(This article by Paul Street is re-posted from ZNet.)
Deletion of essential context and information is one of the many ways in which American corporate news media works to take the risk of American democracy for the rich and powerful. Take a recent front-page Chicago Tribune story titled “Obama Looks to Lock Up Big Money.” Tribune Washington Bureau correspondents Tom Hamburger and Matea Gold note that President Barack Obama’s re-election team has “launched an invigorated effort to draw money from wealthy donors,” thereby “buttressing the campaign against a potential decline in contributions from the everyday supporters who helped fuel a massive fundraising haul in 2008.” The increased emphasis on “deep pocketed backers comes, Hamburger and Gold add, “amid uncertainty about whether Obama will be able to re-energize the small money donors who made up about half of the $745 million he raised in the 2008 campaign.” The page 2 continuation headline of their article reads “Big Money Donors on Obama Radar.’ 1
It’s a nasty, plutocratic story. Team Obama 2012 has devised a new money-tapping entity called the Obama Victory Fund (OVF), a joint venture of Obama’s Chicago-based re-election campaign and the Democratic (party’s) National Committee (DNC). One becomes a “Presidential Partner” by giving $75,000 (the maximum that “contributors” are allowed to give to the DNC for the 2012 election cycle) of one’s spare change to the OVF. Federal election law prohibits individuals from giving (investing) more than $5000 to (in) a candidate in an election cycle. But they can give (invest) up to fifteen times that amount to (in) joint candidate and party committees.
Presidential Partners are “one of three major [Obama fundraising] programs” that offer wealthy political investors “special access to campaign officials in exchange for [large] contributions.”
Along with events like a recent $15,000-a-plate dinner Obama held with Wall Street executives at an elite Manhattan restaurant, these sorts of programs threaten, Hamburger and Gold note, to “undercut the image [Obama] has tried to craft.”[2] The reporters do not say what that image is, but they are clearly referring to the branding of as a friend and champion of the poor and working people in their struggle with the wealthy “special interests” the corporate Democrats seek to identify with the Republican Party when talking to ordinary citizens.
Non-Change Comes from the Top Down
This is a fine and useful report as far as it goes, which is not very far. There are two very big and overlapping things missing from the Tribune’s account. The first critical thing not addressed is the rather important (one would think) question of why the Obama campaign anticipates a significant fall in small donations. The answer to that question (and no small part of the answer to the related question of why Democrats turned out so poorly in the mid-term congressional elections of November 2010) is that president Obama has coldly contradicted his own progressive-sounding and people-friendly campaign rhetoric about change coming from the bottom up by acting in accord with the top-down dictates of the nation’s de facto dictatorship of money. With its monumental bailout of hyper-opulent financial overlords, its refusal to nationalize and cut down the parasitic too-big (too powerful)-to-fail financial institutions that paralyzed the economy, its passage of a health reform bill that only the big insurance and drug companies could love (consistent with Rahm Emmanuel’s advice to the president: “ignore the progressives”), its cutting of an auto bailout deal that rewarded capital flight, its undermining of serious global carbon emission reductions at Copenhagen, its refusal to advance serious public works programs (green or otherwise), its disregarding of promises to labor and other popular constituencies (remember Obama’s immediately abandoned campaign pledge to advance the union re-legalizing Employee Free Choice Act?) and other betrayals of its “progressive base” (the other sides of the coins of promises kept to its corporate sponsors), the “Obama, Inc.” administration has epitomized the cynical essence of the other Golden Rule: “those who have the gold rule.” As William Greider noted in the spring of 2009, “People everywhere [have] learned a blunt lesson about power, who has it and who doesn’t. They [have] watched Washington run to rescue the very financial interests that caused the catastrophe. They [have] learned that government has plenty of money to spend when the right people want it.” The “right people” are those who already have the most money.
It’s another lesson in an old tutorial. Every four years, the radical historian Laurence Shoup noted in early 2008, many Americans invest their hopes in an electoral process that does not deserve their trust. These voters hope that a savior can be installed in the White House – someone who will raise wages, roll back war and militarism, provide universal and adequate health care, rebuild the nation’s infrastructure, produce high-paying jobs, fix the environmental crisis, reduce inequality, guarantee economic security, and generally make daily life more livable. But the dreams are regularly drowned in the icy waters of historical and political “reality.” In the actuality of American politics and policy, the officially “elect-able” candidates are vetted in advance by what Shoup called “the hidden primary of the ruling class.” By prior Establishment selection, all of the “viable” presidential contenders are closely tied to corporate and military-imperial power in numerous and interrelated ways. They run safely within the narrow ideological and policy parameters set by those who rule behind the scenes to make sure that the rich and privileged continue to be the leading beneficiaries of the American system. In its presidential as in its other elections, U.S. “democracy” is “at best” a “guided one; at its worst it is a corrupt farce, amounting to manipulation, with the larger population projects of propaganda in a controlled and trivialized electoral process. It is an illusion,” Shoup claimed– correctly in my opinion – “that real change can ever come from electing a different ruling class-sponsored candidate.”3
“What’s the Dollar Value of a Starry Eyed Idealist?”
Which brings us to the second thing missing from the Tribune report: Obama was a gold-plated deep pockets candidate in the last presidential election cycle. Big money donors have always been “on Obama’s radar” throughout his political career.[4] Obama’s presidential record matches the record-setting corporate campaign funding he quite eagerly sought and received during the presidential race[5]and during his campaign for the U.S. Senate in 2004. As is well known, big money campaign sponsors are not in the business of handing over the White House to progressive enemies of American wealth, empire and inequality, incorporated. Obama’s strong connection to wealthy patrons like Goldman Sachs, General Dynamics, and Exelon and a host of politically connected corporate lobbyists was predicated on his well-heeled backers’ calculation that the Obama phenomenon offered no significant popular or democratic threat to elite financial interests and that its central figure was someone with whom concentrated wealth could productively work in securing its interests and advancing its agenda. As Ken Silverstein noted in an important 2006 Harper’s article that told the story of Obama’s early vetting by the money and politics class in 2003 and 2004, early in his national political career Obama was found to be a safe candidate for concentrated wealth. “On condition of anonymity,” Silverstein reported, “one Washington lobbyist I spoke with was willing to point out the obvious: that big donors would not be helping out Obama if they didn’t see him as a ‘player.’ The lobbyist added: ‘What’s the dollar value of a starry-eyed idealist?’” 6
“A Parallel Public Financing System”: The Myth of Obama’s Small Donor Base
But the biggest problem for Hamburger and Gold’s article is that the notion of Obama as a small-money candidate of “grassroots” donors in 2008 is flatly false. As the nonpartisan Campaign Finance Institute (CFI) showed in a late November 2008 study, Obama’s base of small donors was almost exactly the same percent as the openly plutocratic George W. Bush’s in 2004 – Obama had 24 percent and Bus had 25 percent. “The myth is that money from small donors dominated Barack Obama’s finances,” said CFI director Michael Malbin, acknowledging that his organization also was initially fooled. Compiling total contributions from the same individuals, the CFI the Institute discovered that rather than the 50 percent plus commonly reported during the campaign (and reported to this day by Hamburger and Gold), just a quarter of Obama’s total take came from people whose total donations added up to less than $200. The critical word here is “total.” As the veteran national and foreign affairs correspondent and Los Angeles Times editorial board member Andrew Malcom noted on the Los Angeles Times’ blog in late November of 2008:
“It comes down to which definition of ‘small donor’ you accept: Someone who donated to the Obama campaign by scraping together $199, period. Or someone who donated $199 to the Obama campaign several times, perhaps totaling close to the $4,600 legal limit for the primary and general elections. In aggregate, that would vault him/her out of the small donor category that was so useful to the political campaign’s public relations campaign portraying the donor base as about two times as broad as it really was. The reported numbers show that Obama actually received 80% more money from large donors (those giving $1,000 or more total) than from small donors. Through the Democratic National Convention, the Institute estimates, Obama received $119 million from genuine small donors, an impressive sum, to be sure. But not as impressive as the $210 million he’d raised by then from bundlers and large donors….Now, we’ll see how broad-based news coverage of this real reality is.”7
More than three years later, the Los Angeles Times’ sister paper the Chicago Tribune still hasn’t heard the news on candidate Obama’s plutocratic reality in 2008.
The myth of Obama’s small donor base was disseminated in no small part by the Obama campaign itself, seeking to justify its decision to blow through the spending limits required by the presidential public financing system. The “small donor” story was useful for a richly plutocratic campaign that coldly broke its promise to use the public financing system if its Republican opponent was willing to honor its spending limits. John McCain would have gone with the public system.[8]By early April of 2008, Washington Post reporters Mathew Mosk and Alec McGillis noted, Obama’s marketers had come up with an ingenious solution to the stark conflict between rhetoric and reality in their candidate’s public financing position. Obama claimed that his presidential campaign had created “a parallel public financing system” based on what that the Post called “a wave of modest donations from homemakers and high school teachers.”
“Small givers,” Obama said at an April 2008 fundraiser, “will have as much access and influence over the course and direction of our campaign as has traditionally been reserved for the wealthy and powerful.” This promise struck Mosk and McGillis as difficult to fulfill. They noted that people “with wealth and power” had “played a critical role in creating Obama’s record-breaking fundraising machine, and their generosity earned them a prominent voice in shaping his campaign.” Of particular interest, they found that Obama had received support from “seventy-nine ‘bundlers,’ five of them millionaires,” who had “tapped their personal networks to raise at least $200,000 each. They have helped the campaign recruit more than 27,000 to write checks for $2,300, the maximum allowed.”9
Such are the absurdities of the United States’ fake-democratic political culture, the essence of which was once lucidly captured by the formerly left Christopher Hitchens as “the manipulation of populism by elitism.”
SELECTED NOTES
1 Tom Hamburger and Matea Gold, “Obama Looks to Lock Up Big Money,” Chicago Tribune, June 25, 2011, Section 1, 1-2.
2 Hamburger and Gold, “Obama Looks to Lock Up Big Money.”
3 Laurence H. Shoup, “The Presidential Election 2008,” Z Magazine (February 2008), p. 31.
4 For details and sources, see Paul Street , Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (Paradigm, 2008), xxii-xiv, 12-22.
5 “Obama Breaks Fundraising Records,” Voice of America News, October 21, 2009, at www1.voanews.com/english/news/a-13-2008-10-21-voa47-66601732.html; Street, Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics, 19–22.
6 Ken Silverstein, “Barack Obama, Inc.: The Birth of a Washington Machine,” Harper’s (November 2006).
7 Andrew Malcom, “Obama’s Small Donor Base Image is a Myth, New Study Reveals,,” LA Times, November 28, 2008) http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2008/11/obama-money.html
8 For details and sources, Street, Barack Obama and the Future, 19-22.
9 Matthew Mosk and Alex McGillis, “Big Donors Among Obama’s Grass Roots,” Washington Post, 11 April, 2008, p. A1.
Hip-Hop and Forbes: Parallels of Image and Inequality
(This commentary by Jared A. Ball is re-posted from Black Agenda Report)
“The Blackness on top only masks the deepening levels of Blackness at the bottom.”
The newly released Forbes list of Top 25 money earners in music and the newly released report from the National Urban League of Black inequality in the United States should be paired and used by even the most ardent lovers of hip-hop as proof of one very powerful lesson: The Blackness on top only masks the deepening levels of Blackness at the bottom. Hip-hop, the broader entertainment industry, and the presidency of Barack Obama all, as much as anything else in this country, splendidly demonstrate the point: Heavily promoted Blackness masks Black suffering while enriching a mostly White, male elite.
The Forbes list shows the problem in microcosm. The success of a few rappers hasn’t helped the rest of the hip-hop community any more than the election of the first Black president has helped Black people. And in neither case do the rewards of a select few compare to that which they create for their respective betters. In fact, in each case the respective betters are all mostly housed on Wall Street where each do better than their more highly promoted and meticulously selected blacker representatives. So, for instance, and according to Forbes, the highest earning rap group, the Black Eyed Peas, earned roughly $61 million over the last 12 months. But this is not even half what the top earning band made over that same last year; U2 pulled in about $195 million. And neither amount amounts to much compared to the revenues generated by the owner of the label that owns both of these groups. Vivendi, the parent company of Universal Music Group, was well over $40 billion in 2010.
As it is below, so it is above. In the macrocosm, according to a recent National Urban League study, the standard of living gap between White and Black Americans has actually worsened during the time of the Blackest face in the highest place, the Obama presidency. So just as the highest earning Black musicians bring in less than has about half of their richest counterparts, Black America’s standard of living is only about 70% that of Whites and dropping. And even when the highest earning rap group is often referred to as “multi-racial” and “multi-ethnic,” and even though it’s fronted by a White woman they still can’t close these divides! Even when the president is Black and fronted by White corporations Black inequality persists, and gets worse!
And for real? As big as hip-hop is globally none of the other 5 Black faces on that Forbes list are strictly hip-hop. Jay-Z and P. Diddy make more of their money through other ventures, Beyonce, Usher and Rihanna are pop singing, sometime actors. Hip-hop isn’t even on the list. It’s as broke as the communities that produced it. But just as it would take the accumulated sum of all those other 5 Black faces on that Forbes list to reach the top White group, the Urban League report shows that the accumulated sum of a Black president leaves Black people still having less than half the access to health care as Whites but still twice the unemployment. And all those top Black musicians still leaves the bulk in hip-hop needing equal pay and health care themselves, just ask the Grassroots Artist Movement (G.A.ME) who have been trying to organize around that for years.
But the real point is that in the end, as Jim Hightower pointed out recently, the biggest thieves walk off with it all with no questions asked, like the hedge fund manager who made $2.4 million an hour last year, or all those major corporations who pay no taxes while we are forced to watch schools close and teachers blamed. It is always a good exercise to compare popularly touted individual success stories with the conditions of the communities they’ve escaped.
We are constantly told that the reason Michigan is in such a dire financial state is because we don’t have a “business-friendly” environment.
This has been the mantra of the last four Governors of Michigan and it was reflected in the policy decisions to further deregulate the state culminating in the elimination of the Michigan Business Tax this year under Governor Rick Snyder.
The claim by Snyder, individual business owners, the Chamber of Commerce and groups like the West Michigan Policy Forum is that limited or no business tax will attract new companies thus creating new jobs that will have a trickle down effect in generating local and state revenues.
Not only has this notion been factually dismissed by authors such as Greg LaRoy in his well documented book The Great American Job Scam: Corporate Tax Dodging and the Myth of Job Creation, the very idea that eliminating business taxes will make it impossible for states to be fiscally responsible. A new report by the Boston-based group United for a Fair Economy can help shed some light on this reality.
According to the report Flip It to Fix It: An Immediate, Fair Solution to State Budget Shortfalls, “At the core of the budget crisis facing states are regressive state tax structures (comprised of the major state and local taxes) that are unfair, unsound, and unsustainable by design.”
The researchers at United for Fair Economy state that of the current state tax structure was inverted, which would mean that business pay more of the share of taxes that states could eliminate their deficit. The report goes on to state, “The inversion exercise takes a state’s current distribution of state and local taxes by income quintile (lowest 20 percent, second 20 percent, middle 20 percent, fourth 20 percent, top 20 percent) and flips it at the 50th percentile mark, thereby making a regressive structure progressive.
This resulting progressive tax structure has major benefits to states.
- It raises significant revenue. If every state inverted its tax structure, states would raise a combined $490 billion, wiping out deficits with cash to spare to invest in economy-enhancing activities.
- It is unmatched in its economic efficiency, which encourages steady and strong economic activity and widespread prosperity over time.
- It provides commonsense equity, with wealthy families contributing a greater share of their income in taxes than low- and middle-income families.
The report also provides a state by state breakdown of the current and inverted tax structure to show how states could eliminate their budget deficits – as is reflected in this graph.
Inverting the current tax structure is not being proposed by even most progressive organizations and since the current administration and legislative body seems bent on turning more of the public sector over to the private sector that such a policy will not even be considered in the near future.
Advertisers to blame for childhood obesity in US according to American Academy of Pediatrics
According to a new statement by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) the amount of time kids spend watching media and the targeted junk food ads as contributed significantly to childhood obesity in the US.
MLive posted a story today announcing the new statement by the AAP, which provides a pretty good summary of the findings and ends with a list of actions steps the association is calling for:
• A ban on junk-food advertising during TV shows geared for children.
• A ban on interactive ads and games for children and teens through cell phones, digital TV and other media.
• Federal funding for research into the effects of media use on children.
• More ads and video games promoting healthy food choices.
The action suggestions are a welcomed contribution to the fight against childhood obesity and they are important for a greater understanding on what role media has in the lives of children.
It would have been useful if the MLive writer had talked to the local TV stations to get a response to this new study from the AAP, especially since they all air lots of ads for unhealthy junk foods during children’s TV programs. We contacted channel’s 8, 13 and 17 on this issue, but have not received a response from any of the stations.
In addition, the MLive story does not provide other resources available for parents, teachers and community members concerned about this issue. There is an excellent study on how food and beverage marketers target children from the Center for Digital Democracy and a great toolkit for advocates from the Berkley Media Studies Group. For educators there are great resources to teach media literacy about junk food ads, particularly the lessons plans you can access from the Media Awareness Network.
Lastly, it would have been useful for those with MLive to talk with area pediatrics in West Michigan in order to put a local spin on the issue or the group Stop Targeting Our Kids (STOK) who have been confronting issues around media and children for the past 2 years.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s National Day of Divisiveness
(This article is re-posted from PRWatch.)
Texas Governor Rick Perry plans to host a “National Day of Prayer and Fasting” on Saturday, August 6 at Reliant Stadium in Houston, Texas, in an event is billed as a “non-denominational, apolitical Christian prayer meeting.” Despite the “apolitical” label, the event has some political undertones, particularly since Perry has been flirting with a run for the Republican presidential nomination and currently serves as chair of the Republican Governors Association. Perry has invited the other 49 U.S. state governors to the event. The portrayal of the event as a “nondenominational” ceremony is a misnomer, too, since the event will be exclusively Christian, and no other belief systems will be represented.
Controversial Host
Controversy surrounding Perry’s Day of Prayer is growing quickly. The event is hosted and funded — including the rental of Houston’s huge stadium — by the Tupelo, Mississippi-based American Family Association (AFA), which the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) labels as an anti-gay hate group. A June 11 editorial in the Houston Chronicle opposing Perry’s Day of Prayer said “There could hardly be a more divisive, unforgiving group than the American Family Association,” to host the event.
The AFA makes no attempt to hide its disdain towards gays and other members of society it considers inferior. In 2010, Bryan Fischer, AFA’s Director of Issue Analysis for Government and Public Policy, said, “Homosexuality gave us Adolph Hitler, and homosexuals in the military gave us the Brown Shirts, the Nazi war machine and six million dead Jews.” Fischer has also openly attacked native Americans. In a February, 2011 blog post (pdf), Fischer wrote that native Americans are morally and culturally inferior because of their refusal to accept Christianity. He wrote, “In all the discussions about the European settlement of the New World, one feature has been conspicuously absent: the role that the superstition, savagery and sexual immorality of native Americans played in making them morally disqualified from sovereign control of American soil.” Moreover, Fischer blamed high rates of poverty and alcoholism among native Americans on their refusal to accept Christianity, writing, ” …Many of the tribal reservations today remain mired in poverty and alcoholism because many native Americans continue to cling to the darkness of indigenous superstition instead of coming into the light of Christianity and assimilating into Christian culture.”
AFA’s president, Tim Wildmon, dismisses SPLC’s labeling of AFA as a hate group, saying AFA’s stand on homosexuality represents the beliefs of “a lot of people who have traditional values.” He adds that the purpose of the Day of Prayer is to pray for an end to the “debasement of our culture.” Translation: to pray for an end to America’s increasing acceptance of homosexuality.
Questionable Endorsers
The Rev. John Hagee, pastor of the Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas, is listed as an event endorser. He is the guy who said in a 2006 interview that Hurricane Katrina was God’s retribution against New Orelans for planning a gay pride parade. Like Harold Camping, the elderly radio pastor who gained fame in May, 2011 through his absurd failed global apocalypse PR campaign, Hagee preaches about the Rapture and the second coming of Jesus Christ. Hagee predicted on television that the world will end within 20 years. Hagee openly endorsed John McCain for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008. Another event endorser, David Barton, is a religious activist in Texas, and also a political consultant to the RNC, who says the United States is a “Christian nation” and calls the separation of church and state “a myth.”
In appearances across the U.S., Barton has assured pastors that they are permitted to use their pulpit to endorse political candidates, even though doing so violates IRS rules. Perry’s Day of Prayer is causing concern among progressive Houston-area clergy, so much so that they wrote a letter criticizing the event for breaching the wall of separation between church and state, for excluding non-Christians, and for the event’s partnership with AFA. In their letter, Houston Clergy Council members wrote, “We ask that Rick Perry leave the ministry to us and refocus his energy on the work of governing our state.” They point out that Perry’s event is inappropriate, particularly given the religious diversity of the Houston area.
The “Day of Prayer” event is drawing considerable national attention to Perry, coincidentally just as he considers a run for the Republican presidential nomination. Despite this, and the obvious ties between some event backers and the Republican party, Perry denies that the event is politically motivated. Whatever Rick Perry says, though, if he does declare he is running for president, he can credit this controversial event with boosting his name recognition throughout the country.
The Holland City Council Vote and Talent Retention
Last week’s Holland City Council no vote on an anti-discrimination ordinance has continued to have ripple effects from all sides of this debate.
On Saturday is was reported that a member of Holland’s Human Relations Commission resigned in protest because of the decision by the City Council to vote no on the anti-discrimination ordinance. Other people upset by the vote have begun a boycott of Holland businesses and on the other side of the fence a group has said they will finance efforts to unseat 3 of the 4 city council members who voted for the ordinance.
There have also been a series of articles in the Grand Rapids Press concerning how the Holland City Council vote will impact the local business climate. Last Thursday there was an article that included comments from some area business who think the vote doesn’t promote a welcoming environment. A representative from a consulting firm was quoted as saying, “I’m concerned about Holland’s ability to keep and attain talent because, in the future, there will be a talent war.”
MLive also posted an additional article on Thursday about the issue of attracting “talent” to communities like Holland, which also included a plug for a forum held at the Amway headquarters on Friday morning, where the Mayor’s of Holland, Muskegon and Grand Rapids would be debating the importance of attracting a creative class to West Michigan.
The Press then published a story on Friday about that same forum on retaining talent that was hosted by the Grand Rapids Chamber of Commerce and is a project of the various West Michigan chambers. The article mostly summarizes what each of the area mayors had to say about how you attract and retain talent in one’s community. There was some disagreement on how to attract and retain talent, but there were no voices questioning the very idea of talent retention or even a serious look at what that means.
Many people are aware of the idea of talent retention and the creative class through the work of Richard Florida, author and speaker who works for the Martin Prosperity Institute. The Martin Prosperity Institute, which appeals to hip, young professionals, is nothing more than a slick representation of contemporary neo-liberal capitalism. In other words, how can we help you to become prosperous on the backs of others. Florida and his colleagues at the Martin Prosperity Institute talk about the creative class and culture, but they casually ignore any serious conversation about the fact that their formula will exclude a huge sector of society…….namely working class people.
You see all this discussion about how to retain talent is predicated on the lack of interest in retaining working class people. The thousands of people who live in poverty in Grand Rapids alone are not be courted, recruited and are not the subject of talent retention. They are merely used for their labor to do tasks that apparently do not require talent or creativity, like pick the food we eat, scrub the floors, change the linen, pick up the trash, take care of the elderly and tend to the lawns of West Michigan.
The very idea of a creative class is in itself misleading. If we are going to apply the term class to people in this society, then we only have 2 classes – the ownership/capitalist class and the working class. Sure there is some diversity within the working class in terms of income levels, but ultimately those who do not have economic and political power are part of the working class.
The Holland City Council Vote and Talent Retention
This brings us back to the Holland City Council vote. I am all in favor of such a vote passing in Holland. Having said that, I also think it is important to raise serious questions about the benefit and intent of such an ordinance.
It is important to have an ordinance that would provide some legal recourse for people who are discriminated against. Grand Rapids passed an anti-discrimination ordinance in the mid-90s but people in the LGBT community still face serious discrimination in this community.
In Mayor Heartwell’s comments at the talent retention forum on Friday he admitted that such an ordinance is more symbolic than anything else. However, what he said has less to do with protecting and respecting people’s rights than the role such an ordinance plays in promoting business interest. Heartwell said the ordinance was more about marketing. “What cities can do to attract talent has more to do with place-making. If you create a vibrant area where people want to be, then I think (recruitment) happens.”
So a question that could be asked is, “should cities attract members of the LGBT community because it makes good business sense?” If this is the case then what are we really gaining? Another way to ask the question is, “what about working class members of the LGBT community that are not part of the creative class, will they be welcomed and recruited?”
It is important to recognize at this point that the ideas of Richard Florida are not really new ideas, they are old ideas that are simply repackaged. As a result of the social movements of the 1960s and 70s many businesses realized that if they just started to include women and racial minorities on their boards that this would gain them some points within those circles.
Coca Cola was one of the first businesses to attract more African Americans to leadership positions, in part as a response to the Civil Rights struggle, but more because they are based in one of the largest Black cities in the US (Atlanta) and because they wanted to attract more African American consumers. Coca Cola has been fairly successful in being a more inclusive company in terms of who sits on the board of directors and who has been the CEO in recent decades. However, Coca Cola is a company that makes tremendous profit from selling a product that is fundamentally unhealthy for human consumption, exploits workers worldwide, is complicit in serious human rights violations and destroys ecosystems.
The question is, is the ultimate goal of passing an anti-discrimination ordinance about justice or is it about promoting and enhancing business interests? It seems clear from the news coverage and the interests of groups working to retain talent in West Michigan that their interest has more to do with the profit motive than with justice and it is a question that deserves serious discussion.
Both Vicki Eaklor in her book Queer America: A People’s GLBT History of the United States and Michael Bronski’s A Queer History of the United States document the tension that has always existed within the LGBT community around whether or not their struggle was merely to be accepted/included in a heterosexist society or to struggle for greater liberation, both sexual and social liberation.
Are we to be content that companies like Herman Miller offer same sex partner benefits or do we question the necessity and sustainability of a company that manufacturers and markets office chairs that range from $500 to $5,000? These are the kind of questions and conversations that are vital to the future of social justice and they are the kinds of questions cannot be lost amidst the simplistic talent retention chatter currently underway.
Mexico’s Hidden War
(This story is re-posted from Fault Lines/Al Jazeera.)
The spectacular violence of Mexico’s drug war grabs international attention. Some 40,000 people have been killed since 2006, when President Felipe Calderon deployed Mexican military and security forces in the so-called war against the cartels — often in gruesome and sadistic ways.
But behind the headlines, under cover of impunity, a low- intensity war is being waged.
In the second episode of a two-part series, Josh Rushing and the Fault Lines team travel to the state of Guerrero to investigate claims that Mexican security forces are using the drug war as a pretext to repress indigenous and campesino communities. In one of Mexico’s poorest and top drug-producing states, where struggling farmers are surrounded by the narco-economy, we ask about the cost of taking the struggle against dispossession into your own hands.
Last night US President Barack Obama addressed the nation on the matter of US involvement in Afghanistan. While the President said there would be some US troop removal he also arrogantly defending the US occupation of Afghanistan and gave no indication that the US has any plans to leave that country for years to come.
First, the timetable for US troop withdrawal Obama presented is misleading. Some defenders of the administration will no doubt argue that the President is keeping his word from his December 2009 speech where he announced that the US would begin withdrawing troops by July of 2011.
According to the online source Think Progress, “the United States would still have far more troops in Afghanistan than it did when Obama came into office and more than at any point during former president George W. Bush’s administration:
This means that the troop reduction would not put us much closer to actually ending the war by the end of 2012. Rather this would simply scale back the second surge of 30,000 troops that President Obama announced in December 2009. It would also maintain the first surge of 17,000 troops Obama ordered upon entering office. This comes at a time when a record number of Americans want to end the war in Afghanistan and the costs of which are putting the United States deeper into debt.”
US Foreign Policy analyst Phyllis Bennis also points out in an article that the number of US troops that the Obama administration plans to withdraw also doesn’t take into account the 50,000 NATO troops still present and the 100,000 Pentagon paid contractors.
Bennis went on to say that this limited troop reduction is not a real strategy since it does not address any long-term policy issues. There was no mention of the US military base construction, which is another indication the US has no long-term plans of leaving Afghanistan. Historian Gareth Porter who was interviewed on Democracy Now this morning echoed this notion that the US has no intention of leaving Afghanistan. Porter stated:
I think the second storyline is equally important, and that is that Obama likened the—what he called the “responsible” withdrawal from Afghanistan to what has been done in Iraq. And of course, that reminds us that what the President did in Iraq was to promise to withdraw combat troops, combat brigades, while in fact leaving them there well beyond the date that they were supposed to be withdrawn. So, I think we can look forward to, you know, beyond 2012, having combat troops continue to carry out the war, while the President is talking about withdrawing them. I think we’re in for a repeat of the Iraq experience there.
Another point about Obama’s speech is that he left out not only what the Afghani people think, he left out the fact that civilian casualties have been on the rise in Afghanistan with the so-called surge and that as we mentioned last week Afghanistan has become an extremely dangerous place for women.
In addition, much of the commercial news media coverage so far has accepted the claim from the Obama administration that the surge has worked. According to a report from the Afghanistan Analysis Network the Taliban have actually gained ground in several parts of the country, even in non-Pasthun areas, a reality that contradicts the claims of the White House.
This lack of questioning by the US media is reflected in the way they have framed the issue since the President’s speech last night. For example, the story this morning on MLive tries to present multiple views on the Obama’s announcement about troop withdrawal. However, the article does not question the claims of the administration by the way they have framed the story and they present no perspectives that challenge to overall policy of the past 10 years.
The Grand Rapids Press reporter has some pro-war and anti-war voices, but their comments are purely limited to the issues of US troop numbers in Afghanistan. The Press also spoke with political science professors from Calvin College and GVSU, but both of these “experts” fundamentally accept the US government’s rationale for being in Afghanistan in the first place. This type of reporting not only is misleading, it contributes to a general lack of understanding for the American public who have been forced to pay roughly half a trillion dollars to fund the nearly 10-year US occupation of Afghanistan.
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.
Howard Zinn on Race – This new collection of previously published essays and interviews is a marvelous tribute to a man deeply committed to racial justice in America. The essays are arraigned chronologically and span 5 decades of reflections from Howard Zinn on topics such as civil rights, sit-ins, marches, freedom riders, immigration and the university’s role in perpetuating racism. Zinn writes with clarity and not as an observer, but as someone who fully participated in the struggle for racial justice his whole life. The book ends with an interview with Zinn that took place during the 2008 presidential election where Zinn is highly critical of candidate Obama and calls on the need for new popular movements like the civil rights and black power movements of the 1960s and 1970s.
Deep Green Resistance, by Aric McBay, Lierre Keith and Derrick Jensen – For anyone who is not only concerned about the human caused destruction of ecosystems and species extinction Deep Green Resistance is must reading. This book not provides urgent analysis on the state of the planet it provides an important tactical and strategic framework for how we can engage in resistance to what the authors refer to as industrial civilization. This book does not advocate reform of the system, the benefits of green capitalism or the saving qualities of technology. Deep Green Resistance advocates for the dismantling of industrial civilization and the sharing of skills that will contribute to future autonomous communities that can lead the way to truly sustainable living. Deep Green Resistance is a dangerous book for dangerous times.
Homophobia: A Weapon of Sexism, by Suzanne Pharr – After hearing Suzanne Pharr speak in Grand Rapids earlier this year I was inspired to read here work. Homophobia is an excellent contribution to intersectional analysis and dialogue. What Pharr demonstrates in her book is how homophobia impacts women differently than men and that men often use homophobia as a weapon of male domination. Pharr’s book not only provides important analysis, she includes the stories and experience of numerous lesbian women who have been victimized by the sexist nature of homophobia in American society. However, what makes this book such an important resource is the concluding section on how this analysis can provide those doing anti-oppression work needed skills to organize in the fight against homophobia.
END-CIV: Resist or Die (DVD) – Filmmaker Franklin Lopez has done a marvelous job in this documentary of taking some of the fundamental premises in Derrick Jensen’s book Endgame and making them come alive through visuals. This documentary not only provides us with sharp analysis of the current state of the planet it provides compelling imagery and examples of how people are actively resisting around the world. This is an excellent tool for anyone serious about stopping ecological destruction.
Lawsuit seeks injunction on Emergency Manager law
(This article by Eartha Jane Melzer is re-posted from Michigan Messenger. Some of the sources used in this article were interview today on Democracy Now!)
In a lawsuit filed Wednesday in Ingham County court, citizens from across the state are asking that Michigan’s Emergency Manager law be declared unconstitutional.
The Local Government and School District Fiscal Accountability Act allows the governor to appoint Emergency Managers to take over local units of government, fire elected officials, sell off or privatize community assets and even dissolve whole cities.
The measure was rushed through the Republican-controlled legislature this spring as a move to protect against widespread municipal bankruptcies, with some of its supporters referring to it as “financial martial law.”
But in legal arguments filed in court this morning a group of 25 plaintiffs say the right of citizens to elect their local officials is guaranteed in the state Constitution and financial stress is not a legitimate ground for scrapping the democratic process.
“This is an infringement on basic democracy,” said plaintiffs attorney John Philo of the Sugar Law Center for Economic and Social Justice. “It really is an experiment in a new form of government — one person rule.”
The complaint alleges that the law “violates the rights of local voters by attempting to delegate law-making power and the power to adopt local acts to unelected emergency mangers, by suspending the rights of local electors to establish charters and to elect local officials, and by imposing substantial new costs and expenses upon local municipalities without providing new revenue,” the group argues.
The law is so extreme, the plaintiffs say, that it “establishes a new form of local government, previously unknown within the United States or the State of Michigan, where the people within local municipalities may be governed by an unelected official who establishes local law by decree.”
“Because it is such a radical change in how you govern a city it is untested waters legally,“ Philo said, “but if the Constitution is to have any meaning we think the law should be struck.”
“A financial emergency has never been found to be equivalent to invasion of a foreign government where you can make martial law and suspend the Constitution,” he added.
Philo said that according to the law’s criteria for state intervention 75 percent of Michigan communities could be subject to Emergency Managers.
Unfunded mandate
According to the law local communities are required to pay the salary, benefits and expenses of the appointed Emergency Manager and all costs of any employees or contractors hired by the Emergency Manager as well as legal costs and insurance.
These expenses have been substantial. In Benton Harbor Emergency Manger Joe Harris is paid $11,000 per month. Former Detroit Public Schools Emergency Financial Manager Robert Bobb made $425,000 during his final year on the job. The plaintiffs argue that requiring communities to pay these costs violates the 1978 Headlee amendment which requires the state to reimburse local governments for any new state mandated programs.
Plaintiff Emma Kinnard of Benton Harbor lost her elected officials when Emergency Manager Joe Harris used his new powers to strip the Benton Harbor City Commission of all decision making power in April.
Kinnard said that while she didn’t always agree with Benton Harbor’s local officials she was able to stay informed about city business and participate in city politics, but now there is no mechanism for public participation or oversight of local government, she said.
“This is not democracy this is dictatorship,” she said. “They talk about other communist countries … this is following the same things they were doing. How can this be democracy when there is no accountability … just one person in power?”
“Benton Harbor is a test center,” she said, “If it goes through in Benton Harbor they are going to start doing this all over the state.”
The suit names as defendants Gov. Rick Snyder and state Treasurer Andy Dillon.
There is also a federal suit challenging the Emergency Manager law, filed in April by Detroit’s city pension systems. That suit challenges the authority of Emergency Managers to change city charters and remove trustees from office.
Rep. John Conyers (D-Detroit) and others have argued that the Emergency Manager law violates Michigan and U.S. Constitutional prohibitions against laws that break contracts. Earlier this month the law was used by Pontiac’s Emergency Manager to void the city’s contract with its police dispatchers. A lawsuit over that action is also expected.
Press conferences are scheduled for several cities around the state — Lansing, Benton Harbor, Flint, Detroit and Monroe — to announce the lawsuit today. The plaintiffs have also launched a website.
Here’s the full legal complaint:
