrorists. Voluntary and involuntary protective custody units were formed. Administrative segregation punishment units were formed to isolate prisoners said to be psychologically troubled. All were established in open violation of the United Nations Convention Against Torture, the U.N.’s International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. Kerness calls it “the war at home.” And she says it is only the latest variation of the long assault on the poor, especially people of color.

“There are no former Jim Crow systems,” Kerness said. “The transition from slavery to Black Codes to convict leasing to the Jim Crow laws to the wars on poverty, veterans, youth and political activism in the 1960s has been a seamless evolution of political and social incapacitation of poor people of color. The sophisticated fascism of the practices of stop and frisk, charging people in inner cities with ‘wandering,’ driving and walking while black, ZIP code racism—these and many other de facto practices all serve to keep our prisons full. In a system where 60 percent of those who are imprisoned are people of color, where students of color face harsher punishments in school than their white peers, where 58 percent of African [American] youth … are sent to adult prisons, where women of color are 69 percent more likely to be imprisoned and where offenders of color receive longer sentences, the concept of colorblindness doesn’t exist. The racism around me is palpable.”

“The 1960s, when the last of the Jim Crow laws were reversed, this whole new set of practices accepted by law enforcement was designed to continue to feed the money-generating prison system, which has neo-slavery at its core,” she said. “Until we deeply recognize that the system’s bottom line is social control and creating a business from bodies of color and the poor, nothing can change.” She noted that more than half of those in the prison system have never physically harmed another person but that “just about all of these people have been harmed themselves.” And not only does the criminal justice sweep up the poor and people of color, but slavery within the prison system is permitted by the 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which reads: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States. …”

This, Kerness said, “is at the core how the labor of slaves was transformed into what people in prison call neo-slavery.” Neo-slavery is an integral part of the prison industrial complex, in which hundreds of thousands of the nation’s prisoners, primarily people of color, are forced to work at involuntary labor for a dollar or less an hour. “If you call the New Jersey Bureau of Tourism you are most likely talking to a prisoner at the Edna Mahan Correctional Institution for Women who is earning 23 cents an hour who has no ability to negotiate working hours or working conditions,” she said.

The bodies of poor, unemployed youths are worth little on the streets but become valuable commodities once they are behind bars.

“People have said to me that the criminal justice system doesn’t work,” Kerness said. “I’ve come to believe exactly the opposite—that it works perfectly, just as slavery did, as a matter of economic and political policy. How is it that a 15-year-old in Newark who the country labels worthless to the economy, who has no hope of getting a job or affording college, can suddenly generate 20,000 to 30,000 dollars a year once trapped in the criminal justice system? The expansion of prisons, parole, probation, the court and police systems has resulted in an enormous bureaucracy which has been a boon to everyone from architects to food vendors—all with one thing in common, a paycheck earned by keeping human beings in cages. The criminalization of poverty is a lucrative business, and we have replaced the social safety net with a dragnet.”

Prisons are at once hugely expensive—the country has spent some $300 billion on them since 1980—and, as Kerness pointed out, hugely profitable. Prisons function in the same way the military-industrial complex functions. The money is public and the profits are private. “Privatization in the prison industrial complex includes companies, which run prisons for profit while at the same time gleaning profits from forced labor,” she said. “In the state of New Jersey, food and medical services are provided by corporations, which have a profit motive. One recent explosion of private industry is the partnering of Corrections Corporation of America with the federal government to detain close to 1 million undocumented people. Using public monies to enrich private citizens is the history of capitalism at its most exploitive.”

Those released from prison are woefully unprepared for re-entry. They carry with them the years of trauma they endured. They often suffer from the endemic health problems that come with long incarceration, including hepatitis C, tuberculosis and HIV. They often do not have access to medications upon release to treat their physical and mental illnesses. Finding work is difficult. They feel alienated and are often estranged from friends and family. More than 60 percent end up back in prison.

“How do you teach someone to rid themselves of degradation?” Kerness asked. “How long does it take to teach people to feel safe, a sense of empowerment in a world where they often come home emotionally and physically damaged and unemployable? There are many reasons that ex-prisoners do not make it—paramount among them is that they are not supposed to succeed.”

Kerness has long been a crusader. In 1961 at the age of 19 she left New York to work for a decade in Tennessee in the civil rights struggle, including a year at Tennessee’s Highlander Research and Education Center, where Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. trained. By the 1970s she was involved in housing campaigns for the poor in New Jersey. She kept running into families that included incarcerated members. This led her to found Prison Watch.

The letters that pour into her office are disturbing. Female prisoners routinely complain of being sexually abused by guards. One prisoner wrote to her office: “That was not part of my sentence to perform oral sex with officers.” Other prisoners write on behalf of the mentally ill who have been left to deteriorate in the prison system. One California prisoner told of a mentally ill man spreading feces over himself and the guards then dumping him into a scalding bath that took skin off 30 percent of his body.

Kerness said the letters she receives from prisoners collectively present a litany of “inhumane conditions including cold, filth, callous medical care, extended isolation often lasting years, use of devices of torture, harassment, brutality and racism.” Prisoners send her drawings of “four- and five-point restraints, restraint hoods, restraint belts, restraint beds, stun grenades, stun guns, stun belts, spit hoods, tethers, and waist and leg chains.” But the worst torment, prisoners tell her, is the psychological pain caused by “no touch torture” that included “humiliation, sleep deprivation, sensory disorientation, extreme light or dark, extreme cold or heat” and “extended solitary confinement.” These techniques, she said, are consciously designed to carry out “a systematic attack on all human stimuli.”

The use of sensory deprivation was applied by the government to imprisoned radicals in the 1960s including members of the Black Panthers, the Black Liberation Army, the Puerto Rican independence movement and the American Indian Movement, along with environmentalists, anti-imperialists and civil rights activists. It is now used extensively against Islamic militants, jailhouse lawyers and political prisoners. Many of those political prisoners were part of radical black underground movements in the 1960s that advocated violence. A few, such as Leonard Peltier and Mumia Abu Jamal, are well known, but most have little public visibility—among them Sundiata Acoli, Mutulu Shakur, Imam Jamil Al-Amin (known as H. Rap Brown when in the 1960s he was the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), Jalil Bottom, Sekou Odinga, Abdul Majid, Tom Manning and Bill Dunne.

Those within the system who attempt to resist the abuse and mistreatment are dealt with severely. Prisoners in the overcrowded Southern Ohio Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison in Lucasville, Ohio, staged a revolt in 1993 after years of routine beatings, degrading rituals of public humiliation and the alleged murders of prisoners by guards. The some 450 prisoners, who were able to unite antagonistic prison factions including the Aryan Brotherhood and the black Gangster Disciples, held out for 11 days. It was one of the longest prison rebellions in U.S. history. Nine prisoners and a guard were killed by the prisoners during the revolt. The state responded with characteristic fury. It singled out some 40 prisoners and eventually shipped them to Ohio State Penitentiary (OSP), a supermax facility outside Youngstown that was constructed in 1998. There prisoners are held in solitary confinement 23 hours a day in 7-by-11-foot cells. Prisoners at OSP almost never see the sun or have human contact. Those charged with participating in the uprising have, in some cases, been held in these punitive conditions at OSP or other facilities since the 1993 revolt. Five prisoners—Bomani Shakur, Siddique Abdullah Hasan, Jason Robb, George Skatzes and Namir Abdul Mateen—involved in the uprising were charged with murder. They are being held in isolation on death row.

Kerness says the for-profit prison companies have created an entrepreneurial class like that of the Southern slaveholders, one “dependent on the poor, and on bodies of color as a source for income,” and she describes federal and state departments of corrections as “a state of mind.” This state of mind, she said in the interview, “led to Abu Ghraib, Bagram and Guantanamo and what is going on in U.S. prisons right this moment.”

As long as profit remains an incentive to incarcerate human beings and our corporate state abounds in surplus, redundant labor, there is little chance that the prison system will be reformed. It is making our corporate overlords wealthy. Our prisons serve the engine of corporate capitalism, transferring state money to private corporations. These corporations will continue to stymie rational prison reform because the system, however inhumane and unjust, feeds corporate bank accounts. At its bottom the problem is not race—although race plays a huge part in incarceration rates—nor is it finally poverty; it is the predatory nature of corporate capitalism itself. And until we slay the beast of corporate capitalism, until we wrest power back from corporations, until we build social institutions and a system of governance designed not to profit the few but foster the common good, our prison industry and the horror it perpetuates will only expand.

Barbara Boxer Triggers Outrage Over Proposal to Deploy National Guard in Public Schools

December 26, 2012  |

Days after California’s liberal Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer gave an impassioned floor speech saying that big steps must be taken to stop gun violence that is killing 87 people a day across America, she proposed a bill to give governors power to deploy National Guard troops in public schools—or assign them to local police departments, freeing them to put police in schools.

“Is it not part of the national defense to make sure that your children are safe?” Boxer said at a press conference, where she unveiled the Save Our Schools Act. “The slaughter of the innocents must stop….”

“Of all the bad ideas I’ve heard in the aftermath of the Newtown murders, the worst comes from Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-CA, who wants to provide federal funds for states to send the National Guard into schools,” wrote the Chicago Tribune’s Steve Chapman:

“She quotes the Guard as saying it is ‘particularly well suited for domestic law enforcement support missions’ since it is ‘located in over 3,000 local communities.’ Putting Guard troops in each (or many) of them is about as sensible as putting them in every movie theater and shopping mall. It will cost money and divert the Guard from its customary purposes, requiring either an increase in its size or the sacrifice of other needs. Not to mention that school, statistically, is a very safe place for a child to be.”

No shortage of liberal writers noted that there was an armed guard at the Columbine, Colorado, high school where 15 students were killed in 1999.

Chapman’s response is part of a growing stream of criticism from the political left and right in the five days since the idea was introduced. But beyond the almost visceral reactions that sending armed officers into schools is inappropriate, or won’t work against assailants armed with military-level weaponry, or is federal overreach, there is a deeper danger.

Every time progressives have ceded some ground in the gun-control debate, the pro-gun right has used their pronouncements to move the center of the gun-control debate onto their side of the aisle.

A generation ago, liberal scholars looked at the history of the Second Amendment and concluded that the Constitution’s framers wanted an armed citizenry—as did Congress after the Civil War so ex-slaves could protect themselves. That uneasy finding gave the Right new momentum to legally fight and overturn gun laws, according to the very right-wing lawyers who triumphed in federal court.

Fast-forward to today: The NRA’s proposal to train and arm teachers in response to the Newtown grade school massacre has been widely ridiculed, yet on the same day one of the most liberal U.S. senators proposed a remedy not all that different, as it places people with arms in schools.

To be fair, Boxer called for other gun reforms right after the shooting, such as “taking the weapons of war and high-capacity clips off our streets,” ensuring local police are more involved in issuing gun permits, closing the gun-show loophole, and “keeping guns out of the hands of the mentally ill.” Boxer closed by saying, “We need to keep our schools safe by utilizing all of the law enforcement tools at our disposal. We have failed our children and we have to stop worrying about our political skins.”

She then introduced the Save Our Schools Act, which would allow governors to deploy state National Guard troops in communities—whether to augment local police—or directly into public schools.

The reaction across the political spectrum has been varied but equally sharp. On the political right, the libertarian pro-gun crowd has said that Boxer’s proposal is an example of the worst kind of federal overeach, because further militarization of local police is what prompted the framers to write the Second Amendment.

“If you’ve been decrying the militarization of law enforcement, hold onto your hats boys and girls—because crap just got real,” wrote the pro-gun blog, UnitedLiberty.org.

Perhaps the biggest problem with Boxer’s idea is that it lends credibility to the notion that a more widely armed society is more immune to wanton gun violence.

A generation ago, a handful of liberal constitutional laws scholars wrote detailed and compelling analyses of the Second Amendment’s roots. The University of Texas’ Sanford Levinson’s readable history, The Embarassing Second Amendment, and more recent work by Yale Law School’s Akhil Reed Amar, reluctantly conclude that the U.S. Constitution’s framers, Congress and many states since then want “strong” gun rights.

The New York Times’ legal reporter Adam Liptak wrote in 2007 how these scholars and other liberals gave new intellectual ammunition to the pro-gun lobby to legally challenge and overturn local gun-control laws. He quoted pro-gun lawyers as crediting the liberal scholars’ more open-minded assessment with boosting their arguments in federal court.

It may be that Sen. Boxer is well aware of this legal history and knows that any new or overly broad gun-control laws will be struck down: i.e., the Second Amendment clearly empowers citizen militias, which implies having military-level weapons available to the public. And so, against the backdrop of an increasingly armed America, the solution that surfaces is placing deterrent force in public schools.

But by proposing this remedy on the same day the NRA proposed arming teachers, Boxer is lending credence to the NRA perspective that the only solution to gun violence is more guns. Progressives would like to believe that civilization is making forward progress beyond the need to have guns at the ready for every nightmare scenario. After all, it’s conservatives who take a dimmer view of human nature and dwell on evil.

Walmart President and CEO Mike Duke speaks at the company’s March, 2011 Sustainability Milestone Meeting. Duke has authorized early dividends to stockholders in anticipation of higher taxes next year while defending low wages for employees. (Photo: Walmart Corporate)

In anticipation of higher taxes on dividends, a number of corporations are paying out dividends early – even when they have to borrow to do so.

As the corporate-named “fiscal cliff” nears, hundreds of companies are busy paying out 2013 dividends in 2012, so CEOs and other major shareholders can avoid paying higher taxes when the Bush tax cuts expire. Under the Obama administration, taxes on dividends may increase from the current rate of 15 percent to as high as 43 percent.

Some companies, like Walmart, are moving up the payment of the quarterly dividends by a week, while other companies, like The Washington Post Company, are paying out the entire yearly dividend for 2013 in 2012 in their mad haste to avoid taxation. Some companies are even borrowing money to pay out dividends on earnings that have not even been earned yet. At least the banks are loaning to someone, even if it means the loan is used to dodge taxes.

To read more articles by Danny Weil and other authors in the Public Intellectual Project, click here.

What all these companies have in common is that the early dividend payments benefit a small number of insiders – from the Walton family at Walmart to Donald Graham and Warren Buffet at The Washington Post, to name a few.

Take Larry Ellison. CNBC recently reported that:

Larry Ellison is the latest corporate chief to benefit from the spate of special dividends or accelerated dividends announced in the fourth quarter. Oracle announced Monday it would pay more than $800 million in next year’s dividends this month.

Ellison’s share of the payout is $198.9 million, based on his ownership of 23 percent of the company’s stock.

Sheldon Adelson, the subject of criminal investigations by the US Department of Justice, will be receiving $1.2 billion in dividends from the Las Vegas hotel, The Sands. His tax savings will be over $300 million, certainly enough for him to bankroll another election or many other elections.

Carnival CEO Mickey Arison will receive about $89 million in early dividend pay outs.

Tom Frist, brother of Bill Frist, the former senator from Tennessee, will receive $300 million in early dividend payments from HCA. This is the same firm that paid a $1.7 million settlement for fraudulently billing Medicare, the same program these reactionaries say is broke.

Costco is borrowing $3.5 billion to pay out $3 billion in early dividends. It is borrowing the money because it has not actually earned what it plans to pay out in dividends.

The Washington Post Company will pay out about $70 million in early dividends which primarily benefits the Graham family and Warren Buffet. Buffet is the single largest shareholder, but he often gives his voting rights to Donald Graham. Ironically, “the sage from Omaha” has publicly stated that he should pay higher taxes. Moreover, The Post Company is paying out early dividends despite having negative cash flow of $75 million in the first 9 months of 2012.

These companies and many more are working assiduously to get dividends paid out early. John Collopy, who tracks Wisconsin stocks as director of research at Oshkosh-based Carl M. Hennig, an investment securities firm, said of the tax code which allows all of this dividend diversion: “I think it’s a very nice accommodation.”

Nice indeed.

Walmart will pay out about $1.34 billion in early dividends with roughly half of this amount going directly into the pockets of the Walton family. At the same time Walmart CEO Mike Duke has authorized the early dividends to stockholders, Duke is defending the low wages he pays his employees, reports the Huffington Post. This comes on the heels of the $18.7 million in executive compensation Duke received in 2010. According to the Huffington Post:

The CEO of Walmart Stores Inc. received a pay package in 2010 worth $18.7 million, a 4 percent dip from the year before, according to an Associated Press calculation, as the world’s largest retailer struggled to reverse a decline in a key revenue figure.

That literally hundreds of CEOs are authorizing dividend payments so they and their cadre of insiders can avoid paying taxes on the dividends they allocate to themselves demonstrates the greed prevalent on Wall Street. With no deterrent examples, like any arrests of banksters engaged in fraud, Wall Street and its surrogates and profiteers see no end in sight to their rapacious business plans.

It is especially appalling that many of the companies these CEOs captain derive significant amounts of their revenue from the federal government. HCA derives most of its revenues from the federal government through Medicaid and Medicare, two programs working people are told they simply must give up or receive benefits from later in life.

The Washington Post Company derives about half its revenue from the federal government through Title IV “loans” and “GI benefits,” which are supposed to assist students, but instead end up on Wall Street in the form of dividends and multi-million-dollar payouts to wealthy individuals.

It is likely the list of companies paying early dividends to avoid taxes also include those companies that received generous government bail-outs, and those companies that continue to profit off the illegal wars. It is unacceptable that these CEOs – Donald Graham and Tom First – who benefit from government largesse do not want to pay their fair share to support the government. This is because the government is their piggy bank and without it they could never continue the rackets that purport to be their companies.

It is also no small irony that the same cast of characters preaching debt reduction are helping themselves at the government trough to avoid paying taxes that could seed government coffers and shrink the debt. Instead, they are the usual suspects in running up government debt. While they talk about cutting “entitlements” they are busy serving themselves their own entitlements and assuring that the social safety net is replaced by the Dragnet.

In this season of supposed giving, apparently it never crossed the minds of these CEO Scrooges that they could have used this money to invest in their companies and hire returning war veterans and other unemployed and suffering Americans.

As author Andrew Gavin Marshall stated recently in an article for Truthout on the Trans-Pacific Partnership:

At the same time, state “interference” decreases in sectors that benefit the actual population, such as welfare, social services, pensions, healthcare, education, labor protections and so on. In the actual “free market,” these protections are dismantled, subjecting populations to “market discipline” quite unlike the large corporations and banks that receive direct protection against “market discipline.” The most obvious example of this is the post-2008 bank bailouts.

Yes, the 2008 bailout was a stunning example of corporate coddling, but so is the dividend diversion for it requires the government to aid and abet the depletion of tax revenue. These executives and their benefactors understand that the role of government is to regulate markets for the benefit of the corporations and banks, while forcing the rest of us to compete with each other in a race barreling toward the bottom. This is market monopolization for the elite and market punishment for working people.

The executives of these corporations are little more than modern day robber barons and scam artists who engage in the theft of government monies by using accounting tricks they have managed to lobby for to assure the tax code treats them like royalty. Congress has the power to claw-back these taxes; they could retroactively tax these ill-gotten dividend payments and prosecute the perpetrators of the scheme.

Of course they won’t: They need these companies and their “leaders” to pony up millions, if not billions, in campaign money for their political careers.

WASHINGTON

NRA’s Bizarre Press Conference: ‘More Guns Now!’

December 21, 2012  |

After a week of hiding after the school massacre in the Sandy Hook community of Newtown, Conn., the National Rifle Association today broke its silence with an extraordinary press event in which Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre blamed everybody and everything but the gun culture it has fostered for the deaths of 20 children and seven adults last week at the hands of Adam Lanza.

As media swarmed into Washington, D.C.’s historic Willard Hotel for the NRA event, protesters led by CREDO Action, bearing signs that read “Stop the NRA,” gathered outside the hotel with the stated goal of delivering petitions signed by some 285,000 citizens that read: ”In the wake of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, the NRA must stand down and stop blocking Congress and the President from passing gun control legislation.”

Time was when the National Rifle Association was an organization for hunters and law enforcement officers, among its main aims public education on the safe use of firearms. But that was decades ago, before the NRA found more lucre in its current role trade association and lobby for manufacturers of firearms and ammunition, a business sector that, these days, shows no shame in being among the nation’s foremost merchants of death.

Paranoia Runs Deep

Given the paranoia in which right-wing leaders traffic, there’s a natural alliance between the arms merchants and the political right. Add to that the neo-libertarian ideology of much of the Tea Party movement, which opposes virtually all forms of government regulation, and you have a perfect confluence of interests that keeps conservative politicians of both parties in the NRA’s thrall, hungry for the campaign dollars the organization dispenses through its PAC, and fearful of its opposition at primary time.

At the press conference, LaPierre laid down, in no uncertain terms, that a ban on assault rifles or large-capacity magazines, such as that being suggested by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calf., is unacceptable. (Hear that Republicans? Don’t eventhink about voting for such a thing.)   He complained that the media “demonized” gun-owners, and claimed that a ban on particular weapons such as assault rifles would do nothing to avert future tragedies.

LaPierre then went full-bore on the fear-mongering those on the right traditionally invoke in order to win converts. (It’s not for nothing that sales of assault rifles — particularly the AR-15 model used by Lanza — and high-capacity magazine clips havesoared since the massacre.)

NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre calls for the arming of school personnel at Washington, D.C., press conference. Photo: A.M. Stan

From LaPierre’sprepared text:

How many more copycats are waiting in the wings for their moment of fame…A dozen more killers? A hundred? More? How can we possibly even guess how many, given our nation’s refusal to create an active national database of the mentally ill?

And the fact is, that wouldn’t even begin to address the much larger and more lethal criminal class: Killers, robbers, rapists and drug gang members who have spread like cancer in every community in this country. Meanwhile, federal gun prosecutions have decreased by 40 percent — to the lowest levels in a decade.

Actually, crime rates among the sort of violent criminals named by LaPierre have dropped steadily in recent years, with a gain so small as to bestatistically insignificant over the last year. (There has been a rise in unarmed, so-called “simple assaults,” which raises violent crime figures overall.)

Using Tragedy to Sell More Guns

LaPierre went on to unveil the NRA’s gift to the nation, a program to arm school personnel called The National Shield. Apparently this is what organization leaders meant when, in a brief statement announcing the upcoming press conference on Tuesday, they promised:  ”The NRA is prepared to offer meaningful contributions to help make sure this never happens again.” Flat-screen monitors that flanked the podium showed a graphic for the program, which appeared to be styled in the manner of the offerings on the Obama-era White House Web site.

“The NRA is going to bring all of its knowledge, dedication and resources to develop a model National School Shield Emergency Response Program for every school that wants it,” LaPierre said. “From armed security to building design and access control to information technology to student and teacher training, this multi-faceted program will be developed by the very best experts in their fields.”

Twice during his speech, LaPierre was interrupted by protesters from CODE PINK, each of whom stood at the front of the room, before the velvet-draped barrier, some four feet high, that appeared designed to protect the NRA speakers from the press. The podium was set back some 10 or 15 feet from the barrier, evoking the sense of paranoia that drives America’s gun culture.

The first sign, held up by a male protester, was a pink banner that read: “NRA KILLING OUR KIDS.” After unfurling it, he was escorted out of the room by security. About 10 minutes later, CODE PINK founder Medea Benjamin stepped with her own banner: NRA, BLOOD ON YOUR HANDS. Receiving the same treatment as the previous protester, Benjamin shouted as she was taken out the door by security personnel: “Ban assault weapons now!”

LaPierre never acknowledged the protesters, and simply returned to his prepared text after each interruption.

Although billed as a press conference, NRA President David Keene announced at the beginning that none of the speakers would take questions, before he introduced LaPierre, who simply delivered a speech rife with blame-laying — on everything from video games to gun-free school zones, including Quentin Tarantino and President Barack Obama, the latter of whom he said had cut the budget for school security. LaPierre went so far as to play a clip from a video game called “Kindergarten Killer,” which showed a cartoon child being shot in the head and spurting blood.

NRA security specialist scans room for potential disruptions. The barrier erected between press and the podium is seen in background.

Arming the Schools

Of gun-free school zones, LaPierre said: “Politicians pass laws for gun-free school zones. They issue press releases bragging about them.They post signs advertising them. And in so doing, they tell every insane killer in America that schools are their safest place to inflict maximum mayhem with minimum risk.”

He went on to blame politicians for the death of Sandy Hook School Principal Dawn Hochsprung, implying that she would have wielded a firearm had she been allowed to.

“The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” LaPierre said.  His use of the “good guy, bad guy” language was particularly offensive, since it is widely publicized that that was the language that teacher Kaitlin Roig used in  talking to her first-graders during the massacre last Friday, as she hid them in a small bathroom. She told them that the good guys would be coming soon.

LaPierre then turned the podium over to Asa Hutchinson, a former congressmean and under secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, to outline the new NRA National School Shield program which seems designed, more than anything to sell more guns.

Flat-screen displays that flanked the podium at the Dec. 21, 2012, NRA press event were used to promote the association’s armed-schools program, and to show a clip from a violent video game. Photo: A.M. STAN 

Hutchinson took pains to assure Tea Party followers that he was not advocating a new government program.

After Hutchinson’s presentation (transcript of his remarkshere), Keene returned to the podium to close the event, when a reporter began shouting a question, asking whether the NRA had sought a meeting with the White House. “As I indicated at the outset,” Keene said, “this is the beginning of a serious conversation, and we won’t be taking any questions today.” A conversation, it seems, in which only one side does the talking. Keene did say that the leaders would entertain questions from the media beginning on Monday. (LaPierre is scheduled to appear this Sunday on NBC’sMeet the Press.)

Doubling Down

In the meeting room at the Willard where the press conference took place, the mood among journalists — even mainstream journalists — was one of incredulity. Journos marveled at how an event so tightly scripted could deliver such a tone-deaf message. But the truth is that NRA leaders aren’t looking for popularity among the general public — or even among their own members. As long as they keep their paymasters — the gun-makers — happy, that’s all they appear to care about. They’ve apparently bet that their fear-stoking will pay off in the halls of Congress, where lawmakers have long been loath to cross the lethal behemoth.

But this could be the moment when the NRA has finally jumped the shark; even gun-owners back closing the gun-show loophole that allows gun buyers to skip the background check required for firearm purchase at a store, if only they by their weapons at a gun show instead.

“Wayne LaPierre’s bizarre and quite frankly paranoid press conference today is a testament to just how extreme and out of touch the NRA’s leadership has become,” said Becky Bond, political director of CREDO in a written statement. “If teachers could stand up to a gunman with a semi-automatic assault weapon, then Congress can stand up to the NRA and its lobbyists. The NRA is clearly doubling down on its extreme agenda in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre.”

Maddow: Newtown Residents Turn to Gun Control Activism in Wake of Tragic Shooting

How the Right Has Twisted the 2nd Amendment

President Barack Obama delivers a statement in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House regarding the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, Dec. 14, 2012. (Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson)

President Obama made a statement from the Briefing Room on the shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut:

THE PRESIDENT:  This afternoon, I spoke with Governor Malloy and FBI Director Mueller.  I offered Governor Malloy my condolences on behalf of the nation, and made it clear he will have every single resource that he needs to investigate this heinous crime, care for the victims, counsel their families.

We’ve endured too many of these tragedies in the past few years.  And each time I learn the news I react not as a President, but as anybody else would — as a parent.  And that was especially true today.  I know there’s not a parent in America who doesn’t feel the same overwhelming grief that I do.

The majority of those who died today were children — beautiful little kids between the ages of 5 and 10 years old.  They had their entire lives ahead of them — birthdays, graduations, weddings, kids of their own.  Among the fallen were also teachers — men and women who devoted their lives to helping our children fulfill their dreams.

So our hearts are broken today — for the parents and grandparents, sisters and brothers of these little children, and for the families of the adults who were lost.  Our hearts are broken for the parents of the survivors as well, for as blessed as they are to have their children home tonight, they know that their children’s innocence has been torn away from them too early, and there are no words that will ease their pain.

As a country, we have been through this too many times.  Whether it’s an elementary school in Newtown, or a shopping mall in Oregon, or a temple in Wisconsin, or a movie theater in Aurora, or a street corner in Chicago — these neighborhoods are our neighborhoods, and these children are our children.  And we’re going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics.

This evening, Michelle and I will do what I know every parent in America will do, which is hug our children a little tighter and we’ll tell them that we love them, and we’ll remind each other how deeply we love one another.  But there are families in Connecticut who cannot do that tonight.  And they need all of us right now.  In the hard days to come, that community needs us to be at our best as Americans.  And I will do everything in my power as President to help.

Because while nothing can fill the space of a lost child or loved one, all of us can extend a hand to those in need — to remind them that we are there for them, that we are praying for them, that the love they felt for those they lost endures not just in their memories but also in ours.

May God bless the memory of the victims and, in the words of Scripture, heal the brokenhearted and bind up their wounds.

The President also issued a proclamation honoring the victims of the tragedy, ordering U.S. flags to be flown at half-staff until sunset on December 18.

Don’t Be Afraid, Mr. President — You Can Take on the Gun Lobby

A

n attendee sights a rifle at a booth during the National Rifle Association annual convention in St. Louis, April 14, 2012. (Photo: Daniel Acker / The New York Times)

“We’ve endured too many of these tragedies in the past few years,” President Obama said in response to horrifying shooting massacre of 20 little children and six of their educators in Connecticut.

“Whether it is an elementary school in Newtown, or a shopping mall in Oregon, or a temple in Wisconsin, or a movie theater in Aurora, or a street corner in Chicago, these neighborhoods are our neighborhoods and these children are our children. And we’re going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics,” he noted.

“Meaningful action” has been thwarted, largely because of the power and wealth of the National Rifle Association (NRA). One of the key avenues it has used to exert its influence is the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). For decades, the NRA has helped bankroll ALEC operations and even co-chaired ALEC’s “Public Safety and Elections Task Force,” where it secretly voted on bills alongside elected representatives. At ALEC’s annual meeting this summer, the NRA had the biggest booth at the convention in Salt Lake City and also underwrote a shooting event along with one of the largest sellers of assault weapons in the world.

Numerous bills to bar or impede laws that would help protect Americans from gun violence were drafted by the NRA and adopted by ALEC corporations and legislators as “models” for the rest of the country. And, dozens of these special interest bills have become law in states across the country. As a result of the NRA’s efforts, a city in Connecticut recently repealed the only ban in the state on carrying a concealed firearm. Allowing “concealed carry” has been a long-standing part of the NRA-ALEC agenda, passing in Wisconsin a year ago at the urging of Governor Scott Walker, who was given an award by the NRA for making this item law along with a version of the controversial ALEC-NRA “Stand Your Ground”/”Castle Doctrine” bill. A concealed carry law also was just passed last week in Michigan, along with the so-called “Right to Work” union-busting bill on ALEC’s corporate wish list.

Here is a review of the NRA-by-way-of-ALEC gun agenda:

• The retail sale of machine guns has been barred by federal law since the gangster era but, as uncovered by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), one year ago at ALEC’s “policy summit” in Arizona, the NRA obtained unanimous support from the corporate and lawmaker members of ALEC’s Task Force for “amending” ALEC’s “Consistency in Firearms Regulation Act” to expressly bar cities from banning “machine guns.” Other provisions of that bill prevent cities from banning armor-piercing bullets and from banning efforts to alter guns to make them more deadly if the state does not do so. It also bars cities from suing gun manufacturers for gun deaths based on the theory of liability used by governments to sue tobacco manufacturers for smoking deaths.

• In 2008, as noted by CMD, in the aftermath of the tragic massacre of students and professors by a heavily armed Virginia Tech student, ALEC adopted a model bill to remove state prohibitions of guns on college campuses and to allow students to bring guns to class.

• Also in 2008, as CMD has documented, ALEC also weighed in on litigation challenging a handgun ban in the city of Chicago. ALEC filed a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in that case, McDonald v. Chicago, on the same side as the NRA.

• In 2005, at an ALEC task force meeting co-chaired by Wal-Mart, corporate lobbyists and politicians voted to approve the NRA’s request that a law it spearheaded in Florida with ALEC members become a “model” for other states.  That ALEC bill was misleadingly named the “Castle Doctrine,” but is also known as the “Stand Your Ground” or “Shoot First” or “Kill at Will” law. That Florida law, was initially invoked by law enforcement to prevent the arrest and prosecution earlier this year of high-school student Trayvon Martin’s killer. The law creates legal immunity for shooters claiming self-defense, going well beyond the reach of the traditional rights of self defense to create what some call a “license to kill.”

• CMD connected those dots and documented that the NRA’s lobbyist Marion Hammer pushed this bill through the Florida legislature in early 2005. She then brought the law to the closed door ALEC task force meeting in Texas that summer to become a priority for ALEC legislators. According to the NRA at that time, her pitch was warmly received and “unanimously” adopted by the private and public sector members at that meeting. The list of special interest reps attending that meeting is not publicly available, but it is known that the nation’s largest retailer of ammunition and long guns, Wal-Mart, was the corporate leader of that task force; earlier this year, Wal-Mart announced it was resigning from ALEC.

• Also around that time, ALEC pushed a variety of legislation to require reciprocity between states for “concealed carry” laws, laws that result in more people carrying concealed firearms in public places, as CMD has noted.

• In 2000, as CMD has reported, when Koch Industries was the chair of ALEC’s corporate board, ALEC’s crime task force adopted the “Defense of Free Market and Public Safety Resolution” as a national template for states across the country. That resolution was an effort to thwart law enforcement from using contracts — to buy firearms for police officers — to favor gun manufacturers that adhered to a code of conduct. As part of a lawsuit settlement, gun manufacturer Smith & Wesson (S&W) had agreed to penalize S&W retailers who sold guns that tended to end up used in crimes, barred S&W retailers from using the gun show loophole to avoid conducting criminal background checks on prospective buyers, and forbade dealers from releasing more than one handgun to a purchaser per day. It also required retailers to sell all of its handguns with mechanical trigger locks to help protect kids from accidentally killing themselves or others. ALEC’s resolution sought to bar states from rewarding S&W with contracts for police weapons or creating an incentive for other gun manufacturers to adopt similar voluntary codes of conduct.

• In 1995, ALEC promoted as model legislation a bill that would create state-based criminal background checks for firearms purchases different from the federal Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, which established the National Instant Check criminal background check system at the FBI. As analyzed by CMD, ALEC’s bill expressly exempts firearms sales at gun shows from its background checks (creating a “gun show loophole”). It also exempts holders of “concealed carry” permits from a background check, even though the Brady Law attempts to protect the public through background checks regardless of whether a person had previously obtained a permit to carry a gun, such as from people who subsequently become fugitives or persons adjudicated to be mentally unstable.

• As CMD has shown, ALEC also strongly opposed the 1994 “Assault Weapons Ban,” which sought to expand the long-standing federal bar on fully automatic machine guns by preventing the purchase of rapid-firing “semi-automatic” assault-style weapons. Certain military-style firearms — such as the .223 Bushmaster rifle reportedly found at the scene of the Connecticut school massacre and similar to the one used in the sniper shootings that terrorized D.C. in 2003 — include versions for sale in the U.S. that were modified by manufacturers for the civilian market along with versions that allow three-shot bursts of fire with each pull of the trigger for law enforcement rather than their faster-firing military-style kin like the M4 or AK-47, in light of the federal assault weapons ban. The ban was allowed to expire during the George W. Bush administration, which had very close ties to the NRA.

The NRA’s gun agenda helps protect and expand the market for the firearms sold by the weapons companies that bankroll its multi-million dollar lobbying and influence operations. Although ALEC’s crime task force no longer officially exists, ALEC is doing nothing to undo the damage done through its many years of advancing the wish list of the gun industry through laws like “Stand Your Ground”/”Shoot First,” pushing for guns on college campuses, and even opposing government purchasers from rewarding codes of conduct by gun makers and sellers.

Three months after ALEC issued a PR statement that it was eliminating its Public Safety and Elections Task Force, the NRA announced that it would still be hosting its regular annual shooting event at ALEC’s summer convention, held in July of this year. For the past several years, on the Saturday of ALEC’s annual meeting, the NRA has regularly hosted an outing for ALEC legislators and lobbyists to go shooting together — with complimentary guns and ammo. July’s event was co-sponsored by Browning Arms Company, whose foreign parent company is one of the world’s largest sellers of machine guns, as noted by CMD.

“Calling for ‘meaningful action’ is not enough,” said New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, founder and co-chair of Mayors Against Illegal Guns. “We need immediate action. We have heard all the rhetoric before. What we have not seen is leadership — not from the White House and not from Congress. That must end today. This is a national tragedy and it demands a national response.”

Facts are still coming in about how the 20-year old shooter — who under Connecticut law is too young to possess the pistols he was found with — came to use the assault weapon fired repeatedly and rapidly in the assault on the school children, or why his mother (who was apparently also shot to death by him) reportedly brought or allowed such an arsenal of weapons into the home she shared with her son, who has been called “mentally ill.” But, some observers are pointing out the terrible coincidence of a knife attack that injured 22 students in China within a day of these 20 American school children being murdered in a matter of minutes by a gunman in Connecticut, which shows yet again that the ready availability of guns in the U.S. can be the difference between life and death. And easing access to deadly firearms has been a major part of the NRA/ALEC agenda, underwritten by ALEC corporations and advanced by ALEC politicians, for years and years.

The library of NRA/ALEC gun bills can be accessed here.

(Photo: publik16 / Flickr)The nation is grieving after yet another fatal mass shooting. Aren’t there ways to curb this ongoing national tragedy?

The mass shooting in a Tucson shopping center on January 8, 2011—which left six dead and thirteen wounded, including Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords—has once again turned the public spotlight on the epidemic of gun violence in America. Gun violence takes the lives of 30,000 Americans each year, and injures an additional 70,000, but victims’ families and friends, and, indeed, all of us are touched by this ongoing national tragedy.

Massacres like the one in Tucson and daily shootings around the country compel many to ask, “Can’t we do something about gun violence in America?” The answer, of course, is yes—beginning with changing the weak federal laws that allow almost anyone access to a wide variety of deadly weapons.

In Tucson’s aftermath, Americans are hungry for action: a recent bipartisan nationwide poll [pdf] confirmed that large majorities of Americans support a variety of innovative, common sense reforms. While political will may lag behind public opinion, it’s time to demand safer, less violent communities and to embrace the smart laws that can make them a reality. A good start would include federal adoption of the following proposals:

• Ban large capacity ammunition magazines. In Tucson, Jared Loughner was able to cause so much devastation in a matter of seconds because he used a handgun equipped with a large capacity ammunition magazine capable of holding 33 bullets. Large capacity magazines, some of which can hold up to 100 rounds, are the common thread uniting all of the major mass shootings in recent history [pdf], including those at Fort Hood, Columbine, and Virginia Tech. These magazines were prohibited under federal law until Congress allowed the 1994 assault weapons ban to expire in 2004. There’s simply no reason not to ban them again, and Congresswoman Carolyn McCarthy and Senator Frank Lautenberg have courageously introduced legislation to do just that.
• Require a background check every time a firearm is sold.Many Americans assume that every person who wants to purchase a gun must first pass a criminal background check confirming that he or she isn’t prohibited from owning guns. If only that were the case. Under federal law, a prospective purchaser only has to undergo a background check when buying a gun from a licensed dealer. If a person buys a gun from a so-called “private seller”—as is the case in an estimated 40 percent of gun sales every year—no background check is federally required.Since 1994, the background check system has prevented nearly 1.8 million prohibited persons from purchasing firearms [pdf], while untold numbers of convicted criminals and mentally ill individuals have exploited the “private sale loophole” to gain access to guns. A recent undercover investigation by the City of New York showed just how easy it is to get a gun at a gun show, no questions asked. A background check requirement alone isn’t enough—more also needs to be done to ensure that the names of persons who are prohibited are appropriately entered into the system—but it would be a vital step in the right direction.
• Give ATF the resources it needs.A common refrain used to oppose firearms legislation is that “we should just enforce the laws that are on the books.” Although new laws are certainly needed, better enforcement is an important piece of reducing gun violence, which is why the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) needs to have the resources and leadership to effectively enforce existing federal firearms laws.For starters, it would be nice for ATF to have a boss. The agency has not had a permanent director in over four years. That’s an inexcusable leadership vacuum, and the Senate ought to promptly confirm President Obama’s nominee for ATF Director, Andrew Traver. Second, the Bureau should be given the resources to crack down on dishonest firearms dealers. A small number of unscrupulous gun dealers—by one estimate, only 1 percent of all licensed dealers—sell the majority of firearms recovered in crime scenes nationwide. ATF has the authority to perform an unannounced inspection on a dealer once a year; ATF has the resources, however, to perform an inspection, on average, only once every decade. As documented by the Washington Post late last year, that’s only one of the many resource limitations that are preventing ATF agents from more effectively preventing the widespread trafficking of crime guns.
• Improve access to funding and data for researchers. Congress has, time and again, succumbed to gun lobby pressure to obstruct research into the development of smart, effective policies to fight gun violence, stopping the flow of data as well as money. As the New York Times reported recently, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) once played a key role in supporting research into the public health concerns surrounding gun violence and the development of effective firearms laws. That was until Congress singled out guns in the CDC’s funding bill with language stating that, “None of the funds made available for injury prevention and control…may be used to advocate or promote gun control.”Researchers are also denied access to data tracing the origins of firearms recovered in crimes. Trace information helped academics and members of the public identify particularly problematic gun dealers and observe trends in the spread of crime guns until Congress, in what is known as the Tiahrt Amendment, imposed restrictions that now conceal trace data from public view. This data could provide a valuable resource for innovative policy reform; for example, a recent report from Mayors Against Illegal Guns used trace data to identify ten important state laws that can reduce the trafficking of illegal guns across state lines.

This list could go on, as the gaps in federal firearms laws are as many as they are glaring. Still, there’s reason to think that successfully reducing gun violence through the adoption of common sense gun policy is possible, and the evidence lies not at the federal level, but among the states. While too many states have done nothing to combat gun violence, state and local governments in California and New York, among others, continue to adopt innovative laws to protect public safety. In a recent publication, Legal Community Against Violence (LCAV) found that many of the states with the strongest gun laws also have the lowest gun death rates, while many states with the weakest gun laws have the highest gun death rates.

One conclusion seems inescapable. As the LCAV publication’s title puts it, Gun Laws Matter. With this knowledge, we’ll all be empowered to work toward a better, less violent future.

Supreme Court Takes Gay Marriage Case, But Don’t Hold Your Breath For An Epic Ruling

December 7, 2012  |

Jon Stewart Begs, “Please Tell Me This Is Rock Bottom” After Republicans Thwart Treaty to Protect the Disabled

Senator Marco Rubio, a Republican from Florida, talking with reporters in Washington after a committee meeting in November. (Photo: Jonathan Ernst / The New York Times)

Quite a few bloggers are having fun with Senator Marco Rubio’s bobbing and weaving in response to a question from GQ magazine during a recent interview:

GQ: How old do you think the Earth is?

Marco Rubio: I’m not a scientist, man. I can tell you what recorded history says, I can tell you what the Bible says, but I think that’s a dispute amongst theologians and I think it has nothing to do with the gross domestic product or economic growth of the United States. I think the age of the universe has zero to do with how our economy is going to grow. … I think parents should be able to teach their kids what their faith says, what science says. Whether the Earth was created in seven days, or seven actual eras, I’m not sure we’ll ever be able to answer that. It’s one of the great mysteries.

As I like to say, the G.O.P. doesn’t just want to roll back the New Deal; it wants to roll back the Enlightenment. But here’s what you should realize: when Mr. Rubio said that the question of the Earth’s age “has zero to do with how our economy is going to grow,” he was dead wrong.

For one thing, science and technology education has a lot to do with our future productivity — and how are you going to have effective science education if schools have to give equal time to the views of fundamentalist Christians?

More broadly, the attitude that discounts any amount of evidence — and boy, do we have lots of evidence of the age of the planet! — if it conflicts with prejudices is not an attitude consistent with effective policy. If you’re going to ignore what geologists say because you don’t like its implications, what are the chances that you’ll take sensible advice on monetary and fiscal policy? After all, we’ve just seen how Republicans deal with research reports that undermine their faith in the magic of tax cuts: they try to suppress the reports.

I’m belatedly reading Chris Mooney’s “The Republican Brain”; if truth be told, I was afraid that the book would be too much red meat for my own predispositions, and wanted to keep my cool. But Mr. Mooney actually makes a very good point: the personality traits we associate with modern conservatism, above all a lack of openness, make the modern G.O.P. fundamentally hostile to the very idea of objective inquiry. If they want your opinion, they’ll tell you what it is; doubters of orthodoxy need not apply, and will in fact be persecuted.

So don’t laugh over Mr. Rubio’s young-Earth apologetics. If he, or anyone else from his party, wins in 2016, the joke will be on us.

How We Know the Earth Is Old

One thing that kind of tickles me about Mr. Rubio’s age-of-the-planet stuff is that it leads right to one of my favorite science stories — the founding of modern geology by James Hutton, part of the Scottish Enlightenment.

Mr. Hutton was, for a time, a farmer — and in that occupation, observing the process of erosion and the laying down of deposits of various materials, he realized that the landscape he saw around him could be explained by the same forces operating over immense periods of time, as long as you posited that there were other forces uplifting ancient sediments to form today’s geological features.

How could he know whether this theory was right? He made predictions; in particular, that in places you would find “angular uncomformities,” or striated bodies of sedimentary rocks from different eras that were tilted relative to each other. And, sure enough, he found them.

And once you accepted that the landscape we see was created by the same processes we see every day, you also had to accept the notion of a very ancient planet.

Why do I like this story so much? I think because it’s science of a kind everyone should be able to understand; it doesn’t rely on exotic instruments or hard math (not that there’s anything wrong with either of these), just on keen observation and an open mind.

Too bad that such open minds are so rare in America today, at least on one side of the spectrum.

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Dominance: The New Democratic Voting Base Is an Electoral Steamroller

That may not seem like a lot, but it’s actually a very big deal. Seven of last 47 elections were decided by margins under 2 percentage points. Two others were not far from that. To put it another way, 2 percentage points is just about the difference between an excellent campaign and a lousy one; it’s probably roughly the difference between having a good candidate and a poor one. So getting a 2-point edge going in is probably as large, or larger, than the difference between Bill Clinton and Michael Dukakis.

So it’s important. The question is where it comes from. So far, we don’t know. I’ll run through several possibilities, from the best for the GOP to the worst.

The best-case scenario for Republicans is that it’s just a random shuffle of the numbers. If that’s the case, it won’t continue in 2016. That’s possible! Random deviations from uniform swing happen all the time – could be the weather on Election Day, for all we know.

Next-best is that it’s something having to do with Barack Obama in particular. Perhaps, for example, Obama is losing worse than a generic Democrat would in solid Republican states, but otherwise basically getting the same swing any other Democrat would get. That would depress Obama’s national totals compared to swing state results, thus creating the Electoral College edge, and by definition it would be gone in the future once Obama is off the ballot.

Worse for Republicans would be if the Democratic Electoral College advantage is real – and produced by a Democratic advantage in the art of electioneering. There’s some evidence that Democrats simply had an across-the-board field operation advantage in the last two cycles. If that’s true, it’s presumably concentrated in swing states and could produce the observed effect by increasing Democratic turnout in those states. Unlike the first two possibilities, this one won’t go away on its own, but it is fundamentally fixable; after all, there’s no reason to believe that Democrats have some sort of inherent advantage in this area.

But that’s not going to work if the worst-case scenario turns out to be true.

It’s possible that the Democratic Electoral College advantage observed in both 2008 and 2012 is simply a consequence of demographics – that Democrats are currently scattered in such a way that, all else being equal, fewer Democratic votes are “wasted” (for example by winning California by a large amount) than Republican votes (such as they do in winning Texas by a large margin).

If that last one is the real reason – and it certainly might be – then there’s not much Republicans can do about it; it’s not as if they can convince lots of people from Utah to move to Colorado or get folks from West Virginia to move to Ohio.

Instead, it would mean that for however long the pattern lasts, Republicans will have a permanent disadvantage in presidential elections. That’s not unusual in American elections; Democrats right now appear to have a systematic disadvantage in both House and Senate elections due to how voters happen to be spread out – so, in a sense, a real Democratic advantage for the presidency only evens things out a bit.

It would, however, be a real change in how presidential elections have been fought for at least the last several decades. Republicans would be, in effect, starting every cycle two points behind. If it’s true – and I’m sure before long we’ll have reports from political scientists who have investigated each of the possibilities I suggested – then it’s a pretty big deal.

Filibuster Reform Looking More Likely

As consideration of the “constitutional option” of a Senate rules change restricting the filibuster by a majority vote becomes serious, handicapping of individual senators is also getting underway. Thanks to the 2012 elections, Harry Reid could lose up to five members of his Caucus and still prevail. A  breakdown by The Hill ‘s Alexander Bolton lists ten Democrats (including Indiana’s newly elected Joe Donnelly, who is apparently not on record at all on this subject) who are not publicly on board with a rules change that would ban filibusters on motions to proceed and require “talking filibusters” instead of filibustering by mere threat.

Erskine Bowles. (Photo: New America Foundation / Flickr)

There has been a lot of discussion about Congress enacting a “grand bargain” during the lame duck session of Congress.  Many members of Congress have talked about using the plan put forward by Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles as an outline for a “balanced” approach to deficit reduction.

Let me take this opportunity to tell you a little about Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles and what their plan would do.

As many of you know, Alan Simpson is a former conservative Republican Senator from Wyoming who has wanted to cut Social Security benefits for decades.

Here are just a few of the rude, inaccurate, and derogatory statements that Alan Simpson has made about Social Security:

• On August 24, 2010, Alan Simpson wrote in an e-mail to the head of the Older Women’s League: “And yes, I’ve made some plenty smart cracks about people on Social Security who milk it to the last degree. You know ‘em too. It’s the same with any system in America. We’ve reached a point now where it’s like a milk cow with 310 million tits!  Call when you get honest work!”

• On Friday, May 6, 2011, Alan Simpson told the Investment Company Institute, that Social Security is a “Ponzi scheme”, “not a retirement program.”  Simpson went on to say that Social Security “was never intended as a retirement program. It was set up in ‘37 and ‘38 to take care of people who were in distress — ditch diggers, wage earners — it was to give them 43 percent of the replacement rate of their wages. The [life expectancy] was 63. That’s why they set retirement age at 65.”

• On June 19, 2010, Alan Simpson said: “Social Security was never a retirement. It was set up to take care of poor guys in the depression who lost their butts who were getting butchered.”

Erskine Bowles has been a board member of Morgan Stanley since 2005 and made a fortune as a Wall Street investment banker as many of you know.

However, you may not know that Erskine Bowles made the following statement in 2011 at the University of North Carolina: “Paul Ryan is honest, he is straightforward, he is sincere. And the budget that he came forward with is just like Paul Ryan. It is a sensible, straightforward, honest, serious budget and it cut the budget deficit just like we did, by $4 trillion.”

You may also be unaware that Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson endorsed Congressman Charles Bass (R-NH) against progressive Democrat Ann McClane Kuster.

In their endorsement of Rep. Bass, Bowles and Simpson wrote: “Charlie supported a plan that demonstrated it is possible to raise revenues for deficit reduction through pro-growth tax reforms that reduce tax rates for individuals and businesses.  Likewise, it is possible to reform entitlement programs … He is a brave leader who deserves the thanks of everyone who really cares about our nation’s future.”

Rep. Bass voted for the Paul Ryan budget that every Democrat in the Senate has voted against.  In contrast, Kuster, who went on to defeat Rep. Bass, has said: “Let me be clear: I will never cut Social Security and Medicare benefits. My Tea Party opponent will.”

Even more distressing, in my opinion, is the belief that the Simpson-Bowles plan is a “balanced approach” to deficit reduction that we should be using as a model.

Here are the major elements of the Simpson-Bowles plan that I believe the Democratic Caucus should strongly oppose:

1.     Cutting Social Security benefits for current retirees.  The Simpson-Bowles plan would reduce Social Security benefits for current retirees by using a “chained-CPI” to determine cost-of-living-adjustments (COLAs).  According to the Social Security Administration, enacting a chained CPI would cut Social Security benefits by $112 billion over 10 years meaning that the average Social Security recipient who retires at age 65 would get $560 less a year at age 75 and would get $1,000 less a year at age 85 than under current law.

Two-thirds of senior citizens rely on Social Security for more than half of their income, and the average Social Security benefit today is about $1,200 a month.  At a time when seniors haven’t received a Social Security COLA in two out of the last three years as the price of prescription drugs and healthcare have gone up, the Simpson-Bowles plan would make it harder for today’s average senior citizen to make ends meet.

2.     Cutting veterans’ benefits.   Not only would enacting a chained-CPI be harmful to senior citizens, it would also make substantial cuts to the VA benefits of more than 3 million veterans.  The largest cuts in benefits would impact young, permanently disabled veterans who were seriously wounded in combat.  According to the Social Security Administration, permanently disabled veterans who started receiving VA disability benefits at age 30 would see their benefits cut by more than $1,300 a year at age 45; $1,800 a year at age 55; and $2,260 a year at age 65.  That would be simply unacceptable.

3.     Raising the retirement age to 69 years.  Increasing the retirement age to 69 would reduce lifetime Social Security benefits for workers by about 13 percent.  This would be particularly harmful to construction workers, nurses, factory workers and other labor intensive jobs.  According to the Center for Economic Policy and Research, 45 percent of workers who are 58 years of age and older work in physically demanding jobs or jobs with difficult working conditions.  Moreover, older Americans have a higher rate of long-term unemployment than any other age group.

4.     Cutting Social Security benefits for middle class workers.  According to the Social Security Administration, all of the Social Security policy changes in Bowles-Simpson would cut average annual Social Security benefits for middle-income workers (with average annual lifetime earnings of between $43,000 and $69,000) by up to 35 percent.

5.     Reducing tax rates for the wealthy and large corporations.  The Simpson-Bowles plan would significantly reduce income tax rates for the wealthiest Americans and largest corporations to between 23 and 29 percent — even lower than the top rate of 35% under the Bush tax cuts.    Simpson and Bowles claim that some $1.2 trillion in revenue would be increased under their proposal by eliminating or reducing tax expenditures, such as the mortgage interest deduction, and the tax exclusion on employer health insurance and pension plans.  However, a March 22, 2012 Congressional Research Service report has suggested that federal income tax rates could be reduced by no more than two percentage points under a realistic scenario of reducing tax expenditures in order to be deficit neutral, and could not reduce the deficit.

The President and almost all Democrats have supported repealing the Bush tax breaks for the top two percent.  That means that the top individual income tax rate would be increased from 35 percent to 39.6 percent – the same level under President Clinton when over 22 million new jobs were created.  We should eliminate corporate tax loopholes and tax breaks for the wealthy — and use this revenue to reduce the deficit and create jobs, not to lower tax rates.

Other harmful provisions in the Simpson-Bowles plan include:

• Increasing the regressive gas tax by 15 cents starting next year;

• Increasing premiums for Medicare, Medicaid, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program;

• Increasing interest rates on student loans;

• Increasing co-payments for middle class veterans receiving health care through the VA;

• Cutting 450,000 jobs in the federal workforce and private companies under contract with the federal government;

• Eliminating or limiting the exclusion of taxation on employer provided health insurance and pensions;

• Encouraging companies to ship jobs to China and other low wage countries by adopting a “territorial” tax system allowing corporations to evade U.S. income taxes by establishing subsidiaries overseas;

• Increasing taxes on low-income workers making between $10,000 to $20,000 a year by 14.5% in 2021 by moving to a chained-CPI; and

• Reducing the number of Americans eligible for Medicaid, SSI, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, WIC, Head Start, LIHEAP, the Earned Income Tax Credit, the Refundable Child Credit, and the Savers’ credit by shifting to a chained-CPI.

Those are the major elements of the Simpson-Bowles plan.  If enacted, they will cause major economic pain to virtually every American, while lowering tax rates for millionaires, billionaires and large corporations even more than President Bush.

For all of these reasons, I hope you will join me in opposing the Simpson-Bowles approach to deficit reduction.

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The Most Threatened President in History

By Nathaniel Patterson, Causes

27 November 12

SECRET SERVICE SAYS THE NUMBER OF THREATS AGAINST THE PRESIDENT IS OVERWHELMING

resident Barack Obama is the target of more than 30 potential death threats a day and is being protected by an increasingly over-stretched Secret Service. He is the most threatened President in history.

Since the President took office in 2008, the rate of threats against the president has increased 400% cent. Some threats to the President have been publicized, including the well known alleged plot by white supremacists in Tennessee to rob a gun store, shoot 88 black people, decapitate another 14 and then assassinate the first black president in American history.

Most however, are kept under wraps because the Secret Service fears that revealing details of them would only increase the number of copycat attempts.

According to the U.S. Secret Service agents, their goal is to immediately respond to any direct threat against the president, the first family, the vice president, or visiting heads of state. Agents are then responsible for determining the credibility of the threat.

Each time there is a threat, the Secret Service consults with the Protective Intelligence Division in Washington, D.C., to decide how far an investigation is going to go. If a federal arrest takes place, it will lead to the most serious or extreme of the end results.

Recently, when Anton Caluori, 31, allegedly emailed the FBI on the morning of August 21st to say he would “kill the president,” a Secret Service agent was immediately dispatched to his residence. According to the Department of Justice, Caluori was armed with multiple weapons, making his threat not only credible, but viable.

“This case had all the troubling ingredients: threats of violence and explosive devices, multiple weapons with hundreds of rounds and even brandishing of a weapon at law enforcement,” said U. S. Attorney Jenny A. Durkan. Caluori was subsequently arrested and charged in federal court with making a threat against the president and assault of a federal agent. If convicted, he could face up to 25 years in prison. He is scheduled to appear in federal court in Seattle Monday for a detention hearing.

Recent national events are a stark reminder that the Secret Service has to take these threats of death or violence seriously. While the Secret Service says they take every threat against the president seriously, not all will end in arrest. Threats will come our way from high school students, even junior high school students in the way of prank type calls. There are threats on Twitter and on Facebook and other social sites that allow such comments, but they have to look at them all. People need to know that any type of threat against the president is a violation of federal law.

The Secret Service says that many of those who make such threats are mentally ill, and it is the goal of the Secret Service to find them help. It can be “sobering,” they said, when agents show up at their door.

According to the Secret Service, the president is the most threatened person in the U.S., regardless of political party.

The President is not made aware of all threats against him, however, because as the Secret Service says, “the sheer number would be overwhelming and, frankly, distracting.”

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(Image: CartoonArts International / The New York Times Syndicate)

James Fallows says something I’ve been thinking, too: “For the first time in my conscious life, the Democratic Party is now more organized and coherent, and less fractious and back-biting, than the Republicans,” the correspondent for The Atlantic wrote in a recent online article. “It is almost stupefying to imagine that.”

Indeed. It actually started during primary season, when — as too many have forgotten — the Republican field seemed (and was) dominated by ridiculous figures. President Obama almost revived the Democrats’ old image with his bobble in the first debate, but he and his party pulled it back together. The Democratic campaign was professional, while the Republicans acted like the Keystone Kops. Karl Rove’s image has changed from terrifying master of politics to overpaid crybaby.

But I’d go even further: the Democrats now look like the natural party of government. President George W. Bush had already established a reputation for being unable to get anything right in the actual business of governing; all that was supposedly left was political prowess, and now that’s gone too. And even the news media have, I think, begun to notice that the United States isn’t the “center-right” country of fantasy: we’re a diverse nation, ethnically and otherwise, in which a lot of liberal ideas have become perfectly mainstream.

Still, hubris and all that: this newly effective coalition could be shattered if taken for granted.

And you know what could really produce the kind of dispirited base that was supposed to doom Mr. Obama in 2012? A sellout on key Democratic values as part of a Grand Bargain on the deficit. If, say, Mr. Obama raises the retirement age in return for vague promises on revenue (promises that would be betrayed at the first opportunity) or if he appoints a deficit scold to a major economic post, it could all fall apart.

Death by Epistemology

Josh Marshall, the editor of Talking Points Memo, recently had an interesting discussion — partly with his readers, but also with himself — about the Great Republican Polling Debacle. It seems hard to believe even now, but all the stories indicate that the Republican Party went into Election Day in a state of complete delusion. It wasn’t just the Fox News viewers. It wasn’t just the Romney people. The whole party, base and establishment both, believed that it knew a truth hidden from almost every nonpartisan polling outfit, and that a big victory was virtually assured. As Josh’s readers said, at one level this makes perfect sense. The modern G.O.P. is very much into denial of inconvenient truths, whether those inconvenient truths involve climate change or macroeconomics.

Why shouldn’t we expect a party that still believes in supply-side economics after the Clinton boom and the Bush bust to engage in voodoo polling too?

And yet Republicans retained for a long time a fearsome reputation for political prowess. How can these be reconciled?

I know that I’m not alone in believing that a large part of the answer is that they were never actually that good; they were just lucky. Remember, Mr. Rove almost blew the 2000 election by wasting time on a triumphal tour — and Al Gore would have been elected with ease if it weren’t for hanging chads, felon purges and a partisan Supreme Court.

With one exception, the G.O.P. lost the popular vote in every presidential election since 1988. And 2004 was a “khaki election,” driven by war talk — better yet for the G.O.P., an election driven by talk of the “war on terror,” where voters had no way of telling how things were going other than the Bush administration’s own boasts of victory.

Suppose Sept. 11 hadn’t happened. I think you can make a good case that Republicans would have lost Congress in 2002 and the White House in 2004, and nobody would ever have talked about the permanent Republican majority and all that.

The big question, however, is 2010 — which will have a long legacy, because it gave Republican statehouses the chance to gerrymander a major advantage in the House. My guess is that it was a very contingent event: bad luck for Mr. Obama on the business cycle, compounded by his own team’s mistakes, plus a weirdly ineffective defense of health-care reform. But I’m sure we’ll have a lot more serious analysis in the months to come.

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Norquist admits that a few politicians who signed his pledge are now having “impure thoughts,” worried that Republicans will be blamed for running the country over that “fiscal cliff.” However, he adds, “the media keeps interviewing the same five or so Republicans in Congress who want to cut a deal.”

He’s urging his troops to hold tight: “Even more than getting more revenues, (Democrats) want Republican fingerprints on tax increases so they can smash Republicans in the next series of elections.”

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• The GOP should be listening to reasonable voices such as that of Newt Gingrich. Yes, I used the words “reasonable” and “Gingrich” in the same sentence. He has occasional moments of lucidity, and one came on the “Today” show when he said Republicans “need to stop, take a deep breath and learn.”

  “I was wrong last week, as was virtually every major Republican analyst,” Gingrich said. “And so, you have to stop and say to yourself, ‘If I was that far off, what do I need to learn to better understand America?’”

  The voices the party should ignore include those claiming that House Republicans, by retaining their majority, won some sort of mandate to continue pushing a radical conservative agenda. And yes, Gingrich has made this argument as well. The fog lifts, the fog descends.

  A mandate for the GOP? Don’t make me hurt myself laughing. The ideological hero and policy guru of the House Republican caucus, Paul Ryan, couldn’t even carry his hometown of Janesville, Wis. (And Mitt Romney, by the way, lost all of his various home states.)

  Look, President Obama won 332 electoral votes to 206 for Romney. Much has been written about the demographic shifts that threaten the GOP’s future, but there has been less acknowledgement of an obvious fact about the present: Voters preferred Obama’s policies to Romney’s.

  Obama campaigned on a pledge not to extend the Bush tax cuts for households making more than $250,000. He said umpteen times that he will insist on a “balanced approach” to taming the deficit, involving new revenues as well as spending cuts. At this point, if you woke the president from a sound sleep in the middle of the night and thrust a microphone in his face, the first words out of his mouth might be “balanced approach.”

  Polls show this is what voters want. The election proved this is what voters want. But I fear some Republicans are convincing themselves that their “mandate” requires further obstructionism of the kind we’ve seen in the last two years. House Speaker John Boehner may want to make a deal, but his caucus may not let him.

  Some conservatives even seem tempted to listen to the delusional post-game analysis coming from Romney and Ryan. This is the way to ridicule and ruin.

  Ryan said the problem was that he and Romney lost by big margins in “urban” areas — which I take as a synonym for “places where minorities live.” But Republicans always lose in the inner cities. It’s the vote-heavy suburbs, such as Virginia’s Fairfax County, where Romney and Ryan failed to connect.

  Romney, in a conference call with big-money supporters, offered a variation on his “47 percent” hypothesis, which really does seem to be the way this benighted man sees the world. In Romney’s view, Obama won only because he succeeded in bribing specific groups of voters with what amount to monetary “gifts.”

  “With regards to the young people, for instance, a forgiveness of college loan interest was a big gift,” Romney said. “Free contraceptives were very big with young, college-age women.”

  And as for Obamacare: “You can imagine for somebody making $25,000 or $30,000 or $35,000 a year, being told you’re now going to get free health care, particularly if you don’t have it, getting free health care worth, what, $10,000 per family, in perpetuity — I mean, this is huge. … Likewise with Hispanic voters, free health care was a big plus.”

  It doesn’t occur to Romney that Republicans might have countered this alleged gift-giving with a health care reform plan of their own, other than “go to the emergency room.” If the GOP is really this obtuse, Democrats may win the next few elections without having to break a sweat. And that’s the danger I hope we avoid.

  Don’t get me wrong: I want progressive candidates to win those elections. But parties without meaningful competition become flabby, lazy, unresponsive. Democratic candidates shouldn’t win by default, and neither should progressive ideas. A smart, creative, reality-based conservative movement is ultimately good for the liberal cause — and good for the country.

  Step out of the echo chamber, Republicans. There’s a big country out there, and it’s trying to tell you something. For the sake of party and nation, try listening.

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Bill Moyers & Naomi Klein: How Climate Change Is an Historic Opportunity for Progressives

Naomi Klein, author of the international bestseller The Shock Doctrine, says the tragic destruction of Hurricane Sandy can also be the catalyst for the transformation of politics and our economy. She’s been in New York visiting the devastated areas — including those where “Occupy Sandy” volunteers are unfolding new models of relief — as part of her reporting for a new book and film on climate change and the future, and joins Bill to discuss hurricanes, climate change, and democracy. “Let’s rebuild by actually getting at the root causes. Let’s respond by aiming for an economy that responds to the crisis both [through] inequality and climate change,” Klein tells Bill. “You know, dream big.”

Full text of the transcript below the video:

BILL MOYERS: If you’ve been curious about why New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg endorsed Barack Obama for re-election, just take another look at the widespread havoc caused by the Frankenstorm benignly named Sandy. Having surveyed all this damage Bloomberg Business Week concluded: “It’s Global Warming, Stupid: If Hurricane Sandy doesn’t persuade Americans to get serious about climate change, nothing will.”

Well it was enough to prompt President Obama, at his press conference this week, to say more about global warming than he did all year.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: I am a firm believer that climate change is real, that it is impacted by human behavior and carbon emissions. And as a consequence, I think we’ve got an obligation to future generations to do something about it.

BILL MOYERS: But he made it clear that actually doing something about it will take a back seat to the economy for now. He did return to New York on Thursday to review the recovery effort on Staten Island. Climate change and Hurricane Sandy brought Naomi Klein to town, too. You may know her as the author of “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.” Readers of two influential magazines to put Naomi Klein high on the list of the 100 leading public thinkers in the world. She is now reporting for a new book and documentary on how climate change can spur political and economic transformation. She also has joined with the environmental writer and activist Bill McKibben in a campaign launched this week called “Do the Math.” More on that shortly…. First, congratulations on the baby.

NAOMI KLEIN: Thank you so much.

BILL MOYERS: How old now?

NAOMI KLEIN: He is five months today.

BILL MOYERS: First child?

NAOMI KLEIN: My first child, yeah.

BILL MOYERS: How does a child change the way you see the world?

NAOMI KLEIN: Well it lengthens your timeline definitely. I’m really immersed in climate science right now because of the project I’m working on is related to that. So you know there are always these projections into the future, you know, what’s going to happen in 2050? What’s going to happen in 2080? And I think when you’re solo, you think, “Okay, well, how old will I be then?” Well, you know, and now I’m thinking how old will he be then, right? And so, it’s not that– but I don’t like the idea that, “Okay, now I care about the future now that I have a child.” I think that everybody cares about the future. And I cared about it when I didn’t have a child, too.

BILL MOYERS: Well, I understand that but we’re so complacent about climate change. A new study shows that while the number of people who believe it’s happening has increased by, say, three percentage points over the last year, the number of people who don’t think it is human caused has dropped.

NAOMI KLEIN: It has dropped dramatically. I mean, the statistics on this are quite incredible. 2007, according to a Harris poll, 71 percent of Americans believed that climate change was real, that it was human caused. And by last year, that number went down to 44 percent. 71 percent to 44 percent, that is an unbelievable drop in belief. But then you look at the coverage that the issue’s received in the media. And it’s also dropped dramatically from that high point. 2007, you know, this was this moment where, you know, Hollywood was on board. “Vanity Fair” launched their annual green issue.

And by the way, there hasn’t been an annual green issue since 2008. Stars were showing up to the Academy Awards in hybrid cars. And there was a sense, you know, we all have to play our part, including the elites. And that has really been lost. And that’s why it’s got to come from the bottom up this time.

BILL MOYERS: But what do you think happened to diminish the enthusiasm for doing something about it, the attention from the press, the interest of the elite? What is it?

NAOMI KLEIN: I think we’re up against a very powerful lobby. And you know, this is the fossil fuel lobby. And they have every reason in the world to prevent this from being the most urgent issue on our agenda. And I think, you know, if we look at the history of the environmental movement, going back 25 years to when this issue really broke through, you know, when James Hansen testified before Congress, that–

BILL MOYERS: The NASA scientist, yeah.

NAOMI KLEIN: Exactly, our foremost climate scientist, and said, “I believe it is happening. And I believe it is human caused.” That was the moment where we could no longer deny that we knew, right? I mean, scientists actually knew what well beforehand. But that was the breakthrough moment. And that was 1988. And if we think about what else was happening in the late ’80s? Well, the Berlin Wall fell the next year. And the end of history was declared. And, you know, climate change in a sense, it hit us at the worst possible historical moment. Because it does require collective action, right? It does require that we, you, regulate corporations. That you get, you know, that you plan collectively as a society. And at the moment that it hit the mainstream, all of those ideas fell into disrepute, right? It was all supposed to be free market solutions. Governments were supposed to get out of the way of corporations. Planning was a dirty word, that was what communists did, right? Anything collective was a dirty word. Margaret Thatcher said, “There’s no such thing as society.”

Now if you believe that, you can’t do anything about climate change, because it is the essence of a collective problem. This is our collective atmosphere. We can only respond to this collectively. So the environmental movement responded to that by really personalizing the problem and saying, “Okay, you recycle. And you buy a hybrid car.” And treating this like this could or we’ll have business-friendly solutions like cap and trade and carbon offsetting. That doesn’t work. So that’s part of the problem. So you have this movement that every once in a while would rear up and people would get all excited and we’re really going to do something about this. And whether it was the Rio Summit or the Copenhagen Summit or that moment when Al Gore came out with Inconvenient Truth, but then it would just recede, because it didn’t have that collective social support that it needed.

And on top of that, you have, we’ve had this concerted campaign by the fossil fuel lobby to both buy off the environmental movement, to defame the environmental movement, to infiltrate the environmental movement, and to spread lies in the culture. And that’s what the climate denial movement has been doing so effectively.

BILL MOYERS: I read a piece just this week by the environmental writer Glenn Scherer. He took a look and finds that over the last two years, the lion’s share of the damage from extreme weather, floods, tornadoes, droughts, thunder storms, wind storms, heat waves, wildfires, has occurred in Republican-leaning red states. But those states have sent a whole new crop of climate change deniers to Congress.

NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah, someone’s going to have to explain Oklahoma to me, you know?

BILL MOYERS: My native state.

NAOMI KLEIN: My sister lives in Oklahoma. And, you know, it is so shocking that James Inhofe, the foremost climate denying senator is from the state that is so deeply climate effected. There was something, actually, I was– last year I covered the Heartland Conference, which is the annual confab for all the climate deniers. And James Inhofe was supposed to be the keynote speaker. And the first morning of the conference, there was lots of buzz. He’s the rock star among the climate deniers. Inhofe is coming, he’s opening up this conference, right? And the first morning the main conference organizer stands up at breakfast and lets loose the bad news that James Inhofe has called in sick and he can’t make it.

And it turns out that he had gone swimming in a lake filled with blue-green algae, which is actually a climate-related issue. When lakes get too warm, this blue-green algae spreads. And he had gone swimming. And he had gotten sick from the blue-green algae. So he actually arguably had a climate-related illness and couldn’t come to the climate change conference. But even though he was sick, he wrote a letter from his sickbed just telling them what a great job he was doing. So the powers of denial are amazingly strong, Bill. If you are deeply invested in this free-market ideology, you know, if you really believe with your heart and soul that everything public and anything the government does is evil and that, you know, our liberation will come from liberating corporations, then climate change fundamentally challenges your worldview, precisely because we have to regulate.

We have to plan. We can’t leave everything to the free market. In fact, climate change is, I would argue, the greatest single free-market failure. This is what happens when you don’t regulate corporations and you allow them to treat the atmosphere as an open sewer. So it isn’t just, “Okay, the fossil fuel companies want to protect their profits.” It’s that it’s that this science threatens a worldview. And when you dig deeper, when you drill deeper into those statistics about the drop in belief in climate change, what you see is that Democrats still believe in in climate change, in the 70th percentile. That whole drop of belief, drop off in belief has happened on the right side of the political spectrum. So the most reliable predictor of whether or not somebody believes that climate change is real is what their views are on a range of other political subjects. You know, what do you think about abortion? What is your view of taxes? And what you find is that people who have very strong conservative political beliefs cannot deal with this science, because it threatens everything else they believe.

BILL MOYERS: Do you really believe, are you convinced that there are no free-market solutions? There’s no way to let the market help us solve this crisis?

NAOMI KLEIN: No, absolutely the market can play a role. There are things that government can do to incentivize the free market to do a better job, yes. But is that a replacement for getting in the way, actively, of the fossil fuel industry and preventing them from destroying our chances of a future on a livable planet? It’s not a replacement.

We have to do both. Yes, we need these market incentives on the one hand to encourage renewable energy. But we also need a government that’s willing to say no. No, you can’t mine the Alberta tar sands and burn enough carbon that you will have game over for the climate as James Hansen has said.

BILL MOYERS: But I’m one of those who is the other end of the corporation. I mean, we had a crisis in New York the last two weeks. We couldn’t get gasoline for the indispensable vehicles that get us to work, get us to the supermarket, get us to our sick friends or neighbors. I mean, the point I’m trying to make is we are all the fossil fuel industry, are we not?

NAOMI KLEIN: You know, we often hear that. We often hear that we’re all equally responsible for climate change. And that it’s just the rules of supply and demand.

BILL MOYERS: I have two cars. I keep them filled with gasoline.

NAOMI KLEIN: But I think the question is, you know, if there was a fantastic public transit system that really made it easy for you to get where you wanted to go, would you drive less? So I don’t know about you, but I, you know, I certainly would.

BILL MOYERS: I mean, I use the subways all the time here.

NAOMI KLEIN: And if it was possible to recharge an electric vehicle, if it was as easy to do that as it is to fill up your car with gasoline, you know, if that electricity came from solar and wind, would you insist, “No, I want to fill my car with, you know, with dirty energy”? No, I don’t think you would. Because this is what I think we have expressed over and over again. We are willing to make changes. You know we recycle and we compost. We ride bicycles. I mean, there there’s actually been a tremendous amount of willingness and goodwill for people to change their behavior. But I think where people get demoralized is when they see, “Okay, I’m making these changes, but emissions are still going up, because the corporations aren’t changing how they do business.” So no, I don’t think we’re all equally guilty.

BILL MOYERS: President Obama managed to avoid the subject all through the campaign and he hasn’t exactly been leading the way.

NAOMI KLEIN: He has not been leading the way. And in fact, you know, he spent a lot of time on the campaign bragging about how much pipeline he’s laid down and this ridiculous notion of an all of the above energy strategy, as if you can, you know, develop solar and wind alongside more coal, you know, more oil, more natural gas, and it’s all going to work out in the end.

No, it doesn’t add up. And, you know, I think personally, I think the environmental movement has been a little too close to Obama. And, you know, we learned, for instance, recently, about a meeting that took place shortly after Obama was elected where the message that all these big green groups got was, “We don’t want to talk about climate change. We want to talk about green jobs and energy security.” And a lot of these big green groups played along. So I feel–

BILL MOYERS: You mean the big environmental groups?

NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah, big environmental groups went along with this messaging, talking about energy security, instead of talking about climate change, ’cause they were told that that wasn’t a winnable message. I just think it’s wrong. I think it’s bad strategy.

BILL MOYERS: He got reelected.

NAOMI KLEIN: He got, well, he got reelected, but you know what? I think he, I think Hurricane Sandy helped Obama get reelected.

BILL MOYERS: How so?

NAOMI KLEIN: Well, look at the Bloomberg endorsement that came at the last minute. I mean, Bloomberg endorsed Obama because of climate change. Because he believed that this was an issue that voters cared enough about that they would, that Independents would swing to Obama over climate change, and some of the polling absolutely supports this, that this was one of the reasons why people voted for Obama over Romney was that they were concerned about climate change and they felt that he was a better candidate on climate change.

The truth was, we didn’t have a good candidate. We had a terrible, terrible candidate on climate change, and we had a candidate on climate change who needs a lot of pressure. So I feel more optimistic than I did in 2008, because I think in 2008 the attitude of the environmental movement was, “Our guy just got in and we need to support him. And he’s going to give us the legislation that we, that we want. And we’re going to take his advice. And we’re going to be good little soldiers.”

And now maybe I’m being overly optimistic, but I think that people learned the lesson of the past four years. And people now understand that what Obama needs or what we need, forget what Obama needs, is a real independent movement with climate change at its center and that’s going to put pressure on the entire political class and directly on the fossil fuel companies on this issue. And there’s no waiting around for Obama to do it for you.

BILL MOYERS: Why would you think that the next four years of a lame duck president would be more successful from your standpoint than the first four years, when he’s looking to reelection?

NAOMI KLEIN: Well, I think on the one hand, we’re going to see more direct action. But the other strategy is to go where the problem is. And the problem is the companies themselves. And we’re launching the “Do the Math” tour which is actually trying to kick off a divestment movement. I mean, we’re going after these companies where it hurts, which is their portfolios, which is their stock price.

BILL MOYERS: You’re asking people to disinvest, to take their money out of, universities in particular, right? This is what happened during the fight against apartheid in South Africa and ultimately proved successful.

NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah, and this is, we are modeling it on the anti-apartheid divestment movement. And the reason it’s called “Do the Math” is because of this new body of research that came out last year. A group in Britain called “The Carbon Tracker Initiative.” And this is, you know, a fairly conservative group that addresses itself to the financial community. This is not, you know, sort of activist research. This is a group that identified a market bubble and were concerned about this meant to investors. So it’s a pretty conservative take on it. And what the numbers that they crunched found is that if we are going to ward off truly catastrophic climate change, we need to keep the increase, the temperature increase, below 2 degrees centigrade.

NAOMI KLEIN: The problem with that is that they also measured how much the fossil fuel companies and countries who own their own national oil reserves have now currently in their reserves, which means they have already laid claim to this. They already own it. It’s already inflating their stock price, okay? So how much is that? It’s five times more. So that means that the whole business model for the fossil fuel industry is based on burning five times more carbon than is compatible with a livable planet. So what we’re saying is, “Your business model is at war with life on this planet. It’s at war with us. And we need to fight back.”

So we’re saying, “These are rogue companies. And we think in particular young people whose whole future lies ahead of them have to send a message to their universities, who, and, you know, almost every university has a huge endowment. And there isn’t an endowment out there that doesn’t have holdings in these fossil fuel companies. And so young people are saying to the people who charged with their education, charged with preparing them for the outside world, for their future jobs, “Explain to me how you can prepare me for a future that with your actions you’re demonstrating you don’t believe in. How can you prepare me for a future at the same time as you bet against my future with these fossil fuel holdings? You do the math and you tell me.” And I think there’s a tremendous moral clarity that comes from having that kind of a youth-led movement. So we’re really excited about it.

BILL MOYERS: What do you mean rogue corporations? You’re talking about Chevron and Exxon-Mobil and BP and all of these huge capitalist or institutions.

NAOMI KLEIN: Well, rogue corporations, because their business model involves externalizing the price of their waste onto the rest of us. So their business model is based on not having to pay for what they think of as an externality, which is the carbon that’s spewed into the atmosphere that is warming the planet. And that price is enormous. We absolutely know that the future is going to be filled with many more such super storms and many more such costly, multibillion-dollar disasters. It’s already happening. Last year was– there were more billion-dollar disasters than any year previously. So climate change is costing us. And yet you see this squabbling at, you know, the state level, at the municipal level, over who is going to pay for this

NAOMI KLEIN: The public sector doesn’t have the money to pay for what these rogue corporations have left us with, the price tag of climate change. So we have to do two things. We have to make sure that it doesn’t get worse, that the price tag doesn’t get higher. And we need to get some of that money back, which means, you know, looking at issues like fossil fuel subsidies and, you know, to me, it’s so crazy. I mean, here we are post-Hurricane Sandy. Everyone is saying, “Well, maybe this is going to be our wakeup call.” And right now in New York City, the debate is over how much to increase fares in public transit. And they want to, the Metro Transit Authority wants to increase the price of riding the subway, you know, the price of riding the trains, quite a bit. And so how does this make sense? We’re supposedly having a wakeup call about climate change. And we’re making it harder for people to use public transit. And that’s because we don’t have the resources that we need.

BILL MOYERS: You’ve been out among the areas of devastation. Why?

NAOMI KLEIN: Well, for this book I’m currently writing about climate change and a documentary to go with it, so we were filming in the Rockaways, which is one of the hardest-hit areas and Staten Island and in Red Hook. And also in the relief hubs, where you see just a tremendous number of volunteers organized by, actually, organized by Occupy Wall Street. They call it Occupy Sandy.

BILL MOYERS: Really?

NAOMI KLEIN: Yes. And what I found is that people are—the generosity is tremendous, the humanity is tremendous. I saw a friend last night, and I asked her whether she’d been involved in the hurricane relief. And she said, “Yeah, I gave them my car. I hope I get it back. If you see it, tell me.” So people are tremendous.

BILL MOYERS: This means–

NAOMI KLEIN: So one of the things that you find out in a disaster is you really do need a public sector. It really important. And coming back to what we were talking about earlier, why is climate change so threatening to people on the conservative end of the political spectrum? One of the things it makes an argument for is the public sphere. You need public transit to prevent climate change. But you also need a public health care system to respond to it. It can’t just be ad hoc. It can’t just be charity and goodwill.

BILL MOYERS: When you use terms like “collective action,” “central planning,” you scare corporate executive and the American Enterprise Institute and The Heritage Foundation because they say you want to do away with capitalism.

NAOMI KLEIN: Well, first of all, I don’t use a phrase like “central planning.” I talk about planning, but I don’t think it should be central. And one of the things that one must admit when looking at climate change is that the only thing just as bad or maybe even worse for the climate than capitalism was communism. And when we look at the carbon emissions for the eastern bloc countries, they were actually, in some cases, worse than countries like Australia or Canada. So, let’s just call it a tie. So we need to look for other models. And I think there needs to be much more decentralization and a much deeper definition of democracy than we have right now.

BILL MOYERS: Decentralization of what, Naomi?

NAOMI KLEIN: Well, for instance, you know, if we think about renewable energy, well, one of the things that’s happened is that when you try to get wind farms set up, really big wind farms, there’s usually a lot of community resistance that’s happened in the United States. It’s happened in Britain. Where it hasn’t happened is Germany and Denmark. And the reason for that is that in those places you have movements that have demanded that the renewable energy be community controlled, not centrally planned, but community controlled. So that there’s a sense of ownership, not by some big, faceless state, but by the people who actually live in the community that is impacted.

BILL MOYERS: You’ve written that climate change has little to do with the state of the environment, but much to do with the state of capitalism and transforming the American economic system. And you see an opening with Sandy, right?

NAOMI KLEIN: I do see an opening, because, you know, whenever you have this kind of destruction, there has to be a reconstruction. And what I documented in “The Shock Doctrine” is that these right-wing think tanks, like the ones you named, like the American Enterprise Institute or the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, they historically have gotten very, very good at seizing these moments of opportunity to push through their wish list of policies.

And often their wish list of policies actually dig us deeper into crisis. If I can just– if you’ll bear with me, I’ll just give you one example. After Hurricane Katrina, there was a meeting at the Heritage Foundation, just two weeks after the storm hit. Parts of the city were still underwater. And there was a meeting, the “Wall Street Journal” reported on it. And I got the minutes from the meeting.

The heading was 31 free market solutions for Hurricane Katrina. And you go down the list and it was: and don’t reopen the public schools, replace the public schools with vouchers. And drill for oil in ANWAR, in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, more oil refineries. So what kind of free market solutions are these, right?

Here you have a crisis that was created by a collision between heavy weather (which may or may not have been linked to climate change, but certainly it’s what climate change looks like) colliding with weak infrastructure, because of years and years of neglect. And the free market solutions to this crisis are, “Let’s just get rid of the public infrastructure altogether and drill for more oil, which is the root cause of climate change.” So that’s their shock doctrine. And I think it’s time for a people’s shock.

BILL MOYERS: People’s shock?

NAOMI KLEIN: A people’s shock, which actually we’ve had before, as you know, where, you know, if you think about 1929 and the market shock, and the way in which the public responded. They wanted to get at the root of the problem. And they wanted to get away from speculative finance and that’s how we got some very good legislation passed in this country like Glass-Steagall, and much of the social safety net was born in that moment. Not by exploiting crisis to horde power for the few and to ram through policies that people don’t want, but to build popular movements and to really deepen democracy.

BILL MOYERS: Well, the main thesis of “Shock Doctrine,” which came out five years ago before the great crash was that disaster capitalism exploits crises in order to move greater wealth to the hands of the fewer and fewer people. You don’t expect those people to change their appetites do you or their ways do you, because we face a climate crisis?

NAOMI KLEIN: I don’t expect them to. I wrote “The Shock Doctrine” because I believe that we, I believed at the time that we didn’t understand this tactic. We didn’t understand that during times of crisis certain sectors of the business world and the political class take advantage of our disorientation in order to ram through these policies. And I believed, at the time, that if we understood it, you know, if we had a name for it, if we had a word, a language for it, then the next time they tried it, we would fight back. Because the whole tactic is about taking advantage of our disorientation in those moments of crisis. And the fact that we often can become childlike and look towards, you know, a supposed expert class and leaders to take care of us. And we become too trusting, frankly, during disasters.

BILL MOYERS: It used to be said that weather, now global warming, climate change, was the great equalizer. It affected rich and poor alike. You don’t think it does, do you?

NAOMI KLEIN: What I’m seeing. And I’ve seen this, you know–I’ve been tracking this now for about six years, more and more, there’s a privatization of response to disaster, where I think that wealthy people understand that, yes, we are going to see more and more storms. We live in a turbulent world. It’s going to get even more turbulent. And they’re planning. So you have, for instance private insurance companies now increasingly offer what they call a concierge service. The first company that was doing this was A.I.G. And in the midst of the California wildfires about six years ago, for the first time, you saw private firefighters showing up at people’s homes, spraying them in fire retardant, so that when the flames came, this house would stay. This mansion, usually, would be standing and the one next door might burn to the ground. So this is extraordinary. Because we would tend to think of, you know, firefighting. This is definitely, you know, a public good. This is definitely something that people get equally. But now we’re finding that even that there’s even a sort of two-tiering of protection from wildfires.

BILL MOYERS: Yeah, there was even a short-lived airline in Florida I read about that offered five-star evacuation service in events of hurricanes.

NAOMI KLEIN: After Hurricane Katrina a company in Florida saw a market opportunity. And they decided to offer a charter airline that would turn your hurricane into a luxury vacation. That was actually the slogan. They would let you know when a hurricane was headed for your area. They would pick you up in a limousine, drive you to the airport, and whisk you up. And they would make you five star hotel reservations at the destination of your choice. So, you know, why does a hurricane have to be bad news after all?

BILL MOYERS: And this kind of privatization is what you wrote about in “Shock Doctrine,” that privatization of resources, monopolization of resources by the rich, in times of crisis, further divide us as a society

NAOMI KLEIN: Absolutely. And, you know, one of the things about deregulated capitalism is that it is a crisis creation machine, you know? You take away all the rules and you are going to have serial crises. They may be economic crises, booms and busts. Or there will be ecological crises. You’re going to have both. You’re just going to have shock after shock after shock. And the more, the longer this goes on, the more shocks you’re going to have.

And the way we’re currently responding to it is that with each shock, we become more divided. And the more we understand that this is what the future looks like, the more those who can afford it protect themselves and buy their way out of having to depend on the public sector and therefore are less invested in these collective responses. And that’s why there has to be a whole other way of responding to this crisis.

BILL MOYERS: You wrote recently that climate change can be a historic moment to usher in the next great wave of progressive change.

NAOMI KLEIN: It can be and it must be. I mean, it’s our only chance. I believe it’s the biggest challenge humanity has ever faced. And we’ve been kidding ourselves about what it’s going to take to get our emissions down to the extent that they need to go down. I mean, you talk about 80 percent lowering emissions. I mean, that is such a huge shift.

And I think that’s part of the way in which, and I don’t mean to beat up on the big environmental groups, because they do fantastic work. But I think that part of the reason why public opinion on this issue has been so shaky is that it doesn’t really add up to say to the public, you know, “This is a huge problem. It’s Armageddon.” You know, you have “Inconvenient Truth.” You scare the hell out of people. But then you say, “Well, the solution can be very minor. You can change your light bulb. And we’ll have this complicated piece of legislation called cap and trade that you don’t really understand, but that basically means that companies here can keep on polluting, but they’re going to trade their carbon emissions. And, you know, somebody else is going to plant trees on the other side of the planet and they’ll get credits.”

And people look at that going, “Okay, if this was a crisis, wouldn’t be we be responding more aggressively? So wouldn’t we be responding in a way that you have, we’ve responded in the past during war times, where there’s been, you know, that kind of a collective sense of shared responsibility?” Because I think when we really do feel that sense of urgency about an issue, and I believe we should feel it about climate change, we are willing to sacrifice. We have shown that in the past. But when you hold up a supposed emergency and actually don’t ask anything of people, anything major, they actually think you might be lying, that it might not really be an emergency after all. So if this is an emergency, we have to act like it. And yeah, it is a fundamental challenge. But the good news is, you know, we get to have a future for our kids.

Obama Calls Out GOP on Benghazi Smears, Pushes House on Middle-Class Tax Break

Fiscal Cliff Scare Talk Follows Shock Doctrine Script

• 

• (Photo: Ruth Fremson / The New York Times)The Right just suffered a defeat, the middle continues to weaken amid elusive economic recovery and the resurgent Left in Europe grows and strengthens. Many conditions for resurgence of OWS or its reincarnation are in place.

  Capitalism’s crises, especially when deep and long-lasting like today’s, polarize its politics. Left and right are reinvigorated by improved opportunities to advance their respective economic agendas. The middle, long in power and deeply complicit with capitalism, gets blamed for the crisis and its social costs. The resurgent right uses the crisis to advance classic demands on behalf of business and the rich for yet more wealth, income, and freedom from government regulation and taxes. The resurgent left uses the crisis to argue that capitalism’s injustice, inefficiency and waste show the need for transition beyond it. The middle tries to hold on, hoping that capitalism’s intrinsic instability, its recurring cycles, will produce an upturn before the people abandon the middle. Such an upturn could “stabilize” politics, undermine the appeal of the Left and Right, and be credited to the middle’s policies. This struggle of right, left and middle provides an entry point into the political economy of Obama’s re-election.

  Political polarization caused by capitalist crises is clearest today in the economy most damaged, so far. Greece’s two main parties of the middle alternated power for decades, but they suddenly dropped to a combined 35 percent of the vote in the 2012 elections. Left and right parties surged into sudden political prominence. They are winning mass support as people abandon the political middle. They resent the crisis and bailouts chiefly of banks, corporations, stock markets and the rich. They hate austerity policies that shift the costs of crisis and bailouts onto them by cutting public jobs, services and supports just when they are most needed.

  A parallel drama unfolds in the US. The crisis since 2007 produced a resurgent right in the tea parties. They blamed the crisis on poor people abusing credit, immigrants abusing US law and institutions and governmental economic interventions. A few criticized Wall Street, but quieted when reminded about the Right’s chief financiers. Thus the resurgent right married social concerns (oppositions to abortion, birth control, gun control, church-state separation, etc.) to enthusiastic support for capitalism.

  Tea party members expressed that marriage by reviving old tirades against “socialism.” They secured financing not only by carefully avoiding any critique of capitalism, but also by insisting that capitalists would resume prosperity and growth if freed of government regulations and taxes. The right sought to use the crisis to advance the classic capitalist agenda of maximizing wealth, income and freedoms for the corporate elites and the richest 1 percent to 10 percent of individuals.

  The Left in the US lacks the Right’s financing opportunities. It also inherits the last 50 years of state persecutions and corporate attacks that destroyed once-strong political parties (populist, socialist and communist) and labor unions’ former militancy, size and power. A resurgent left slowly and arduously re-gathers people and resources to organize itself into a social force. Occupy Wall Street (OWS) thus emerged only years after the tea parties in the US, and after a resurgent left arose in Europe. OWS was far less organized and financed than either of them. Its nonetheless astonishing growth demonstrated the vulnerability of the middle (traditional Republican and Democratic establishments) and the powerful potential of a new left.

  The middle, as servant/guarantor of capitalism, fundamentally opposes an anti-capitalist left. The middle likewise fears that the Right’s program could generate a popular backlash threatening capitalism. Occupying the middle in US politics (as traditional Republicans and Democrats always have), Obama’s job is to protect the economic status quo and manage crisis turbulence like a steady pilot. He works to undermine the appeal and/or organizations of both resurgent right and left while waiting/hoping for the capitalist cycle’s next upturn. Upturns happen when wages and costs fall far enough to offer profit opportunities that induce capitalists to invest again.

  Obama offers “hope and wait” for an upturn while not significantly increasing taxes or regulations for corporations and the rich. That is what the political middle does. Obama’s slight increase in regulation (e.g. Dodd-Frank) and merely talking about raising the richest individuals’ tax rates further galvanized the Right and its financing. Obama had taken such small steps to counteract left accusations that the costs of crisis and bailouts were being shifted onto average people through mass unemployment, home foreclosures and austerity policies. Crises polarize by making the political middle increasingly difficult to hold.

  Because of the tea parties’ size and financing, Obama tried to accommodate, moderate and compromise more than repress them. That cost him the enthusiasm of his supporters since 2008. Because of the ultimately greater threat of OWS’s mass appeal and because the OWS organization and financing were weak, Obama repressed more than accommodated it (coordinated mayors bulldozed encampments, police harassed, etc.). That produced a deeper enmity whose consequences will soon unfold.

  The resurgent right captured control of a significant portion of the Republican Party. It forced the Romney campaign to waver between middle and right. Thereby the Right’s interpretation of the causes and cures for the economic crisis became the major challenge to the middle. While Romney wavered, Obama championed the middle. Meanwhile, a repressed OWS (and others such as the Green Party) could not make candidates contend with interpretations of the crisis as the product of a capitalism sacrificing the 99% for the benefit of the 1%.

  The 2012 election thus tested what the resurgent right could achieve when functioning as a massively-funded, major component of Romney’s campaign. Obama’s victory shows that the Right lost to the middle; too many voters rejected its analyses and programs. Without a seriously contending left, the 2012 majority preferred the middle, despite having lost confidence in it continuously since 2008.

  The crisis continues and may worsen over the next year or two. The economic decline that helped produce OWS has deepened (e.g. average real weekly wages fell 2.5 per cent from October 2010 to October 2012). The Right just suffered a defeat. The middle weakens further as economic recovery remains elusive. The resurgent left in Europe grows and strengthens. Many conditions for resurgence of OWS or its reincarnation are in place.

Hopes for Obama’s Second Term

The Vatican Hates Gays

And why limit the comparing same-sex unions to polygamy? Why not any crazy-ass combination at all? In September, Australian senator Cory Bernardi resigned after remarking, “The next step, quite frankly, is having three people or four people that love each other being able to enter into a permanent union endorsed by society – or any other type of relationship … There are even some creepy people out there … [who] say it is OK to have consensual sexual relations between humans and animals. Will that be a future step? In the future, will we say: ‘These two creatures love each other, and maybe they should be able to be joined in a union’? I think that these things are the next step.” And last year, in  a piece called “If same-sex marriage, why not polygamy?” in the American Conservative, Rod Dreher facetiously argued, ”Why, for example, should a brother and sister who have agreed to undergo sterilization as a condition of their marital union be denied the right to marry, if that is their wish?” That right there is the template for How These People Think. Civil rights? What’s next? Dogs and cats, living together! Mass hysteria!

To those who think a loving union between two people is like having a compound full of sister wives or whatever, let me humbly suggest you dial it down a bit. As Andrew Sullivan long ago pleaded, ”Spare us this bizarre point that no new line can be drawn in access to marriage — or else everything is up for grabs and, before we know where we are, men will be marrying their dogs. It is intellectually laughable.” In a Washington Post essay last month, Emory University religion and law scholar John Witte Jr. explained — using evidence and science! — that nature suggests polygamous arrangements produce “rivalry and discord in the home,” in which “children have to work hard to get attention, affection and resources which are dissipated.” He added, “Women and children of modern polygamy are often poorly educated, impoverished, and chronically dependent on welfare.” Polygamy produces scarcity and competition. Same-sex relationships don’t. Maybe that’s why there’s no huge polygamy pride parade every June.

Nobody expects the Catholic Church, with its long-standing history of fear and animosity toward gays, as well as its sneaky track record of blaming them for its own most despicable crimes, to go all rainbow flag in the imminent future. Opening hearts and changing old norms is going to take a whole lot of time and incredible effort. But it’s encouraging that here in the U.S., it was Catholics who helped push Barack Obama toward victory last week, defeating Mitt Romney by 50 to 47 percent. Catholics who believe in marriage equality – oh, and the reproductive rights of our fellow citizens.

So while here at home bishops may rail “against all forms of its weakening” matrimony, and back at the Vatican they may try to instill fear that equal rights will lead to an outbreak of harems, those of us here in the land called Reality aren’t sweating it. Frankly, if you’re looking for a reason for opposing marriage equality and the basic rights and dignity of your fellow humans, you might as well just stick with, “I don’t know, it just makes me feel icky, I guess.” Same-sex marriage doesn’t lead to polygamy. And, guess what? It doesn’t erode hetero unions either. And if you want to suggest otherwise, by all means, look up from your lazy reasoning and just try to prove it.

Now that President Obama has secured a second term, the official Washington speculation machine — and, no, that doesn’t actually exist (or does it?) — has turned to the heavy turnover expected in his Cabinet.

While only Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has made clear she plans to leave early in the Obama second term, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner has also clearly suggested he is on his way out, and Attorney General Eric Holder has been noncommittal of late about his future plans. CIA Director David Petraeus’ stunning resignation on Friday creates another high-profile opening (although not a Cabinet-level position) for the president to fill.

While those inner Cabinet jobs will draw the lion’s share of attention, it’s likely there will be more turnover in secondary Cabinet positions too, if for no other reason than the Obama Cabinet has seen historically low levels of turnover in the first term. One example: The Commerce Department has lacked a top official since the resignation of John Bryson following a car accident in June.

Below is a baseline handicapping of who might step into the major Cabinet jobs when they come open. Remember: The choice is ultimately up to Obama and no one else, which makes much of the talk about whom he might pick decidedly speculative. But, that’s never stopped us before! Away we go!

* State: Following in the footsteps of Clinton, one of the best-known and most well-respected politicians/diplomats in the world, is no easy task. (Clinton continues to play somewhat coy about what she’ll do after State but has left little doubt she’s leaving as the country’s top diplomat.)  Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry clearly pines for the job, but to pick Kerry would mean a special election to replace him in the Bay State in early 2013 with soon-to-be former senator Scott Brown (R) lurking. Democrats’ surprising gains in the Senate may give Obama the wiggle room to pick Kerry — special election be damned! — but it’s clearly a consideration. Other names mentioned include U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice and National Security Adviser Tom Donilon.

* Treasury: Given the still-struggling state of the economy, Obama’s pick to succeed Geithner could well be the most important one he makes heading into a second term. White House chief of staff Jack Lew seems to have the inside track, but if he is chosen, Obama would have to find a new chief — his fourth during his time in office. Former Clinton Administration official — and two-time failed North Carolina Senate candidate — Erskine Bowles appears to be a rising choice thanks to his work on the eponymous debt commission.

* Justice: Holder’s unwillingness to commit to a future in the Cabinet coupled with the stress that comes with being among the most high profile — if not the highest profile — member of any Cabinet has led many to conclude he is on his way out. If that happens, Department of Homeland Security’s Janet Napolitano would badly want the job and has a resume — elected to two terms as governor of Arizona, former state attorney general — that would strongly recommend her. Of course, putting Napolitano at Justice would create another opening at DHS for the president to fill.  Other names mentioned include Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick and Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse. Aides to Patrick and Whitehouse both deny their bosses want the job but that, of course, is standard operating procedure in the Cabinet shuffle.

* Defense: Leon Panetta split time during Obama’s first term — serving as CIA Director and then Secretary of Defense. There’s widespread speculation that he wants to return to his native California sometime in the early(ish) part of 2013. If Panetta does head west, two names are regarded as the leading replacements: former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy and Deputy Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter. If Flournoy is the pick, she would be the first female Secretary of Defense ever. (For more on Flournoy, read Emily Wax’s 2011 profile of her.)

Obama wins Florida: Florida was officially called for Obama on Saturday, officially handing him a 332-206 electoral vote win.

The call wasn’t surprising, given Obama held a small but firm lead in Florida ever since Election Day, but it does mean he swept basically every tossup state in the country on Tuesday and has a sizable Electoral College win to show for it.

Obama came just 33 electoral votes shy of his 2008 showing, when he also carried Indiana, North Carolina and one electoral vote in Nebraska.

Fixbits:

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) says Republicans lost because they didn’t explain what they’re for.

Bill Kristol becomes the latest conservative to call for Republicans to budge on taxes.

Top Obama adviser David Axelrod says he likes what he’s hearing from House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio).

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) says she got no advance notice of Petraeus’s resignation and admission of an affair.

Sources tell ABC that Petraeus has told people close to him that his affair with Paula Broadwell started after he left the army in August 2011.

Former congressman Jay Inslee (D) was declared the winner of the Washington state governor’s race on Saturday.

Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) trails by more than 2,000 votes in the final count from Florida’s 18th district, a margin that is outside the bounds for a recount. But his campaign is still exploring legal avenues.

Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr.’s (D-Ill.) plea deal could include jail time and his resignation.

Must-reads:

“FBI probe of Petraeus triggered by e-mail threats from biographer, officials say” — Sari Horwitz and Greg Miller, Washington Post

“The Sins Of General David Petraeus” — Michael Hastings, BuzzFeed

“Christian Right Failed to Sway Voters on Issues” — Laurie Goodstein, New York Times

Watch Bill Maher on Election 2012: ‘White People Vote For White People Like It’s Going Out Of Style’

MSNBC Making Moves Against Fox, While Right-Wingers Revolt Against Conservative Media

America: Love It Or Be Left Behind

Shameless Disaster Capitalism: How Companies Are Already Planning to Get Rich Off Superstorm Sandy

Election Day finally arrives in America and whichever candidate emerges victorious will inherit a presidency that is sure to be a decisive one given what is at stake. To the careful observer of US political trajectory, two issues stand out as the most consequential in regards to the security and wellbeing of not only the domestic population, but the rest of the world as well.  These are anthropogenic global warming and uranium enrichment in Iran. The first issue is significant due to its uncontroversial implications for human catastrophe if left unchecked.  The second, because of the financial and social burdens of possible military escalation which, given the players involved, could trigger nuclear disaster. The ambiguous manner in which these subjects are treated in the public arena reveals much about the intentions behind current policy.

Challenging conventional wisdom about climate change

Most Americans that step outside and/or watch TV know that these are major issues.  However, the reasons for their importance are often omitted from public discussion as was made clear in the recent presidential debates.  Moreover, President Obama’s virtual silence on the climate issue has upset many now disillusioned by the failure of actions to match the clean energy sentiments he voiced in 2008.

Furthermore, climate skepticism is given an unusual level of prominence in US press by international standards as revealed by a recent study published by an Oxford University researcher.  The study, which compared articles from The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal to equivalent newspapers in Brazil, China, France, India, and the UK, concluded that there is “evidence for seeing a greater presence in the US media of the sort of scepticism [sic] which strongly attacks the scientific legitimacy of climate change policy proposals compared to all the other five countries.”

Action on climate change is further constrained by the political context within which mainstream politicians operate. Writing in the New York Times, Scott Shane recently observed that “in the current fiscal environment, promising an ambitious effort to reduce poverty or counter global warming might imply big new spending, which is practically and politically anathema.”  As Shane writes, “any candidate troubled by how the United States lags behind its peers in health or education has plenty of advisers and consultants to warn him never to mention it on the stump”.

Despite the silence from politicians and the steady stream of propaganda from the climate denial front, a recent report published by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication found that a large majority (74%) of the American population agree that global warming is affecting weather in the United States.  Furthermore, this number is up by 5 points since Spring 2012.  In other words, unusually warm months and frequent droughts are not passing unnoticed. The problem is that the connection to human activity is not being made as often as it should be.  Recent Pew polling shows that 42% of Americans acknowledge the human origin of global warming (incidentally, the numbers are 18% and 63% for Romney and Obama supporters respectively). The data indicate that though people are recognizing that the weather is becoming increasingly abnormal, they hesitate to draw anthropogenic conclusions despite the scientific consensus.

This comes as less of a surprise, however, when we consider the power of the interests driving the debate. An American Petroleum Institute strategy memo famously published in the New York Times in 1998: “Victory will be achieved when average citizens ‘understand’ (recognize) uncertainties in climate science…[and] media coverage reflects balance on climate science and recognition of the validity of viewpoints that challenge the current ‘conventional wisdom’”. This is still the strategy of Big Oil today. Take, for example, a report on climate change authored by Patrick Michaels of the Cato Institute in October 2012. Some of its “key findings” include “Impacts of observed climate change have little national significance;” “Sea level rises caused by global warming are easily adapted to;” “Policies enacted by the developed world will have little effect on global temperature” (10). The Cato Institute was co-founded by Charles Koch, CEO of Koch Industries Inc., an industry giant in oil refining and associated manufacturing. He and his brother, David, remain major shareholders at Cato. Furthermore, the author Pat Michaels admitted to 40% of his work being funded by the petroleum industry in a CNN interview with Fareed Zakaria.

Subverting Iranian autonomy

So even though everybody’s frightened about bizarre weather events, our leaders and media outlets encourage uncertainty and confusion.  In other words, you might be worried about the future, but you have to deal with your own assumptions about what the problem really is.  On the other hand, uncertainty is not the tactic of choice when it comes to the Iran problem and the very real possibility of war. A singular perspective dominates: that Iran’s enrichment program is for the sole purpose of building a bomb to use against Israel or facilitate terrorism against the West.  This undoubtedly terrifying prospect has become a dogma of U.S. (and Israeli) policymakers.

This dogma, however, remains unconfirmed and questionable despite several investigations. A Reuters release in March put it succinctly: “The United States, European allies, and even Israel generally agree on three things about Iran’s nuclear program: Tehran does not have a bomb, has not decided to build one, and is probably years away from having a deliverable nuclear warhead”. Even Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta conceded to the Senate Budget Committee that “our intelligence makes clear that they haven’t made the decision to develop a nuclear weapon.” All of this is consistent with Iran’s repeated claims that their enrichment program is solely for civilian objectives and that it is well within its right to pursue such a program as a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty and member of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Regardless, the hardliners insist that possessing offensive capacities is the eventual goal.

Why would they pursue nuclear weapons?  Here we can make educated guesses by looking at the available data.  A survey of Arab public opinion published in March 2012 revealed that a large majority believes Israel and the United States to be the greatest threats to peace while only 5% believed Iran to be most threatening.  Furthermore, they opine that since Israel, the chief harasser of Iran, itself possesses nuclear weapons, then Iran, too, has a right to possess them.

The idea that Iran would seek to possess a nuclear weapon as a deterrent and neutralizer of Western belligerence is not particularly novel and is understandable given the constant hostility perceived by the regional population. As recently pointed out by Glenn Greenwald in the Guardian, the security and autonomy afforded by nuclear weapons is what is most unsettling to US policymakers.  The idea that Iran would use them offensively is highly implausible from a strategic standpoint. Doing so would surely invite a military retaliation on a scale that would certainly dwarf the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Even if Iran survived as a nation, a regime change would undoubtedly occur.

Regardless, the US and Israel have repeatedly threatened to attack if Iran does not scale down its enrichment program In both countries, threats of unilateral action are in sharp opposition to public opinion showing how dismissive state leaders have become: 70% in the U.S. and 61% in Israel. Furthermore, 51% of Americans oppose a military strike even with UN authorization. Perhaps the most notable finding, however, is that the percentage of Americans that consider Iran’s nuclear program a threat has dropped 22 percentage points since its peak in 2002. Not only does the public not want war, the number of people convinced that Iran’s enrichment program is a threat has been steadily declining. The reason could be that Iran’s behavior has not been particularly hostile since 2002. As it happens, we find in some cases that their lack of hostility is actually met with confusion and apprehension by US/Israeli elites.

A recent New York Times article is particularly revealing: “Israel’s defense minister [Ehud Barak] said Tuesday that the country had interpreted Iran’s conversion of some enriched uranium to fuel rods for civilian use as evidence that Iran had delayed ambitions to build a nuclear weapon”. Note that Iran’s conversion to fuel rods is in perfect agreement with what they have repeatedly claimed to be doing: enriching uranium for civilian purposes in accord with the Non-Proliferation agreements. However, Barak’s interviewer soon after wrote in The Daily Telegraph that “Iran’s decision to convert much of its stockpile of 20 per cent enriched uranium into harmless fuel rods” suggests that Ayatollah Khameini could be “more cautious than we think” and “is nervous and feeling the pressure.” Perhaps by accident, he appears to violate US/Israeli dogma when he wonders whether “the ultimate destination of Iran’s nuclear programme [is] still an open question?” (20).

What is the Supreme Leader of Iran “feeling the pressure” of? It goes unspoken that the US is already waging war with Iran through cyber attacks and economic sanctions that have devastated the country.  Though it has become increasingly clear that Tehran will not budge, the population continues to take the beating.  The annual inflation rate is over 20%—possibly even double that—while food prices and unemployment have skyrocketed. In a recent letter to the New York Times, an Israeli citizen writes: “These sanctions are affecting at least 50 million women and children” and asks, with reason, “Isn’t this a form of collective punishment that might be considered a war crime under the Geneva convention?”.

Clearly the US will go to great lengths to prevent an autonomous, secure Iran. To understand why autonomy in the Middle East is so threatening a prospect, we must consider the importance of regional control to the US. Relinquishing control would enable independent development and/or allow adjacent super powers – Russia and China – to become the primary enforcers and thereby increase their global influence.  Further, nuclear security would grant the current Iranian regime more control over its own energy resources which could be used to effectively compete with US clients in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Afghanistan. It is in this context that Israel serves its most useful function as a U.S. satellite presence in the region.  Its high-tech industry, strategic location, and cultural orientation are what make it “our natural ally.”   And as long as Iran is perceived to pose an “existential threat” to the United States’ enforcer in the Middle East, the hawks will not put down the drum.

The war games cannot continue

The election campaign and especially the presidential debates have made clear how necessary mythology and illusion are to economic security.  If the reality of anthropogenic global warming were to become a national truism, then we may begin to question the value of our military exploits in the Middle East.  Both candidates want to take steps to ensure the flow of oil and profits into US pipelines but neither want to discuss the irreversible damage further military conflict and carbon-intensive activity could do to the economy and to the environment.  Obviously the U.S. cannot relinquish its influence in the region and thereby forfeit its substantial leverage over adjacent superpowers. However, a multilateral diplomatic solution to this obvious dilemma simply will not be discussed or considered.

By focusing on the “threat” posed by Iran, the United States political apparatus is able to channel public concern in a way that justifies aggressive tactics. As long as the population is sufficiently misinformed and fearful about Iran’s nuclear program, then our military presence in the region can be scaled up conveniently — given a fitting pretext — without significant domestic opposition which is absolutely critical at this time to challenge the oil-based destruction of the environment.

More broadly, it appears that the only rational course of action is substantial public activism to redirect government intervention – not only to promote growth in the clean energy sector, but also to reign in the military-industrial complex behind fossil fuels. Though government has historically been complicit in escalating the climate-petroleum doom cycle (e.g. military exploits in the Middle East), it is the only mechanism by which the public can initiate change. To accomplish this, the propaganda campaigns against Iran and anthropogenic global warming need to be properly understood so that the right steps can be taken to circumnavigate them avoid disaster.

In this respect, Hurricane Sandy and its associated tragedies have been a slap in the face to the American people. Consequently, a recent BusinessWeek cover story titled “It’s Global Warming, Stupid” acknowledged the “success of climate deniers in framing action on global warming as inimical to economic growth,” but noted that “the US can’t afford regular Sandy-size disruptions in economic activity”. This is sadly and undoubtedly true not just for the US, but for all nations and all of humanity.