Citizens Inundated report focuses on how money influences elections
The National Media Reform group Free Press just released a new report entitled, Citizens Inundated: How big-money politics and broadcast media are poisoning democratic discourse and undermining US elections.
The 11-page report looks at the long-standing trend of the amount of money spent on political ads during any given state or national election cycles. Filling the airwaves with political ads during an election cycle is not new, but what has changed since the Supreme Court ruling on Citizens United is that the amount of money being donated to political campaigns is resulting in an even larger increase in political ads.
The report is presented in three main sections: the Supreme Court decision and Super PACs, Broadcasters and the FCC and Views, Voters and the 1%.
In the first section the report states, “Citizens United unleashed a deluge of political advertising during the 2010 midterm election. Kantar Media’s Campaign Media Analysis Group estimates that candidates, political parties and independent groups will spend up to $3.3 billion to buy TV ads during the 2012 election season. That’s a 57 percent increase over the estimated $2.1 billion that was spent on local ads during the 2008 presidential race.”
In the second section of the report we find information and analysis relative to the lack of accessible information from broadcasters on which entities is buying airtime and how much they are spending. The report talks about how the efforts to provide more transparency and get broadcaster to post online regular information on political ad spending is being resisted by both the broadcasters and groups like Committee for Political Truth, which is a 501c4 group that runs attack ads to influence elections.
The last section of the report addresses two major issues. First, it looks at how the amount of money going to broadcasters from political ads provides no incentive for broadcaster to do any serious reporting on candidates during an election. The other major issue in this section talks about how it is really the 1% of the population, the richest Americans, who give the bulk of campaign money, are determining the outcome of current elections.
“Money does determine winners and losers in U.S. politics. But that spending power is limited to the top one percent. In a November 2011 New York Times editorial, Harvard Law School Professor Lawrence Lessig reported that less than one percent of Americans give more than $200 to a political campaign, and that fewer than .05 percent give the maximum to any congressional candidate.46 “Campaigns financed by the one percent,” Lessig concludes, “will never earn the confidence of the 99 percent, or appear to any of us as anything other than corrupt.”
One conclusion to draw from this report is that until there is real and substantive campaign finance changes made the electoral process in the US will be a farce.
GRIID plans to provide some monitoring of political ads that air in the West Michigan market and how much money broadcasters are making from those ads between now and the November election. In the meantime, read this new report and share the graphic below, which visually communicates the unjust influence of money in elections.
New Media We Recommend
Below is a list of new materials that we have read/watched in recent weeks. The comments are not a “review” of the material, instead sort of an endorsement of ideas and investigations that can provide solid analysis and even inspiration in the struggle for change. All these items are available at The Bloom Collective, so check them out and stimulate your mind.
Kill the Messenger: The Media’s Role in the Fate of the World, by Maria Armoudian – As someone who firmly believes in the importance of independent media, I found Maria Armoudian’s book Kill the Messenger an excellent articulation of the importance that media plays in social change. The author/Professor looks at numerous case studies pertaining to the role of the news media in international affairs, such as the Rwandan genocide, the Bosnia War and Mexico & Chile’s fight for democracy. Armoudian’s case studies not only support her thesis of how crucial media can be in our understanding of complex global affairs, she makes it clear that the news media can also foster violence & war or it can be a tool for resisting violence and fighting for peace. The book concludes with some suggestions of what a truly independent media would look like and why it is necessary to develop in these turbulent times.
Why Are Faggots so Afraid of Faggots?: Flaming Challenges to Masculinity, Objectification and the Desire to Conform, edited by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore – Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore has done it again. This book is another amazing collection of essays that challenges the blatant straight homophobia in this culture. These essays also challenge gender norms and even take on the overt efforts within the more mainstream LGBT community’s desire to assimilate. The essays use humor, poetry, sarcasm and sharp analysis that takes us out of our comfort zone and forces us to seriously rethink how we see gender in painfully male dominant world. In addition, these essays speak to the resiliency, courage and compassion of those who will not be silent on the institutional mechanisms that seek to police our behavior at every turn. Delightfully brilliant!
Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions, by Paul Mason – BBC journalist Paul Mason has given us a gift. Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere is a first hand account of the social uprisings happening all across the world. Mason begins with the Arab Spring and provides readers with a beautifully written narrative about some of the people involved in the Egyptian revolution, both the conditions that led to their involvement and reflections on their participation in the overthrow of President Mubarak. Mason then takes the reader to the youth rebellion in Britain, the uprisings in Spain and Greece, then ending with American and the Occupy Wall Street Movement. While the author does not provide any serious critique of each of these movements worldwide, the book does give one a sense of the scope of the global uprising and the possibilities that exist for more profound social transformation. An important contribution to the resistance literature of the 21st Century.
The FBI’s War on Black America (DVD) – This 1989 documentary (recently released on DVD) provides a stout history overview of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) brutal campaign against Black activists in the 1950s – the 1970s. Using archival footage and interviews from numerous Black activists and revolutionaries, this film chronicles the FBI COINTELPRO campaign to undermine and eliminate the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. This film presents the more radical elements of the larger freedom struggle by Blacks in the US and why they were seen as a threat to the established power structure. A important conclusion that one could draw from such a film is that anytime an oppressed group fights back against power it will be targeted for marginalization or elimination. The FBI’s War on Black America is a film that should be seen by people who want racial justice, since it doesn’t sugar coat the history of how the US power structure responded to the Black liberation movement that has too often been sanitized.
WOTV channel 4 for women not a venue for gender equity
A local TV station produced by and featuring on air personnel that are exclusively women. What a great idea!
The broadcast industry has been so male dominated since its inception, but an all female TV crew could provide West Michigan viewers with perspectives that would be essential to the transformation of this community.
There could be women talking about politics, the economy, health care, the environment, foreign policy and education. These women could be highlighting the achievements of women locally, nationally and globally.
There could be regular segments that look at how women are at the forefront of most major social movements, both historically and at the present. Women are part of every major social uprising around the world, from India to Greece.
There could be regular segments discussing why women are still paid significantly less than men in this country and why there is an increase of women living in poverty and a significant growth in numbers of women in the prison industrial complex in the US.
This would be a great example of giving voice to women and using a local TV station that would truly serve the public interest. Unfortunately, this is not the case.
There is a new TV station devote to women, WOTV channel 4, but the station appears to be using the re-designed channel mostly for commercial purposes that target women in very gender-limiting ways.
By gender limiting I mean the channel features 7 women who offer advice or act as experts on the following topics – motherhood, wellness, eating healthy, local social calendar and financial planning. The station also features a woman who is referred to as the “Zen expert.”
Most of these areas of interest are in very narrowly stereotyped female areas of interest and do not allow for women to address larger political, social and economic issues that equally impact women.
For example, here is the description for the Social Sizzle Expert. “Jordan Carson is the WOTV 4 Women expert on the Social Sizzle, focusing on the hottest events and places around west Michigan! You can spot Jordan checking out the newest Grand Rapids restaurant with the girls, MC’ing a charity event, hitting up local boutiques or strolling around Rosa Park Circle with her Toy Yorkie, Sammy.” This does not really inspire the kind of contribution that women could make that was envisioned by the Women’s Suffrage movement or the various waves of feminism over the past 40 years.
However, the channel does seem to be a mechanism for promoting more commercial messages, which presents women primarily as consumers or more crudely as SHOPPERS.
The WOTV 4 for women website also offers lots of beauty tips and cooking recipes, since we all know this is what it means to be a woman. In addition, the channel seems to be catering to more upscale women and professional women. Women who are struggling financially, women who are grassroots organizers and care givers, educators and healers are not really who this channel seems to be highlighting in its first few weeks of operation. One can look at the WOTV channel 4 for women party pictures to get an indication of the kind of women it serves, with the event being held at the Cygnus 27 restaurant inside the Amway Grand Plaza.
The broadcast industry is given the rights to the airwaves to serve the public interest. The WOTV channel 4 for women at this point doesn’t seem to be serving the public interest, rather it seems to be serving commercial interests. In addition, the channel seems to be doing harm to the gains made by women over the past 100 years by presenting narrow gender conformity based on the topics they cover and the audience they seem to be targeting.
Imagine if that channel featured women from the YWCA, the Grand Rapids chapter of NOW, the women of Our Kitchen Table, women from the GVSU or Aquinas College Women’s Center, female religious leaders, female community organizers and women who fight gender inequity every day in this community. That would be a TV channel worth getting excited over.
The Grammy Awards, Corporate Greed and Cultural Genocide
This article by Bruce Dixon is re-posted from Black Agenda Report.
For tens of thousands of years longer than humans have been reading and writing, since way, way before our ancestors began saving seeds and planting them, humans have made music. It’s one of many things that make us human.
But so are racism, hypocrisy and in the current era, vampire capitalism. It’s hard to see anything but hypocritical racism and greed in the decision of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences – the body that gives out the Grammys — in their elimination of more than thirty musical categories, including Latin jazz and 3 other Latin music categories, 4 R&B categories, zydeco and Native American music, one Gospel, one Rap and one World Music category.
The award ceremony led off with a prayer for Whitney Houston. But four of Houston’s six Grammies are in categories that the Grammies no longer notice. The late Etta James was hailed as well, at the same time the categories for two of her Grammies were done away with. So the real message was that the next wave of Whitney Houstons won’t be nearly as welcome. Most of the musical categories eliminated by the Grammies this year were Latin, black and nonwhite.
“Why do they only cut this music?” asked multiple Grammy award winner Carlos Santana, who protested outside the awards ceremony with many other musicians. “I think they’re racist. You can’t eliminate black gospel music or Hawaiian music or American Indian music or Latin jazz music because all this represents what the United States is, a social experiment.” Other award recipients who have publicly spoken and written demanding the organization to restore the stricken categories are Herbie Hancock, Eddie Palmieri, Paul Simon Bill Cosby, Esperanza Spalding, Bonnie Raitt, Stanley Clarke, David Amram, Pete Escovedo, Oscar Hernandez and Larry Harlow.
A number of artists filed suit against the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, demanding the minutes of meetings at which the elimination of these awards were discussed. Although they were dues paying members of long standing who recruited and contributed labor to its outreach programs, the academy denied access to these records through the courts on the grounds that they were “a foreign corporation established in Delaware” and so not subject to the transparency laws applicable to domestic non-profits.
The truth is that elimination of these categories is a kind of cultural genocide, a fencing off and enclosure of artistic space where many kinds of great music will be less able to connect with their audiences. In an era when a tiny number of major recording companies monopolize access to radio airplay and most concert venues, one more award, more or less, doesn’t mean much to Alicia Keys or Beyonce. But a Grammy, or even a Grammy nomination, for a struggling independent artist can be the difference between being able to make a living at her music, or having to give it up and do something else to survive.
You can find more information, and sign the petition to restore the stricken categories at www.grammywatch.org. That’s www.grammywatch.org. The decisions of what music to study and play and listen and dance to are decisions that audiences and artists should make. They are much too important to be reserved for greedy and racist recording industry executives. Letting them make that decision for us IS cultural genocide.
Earlier today we did the first interview in our newest Grand Rapids People’s History Project. The focus of this film and online archive is local resistance to the US war in Vietnam.
The areas of interest we want to explore are: public forms of resistance in Grand Rapids, such as protest, marches and teach-ins; draft resistance; Vietnam Veterans and GI resistance; responses from the faith community; tax resistance; cultural resistance through music, poetry & art; and people from Grand Rapids going to Washington DC or other sites of major protests during that time.
Like the Grand Rapids People’s History of the LGBTQ Community, we plan on conducting interviews and collecting archival documents, pictures and video. We also will be looking at what was happening locally to what was happening nationally and we will investigate the way in which the local news media reported on the US war in Vietnam.
We are looking for people to interview who were active in the anti-war movement in the 1960’s and 70’s. If people know someone who was involved in that resistance and can provide us with contact information that would be helpful. We are also looking for people who could donate time and energy to doing research with us for this project, such as researching the Grand Rapids Press, college newspapers and any other public record from that time, which would provide us with archival materials on the local anti-Vietnam War movement.
For those who want to be involved in this project contact me at jsmith@griid.org.
Michigan’s budget crisis puts democracy on the chopping block
This article by Paul Abowd is re-posted from iwatchnews.org.
When the city of Pontiac, Mich., ordered the closing of its fire department in December, Councilman Kermit Williams found out in the morning paper. This was just one in a series of radical realignments for the city, whose elected government has been replaced by one person with unprecedented power over nearly every aspect of city policy.
Public Act 4, a law Michigan passed in March 2011, has cut elected officials like Williams out of the process. It allows Gov. Rick Snyder to give emergency managers unilateral powers over the municipalities and school districts they run.
“They couldn’t get elected if they tried,” said Williams.
Appointed managers can nullify labor contracts, sell public utilities and dismiss elected officials. Michigan cities Benton Harbor, Ecorse, Flint, Pontiac, and two school districts are under emergency management. Detroit, the state’s largest city, is under financial review by the state.
Michigan is one of 23 states where the GOP has control of both houses and the governor’s mansion since the 2010 election. With the help of free-market think tanks, the state legislature used its one-party rule to pass a flurry of legislation aimed at the state’s prolonged great recession marked by auto industry flight and compounded by the 2007 housing market crash.
The emergency law, an unprecedented austerity measure, is the centerpiece of their strategy. Gov. Snyder’s supporters say Public Act 4 allows a more efficient and nimble response to the budget crisis than local governments have been able to muster. Critics have filed suit and begun a petition campaign to repeal what they call a power grab that obstructs voting rights. Labor officials say the law is part of a nationwide effort by right-wing think tanks and their corporate backers to break up public sector unions.
“We haven’t seen anything this severe anywhere else in the country,” said Charles Monaco, spokesman for the Progressive States Network. “There’s been nothing in other states where a budget measure overturns the democratic vote.”
Fallout in the cities
Pontiac’s Emergency Manager Louis Schimmel privatized city hall, firing Mayor Leon Jukowski, then rehiring him as a paid consultant. The City Council was not so lucky.
Neither were the police and fire departments. Pontiac is now patrolled by the county Sheriff, and nearby Waterford Township will put out fires. In late December, Schimmel put hundreds of city properties, including City Hall, up for sale.
Schimmel says he can do what elected officials have been unable to do: execute a plan for balancing the books quickly. Still, he has run into nagging structural roadblocks.
In February, Gov. Snyder celebrated a rare $457 million surplus in the state budget. But legislators in the Democratic minority say his administration has not eased the financial strain on cities. Changes to the corporate tax code are expected to reduce business tax revenue by $1.7 billion this year, and city governments will see a 10 percent cut to the $1 billion revenue-sharing budget.
“One thing we can’t do is print money,” said Schimmel. “We’re always chasing the dropping knife, fixing something here and losing revenue somewhere else.”
City officials like Williams say the emergency manager approach has been tried, unsuccessfully, for more than a decade. Public Act 4 is a strengthened version of a 1990 law that brought state appointees to several cities beginning in 2000.
Appointed managers and elected officials have pointed the finger at each other for the worsening economic situation in the cities. Neither, however, has been able to provide more than short-term fixes to the long-term flow of jobs, residents and revenue from the cities.
Pontiac has been under some form of state-appointed management for three years, during which time the city’s credit rating has dropped from B to Triple-C. The city is projecting a $9 million deficit for 2012.
“They aren’t creating revenue,” said Councilman Williams. “You can’t just cut your way out of a deficit.”
Williams says the emergency manager’s worst cut has been to the democratic process. With an indefinite appointment and city-paid salary, Schimmel doesn’t answer to anyone but the governor, at whose pleasure he serves. City Council can no longer make decisions but still calls meetings, which Williams says are routinely packed with angry residents.
Mackinac plan
Louis Schimmel brings to the Pontiac job years of experience as an associate of Michigan’s Mackinac Center for Public Policy. The center is part of a national network of free-market think tanks that draw support from the Heritage Foundation and major corporate donors. Among the Center’s funders is multi-billionaire Charles Koch, a champion of conservative movements.
Schimmel has pushed Mackinac’s gospel of privatization for decades. He served as the center’s director of municipal finance and its board of scholars.
The organization has played an integral role in the formation of the emergency law. In 2005, Mackinac published Schimmel’s essay calling on Michigan’s legislature to give managers the power to impose contract changes on public employee unions and “replace and take on the powers of the governing body.”
After the GOP won control in 2010, Mackinac reprinted Schimmel’s article. Two months later, Mackinac celebrated when the legislature put its prescriptions into Public Act 4.
Schimmel got those powers when he was hired to run Pontiac in September. He quickly fired the city’s clerk, attorney and director of public works. He contracted out the public works, building, public safety, law, and water departments.
“Nearly the whole city has been privatized,” said Councilman Williams, who now works without a city salary.
In 1986, Schimmel also privatized city services when Ecorse, Mich., landed in state receivership.
More than twenty years later, the city is back in debt, and back under state management. In a December planning report, new Emergency Manager Joyce Parker said Ecorse would save $2 million annually by bringing the city’s Department of Works back in house, ending costly contracts stemming from the 1980s restructuring.
Schimmel concedes the privatization strategy can backfire, but blames inept local government. “If you don’t have an overseer of the contractor, privatization can be much more expensive than in-house services,” he said.
Bargain basement
The Mackinac Center has also pushed state legislators to challenge public employee unions. Before the March 2011 emergency bill passed, Mackinac’s Legislative Analyst Jack McHugh laid out the center’s agenda.
“Our goal is [to] outlaw government collective bargaining in Michigan,” he wrote to state Rep. Tom McMillin in an email obtained by think tank Progress Michigan.
In Flint, Emergency Manager Michael Brown promised to restructure collective bargaining agreements in his mid-January report to the state.
Flint has hemorrhaged jobs for decades since General Motors began closing factories in the 1980s. Brown is the second state-appointed manager in a decade.
“We’re on the merry-go-round again,” said Paul Jordan, a longtime Flint resident who has joined a legal effort to overturn the law. “This didn’t work in 2002.”
International Vice President of the AFSCME public employees union Larry Roehrig says city workers agreed to health care concessions in a contract with the elected government, hoping to avoid further cuts when Brown arrived.
“We are holding our collective breath,” said Roehrig. “Sure we’re worried, but what can we do?”
The police and fire unions have no agreement with the city, and have taken a more defiant approach to Brown, who can impose contract changes, and even abolish the entire bargaining agreement with state approval.
“If you can bust the unions, you’ve busted the Democratic Party,” said Brit Satchwell, president of the Ann Arbor Education Association, the teachers union.
The Mackinac Center claims that Michigan could save $5.7 billion if public employees’ wages and benefits were made comparable to sinking private sector wages.
Facing charges of greed, the public employee union leaders say cuts to public sector jobs have only seeded the next phase of economic woes in the state — foreclosures, unemployment, and intensified reliance on state aid programs in cities like Flint, where the jobless rate at the end of 2011 was 17.5 percent.
“It’s an acceleration of the downward spiral,” said Satchwell.
Mackinac and ALEC
Another group that may be influencing state legislators in passing emergency manager type laws is the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).
The group convenes national conferences with state legislators and corporate representatives to draft model legislation. Elected officials in ALEC pay a minimal fee to join the group, while corporations pay up to $100,000.
Michigan’s Mackinac Center attends ALEC events, as well. James Hohman, a center analyst, was one of 40 private sector representatives at a December 2010 conference on state fiscal policy, months before Michigan passed Public Act 4.
According to minutes from the closed-door meeting, legislators, corporate representatives and think tanks including Mackinac hammered out new model laws to align public and private sector pay and restructure state pensions.
Since 2010, ALEC member Rep. McMillin has introduced several bills taken right from the playbook. One resolution encouraging privatization of public services draws directly from ALEC’s model laws, hundreds of which were leaked to the Center for Media and Democracy last summer.
The model bills have matched up with language found in Arizona’s immigration law and informed Ohio and Wisconsin’s collective bargaining laws.
ALEC’s Tax and Fiscal Policy Director Jonathan Williams did not respond to requests for comment.
ALEC publishes reports on state fiscal policy including the “State Budget Reform Toolkit” and the yearly “Rich States, Poor States” report, written with Koch Foundation money. The reports encourage legislators to target public employees, minimize “redistribution of income” through welfare programs, identify privatization opportunities, sell off public holdings like water systems, hospitals, and utilities and slash corporate taxes.
The reports recommend that states create a “centralized, independent, decision-making body to manage privatization and government efficiency initiatives.” Michigan’s law grants far more sweeping powers to one state appointee.
The D.C.-based think tank’s connection with Michigan lawmakers runs decades deep. John Engler was Michigan’s governor for three terms, from 1991 to 2003. ALEC hails him as an early member in the 1970s and a “pioneer” in the movement to privatize state holdings.
When Snyder was elected in 2010, he hired Engler’s former Lieutenant Gov. Dick Posthumous, also a longtime ALEC member, as his special legislative adviser.
Pushback
Detroit’s elected leaders, unions and citizens groups have attracted national support in their opposition to the State Treasurer’s financial review of city finances in December. Members of the City Council responded by demanding that the state repay $220 million owed to the city under a former revenue-sharing agreement
Michigan’s congressional delegation asked Gov. Snyder to back away from the law, while a ten-person review board determines whether Detroit is eligible for a manager.
Detroit’s Mayor Dave Bing acknowledges the city’s budget woes — a $200 million deficit — and has proposed raising corporate taxes, laying off 1,000 city workers, and altering city pensions to head off an emergency manager who would put elected leaders out of a job.
The state’s decision whether to install a manager will hinge on the outcome of Bing’s ongoing talks with city unions. In February, the mayor announced a tentative agreement on concessions with public employees.
Meanwhile, Congressman John Conyers has asked the U.S. Department of Justice to review the federal constitutionality of the law. And Michigan residents will deliver hundreds of thousands of signatures to the state on March 2, attempting to put the law up for referendum in November.
Detroit’s Sugar Law Center for Economic and Social Justice has filed a suit claiming the law violates basic sections of the state constitution, including the home rule provision that outlines residents’ rights to elect local government.
“If we win this case, it will give other state legislatures pause before pursuing similar laws,” said Tova Perlmutter, director of the law center.
MLive uncritically looks at GRCC farmer certification program
Earlier today, MLive posted a story by reporter Brian McVicar, which promoted a new program by the Grand Rapids Community College that seeks to assist local farmer obtain certification and allow them to sell to larger food distributors.
The article states that GRCC is offering Good Agricultural Practice (GAP) certification classes to area farmers who want to expand their sales beyond farmers markets. Nowhere in the story does the reporter question the premise of the project, which seems to be shifting food sales from farmers markets to involve food marketers and food brokers. The article does not include voices that would suggest that farmers markets are the best mechanisms for promoting local food.
The only sources cited in the article are the director of work force training at GRCC and someone with the MSU extension, which is one of the partners in this project.
However, the article omits the other partners in this project, which according to GRCC are Sysco, Walsma Lyons and Morse Marketing Connections. The MLive story does mention Sysco, but not as a partner.
Understanding who the partners are in this project makes all the difference in the world. Sysco, Walsma Lyons and Morse Marketing Connections do not grow food, they only distribute and market food products. These entities also have a long history of being food brokers and marketers with an emphasis that is not on the local. For instance, Walsma Lyons states they offer access “to a large global network of preferred suppliers.”
Morse Marketing Connections, “originally worked with Michigan-based agricultural groups and has expanded nationally, now working in multi-sector partnerships across a variety of food-related initiatives, with government agencies, private and public universities and corporations.” Sysco, while it has a Grand Rapids office, is one of the largest food distributors in the US.
What the MLive reporter failed to acknowledge or investigate is that when companies like Sysco get involved in purchasing from local growing’s, particularly small farmers is that they then exert tremendous influence in what those farmers grow. The reason being is that Sysco and other food brokers operate on volume, which means they not only are likely to determine food prices, they sometime can determine what farmers grow, based on “the market.” If a small blueberry farmer begins to sell their product to companies like Sysco they are submitting themselves to an unstable market that is often determined by what Sysco other food distributors can market around the country or around the global. This means that when a crop disaster happens anywhere else in the world it can impact the sales of food grown locally that are now in the global market because of their relationship to companies like Sysco.
This topic was explored briefly in the film Food Inc., but is better explained in Raj Patel’s book Stuffed and Starved: Markets, Power and the Hidden Battle for the World’s Food System.
If the local news media is going to report on local programs that are supposed to “assist” area farmers, then they need to ask important questions about the commercial partners in this project and what it really means for farmers and the public.
This Day is Resistance History: The Birth of Frederick Douglass
On February 14, 1817, the great Abolitionist and former slave, Frederick Douglass was born.
Including ex-slave as a descriptor is important, since Douglass was one of the first to write about his experience as a slave in the US with his first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, in 1845.
The publishing of this autobiography by Douglass came about in part because Douglass would often encounter disbelief from White audiences about his former slave status, because he spoke so eloquently in public. Privileged White audiences, it seems, had a hard time believing that a Black man could use language in such a powerful way, but it was Douglass’ own experience of slavery that gave him the ability to articulate an abolitionist message.
Frederick Douglass was one of the seminal figures of the 19th Century Abolitionist movement, not just because he was an ex-slave, but because he was a tireless organizer who challenged not only chattel slavery, he challenged institutional racism that was at the very foundation of this nation.
In his 1852 speech, The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro, Douglass states:
What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sound of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants brass fronted impudence; your shout of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanks-givings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.
As the battle to end Chattel slavery continued, Douglass not only became one of the strongest voices for abolition, he was deeply involved in the multi-pronged efforts to dismantle legalized slavery.
Douglass not only documented the abolitionist movement in his publication The North Star, the former slave challenged the White anti-slavery sectors to do more than take a moral position against slavery. Douglass supported and was involved in the Underground Railroad, mostly through speaking, writing and raising money for those doing the dangerous work.
Douglass was also constantly slapping America upside the head by framing the issue as one of urgency and liberation. There were those at the time who advocated for a reformist approach and to “not ask for too much too soon,” but Douglass would constantly remind his audience that nothing short of the immediate abolition of slavery was acceptable. Indeed, while Douglass may not have fully agreed with the militant responses to legalized slavery from Nat Turner or John Brown, he recognized that this kind of resistance was inevitable if change didn’t come immediately.
Douglass understood the function of power in the US and how change would not come through a reformist strategy. In 1857, Douglass would pen one of his most powerful criticisms of reformism, in his West India Emancipation speech:
Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.
This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong, which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
We also celebrate Frederick Douglass because he was more than an abolitionist. Douglass was an anti-imperialist who condemned the US invasion of Mexico. In 1948, Douglass wrote in The North Star, of “the present disgraceful, cruel, and iniquitous war with our sister republic. Mexico seems a doomed victim to Anglo Saxon cupidity and love of dominion.”
We celebrate Frederick Douglass today because he was one of the first men to stand in solidarity with women who were organizing for their own liberation. Douglass understood the importance of inter-sectionality and that oppression was wrong no matter what form it took. He wrote the following words in support of women’s rights in the immediate aftermath of the Seneca Falls Convention.
In respect to political rights, we hold woman to be justly entitled to all we claim for man. We go farther, and express our conviction that all political rights which it is expedient for man to exercise, it is equally so for women. All that distinguishes man as an intelligent and accountable being, is equally true of woman; and if that government is only just which governs by the free consent of the governed, there can be no reason in the world for denying to woman the exercise of the elective franchise, or a hand in making and administering the laws of the land.
Lastly, we celebrate the birth of Frederick Douglass because he understood the importance of independent media (The North Star) and the practice of journalism that exposed power.
Stabenow announces Farm Bill hearings on Washington, continues to support subsidies to agribusiness
Last week, Michigan Senator Debbie Stabenow announced that the Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee will be holding four hearings over the next month on the 2012 Farm Bill.
The four hearings will cover the following topics: Energy and Economic Growth for Rural America; Strengthening Conservation through the 2012 Farm Bill; Healthy Food Initiatives, Local Production; and Nutrition and Risk Management and Commodities in the 2012 Farm Bill.
The announcement also says, “Witnesses, times and other specific hearing details to be announced.” This clearly suggests that Stabenow and the other Committee members have selectively invited people to address the committee, which if it follows the same pattern of the Michigan Farm Bill hearing from 2011, then all the “witnesses” will be representatives from Agri-business.
The selection of who will no doubt be speaking at these hearings could also be deduced by looking at who the major campaign contributors are to Senator Stabenow, who is in the midst of a re-election year. Several of the top 20 contributors for the 2012 election are from the agribusiness sector.
A third indicator on who might be speaking at the upcoming Ag Committee hearings is reflected in whom Senator Stabenow has recently provided taxpayer subsidies to.
On February 3rd, Stabenow announced that several Michigan food suppliers would be receiving federal funding. All four recipients will be using the “grant” money to “develop marketing strategies for agricultural commodities.” The four businesses are producers of beet sugar, chocolate & yogurt-covered blueberries, fruit wines and bio-based chemical products. Interesting, since none of these products seem like essential food staples and that promote better nutrition. Indeed, all four products seem to be specialty items that will all be fairly pricey and target more upscale consumers. This is what your tax dollars are being used for……..to advertise luxury food items to upscale consumers.
We plan on reporting on the outcome of each of these hearings as information becomes available.
450 US Military bases in Afghanistan and counting
This article by Nick Turse is re-posted from Tom’s Dispatch.
In late December, the lot was just a big blank: a few burgundy metal shipping containers sitting in an expanse of crushed eggshell-colored gravel inside a razor-wire-topped fence. The American military in Afghanistan doesn’t want to talk about it, but one day soon, it will be a new hub for the American drone war in the Greater Middle East.
Next year, that empty lot will be a two-story concrete intelligence facility for America’s drone war, brightly lit and filled with powerful computers kept in climate-controlled comfort in a country where most of the population has no access to electricity. It will boast almost 7,000 square feet of offices, briefing and conference rooms, and a large “processing, exploitation, and dissemination” operations center — and, of course, it will be built with American tax dollars.
Nor is it an anomaly. Despite all the talk of drawdowns and withdrawals, there has been a years-long building boom in Afghanistan that shows little sign of abating. In early 2010, the U.S.-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) had nearly 400 bases in Afghanistan. Today, Lieutenant Lauren Rago of ISAF public affairs tells TomDispatch, the number tops 450.
The hush-hush, high-tech, super-secure facility at the massive air base in Kandahar is just one of many building projects the U.S. military currently has planned or underway in Afghanistan. While some U.S. bases are indeed closing up shop or being transferred to the Afghan government, and there’s talk of combat operations slowing or ending next year, as well as a withdrawal of American combat forces from Afghanistan by 2014, the U.S. military is still preparing for a much longer haul at mega-bases like Kandahar and Bagram airfields. The same is true even of some smaller camps, forward operating bases (FOBs), and combat outposts (COPs) scattered through the country’s backlands. “Bagram is going through a significant transition during the next year to two years,” Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Gerdes of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Bagram Office recently toldFreedom Builder, a Corps of Engineers publication. “We’re transitioning… into a long-term, five-year, 10-year vision for the base.”
Whether the U.S. military will still be in Afghanistan in five or 10 years remains to be seen, but steps are currently being taken to make that possible. U.S. military publications, plans and schematics, contracting documents, and other official data examined by TomDispatch catalog hundreds of construction projects worth billions of dollars slated to begin, continue, or conclude in 2012.
While many of these efforts are geared toward structures for Afghan forces or civilian institutions, a considerable number involve U.S. facilities, some of the most significant being dedicated to the ascendant forms of American warfare: drone operations and missions by elite special operations units. The available plans for most of these projects suggest durability. “The structures that are going in are concrete and mortar, rather than plywood and tent skins,” says Gerdes. As of last December, his office was involved in 30 Afghan construction projects for U.S. or international coalition partners worth almost $427 million.
The Big Base Build-Up
Recently, the New York Times reported that President Obama is likely to approve a plan to shift much of the U.S. effort in Afghanistan to special operations forces. These elite troops would then conduct kill/capture missions and train local troops well beyond 2014. Recent building efforts in the country bear this out.
A major project at Bagram Air Base, for instance, involves the construction of a special operations forces complex, a clandestine base within a base that will afford America’s black ops troops secrecy and near-absolute autonomy from other U.S. and coalition forces. Begun in 2010, the $29 million project is slated to be completed this May and join roughly 90 locations around the country where troops from Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force-Afghanistan have been stationed.
Elsewhere on Bagram, tens of millions of dollars are being spent on projects that are less sexy but no less integral to the war effort, like paving dirt roads and upgrading drainage systems on the mega-base. In January, the U.S. military awarded a $7 million contract to a Turkish construction company to build a 24,000-square-foot command-and-control facility. Plans are also in the works for a new operations center to support tactical fighter jet missions, a new flight-line fire station, as well as more lighting and other improvements to support the American air war.
Last month, Afghan President Hamid Karzai ordered that the U.S.-run prison at Bagram be transferred to Afghan control. By the end of January, the U.S. had issued a $36 million contract for the construction, within a year, of a new prison on the base. While details are sparse, plans for the detention center indicate a thoroughly modern, high-security facility complete with guard towers, advanced surveillance systems, administrative facilities, and the capacity to house about 2,000 prisoners.
At Kandahar Air Field, that new intelligence facility for the drone war will be joined by a similarly-sized structure devoted to administrative operations and maintenance tasks associated with robotic aerial missions. It will be able to accommodate as many as 180 personnel at a time. With an estimated combined price tag of up to $5 million, both buildings will be integral to Air Force and possibly CIA operations involving both the MQ-1 Predator drone and its more advanced and more heavily-armed progeny, the MQ-9 Reaper.
The military is keeping information about these drone facilities under extraordinarily tight wraps. They refused to answer questions about whether, for instance, the construction of these new centers for robotic warfare are in any way related to the loss of Shamsi Air Base in neighboring Pakistan as a drone operations center, or if they signal efforts to increase the tempo of drone missions in the years ahead. The International Joint Command’s chief of Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) operations, aware that such questions were to be posed, backed out of a planned interview with TomDispatch.
“Unfortunately our ISR chief here in the International Joint Command is going to be unable to address your questions,” Lieutenant Ryan Welsh of ISAF Joint Command Media Outreach explained by email just days before the scheduled interview. He also made it clear that any question involving drone operations in Pakistan was off limits. “The issues that you raise are outside the scope under which the IJC operates, therefore we are unable to facilitate this interview request.”
Whether the construction at Kandahar is designed to free up facilities elsewhere for CIA drone operations across the border in Pakistan or is related only to missions within Afghanistan, it strongly suggests a ramping up of unmanned operations. It is, however, just one facet of the ongoing construction at the air field. This month, a $26 million project to build 11 new structures devoted to tactical vehicle maintenance at Kandahar is scheduled for completion. With two large buildings for upkeep and repairs, one devoted strictly to fixing tires, another to painting vehicles, as well as an industrial-sized car wash, and administrative and storage facilities, the big base’s building boom shows no sign of flickering out.
Construction and Reconstruction
This year, at Herat Air Base in the province of the same name bordering Turkmenistan and Iran, the U.S. is slated to begin a multimillion-dollar project to enhance its special forces’ air operations. Plans are in the works to expand apron space — where aircraft can be parked, serviced, and loaded or unloaded — for helicopters and airplanes, as well as to build new taxiways and aircraft shelters.
That project is just one of nearly 130, cumulatively valued at about $1.5 billion, slated to be carried out in Herat, Helmand, and Kandahar provinces this year, according to Army Corps of Engineers documents examined by TomDispatch. These also include efforts at Camp Tombstone and Camp Dwyer, both in Helmand Province as well as Kandahar’s FOB Hadrian and FOB Wilson. The U.S. military also recently awarded a contract for more air field apron space at a base in Kunduz, a new secure entrance and new roads for FOB Delaram II, and new utilities and roads at FOB Shank, while the Marines recently built a new chapel at Camp Bastion.
Seven years ago, Forward Operating Base Sweeney, located a mile up in a mountain range in Zabul Province, was a well-outfitted, if remote, American base. After U.S. troops abandoned it, however, the base fell into disrepair. Last month, American troops returned in force and began rebuilding the outpost, constructing everything from new troop housing to a new storage facility. “We built a lot of buildings, we put up a lot of tents, we filled a lot of sandbags, and we increased our force protection significantly,” Captain Joe Mickley, commanding officer of the soldiers taking up residence at the base, told a military reporter.
Decommission and Deconstruction
Hesco barriers are, in essence, big bags of dirt. Up to seven feet tall, made of canvas and heavy gauge wire mesh, they form protective walls around U.S. outposts all over Afghanistan. They’ll take the worst of sniper rounds, rifle-propelled grenades, even mortar shells, but one thing can absolutely wreck them — the Marines’ 9th Engineer Support Battalion.
At the beginning of December, the 9th Engineers were building bases and filling up Hescos in Helmand Province. By the end of the month, they were tearing others down.
Wielding pickaxes, shovels, bolt-cutters, powerful rescue saws, and front-end loaders, they have begun “demilitarizing” bases, cutting countless Hescos — which cost $700 or more a pop — into heaps of jagged scrap metal and bulldozing berms in advance of the announced American withdrawal from Afghanistan. At Firebase Saenz, for example, Marines were bathed in a sea of crimson sparks as they sawed their way through the metal mesh and let the dirt spill out, leaving a country already haunted by the ghosts of British and Russian bases with yet another defunct foreign outpost. After Saenz, it was on to another patrol base slated for destruction.
Not all rural outposts are being torn down, however. Some are being handed over to the Afghan Army or police. And new facilities are now being built for the indigenous forces at an increasing rate. “If current projections remain accurate, we will award 18 contracts in February,” Bonnie Perry, the head of contracting for the Army Corps of Engineers’ Afghanistan Engineering District-South, told military reporter Karla Marshall. “Next quarter we expect that awards will remain high, with the largest number of contract awards occurring in May.” One of the projects underway is a large base near Herat, which will include barracks, dining facilities, office space, and other amenities for Afghan commandos.
Tell Me How This Ends
No one should be surprised that the U.S. military is building up and tearing down bases at the same time, nor that much of the new construction is going on at mega-bases, while small outposts in the countryside are being abandoned. This is exactly what you would expect of an occupation force looking to scale back its “footprint” and end major combat operations while maintaining an on-going presence in Afghanistan. Given the U.S. military’s projected retreat to its giant bases and an increased reliance on kill/capture black-ops as well as unmanned air missions, it’s also no surprise that its signature projects for 2012 include a new special operations forces compound, clandestine drone facilities, and a brand new military prison.
There’s little doubt Bagram Air Base will exist in five or 10 years. Just who will be occupying it is, however, less clear. After all, in Iraq, the Obama administration negotiated for some way to station a significant military force — 10,000 or more troops — there beyond a withdrawal date that had been set in stone for years. While a token number of U.S. troops and a highly militarized State Department contingent remain there, the Iraqi government largely thwarted the American efforts — and now, even the State Department presence is being halved.
It’s less likely this will be the case in Afghanistan, but it remains possible. Still, it’s clear that the military is building in that country as if an enduring American presence were a given. Whatever the outcome, vestiges of the current base-building boom will endure and become part of America’s Afghan legacy.
On Bagram’s grounds stands a distinctive structure called the “Crow’s Nest.” It’s an old control tower built by the Soviets to coordinate their military operations in Afghanistan. That foreign force left the country in 1989. The Soviet Union itself departed from the planet less than three years later. The tower remains.
America’s new prison in Bagram will undoubtedly remain, too. Just who the jailers will be and who will be locked inside five years or 10 years from now is, of course, unknown. But given the history — marked by torture and deaths — of the appalling treatment of inmates at Bagram and, more generally, of the brutality toward prisoners by all parties to the conflict over the years, in no scenario are the results likely to be pretty.
Grand Rapids Institute for Information Democracy 