Local history may be about to repeat itself in suburban St. Louis, as another well-established African-American neighborhood faces extinction by buyout, demolition and commercial development. This time, it’s an area of the inner-ring suburb called University City. That municipality’s city council is proposing a $70-million tax-increment-financing plan [TIF] to entice a developer to transform a 50-acre area via a $170 million project. Currently occupying the redevelopment area is an diverse array of successful, locally owned, small businesses—including Japanese, Jamaican, Vietnamese and Korean restaurants, and other enterprises. Behind the shops are neighborhoods of small, 1950s-vintage homes, many of which are owner-occupied by people of diverse ethnicity.

St. Louis has seen this movie before. In the 1950’s, an African-American residential enclave fell victim to an ambitious plan for the suburban City of Clayton, which transformed itself from a quiet County seat into a virtual second downtown for the St. Louis area. In the 1980’s, the City of Kinloch—founded in 1948 as Missouri’s first incorporated African-American city—lost a vast chunk of its territory, and later, most of its population, to the expansion of St. Louis’ airport. In the late 1990’s, another mostly African-American area, known as Hadley Township, was largely demolished and reincarnated as a Wal-Mart development. More recently, most of the remainder of Hadley Township disappeared as well, to be replaced by a Menard’s hardware super center. Nearby, the traditionally black neighborhood called Evans Place vaporized when a developer paved it over for the Brentwood Promenade, anchored by Target, Trader Joe’s, Bed Bath & Beyond and other big boxes. And, about five miles away, is a development known as Kirkwood Commons, which clear- cut a huge swath of an historically significant African-American neighborhood called Meacham Park.

So, it comes as no surprise that yet another African-American neighborhood is now up for grabs. Supporters of the development—primarily members of University City’s City Council— say it will bring a “pot of money” to University City’s coffers, which can be used, in turn, to help homeowners in other deteriorating neighborhoods improve their properties, and upgrade infrastructure. Opponents object to the destruction of established, affordable neighborhoods, the demolition of locally owned businesses, and the notion of anchoring the project with a big-box store—presumably Costco—in a city  with a decades-old track record of failing big box stores. “You don’t build up a city by tearing it down,” they say in their anti-TIF literature.

University City officials want the project completed by sometime in 2020. Getting there could be problematic. A public meeting held this evening drew an overflow crowd of about 500 University City residents and business owners. After less than 20 minutes of presentations by city officials, members of the audience—already annoyed by an inadequate sound system and an overcrowded venue—began shouting out questions and criticisms. Before the meeting began, at least 50 people put their names on a speaker’s list. [Full disclosure: I left the meeting when audience members began to break protocol with angry comments. Clearly, the rest of the meeting was almost sure to be loud and contentious.] It was.

So, while the TIF commission came into the public meeting leaning toward support of the project, getting fully to “yes” is probably going to be a rocky road.

Whether this development proposal succeeds or not, the underlying question remains: Why do these projects seem to occur so frequently in African-American neighborhoods? It’s not coincidence. A 2014 report, entitled “For the Sake of All,“ laid out, in great detail, the governmental policies, discriminatory mortgage-lending practices, and real-estate-industry behaviors that intentionally created racial segregation patterns in the St. Louis area over many years. Undoubtedly, those machinations factored in to the concentration of African-Americans into certain areas in the region and to the devaluation that has attracted commercial re-developers through the years.

A 2018 update to the first report, entitled “Dismantling the Divide,” proposes strategies that could help reverse the entrenched patterns of racial segregation that plague the St. Louis region. And today, in an op-ed published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Jason Purnell, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, and project director for “Dismantling the Divide,” called the University City TIF proposal—if done thoughtfully and innovatively— an opportunity for positive change:

This proposed development holds the chance for University City leaders to distinguish themselves as innovators regarding racial equity, inclusion and fair housing. Before granting a TIF, they could require the developer to sign off on a community benefits agreement with the residents and other neighborhood stakeholders. This sound policy decision would require [the developer] Novus to meet with these groups and negotiate requirements for the development, which could include the creation of appropriate affordable housing and retail spaces so existing businesses and residents can continue to call the area home.

In the 1960s and 1970s, University City distinguished itself as a bulwark against “block-busting” and white flight. Residents formed the Freedom of Residence Committee that “pressed for fair housing and inclusion of African-Americans in University City so they weren’t steered out of the local real estate market, and whites weren’t steered away from integrating neighborhoods,” writes Purnell.

Can U. City revive its reputation as an innovator in addressing the racial divide?  The answer to that question may well lie in how it deals  with the proposed TIF project.

The post Death by TIF: Another African-American neighborhood faces extinction appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Consider two anecdotes:

The First: Recently I tried to get into the mind of a Trump supporter that had posted a status about the liberal media and their unfair treatment of the president. I had a logical path to lead this person on, thinking I had a silver bullet: we both agree there is bias in journalism. But if journalism is truly degenerate these days, why and when did it happen? I argued that the degeneracy of the press could be traced to Reagan-era media consolidation and privatization, which caused the rise of news-as-entertainment. Outlets like MSNBC and Huffington Post, I said, were merely marketed to liberals; they did not represent substantive left-wing thought. And Fox News is worse, peddling outright lies like the “Puppermaster” fantasy of George Soros, or the birther myth. So you shouldn’t blame Rachel Maddow for liberal “fake news”; Reagan, Milton Friedman, and Roger Ailes are the real culprits. Checkmate, or so I thought.

Nope, he said. The problem isn’t capitalism’s inevitable drive towards marketizing everything. The problem is liberal cynicism, “the media”, broadly construed, lying in order to bring down a man they considered a Nazi. My pro-Trump acquaintance acknowledged that the liberal media thought it was doing the right thing by demonizing Trump. But he was certain they were motivated by pure, hateful ideology.

The Second: R.L. Stephens recently came out with an amazing critique of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between The World And Me. Coates’ critically acclaimed book is a long-form essay on how he sees racism in the United States and the world. What Stephens takes issue with is Coates’ framing of racism as a force of nature, not a historical, class-based process: “One cannot subpoena an earthquake”, Coates writes. He proposes no solution, positing essentially that white people must self-reflect to the point where they are “woke” enough not to be racist. Stephens, on the other hand, writes that

The racialized tragedies faced daily by the masses require us to embrace class struggle, not       Coates’s demobilizing metaphysical maxims about how white people “must ultimately stop     themselves”…the only way to defeat racism was to fight it, every step of the way.

What tied these two incidents together in my mind was the implicit or explicit rejection of material causes for events. The pro-Trump guy from above could not fathom that the ideology he hated had its roots in capitalism, the economic system he loved; Ta-Nehisi Coates chooses to describe racism as an almost mystical force rather than the product of early capitalism’s desire for free labor and its many ramifications. Neither seems to be able to tie their abstract problems to the concrete reality of economic and social life, or propose a decent plan for dealing with said problems.

This fairy-tale of wicked ideologues is increasingly common across the discourse. At its root is a rejection of materialism and material conditions. Rather than acknowledge that ideology has its roots in history and economics, and is not simply the result of cabals of like-minded individuals enforcing their will upon the world.

The philosopher Hegel insisted that ideas and clashing ideologies propelled history forward; Marx and Engels said famously that they “found Hegel on his head” and “flipped him over”. In other words, materialism here refers not to avarice or selfishness but to an analytical frame that views history as the result of economic and material forces, not a battle of ideas.

Ideology, particularly American reactionism, is rooted in material conditions: many fundamentalist Christian strains grew out of rejection of the New Deal; the adding of “under god” to the pledge of allegiance was aimed at countering godless communism (thought the pledge itself was written by socialist Francis Bellamy; modern conservatives use abortion as a wedge issue to divide Left-leaning voters. In each case ideology served a particular function for the ruling class, strengthening and consolidating their sway on society.

My pro-Trump friend realized that a “liberal media” exists, but couldn’t conceptualize that it’s societal function might be to serve as the liberal wing of a capitalist state, and to make its owners money. Coates details in exquisite language the abject misery inflicted upon black Americans, but seems to provide nebulous solutions: White Americans should engage in rigorous self-criticism, but interracial mass politics is off the table, or ignored.

When presented with irrational ideological conclusions, the answer is not to respond with more dogma. Rather, presenting material conditions and solutions may dispel the smoke of vicious belief. That is the thesis of the Sanders crowd: Clinton ran on the phrase, “they go low, we go high” to indicate a campaign centered on national honor and decorum; they should have said, “when they go low, we provide material solutions to your problems, like free healthcare, education, an end to corporate dominance, and the empowerment of the working class”. To be fair, Clinton’s slogan was probably more attractive than mine.

But we’ve lost that frame of analysis. Postmodernism, and the overwhelming onslaught of modern mass media have us looking at Twitter and Facebook for the reasons behind things. This means my pro-Trump friend thinks posting about liberal bias is a crucial part of politics. Ta-Nehisi Coates seems to think that cultural critiques of racism and endless talk of “bodies” is a crucial part of anti-racist struggle. Not to suggest that Coates is equally incorrect: He’s a great writer with an eloquence I envy, and I think that Between The World And Me has given a lot of people a lot to think about. But I see a common thread of politics and the struggle for justice reduced to analysis of culture.

It seems likely that center-left liberals and far-right conservatives both subscribe to Milo Yiannopolis’ thesis: Politics is downstream of culture.

The first step in defeating Trump and company is to understand that they are not evil for the sake of it, and they are not evil because of their uncouthness. They are evil because they are the result of a decades-long movement on the right towards a brutal variant of state capitalism and xenophobia.

The defeat of the right-wing ideologues currently running the country will not come when we “stand together”, “learn to love one another”, or any such amorphous truism. It will come when millions of working- and middle-class Americans band together to enact a specific progressive agenda.

The post Material Conditions First! appeared first on Occasional Planet.

It looks like Trump-appointee Ajit Pai over at the FCC is setting his sights on unraveling regulations that guarantee net neutrality.

This radical change would mark a reversal of strong net-neutrality protections put into place during the Obama administration by former FCC chairman Tom Wheeler. The history of how open Internet advocates won the first-round fight for net neutrality and defeated paid prioritization is revealing. After initial missteps in 2014, when Wheeler’s proposal to allow companies like Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon to create pay-to-play fast lanes caused massive online protests and pushback from the tech industry, the future of the open Internet seemed assured. At the time, open-Internet advocates cheered Wheeler on when he reversed course and decided to base net-neutrality rules on Title II of the Communications Act of 1939.

How times have changed. The Trump administration is engaged in a frenzied destruction of a host of Obama-era regulatory protections. It looks like net neutrality may be next on the list. It’s been reported that FCC Chairman Pai has been huddling with telecom lobbyists representing AT&T, Comcast, Charter, Sprint, Verizon, and T-Mobile. These meetings and Pai’s statements to the press seem to be signaling that the chairman is setting the stage for a policy shift that would favor the bottom line of the telecom giants over the interests of everyone else—meaning the interests of every other sector in the economy. In lock step with the broadband industry, Pai has consistently stated his dissatisfaction with the Title II designation, which classifies broadband companies as utilities and subjects them to utility-like regulation.

Reporting from Recode, an online tech blog, indicates that Pai may be considering voluntary compliance to ensure open access. Let’s be honest. That’s a joke by any objective standard. Pai needs to produce a single example of a corporate giant voluntarily deferring on potential profits as well as a commitment by the Trump administration to tough enforcement before voluntary compliance can be taken seriously. This is how Recode reports on the direction Pai may be considering:

“Under Pai’s early blueprint, Internet providers could be encouraged to commit in writing that they won’t slow down or block Internet traffic. If they break that promise, they could be penalized by another agency, the Federal Trade Commission, which can take action whenever companies deceive consumers.”

The issue of net neutrality is the fight that won’t go away. After all, we now live in a world where literally everything depends on affordable, open access to Internet service. The players and the stakes are high. The fight for open access pits the telecom giants in a struggle with the tech industry and the public at large.

What is net neutrality and why does it inspire such passion? Net neutrality is the principle that the Internet should remain a level playing field for all users. Net neutrality preserves the rights of all users to communicate freely online, and net neutrality has been the engine for fostering a new and robust online marketplace.

Who benefits from net neutrality? The answer is everyone and everything except the Internet service providers. Net neutrality fosters job growth, competition, and innovation. It’s essential for small-business owners, online retailers, entrepreneurs, and startups, for online job sites, streaming entertainment providers, free-speech advocates, students, and political, social, and arts groups that lack access to mainstream media.

When it passed rules to protect net neutrality, the Obama administration was hardly a radical outlier in understanding the economic, social, and political benefits of an open Internet. As you can see in the map below, the rest of the connected world understands as well—the exceptions being Russia and China where suppression of free speech is the norm, and net neutrality threatens government control of political dissent.

The American tech industry is another player that understands what’s at stake in this fight. This is how a spokesperson for the Internet Association, a lobbying group for Silicon Valley tech companies, summed up the industry’s battle readiness to fight for strong net neutrality protections and against paid prioritization:

“Internet companies are ready to fight to maintain strong net neutrality protections in any forum. ISPs [Internet service providers] must not be allowed to meddle with people’s right to access content and services online, and efforts to weaken net neutrality rules are bad for consumers and innovation.”

What happens if the service providers win this round and we lose net neutrality? Here’s a short list of what could happen, and it’s pretty grim.

Open access would disappear, and innovation would be stymied. Free speech could be curtailed. Cable and phone companies could create Internet fast and slow lanes and slow down or block Internet traffic as they choose. The fast- and slow-lane system would effectively create online winners and losers. Extra charges could be levied to content companies that could afford to pay for faster speeds and preferential access, thus limiting competition. Those extra charges would be passed on to all of us, and the cost of Internet service would increase for consumers and small businesses. Internet service providers could slow down competitors’ content and block political or social opinions the provider might disagree with.

So get ready everyone. Round two is about to begin.

The post Net Neutrality: Round Two appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Another day, another corporation receiving massive tax breaks by the government. Most recently, it was $7 million from the Trump/Pence administration to Carrier (owned by United Technologies) to stop the company from moving a factory to Mexico. Not all the jobs will be saved, but it’s still being considered a win by the Capitalist-in-chief. Even before he entered politics, Trump the businessman knew how to work the system to get himself millions of dollars in tax breaks. This practice of corporate welfare isn’t new or even that unusual.

Here is a map of the United States, filled in by which company got the largest handout (via targeted tax breaks, grants, and other subsidiaries) in each state.

This infographic was published first on reason.com

The post The United States of corporate welfare appeared first on Occasional Planet.

One of the oddities, for me, about what is happening in education now is how those promoting more standardized testing are called “reformers.” Really, what kind of reform? I guess that it’s similar to those who advocated that prisons move away from rehabilitation and just focus on warehousing.

But now, the standardized test addicts have new friends in, of all people, hedge fund managers. Yep, those Wall Street folks who know how to make money without making anything else. Well, the hedgers love numbers, and many of them are very good at using them to their personal advantage, while not contributing anything tangible to society. And now that seems to be what they’re doing in the far-flung field–from them–of education.

Justin Miller reports in The American Prospect, “How Hedge Funders Built the Pro-Charter Political Network.”

The hedge-fund industry and the charter movement are almost inextricably entangled. Executives see charter-school expansion as vital to the future of public education, relying on a model of competition. They see testing as essential to accountability. And they often look at teacher unions with unvarnished distaste. Several hedge-fund managers have launched their own charter-school chains. You’d be hard-pressed to find a hedge-fund guy who doesn’t sit on a charter-school board.

Apparently what hedge fund managers like in education are (a) charter schools, (b) competition and (c) accountability. They don’t like teachers’ unions. It might seem innocent enough, but let’s drill down a bit.

Charter schools were initially established to create competition for public schools. That, in itself, was a controversial idea because it involved siphoning money from the public school coffers and directing it toward individual schools outside the system. The teachers in those schools did not have to be unionized, so that created a threat to public school teachers. But the upside would be that these new schools could go in their own direction and use techniques that often-calcified public schools rejected out of hand. They could focus more on the needs of the individual students without having to protect a system that was top heavy with a large bureaucracy. In a sense, it would be a marriage between the independence of private schools with the access to public monies that public schools have.

Since large urban public school districts were mostly in financial distress, it would have been difficult to imagine that schools affiliated with the systems would make money. But hedge fund managers, and before them “education companies,” knew where to look for profit sources. The plan with charter schools was to make their operation more efficient than public schools, to reduce expenses so that there would be a profit to skim off the top. Additionally, charter schools set up profitable arrangements with universities in partnerships, presumably to improve the educational offerings to students. Large corporations saw charter schools as opportunities for philanthropy, and then the possibility of claiming partial responsibility for how well these charter schools could do.

But how would they know if the charter schools actually did “better” than public schools? The answer lay in standardized test scores. The model had been tried for decades, with companies like Princeton Review and Kaplan offering tuition-based courses to high school students to improve their college admission test scores. That seemed to work, in part because what Princeton Review and Kaplan were doing was to prepare students to take tests that they were more-or-less indebted to take.

The standardized test factor was a great metric, if the idea was to find a way in which elementary and secondary schools could be tracked. But what did it measure? Well, it measured students’ abilities to perform well on tests, and teachers’ skills in preparing them. Never mind that this was a perfect storm to create cheating, and it did, but it was somewhat like the tail wagging the dog. In this case, the tail was the standardized tests and the dog was the students.

Is this really what America wants to provide learning opportunities for its children? Schools that are test-driven and sources of profit for corporations that include hedge fund managers. Where is each individual student’s curiosity, critical thinking skills, and pure love of learning? It’s time to “stop the madness,” but neither hedge fund managers nor charter school companies have been known for doing that. Perhaps they should take a renewed look at the movie, “Race to Nowhere,” which questions so much of what they are doing.

The post With friends like hedge fund managers, education reform does not need enemies appeared first on Occasional Planet.

It’s nothing new to say that sometimes Hillary Clinton is her own worst enemy. I’ve been a Bernie supporter, but I really want to enthusiastically support Hillary because (a) she likely will be the Democratic nominee, and (b) all things being equal (or even close to equal), I certainly would prefer to have a woman candidate, and then president.

It’s interesting how Hillary has been involved in so many “cover-ups” beginning with Whitewater in Arkansas, and then Gennifer Flowers (yes, with a ‘G’), an alleged Bill femme fatale in days past. Her modus operandi seems to be to disclose considerable information, but not enough to put people’s concerns to rest. But interestingly enough, none of the alleged scandals, or wrong-doings that have come to light over the past twenty-five years have turned out to be anything close to what the accusers say they are. I imagine that the F.B.I. investigation of her personal mail server, which she used while serving as Secretary of State, will again determine that while her judgments were less than optimal, overall the situation is much ado about nothing.

The transcripts of her three speeches before Goldman-Sachs and other Wall Street firms may not be as insignificant as she would like us to believe. As of now, we know little about them. Politico has reported that during one of the Goldman speeches, “Clinton offered a message that the collected plutocrats found reassuring, according to accounts offered by several attendees, declaring that the banker-bashing so popular within both political parties was unproductive and indeed foolish.”

This tidbit is far from being either conclusive or damning. But as mystery shrouds the contents of her speeches, they are a breeding ground for rumors, and there is little doubt that Donald Trump will use fact or fiction without distinction to try to bring her down.

Like so many, I am very curious about what she said in those speeches. If it’s left up to Hillary, it’s close to a certainty that I will never find out. But The Hill is now reporting that “GOP operatives on the prowl for secret Clinton transcripts.” This is what we call opposition research. I have always disliked such action because it seems to be the engine that drives negativity in politics. But when there is something in the dark that needs to be sanitized by sunlight, then I will grudgingly accept it.

According to The Hill,

Ian Prior, the communications director for the well-funded Republican group American Crossroads, said information about the Goldman Sachs speeches could prove cataclysmic for the Democratic Party.

Finding and releasing the transcripts “would be a heck of a way to outflank Hillary on her left [in a general election] and stop Bernie’s supporters from voting for her,” he said.

American Crossroads is one of those Karl Rove-founded Super-Pacs that excels in raising money (hundreds of millions in the 2012 presidential cycle), and in losing big (a success rate in the single digits). But that doesn’t mean that it can’t hire sleuths to investigate real or imagined transgressions by opponents. The truth doesn’t matter; what counts is arriving at a conclusion that could be embarrassing in the cross-hairs. Consider it to be the 2010s version on the 1970s “plumbers” established by Richard Nixon.

What I’d like American Crossroads to find would be the truth; i.e. an actual transcript of what Hillary Clinton said in those speeches. In a sense, it would be a relief to Hillary Clinton; she would no longer have to stonewall this issue. It’s also quite possible that she wisely hedged her bets when she spoke on Wall Street and said very little to the moguls that would inflame Democrats. If she said more, she could explain it to many by saying that she had to throw out some red meat to the crowd because she was being paid $225,000 a pop for these speeches. Americans could understand that as they accept Trump’s fixation with being wealthy.

But perhaps most importantly, Hillary Clinton could do what so many would like her to do … say that that was then and this is now. In the past, she felt that she had to kowtow to Wall Street go gain their good graces and their political donations. If she becomes the Democratic nominee, that will no longer be necessary, she can try to emulate Bernie Sanders’ small donations strategy once she eschews the big bucks coming from a concentrated and very powerful segment of the American population.

It’s not just a question of changing her ways in order to win the election. With Trump as the likely Republican nominee, she will be the odds-on favorite to win the presidency. But governing with questions unanswered that should be answered will plague her throughout her presidency. In a former life, Clinton was on the staff of the Senate Watergate Committee; she needs now to review her notes from that period. It’s been extremely difficult for Barack Obama to govern without a scintilla of a scandal or cover-up. If Clinton wins the presidency, it well may be nothing but trouble if she even has the appearance of withholding what the public deserves to know. That’s why in this one rare case, I’m rooting for American Crossroads to do Hillary a favor and to find the transcripts.

The post Rooting for GOP opposition research on Hillary appeared first on Occasional Planet.

First off, let me be clear. I’m voting for Bernie Sanders in the primary and I hope he wins the nomination. If he doesn’t I will vote for Hillary Clinton. I’m choosing Bernie not just because my political views are closer to his, they are, but because I think he has the best chance of winning in November.

That said, I have some problems with Bernie Sanders.  My greatest criticism is that he’s a faux Democratic Socialist. No real Democratic Socialist would vote, as he has time and again, to continue the U.S. imperialist wars in the Middle East and the Ukraine. His foreign policy views are slightly better than Clinton’s, and he is less of an outright warmonger, but he is a huge disappointment to me on that front. Bernie can’t call for a “revolution” and ignore the link between our vast imperialist military/intelligence state and the problems we are facing at home. They are profoundly connected. Even though this is a big issue for me, I’m still voting for him, and I will explain the many reasons why. Before I get to them, there are other things about Bernie that I’m not thrilled about.

Bernie’s deals with the Devil

As an Independent from Vermont, Bernie’s deals with the Democratic Party have somewhat muzzled his progressive voice. I’ll give you an example. Although to his credit, he did, rather brilliantly, force Republicans to add funding for community health centers to the Affordable Care Act, he did not push hard enough for the “public option.” Bernie had a lot of influence because he sat on the committee that wrote the bill.

He’s been terrible on guns, primarily to garner votes from gun-owning Democrats, Independents and Republicans in his home state of Vermont.

Because of his deal with the Democratic Party to not run candidates against him in exchange for his caucusing with Democrats, he has diminished his ability to be critical of the Party.

Countering Bernie criticism from the Left

There’s no shortage of criticism of Bernie by writers on the Left. People I admire, like Paul Street and Chris Hedges, consider Bernie a socialist sellout. They support Green Party candidate Jill Stein. I too would prefer to vote for her, but the stakes are too high. I don’t want a Republican in the White House.

For better or worse, Bernie’s imperfect deals with Democrats, which the Left despises and considers a deep character flaw, have allowed him to “get shit done” as Hillary supporters like to claim. In fact, Bernie has way more legislative success to his credit than Hillary, precisely because he’s a very skilled dealmaker. When he was in the House, he was called the “Amendment King,” because he improved not-so-great bills by introducing progressive amendments. Bernie is not as ideologically or politically “pure” as the Left or I would like, but he has been consistently effective, nonetheless, in passing bills that help ordinary Americans.

It’s the money, stupid

Bernie is remarkably clean when it comes to special interest money. He takes campaign donations from unions, but not banks and big corporations. And he has not benefited personally from holding elected office. After being in public office for 34 years (including time as mayor of Burlington, VT), his net worth is around $400,000. The Clintons left the White House broke, but managed to make $230 million over the next 14 years from speaking engagements, book deals, and consulting gigs.

If Hillary is nominated and elected president, her indebtedness to powerful special interests will leave her hamstrung when it comes to “getting shit done” for the American people. Hillary is very “experienced” at simultaneously dog-whistling to her donors as she tells voters she is “fighting for them.” She did that very artfully during the last debate when talking about the TPP trade agreement.

My point is that the influence of Big Money is devastating. This is the main reason Bernie keeps harping on it. Big Money produces watered down bills like the Affordable Care Act and Dodd-Frank that are touted as the best thing since sliced bread—or the Depression—take your pick. Worse, Big Money siphons off trillions for wars that benefit its interests. For good reason, people feel shafted. No wonder they are looking for a non-establishment candidate—someone who is not drowning in campaign donations and speaking fees from banks and corporations. Those who are looking for a scapegoat choose fascist candidate Donald Trump, Those who want a government more responsive to their needs choose Bernie Sanders.

If elected president, Bernie will not be afraid to mobilize the electorate behind initiatives that challenge big money, because he has no skin in the game. He has no one to appease on Wall Street. He doesn’t have to suck up to Lloyd Blankfein to get reelected. That’s precisely why Blankfein called him “dangerous.”

Bernie can flip the House and Senate, Hillary can’t

If Bernie keeps winning the primaries, he will continue to energize and turn out a previously disaffected voter base—a broad spectrum of young Democrats, Independents and some Republicans. Unlike Hillary, he will insure a huge voter turnout in November, giving him the possibility of flipping the House and Senate.

As Bernie’s campaign manager confirmed in a recent interview, the plan is to bring progressive candidates on board to challenge Republicans down ticket. If Elizabeth Warren is his running mate, he will not only win, he could shut down Republicans for a decade. If she isn’t on the ticket, he still has a very good chance of winning the presidency and achieving a Democratic victory in the House and Senate—an advantage he will not squander. The road will be steep to take back the House and Senate, but only Bernie has a chance to achieve this.

Clinton campaign dated and out-of-touch

Bernie Sander’s record-breaking victory in New Hampshire exposed how out-of-sync the Clinton machine is with the times. Hillary lost because she based her campaign on the playbook of a fading, and out-of-touch Democratic establishment—one that has fought to deny Democratic voters a choice, and make her nomination a coronation.

Hillary figured women would vote for her simply because she was a woman. She figured college grads and wealthier Democrats would vote for her because her more “pragmatic” policies wouldn’t seriously challenge the status quo. She figured Bernie Sanders was not a real threat, and that she was the inevitable candidate—all fatal assumptions by an out-of-touch campaign.

Not surprising, in New Hampshire she won those 65 or older with incomes over $200,000, but she lost everyone else—women, men, people under 30, college grads, blue-collar workers. She lost both liberals and moderates. Hillary and the Democratic establishment backing her were so focused on big money and power players they missed the seismic shift happening under their feet. They ignored, for example, the public’s enthusiasm for populist icon Elizabeth Warren, the only woman senator yet to endorse Hillary Clinton.

In a speech from the senate floor on the sixth anniversary of Citizens United, Warren said:

A new presidential election is upon us. The first votes will be cast in Iowa in just eleven days. Anyone who shrugs and claims that change is just too hard has crawled into bed with the billionaires who want to run this country like some private club.

Wonder who she was talking about?

If Hillary wins the nomination, she won’t bring the party together

If Hillary wins the nomination, even with Bernie’s promised endorsement, she doesn’t have the skills to reunite the party. That said, because of a GOP in disarray, Hillary could still win in November, but not by much, because voter turnout could be diminished. Therein lies the danger. Throw in that her unfavorable rating is quite high, and Democrats could lose. And, because turnout will be lackluster, she will not be able to change the Republican grip on the House and Senate.

Bernie has the wisdom and judgment to be president

A good way to judge a president is by the people he or she chooses as advisors and cabinet members. If Hillary gets elected, she will bring into her administration the same old corporate/Wall Street cronies that were there under Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. In contrast, Bernie has suggested people like Robert Reich, Elizabeth Warren and progressive economist Joseph Stiglitz. He has said on CNN’s State of the Union that his administration would include “great public servants who, for years, have been standing up for the middle class and the working families of this country.”

Hillary may have more “experience” in holding powerful positions, but her judgment in her various roles has been deeply flawed and compromised, and at times, atrocious. I don’t expect her judgment to be any better as president. I also cringe at the idea of Bill and Hillary being back in the White House. Something about this feels terribly wrong. A democracy should not have ruling dynasties, backed by massive amounts of corporate/oligarch money, moving in and out of the White House.

You may imagine the president as a solitary figure, making big decisions on his or her own, but in reality the president is a leader of a team. The president we need now is someone who can put together and lead an extraordinary team of public servants who will craft and enact policies that will benefit the majority of the American people. We need someone who is willing to confront and break the grip of money in politics. That person is not Hillary Clinton. It’s Bernie Sanders.

Matt Taibbi on “The Case for Bernie Sanders”

Sanders is a clear outlier in a generation that has forgotten what it means to be a public servant. The Times remarks upon his “grumpy demeanor.” But Bernie is grumpy because he’s thinking about vets who need surgeries, guest workers who’ve had their wages ripped off, kids without access to dentists or some other godforsaken problem that most of us normal people can care about for maybe a few minutes on a good day, but Bernie worries about more or less all the time.

I first met Bernie Sanders ten years ago, and I don’t believe there’s anything else he really thinks about. There’s no other endgame for him. He’s not looking for a book deal or a membership in a Martha’s Vineyard golf club or a cameo in a Guy Ritchie movie. This election isn’t a game to him; it’s not the awesomely repulsive dark joke it is to me and many others.

And the only reason this attention-averse, sometimes socially uncomfortable person is subjecting himself to this asinine process is because he genuinely believes the system is not beyond repair.

Not all of us can say that. But that doesn’t make us right, and him “unrealistic.” More than any other politician in recent memory, Bernie Sanders is focused on reality. It’s the rest of us who are lost.

The post Why I’m voting for Bernie Sanders appeared first on Occasional Planet.

For some time, we have been examining why Republicans look at things so differently from Democrats. Much has been written about the Republican brain including a book by that title by journalist and author Chris Mooney. Mooney has been described as “one of the few journalists in the country who specializes in the now dangerous intersection of and politics.” His findings include evidence …. that among other things, many Republicans are not particularly concerned with evidence when it is not convenient to their arguments. Mooney also posits that Republicans are not as open to new information and experiences as others. They also seem to be lacking in empathy, as compared to others.

I recently adapted Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs of an individual to a comparable hierarchy of public citizen needs.

Being successful in caring about the first four levels (self, family, community, country & religion) is challenging enough for most people. Very few get to the fifth and highest level; caring about the “common good.” This may be in part because the demands of the previous four are so intense. But unlike many progressives, Republicans frequently have a sense of disdain towards the “common good.” This explains in part why they are so resistant to strengthening the safety net that the government has put in place to help care for those among us who are most in need.

What has been most frustrating and stifling to me is how journalists so willingly accept conservative ideas as equivalent to progressive ones. If the issue is what to do about gun violence in the United States, most in the media see two equally valid positions lined up against one another: protecting the Second Amendment and saving over 30,000 lives a year. If the issue is funding for school lunches, it’s the presumed equality of saving money by having kids go hungry vs. spending more money to keep children from starving.

It’s baffling to me how journalists can simply accept these false equivalencies. After all, most journalists are college-educated and took courses that required deductive reasoning and logic. It had been my impression, perhaps mistaken, that many students who went into the field of journalism did so because they wanted to uncover inequities and dysfunctions in our society. I thought that if they were to choose to not enter journalism, they might choose to go into fields such as sociology, psychology or international relations to try to be part of making a better world.

Fields like sociology, psychology and international relations focus on the dynamics of meeting the needs of individuals as well as serving the common good. Indeed, many individuals who enter those fields are able to look beyond their personal needs and consider what is best for all.

In fact, very few journalists seem to place much value in trying to be part of an effort to improve the common good. They may think that they are helping the world because they disclose information that can be beneficial to all of us. But disclosure without a sense of priorities is assembling a building without knowing which parts need to be put in place first. When the press reports on the total amount of campaign funds that a political candidate has raised, without providing information on who were the donors, and more importantly, what these donors might want in exchange, it is incomplete reporting.

It strikes me that there are two primary reasons why so few journalists factor the common good into their reporting.

1. Media outlets are now strapped for cash. The industry has become much more competitive, and public loyalty to brands is much more fleeting than it used to be. So many media outlets, and this is particularly so in local news coverage, pander to a strange combination of “blood and guts” and civic boosterism.
2. The field of journalism, like virtually all other professions, has a strong sense of clan. No matter how sleazy the output from a media source might be, the powers that be are always quick to point out that they are adhering to journalist ethics. This self-policing code references a number of factors, such as reliability of sources and providing accurate quotes. These are clearly important, but they do not necessarily touch on the “greater good” for the society in which they report. Loyalty to clan, or profession, is somewhat like “caring about one’s religion and country” in the public citizen hierarchy.

Item 4 could be something like:

Primary loyalty to profession is not unique to journalism. It’s certainly the case in education, the law, health care, and most other professions. But in journalism, parochial loyalty carries a special downside. Since journalists are reporting about “the world around us,” their purview should be broader than journalistic ethics. Ideally, they can give us the 30,000-foot, bird’s-eye view as well as the “up close and personal.” The means that with issues of state, they must be able to put happenings into context. When it comes to reporting many Republican talking points, this is where so many journalists seem to fail miserably.

Very few television journalists place the common good above all other concerns. Those who come to mind include Bill Moyers, Mark Shields and yes, David Brooks. Other than PBS, the perspective of other mainstream television journalists seems devoid of concern about the common good. Fox News obviously has a biased axe to grind. CNN uses hype as the path to higher ratings, so their concerns are primarily “what’s happening now” and what will bring us more viewers. MSNBC preaches a progressive agenda, but prefers to take cheap shots at conservatives rather than helping to explain the progressive perspective to those who may not be familiar with it. The process that they practice in presenting news rarely serves the common good.

As a society, we need more people to look at the broader issues that we face, rather than just what our professions teach us to be important. Professional practices, coupled with the pressures of raising revenue and cutting costs, make it difficult for journalists, attorneys, educators and others to place the common good as their first priority. Maybe what we need to do is the exact opposite of the current trend of training more people in the STEM fields. We need more philosophers who can help us sort this all out.

The post Why journalists engage in so many false equivalencies appeared first on Occasional Planet.

In a recent interview in Jacobin, linguist, philosopher, and political activist Noam Chomsky gave an interesting answer to a question about the American capitalist system. He basically said we don’t have one. We have something else, more akin to “state capitalism.”

And by not being engaged and involved in the political process, we’ve allowed corporations and banks to “run things,” to take over government. We’ve felt powerless to effect change, and we’ve allowed them to suck up resources that should be going to fund projects and policies that directly help us and the communities where we live.

Chomsky’s comment on our so called “capitalist system:”

What’s called “the capitalist system” is very far from any model of capitalism or market. Take the fossil fuels industries: there was a recent study by the IMF, which tried to estimate the subsidy that energy corporations get from governments. The total was colossal. I think it was around $5 trillion annually. That’s got nothing to do with markets and capitalism.

I think Chomsky is saying that our form of capitalism is not one Adam Smith would recognize. In our version, fossil fuel companies fund politicians, who then vote for industry subsidies. Even though the industry is a big contributor to climate change, the government continues to promote fossil fuels. Bought senators and congressmen continue to give away money to a highly profitable industry that doesn’t need it. Money in politics has a life of its own, and it’s not benign. If a senator or congressperson stops voting for subsidies, there’s hell to pay when he or she is up for reelection. Not only will they no longer get campaign donations, they will have money being spent against them. We live under the illusion that  we have a “free-market” economy, when its more akin to a mafia-run protection racket.

Chomsky turns the conversation to banks:

And the same is true of other components of the so-called capitalist system. By now, in the US and other Western countries, there’s been, during the neoliberal period, a sharp increase in the financialization of the economy. Financial institutions in the US had about 40 percent of corporate profits on the eve of the 2008 collapse, for which they had a large share of responsibility.

There’s another IMF study that investigated the profits of American banks, and it found that they were almost entirely dependent on implicit public subsidies. There’s a kind of a guarantee—it’s not on paper, but it’s an implicit guarantee—that if they get into trouble they will be bailed out. That’s called too-big-to-fail.

And the credit rating agencies of course know that, they take that into account, and with high credit ratings, financial institutions get privileged access to cheaper credit, they get subsidies if things go wrong and many other incentives, which effectively amounts to perhaps their total profit. The business press tried to make an estimate of this number and guessed about $80 billion a year. That’s got nothing to do with capitalism.

It’s clear that without massive subsidies and bailouts, the banks would be insolvent. In a real capitalist system they would have been failed businesses. Chomsky is not the first to point this out. For nearly imploding the world economy, banks were rewarded with access to free money, which they use, not for repairing the damage they did to main street, but for speculation. Thanks to Bill Clinton removing the wall between traditional and investment banking, big banks continue to operate like gambling casinos.

Corporations, too, have been borrowing money at very low, or no interest for stock buy-backs, which raises stock prices and CEO pay. Profits are off-shored and tax-sheltered. Nothing big banks and big corporations are doing right now is helping middle class and working people. Chomsky continues:

It’s the same in many other sectors of the economy. So the real question is, will this system of state capitalism, which is what it is, survive the continued use of fossil fuels? And the answer to that is, of course, no.

By now, there’s a pretty strong consensus among scientists who say that a large majority of the remaining fossil fuels, maybe 80 percent, have to be left in the ground if we hope to avoid a temperature rise which would be pretty lethal. And, unfortunately, that’s not happening. Humans may be destroying their chances for a decent survival. It won’t kill everybody, but it would change the world dramatically.

This is Chomsky’s conclusion if the current situation were to continue. But there’s a rebellion brewing against the status quo. Bernie Sanders in the US, Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, Alex Tsipris in Greece, and Pablo Iglesias in Spain are openly challenging the corporate/bank/billionaire grip on their respective governments. And in Canada, the Liberal Party just won back control of Parliament after nine years of the conservative Harper government. So, there’s reason for hope.

Getting a person or party elected is not enough

We can’t pin all our hopes on another Wall Street-funded candidate. Chomsky thinks it will take pressure from a large popular movement to effectively challenge the grip of money and power on government. The job of activists and organizers, he says, is to help people understand they have power, and even though they feel powerless, they’re not powerless. “People feel impotent, but that has to be overcome.”

About Bernie Sanders, Chomsky feels it’s pretty unlikely in a system of bought elections that he could win. And even if he won, he would be abandoned by both corporate parties, In other words, he couldn’t get much done. But, even if he loses he will have made a positive contribution. Chiomsky says:

In fact, the Sanders campaign I think is valuable—it’s opening up issues, it’s maybe pressing the mainstream Democrats a little bit in a progressive direction, and it is mobilizing a lot of popular forces, and the most positive outcome would be if they remain after the election.

It’s a serious mistake to just to be geared to the quadrennial electoral extravaganza and then go home. That’s not the way changes take place. The mobilization could lead to a continuing popular organization, which could maybe have an effect in the long run.

A little history

In 2009, newly elected President Barack Obama could have nurtured and expanded his extremely effective Obama for America organization to be exactly the kind of popular organization Chomsky calls for—one standing behind him and supporting him in demanding real change—but he funneled everyone into the newly formed “Organizing for America.” Organizing for America served to neutralize and eventually shut down the enthusiasm and populist energy stirred up by his campaign, thwarting any threat to the big money interests that bankrolled his election. As Gloria Bilchik wrote in 2010, OFA became a propaganda machine for the President and a subsidiary of the Democratic National Committee.

The best outcome of the coming election will be if Bernie’s followers form a truly progressive organization independent of the Democratic Party. It’s purpose would be to keep pressure on politicians to do the right thing for the American people.

The post Noam Chomsky: On capitalism and why electing Bernie isn’t enough appeared first on Occasional Planet.

We’re republishing this post from 2012, because it continues to have relevance to our ongoing debate about gun violence in America. After the recent mass shooting at a community college in Oregon, the media diverted attention from the problem of gun proliferation to ” how do we keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill?” Instead, we should be asking: Why do we allow gun manufacturers and importers to flood the country with tens of millions of guns every year? Why do we allow the NRA to posture as a gun enthusiast’s organization when its main purpose is to, a) sell weapons for the gun industry, and b) undermine any laws that might stem the flow of guns into our communities?

The National Rifle Association (NRA) is the lobbying arm of the firearms industry. It uses fear, racism, and focus-group tested catchwords like “freedom,” and “self-defence” to pimp sales for the over 300 firearms manufacturers in the United States. While the NRA represents itself as an association of gun enthusiasts, its real purpose is to serve the interests of gun manufacturers. To that end, it bullies elected officials into passing laws that will make it easier for the gun industry sell more rifles and handguns. It promotes gun sales among the public by stoking fear and racism. It conflates patriotism with gun ownership, suggesting individuals have a patriotic duty to own a firearm.

Playing off fear and racism, the NRA says “good,” people should carry a gun to protect themselves from “bad” people whom they perceive as threatening them or their loved ones. In its latest strategy to boost gun sales, the NRA has, with the help of ALEC, passed “Stand Your Ground” or “Kill at Will” laws in dozens of states across the country. By encouraging a vigilante mindset, these new laws have resulted in a large increase in “justifiable homicides.” Unfortunately, the recent shooting in Florida of “bad” hoodie-wearing, unarmed African-American teenager Trayvon Martin by “good” gun-toting, neighborhood watch citizen George Zimmerman may add to that statistic.

It’s no surprise that gun sales and concealed weapons applications have boomed since Barack Obama was elected. That’s because NRA president Wayne LaPierre has been spreading the rumor that President Obama “has a secret plan to take away your guns.” The NRA has cynically used the election (and racist feelings against President Obama) to gin up gun sales—because the NRA is not about what is good for the country, it’s about promoting gun industry profits.

Politicians pander for NRA campaign contributions

At the 2012 NRA convention in St Louis, MO, Newt Gingrich—while simultaneously reaching for new heights of absurdity and new lows in pandering—called for “universal gun ownership.” In delivering the ultimate gun industry wet dream, he promised if elected president to submit a UN resolution calling for the arming of everyone on the planet. Yes, really. As quoted from Digby:

The right to bear arms comes from our creator, not our government,” Gingrich said. The NRA “has been too timid” in promoting its agenda beyond American borders. The Bill of Rights was not written only for Americans, he said. “It is a universal document.”

“A Gingrich presidency will submit to the UN a treaty that extends the right to bear arms as a human right to every person on the planet.” Every world citizen, he said, “deserves the right to defend themselves from those who exploit, imprison, or kill them.” For his latest big idea, Gingrich earned a standing ovation from the crowd of roughly 5,000.

The jaw-dropping irresponsibility of Gingrich’s craven statement, aimed squarely at the primitive reptilian brain—the one in all of us that responds to fear with fight or flight—boggles the mind. But then again, the GOP specializes in pandering to the lower aspects of our human nature in order to win elections for their corporate overlords.

The social and economic toll of gun proliferation in the United States

The Medical school of the University of Utah has collected some powerful statistics that throw a stark light on the devastating effects of gun proliferation. In the end, gun ownership has huge economic and social consequences for the United States. Here are a few highlights:

In the U.S. for 2010, there were 31,513 deaths from firearms, distributed as follows by mode of death: Suicide 19,308; Homicide 11,015; Accident 600. Firearm injuries are among the top ten causes of death in the U.S., right up there with cancer, stroke and heart disease.

There are over 200,000 non-fatal gun injuries per year in the U.S. Many of these injuries require hospitalization and very expensive trauma care. An older study from 1994 revealed the cost per gun injury requiring admission to a trauma center was over $14,000. The cumulative lifetime cost in 1985 for gunshot wounds was estimated to be $911 million, with $13.4 billion in lost work productivity.

A 2003 study of firearm deaths in high-income countries used data from the World Health Organization (WHO). To put these statistics in perspective, the total population in the United States for 2003 was 290.8 million while the combined population for the other 22 countries was 563.5 million. There were 29,771 firearm deaths in the US and 7,653 firearm deaths in the 22 other countries combined. In other words, of all the firearm deaths in these 23 high-income countries in 2003, 80% occurred in the US.

Accidental shooting deaths are most commonly associated with one or more children playing with a gun they found in the home. The person pulling the trigger is a friend, family member, or the victim. In the period from 1979 to 2000, accidental firearms deaths involving children declined in the U.S., aided by child access prevention laws and felony prosecution of offenders. A study of non-natural deaths in a large American city revealed that half of such deaths in persons from 10 to 19 years of age were due to homicide, and firearms were involved in 88% of them.

In a 2004 study, regardless of storage practice, type of gun, or number of firearms in the home, having a gun in the home was associated with an increased risk of firearm homicide and suicide in the home. Persons who own a gun and who engage in abuse of intimate partners such as a spouse are more likely to use a gun to threaten their intimate partner.

In a 2009 study, individuals in possession of a gun at the time of an assault are 4.46 times more likely to be shot in the assault than persons not in possession. So much for the “self-protection” argument for gun ownership.

Forget public safety, there’s money to be made in selling lethal weapons

According to Hoovers, a Dun and Brandstreet company: “The US gun and ammunition manufacturing industry includes about 300 companies with combined annual revenue of about $6 billion. Major gun and ammunition manufacturers include Browning Arms; Freedom Group (which includes Remington Arms, Marlin Firearms, and Bushmaster Firearms); Olin; Alliant Techsystems; Sturm, Ruger & Company; and Smith & Wesson. The industry is highly concentrated.

To underscore the lucrative nature of this business, large private equity firms like Cerberus and The Freedom group have been buying up gun manufacturing companies, like Remington and Bushmaster, because they have decided there is an opportunity to grow the industry beyond what it is and make even more money.

Changing the conversation about guns in America

Do we want a country where everyone is paranoid and armed to the teeth? Or do we want a country like Denmark, that has the lowest rate of deaths involving firearms of the 23 largest industrial countries? The reason Denmark has the lowest rate is because guns are illegal in Denmark and the laws against them are stringent, putting anyone who carries a gun and is not legally allowed to do so in jail. Only police officers and soldiers are allowed to carry guns. Other weapons, such as knives or lead pipes are now considered deadly weapons in Denmark, and in recent years stricter laws have been passed for assault with those deadly weapons.

The current conversation about gun ownership in the United States is based on a misguided interpretation of the Second Amendment. Widespread ownership of guns is considered a given in American culture and discussion about guns is myopic, limited to “responsible” gun ownership vs. irresponsible gun ownership, legal gun ownership vs. illegal gun ownership, or open carry vs. concealed carry. Elected officials are afraid of the NRA and rarely take it to task . To avoid hundreds of thousands of gun injuries and deaths per year, and to create a more peaceful and safe society, we need to call out the NRA as the official pimp of the gun industry—and begin the discussion about disarming America.

The post NRA: Still the official pimp for the multi-billion dollar gun industry appeared first on Occasional Planet.