Low Information Voters and Republican Strategy

Some of the most distressing descriptions of American citizens I've read lately have been detailed by two retired Congressional staffers, one a 28-year veteran of the Republican party and the other who worked for a moderate Democrat. These are not people on the fringes of the right or left. And now that they have retired, they feel free to write what they really believe, what they have actually experienced and observed. This is what Mike Lofgren, who served 28 years as a Congressional staffer and "16 years as a professional staff member on the Republican side of both the House and Senate Budget Committees," writes :

There are tens of millions of low-information voters who hardly know which party controls which branch of government, let alone which party is pursuing a particular legislative tactic. These voters' confusion over who did what allows them to form the conclusion that "they are all crooks," and that "government is no good," further leading them to think, "a plague on both your houses" and "the parties are like two kids in a school yard." This ill-informed public cynicism, in its turn, further intensifies the long-term decline in public trust in government that has been taking place since the early 1960s - a distrust that has been stoked by Republican rhetoric at every turn ("Government is the problem," declared Ronald Reagan in 1980).

Lofgren goes on to describe how "the long-term Republican strategy of undermining confidence in our democratic institutions has reaped electoral dividends." People who think government doesn't work decide that their vote doesn't count, too. And so they stay home while the far-right minority, "whipped into a lather by three hours daily of Rush Limbaugh or Fox News" increases its clout in elections. This strategy of weakening trust in government institutions to create citizen malaise goes hand in hand with another Republican strategy, that of disenfranchising voters who are more likely to vote Democratic:

Ever since Republicans captured the majority in a number of state legislatures last November, they have systematically attempted to make it more difficult to vote: by onerous voter ID requirements (in Wisconsin, Republicans have legislated photo IDs while simultaneously shutting Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) offices in Democratic constituencies while at the same time lengthening the hours of operation of DMV offices in GOP constituencies)**; by narrowing registration periods; and by residency requirements that may disenfranchise university students.

Lofgren says that other folks are very upfront about these strategies:

A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption [the more recent Republican strategy to filibuster every confirmation and routine procedural motion] .... By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.

 So what Republicans cannot succeed in doing by rigorous debate of the issues and communication of those issues to constituents, they plan to win by subterfuge and destruction of democratic institutions. Again, this is not some leftie talking; this is a guy who witnessed Republican strategy for years from the bullpen and who mourns the demise of Republican virtue (if virtue exists in politics). He is no supporter of President Obama, he says, but he wanted Obama to succeed in the worst economic crisis the country has faced in years because he wanted his country to succeed. The Republicans--those leading now--want the country to fail so that Obama will fail. The country fails, millions of Americans suffer--but they will blame the current president. Why? Because they are low information voters who have no idea how government works.

The second negative description of American citizens comes from a Congressional staffer who worked for years for a moderate Democrat. This staffer wrote in response to James Fallows' post about Mike Lofgren's essay.

The mainstream media absolutely fails to understand how little attention average Americans really pay to what goes on in all forms of government. During our 2008 race, our pollster taught me (hard to believe it took me 24 years to learn this) that the average voter spends only 5 minutes thinking about for whom to vote for Congress. All the millions of dollars of TV ads, all the thousands of robo-calls and door-knocks, and it all comes down to having a message that will stick in the voters' minds during the 5 minutes before they walk into the voting booth.

 Although the pollster mentioned above is referring to Congressional races, I grimaced a little when I read how inattentive voters are in making their choices. While I understand my own ideals and how those ideals have affected my voting record in national elections and state level elections, I have been less attentive to local elections. Yet that's where many politicians get their start, in their being elected to the school board or to mayor. From the city level, they may go to the state level and then the national level--though, more often than not these days, the already-rich jump directly to representing us at the state and national level.

If anything should convince those disaffected voters to get out to vote, this should: there are people hoping that you won't vote so that their ability to whip up the anger and fear of the fringe will have a stronger impact. And that's not good for our country...or for ordinary Americans.

**I have read that the push in Wisconsin to close Department of Motor Vehicles offices has been tabled. A spokesman said that there was no intention to shut down offices in Democratic constituencies, but a Democratic spokesman said that a look at which offices were planned to be shut down counters that claim. However, a recent Wisconsin Department of Motor Vehicles memo came to light in which employees were directed to provide material when people ask for the free ID but that they should not readily provide information if not asked. So it's pretty clear what the intent is.

More on the Wisconsin voter ID conflict: This guy evidently should have used his personal e-mail to send out his message, but....."Wisconsin Employee Fired for E-mail Defying Voter ID Policy," posted on TPM. More at the Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel: "State Employee Fired After Telling Co-Workers about Photo ID Policy," 8 Sept. 2011.

Antidotes for Angst and Despair

For days, weeks even, I have been thinking of trying to address as honestly and straightforwardly as I can why I usually support liberal causes over conservative causes and why I have become increasingly cynical about politics and the possibilities of change in the way we are governed.  I envisioned a series of such exploratory posts, and yesterday I wrote the first one, addressing my changing perspective on religion. And then I lost the entire post because I was using the updated Blogger interface, which evidently doesn't save drafts automatically as the older interface does. Or perhaps the loss of the post was due to some error of my own. Whatever the cause,  nothing I could do resulted in my being able to retrieve the lost essay. So I surrendered to the capriciousness of technology and took a walk instead. Later I recorded some details of that walk with photos and a post that turned out quite differently than I had originally intended.

I have found, however, that experiencing--and recalling--details of the natural world helps me maintain perspective when confronted with political landscapes where alliances are constantly shifting, where people say what they don't believe, don't believe what they say, say they believe what facts and figures can't support, or massage facts and figures to conclude what they wish from them, or just make up stuff and hope that saying it over and over will convince people of its veracity. (Unfortunately, research shows that this last strategy works.)

So a day when I get online and read that even a career Republican Congressional staffer thinks that the Republican party is now "full of lunatics" or that "the average voter spends only 5 minutes thinking about for whom to vote for Congress," I know that's a day I need to leave despair at the keyboard and get outside.

A camera can be distracting if I am constantly snapping photos so that the initial experience is distanced and delayed to later viewing. But having a camera in hand can also help me to focus on sights I might otherwise overlook: the mushroom covered in tiny brown fibers that look like furry hair, the fly with red eyes perched on an autumn-blooming flower, the photography-worthy gate to one's neighbor's yard, slender green limbs heavy with purple beauty berry, a dragonfly posing patiently on a blue-black salvia bloom. Just small moments of awe and beauty can help restore my equilibrium.

However, I'm afraid that all my antidotes to angst and despair--immersing myself in the natural world, gardening, crafting things, writing--have limited efficacy and must be administered frequently. The next news cycle requires another dose.

 For an enlarged view of the dragonfly I photographed today on my patio, click on the photo.

After the Storm

Tropical Storm Lee has finally left Louisiana after days of dropping copious amounts of rain. At our house, we received just a little less than 11 inches of rain. What remains is wind, lots of cool wind brought in by a cool, dryer front colliding with the warm moist air of Lee. Our cats can be seen sniffing the air and walking in and out the front door, which we propped open in order to enjoy this uncharacteristically cool air at the end of summer in South Louisiana.  The cooler north wind brings with it, perhaps, unfamiliar scents and a hint of fall, both welcome after four days of rain.

Like the cats, my husband and I also ventured out to sniff the air, to enjoy the cool breeze, and to appreciate the subtle signs of fall. The sky was still overcast when we left the house to walk through our neighborhood and along a paved trail, but by the time we returned, the clouds were on their way out, headed to Georgia and the Appalachians.

More Irony

I don't get cable anymore, so I'm evidently missing out on a whole host of reality television shows turned bad--not that I ever was a fan of reality shows, in the first place. First there was the poor guy who had appeared on that "Housewives" show who hung himself after his wife filed for divorce. How horrible! And now here's Stephen Seagal with his little reality show, Steven Seagal: Lawman. I mean, it's funny how actors like this (the Chuck-Norris syndrome) take themselves so seriously. Here is Steven Seagal playing lawman with that controversial sheriff of Maricopa County in Arizona, Joe Arpaio. Evidently, alongside Sheriff Joe Arpaio, ol' Seagal raided a guy's home for alleged animal cruelty (cock-fighting)--a raid that included driving a tank through Jesus Sanchez Llovera's front gate. (What is this, Iraq?) In the raid, Llovera's 11-month-old dog and over 100 of his roosters were killed by gunfire.

h/t TPM

Update: But maybe the dog wasn't killed after all-- "Arpaio, Seagal deny dog killing claim during raid."

Quotes for the Week (Lest We Forget)

Dick Cheney
Dick Cheney is trying to polish his image as he gets oh-so-gently interviewed on television about his new book. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff, has this to say about Dick Cheney:

• "He wanted desperately to be president of the United States... he knew the Texas governor was not steeped in anything but baseball, so he knew he was going to be president and I think he got his dream. He was president for all practical purposes for the first term of the Bush administration."
  
  
• "He's developed an angst and almost a protective cover, and now he fears being tried as a war criminal so he uses such terminology as 'exploding heads all over Washington' because that's the way someone who's decided he's not going to be prosecuted acts: boldly, let's get out in front of everybody, let's act like we are not concerned and so forth when in fact they are covering up their own fear that somebody will Pinochet him." Both quotes quoted by Elspeth Reeve for The Atlantic Wire, Powell Aide: Cheney was President 'For All Practical Purposes'," posted 30 Aug. 2011.

Dahlia Lithwick reminds us that "until there are legal consequences for those who order or engage in torture, we will only be pretending. Cheney is the beneficiary of that artifice." And that's the tragedy:

Most of us do not want warrantless surveillance, secret prisons, or war against every dictator who looks at us funny. We may be bloodthirsty, but we aren't morons. On his most combative and truly lawless positions, Cheney still stands largely alone.

The tragedy is that it doesn't matter if we are all Cheneyites now. That there is even one Cheney is enough. He understands and benefits from the fact that the law is still all on his side; that there is only heated rhetoric on ours. As John Adams famously put it, the United States was intended to be a government of laws, not of men. Dick Cheney is living proof that if we are not brave enough to enforce our laws, we will forever be at the mercy of a handful of men.

And Conor Friedersdorf reminds us why Americans loathe Cheney (except those, perhaps, who frequented the cocktail circuit with him in Washington, D.C.; amazing how close proximity to power blunts the moral nerve endings--my observation, not Friedersdorf's). Friedersdorf's blog post titled "Remembering Why Americans Loathe Dick Cheney" is based on the investigative reporting and writing of several people, including Wil S. Hylton, Barton Gellman, Jane Mayer, Charlie Savage, and Jack Balkin. Friedersdorf ends his numerical march down memory lane with this gem:

Dick Cheney was a self-aggrandizing criminal who used his knowledge as a Washington insider to subvert both informed public debate about matters of war and peace and to manipulate presidential decisionmaking, sometimes in ways that angered even George W. Bush.

After his early years of public service, he capitalized on connections he made while being paid by taxpayers to earn tens of millions of dollars presiding over Halliburton. While there, he did business with corrupt Arab autocrats, including some in countries that were enemies of the United States. Upon returning to government, he advanced a theory of the executive that is at odds with the intentions of the founders, successfully encouraged the federal government to illegally spy on innocent Americans, passed on to the public false information about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and became directly complicit in a regime of torture for which he should be in jail. Thus his unpopularity circa 2008, when he left office.

Good riddance.

[my emphasis]

Morning Reading, Morning Thoughts

My morning's reading:

• Ryan Lizza's "Leap of Faith," about "the transformation of Michele Bachmann from Tea Party insurgent and cable-news Pasionaria to serious Republican contender in the 2012 Presidential race," in The New Yorker. I found this article particularly interesting because, like Michele Bachmann, I was early influenced by evangelical Christianity; only for me, that influence was in a country Southern Baptist Church that my paternal grandmother helped establish. I also read Francis Schaeffer's works in search of an intellectual way to verify my beliefs, and for a time, the church in which I was a member focused on eschatology and most specifically on Hal Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth. So there is nothing in Michele Bachmann's far-right views that is unfamiliar to me. The difference is that I rejected those views. Brain-washing* is a peculiar thing: when you're under the influence, you don't realize that you are being manipulated--or if you suspect, as I did, you search for ways to justify your continued adherence to the views of your group while also fearing the rejection that will come when you leave the group. When you shake yourself free--not easily and not unassisted--you are appalled by your emotional and rational--and even moral--submission to views you now find untenable. Having been under the influence of far-right Christianity as a youth, I certainly don't want to experience being under that same influence as a citizen. While I find much to admire in the teachings of Jesus, I find much to abhor in how those teachings are expressed in far-right Christian theology.
  
  
• "Your Head on My Shoulder: Parasitic Twins and other Half-Formed Siblings," by Jesse Bering, in Slate--This article was interesting in its gruesome descriptions of parasitic twins, in which one twin is born healthy and another is mal-formed, incomplete, and attached to the healthy twin. And, also, the author's comments at the end connect to the current movement in this country to ban abortions. We have leaders advocating banning abortion of any kind, even if the young woman is a victim of rape or incest. Evidently, these same people would ban abortions of mal-formed twins (some of which are just a jumble of parts) though such intervention might promote the health of the fully-formed and viable twin. When Michele Bachmann and others such as she say they believe in "liberty," they don't mean the liberty for women to make their own reproductive decisions, even when those decisions are based on sound science and/or compassion.
  
  
• Dave Weigel's piece in Slate, "Republicans for Tax Hikes (Republicans have finally found a group they want to tax: poor people)"--My previous post responds to this crazy turn of events in the Republican party. But Weigel's analysis points out that there is a method to this madness: Tax the poor more so that they will support lowering taxes for everyone. That way, there is more support for keeping taxes low on the rich.

  In 2002 and 2003, long before it got Huntsman in the room, the Wall Street Journal editorialized that poor people who didn't pay income taxes were "lucky duckies." The poor slob with a low income and child tax credit would get a small or nonexistent tax bill, not one that would "get his or her blood boiling with tax rage." The problem here wasn't that the poor slob wasn't paying any taxes; the problem was that his meager tax bill failed to foment enough anger to reduce taxes on other people. Tax cuts for the rich—tax cuts for anyone, really, but the Journal has always been concerned about tax cuts for the rich—require a broad base of outrage.

  Diabolical. And I don't mean that in an admiring way.
  
  
• Ta-Nehisi Coates' blog post, "Affirmative Action for Colonial White People," on The Atlantic's website--Actually, I read this piece last night, but it seems to me that what Coates points out here about how slaves (black) and servants (mostly white) were manipulated to prevent their finding common ground speaks to how people continue to be manipulated by those in power in order to prevent those without power from uniting against that power. (See above.)
  
  ___________
  
  *"Brainwashing" may be too strong of a word to describe my experience in the Southern Baptist Church, but the message I got as a child was full of fear and loathing--loathing for the physical self, fear of damnation--and it was sometimes delivered in scary ways. We had preachers who would get all worked up about sin and hell until they were shouting and stomping around the pulpit. At the close of sermons, at what is called "altar-call," we were asked to close our eyes and raise our hands if we felt we needed forgiveness. "Don't worry," the pastor would say, "Only I and God can see your raised hands." But then, once we would raise them, he would tell us that if we had raised our hands, we now needed to come forward publicly and make a confession, implying that we fell "short of the glory of God," in the Apostle Paul's words, if we didn't have the courage to do so. Guilt was a mighty tool. And that time we were studying Hal Lindsey's books was a very dark time, full of foreboding. I had nightmares about Jesus coming back in the clouds and my feet not being able to leave the ground to join the throng of believers in the sky. And one of our pastors would get so excited when our church's gospel quartet sang "The King is Coming," that he would begin screaming. Really.
  

The Poor

My mind has lately returned to my childhood and a place that I once held very dear, my maternal grandparents' home in East Gate, Texas, on the prairie in Liberty County, near Gum Grove, Texas, not far from Huffman, Texas, and Dayton, Texas. My grandparents lived there in a wooden house built by my grandfather and his father. My mother and her siblings were reared there. And I spent many summer days there, picking peas and then shelling them in the shade of pecan trees, shucking corn, playing board games and dominoes with my grandmother, who never seemed to tire from playing those games with her grandchildren. In the evening, we would watch westerns on television or the Grand Ol' Opry with my grandfather. My grandmother would prepare food that sent us home in despair when we were teenagers; one summer one of my sisters gained ten pounds after staying a week with my grandmother. The typical breakfast spread? Fried eggs and bacon, sausage, homemade biscuits served with milk gravy and butter from the Jersey cow, fig preserves, and very black coffee. My grandmother would also prepare spice cake, lemon meringue pies, chocolate meringue pies or pecan pies for later desserts. Supper was frequently fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, and a selection of vegetables we had perhaps helped pick.

My grandparents' education did not go beyond 9th grade. My grandmother told me that when she was in ninth grade, she caught flu and stayed home to recuperate. She never returned to school. My grandfather worked the rodeos, labored in the oil fields before I was born, and worked for Liberty County doing odd jobs. He raised cattle and sold cattle. He, my father, and one of my uncles herded their cattle together, with that of other friends, on government land in the marshes of Old and Lost Rivers when I was a child. I still have clear memories of my grandfather on a horse, of the sound of boots on a wooden floor, of the jangle of spurs and the whispering shush of leather chaps--and of Papa playing "Redwing" and "Orange Blossom Special" on his harmonica.

My grandmother's favorite television show was a morning show called "Dialing for Dollars." At the beginning of the show, the host would announce a password, and later in the show, the host would dial a telephone number. If the person answering the telephone knew the password, that person would win prize money. We couldn't be far from the telephone on those days that my grandmother watched; she always hoped that she would win. And I think she did win some groceries one time. Other than that, my grandmother didn't watch much television. But she loved the Houston Astros, and she would listen to games on the radio.

Only occasionally was I reminded that my grandparents were poor, especially in their old age.  My grandmother clipped coupons, counted her change, and was careful to purchase items on sale. When I was a very little child in the early sixties, she made her own cotton dresses on a treadle sewing machine. I remember the old wringer-washing machine that was in the side yard next to the house and the clothesline where we hung out clothes to dry. Later, of course, she had an electric washer and dryer installed in what we called "the back porch," rooms enclosed at the back of the house near the kitchen. I suspect that the electric washer and dryer were gifts from family, perhaps her children. The house itself lacked air-conditioning. Instead, someone had installed an industrial fan in the dining-room window. The fan didn't have a switch. We would have to plug it in and then give one of the fan blades a push to get it going.

And, then, once when I was a young adult, maybe still a teenager, we had a family gathering at which I was forcibly reminded of my grandparents' poverty. A young woman from Houston whose mother had married into the family was visiting with her fiance, a very well-off young man. As they walked under the shade of the pecan trees into the yard bare of grass and up to the un-air-conditioned house, I overheard the young woman say to her future husband, "Can you imagine living here?"

I can still feel the hot flush of anger...and shame...that I felt then, loving my grandparents as I did and also realizing that they were indeed poor, specimens of poverty in the eyes of the suburban middle-class and the Houston wealthy.

What we never lacked at my grandparents' house was plenty of love. My grandmother's freezer and refrigerator were always full of food, and she loved preparing meals for her extended family. She and my grandfather were generous and kind.

I think of them when I hear pundits sneer about the poor today, about how 51% of Americans don't pay federal income tax because they are, indeed, poor. Those pundits easily forget that those Americans pay other taxes,  payroll taxes (if they have jobs), taxes on goods, property taxes, and state income taxes in those states with such taxes.  I was enraged by Fox News pundits claiming that Democrats, President Obama, and even that really wealthy guy Warren Buffet were inciting class warfare against the rich -- and at the language used on Fox News to describe the poor as "takers" and "moochers." And I was happy to see Jon Stewart expose the hypocrisy and meanness of those who think the poor can't be poor if they own a refrigerator or a microwave or a cellphone. Watch Jon's takedown here: Jon Stewart's The Daily Show, August 18, 2011.

We owe a lot to the working poor.

Irony

Here's a bit of irony: "Karl Rove Created Rick Perry--Now Can He Stop Him?"

Karl Rove created campaign tactics to cynically appeal to the religious far-right. Now there's a presidential candidate that perfectly (and just as cynically, perhaps--who knows?) epitomizes the far-right to which Rove appealed, and Rove doesn't want that candidate to be nominated for president.  Why? Because he thinks the guy can't be elected, or that, if he is, folks like Rove won't be able to control him or the far-right that he represents. Karl Rove is Frankenstein, I guess, who has created a monster (the far-right's current influence on the Republican party, not Rick Perry, necessarily--I don't know the man personally, but I was reared in far-right country).

Interested in Rove's amoral political tactics? Read the following:

• "Karl Rove in a Corner,", by Josh Green, for The Atlantic, 2004.
  
  
• Frontline's "Karl Rove: The Architect."

And Karl Rove's political predecessor, Lee Atwater:
Frontline's "The Lee Atwater Story: Boogie Man."

University Costs

My husband and I recently moved both our adult children back to the universities that they are attending: two children in two different states. Now we're back to a two-adult household, just as we started our married lives 33 years ago--except that we still have dependents. We are essentially maintaining three households, with some assistance from our children. The undergraduate has a state scholarship based on high-school attendance in the state and on grade point average.  The graduate student just discovered that he has been assigned a Teacher Assistant position in the department where he is studying, a position that will perhaps waive out-of-state tuition (but not tuition altogether) and offer a small stipend. Both saved money from summer jobs this year while living with us to cut expenses.

What a difference I see between the time that my husband and I were in college and today.  The costs of higher education have increased significantly since 1978-1987, when my husband and I married as undergraduates and then attended graduate school. My husband and I were able to pay all our expenses with the money we made as a Graduate Assistant Teacher and a Graduate Research Assistant. Our son's  TA position will fall far short of providing for living expenses, books, and tuition. Students such as he must either depend upon family assistance or student loans. One university sent our son a letter informing him that he was eligible for a loan, of course--for $45,000 a year, essentially what comes to a $100,000 debt for a master's degree. My husband and I paid less than $100,000 for each of the first three homes that we bought between 1983 and 1993.  And we graduated with a master's degree and a Ph.D with no debt, due to scholarships, teaching and research appointments, cheap married-student housing, food hand-outs from family, and penny-pinching. Pity the kids who graduate with a $100,000+ debt and want to begin a Ph.D program, too. Or start a family.

See also: "The Debt Crisis at American Colleges," by  Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, in The Atlantic, posted 17 August 2011.

Interesting Comparisons

A recent study published by the Pew Research Center used data collected by the Census Bureau to determine the effect of the recession on certain segments of the population.  From 2005 to 2009:

• "the median wealth of Hispanic households fell 66 percent
  
• ....while the median wealth of whites fell just 16 percent over the same period."
  
• "African Americans saw their wealth drop 53 percent."
  
• "Asians also saw a big decline, with household wealth dropping 54 percent."
  
  Source: "Recession Study Finds Hispanics Hit the Hardest," Sabrina Tavernise, The New York Times,  26 July 2011.

In contrast, the Center for Responsive Politics has a new study out showing that:

• ... "congressional members’ personal wealth collectively increased by more than 16 percent between 2008 and 2009."
• ... "[n]early half of them -- 261 -- are millionaires, a slight increase from the previous year..."
• "And of these congressional millionaires, 55 have an average calculated wealth in 2009 of $10 million or more, with eight in the $100 million-plus range."
  
  Source: "Congressional Members' Personal Wealth Expands Despite Sour National Economy," Open Secrets Blog at opensecrets.org

Here's how the median household net worth plunged for different segments of American society:

• Hispanics:  from $18,359 in 2005 to $6,235 in 2009.
  
• Blacks: from $12,124 in 2005 to $5,677 in 2009.
  
• Whites: from $134,992 in 2005 to $113,149 in 2009.
  
• Asians: from $168,103 in 2005 to $78,066 in 2009.
  
• All: from $96,894 in 2005 to $70,000 in 2009
  Source: "Recession Study Finds Hispanics Hit the Hardest," New York Times.  

In contrast, the median wealth of our leaders in Congress and the Senate INCREASED:

• U.S. House member:  from$645,503 in 2008 to $765,010 in 2009.
  
• U.S. Senator: from $2.27 million in 2008 to $$2.38 million in 2009.
  
• ALL members of Congress, House members and Senate members: $785,515 in 2008 to $911,510 in 2009. 

Source: "Congressional Members' Personal Wealth Expands Despite Sour Economy," www. opensecrets.org

Of course, these numbers represent median wealth of groups whose members have very disparate household worth. But the comparison is stark between the median wealth of members of the U.S. Congress and those of the citizens who elected them and who are suffering the most from the economy. It is therefore difficult not to be cynical when Republicans insist on not raising taxes on the wealthy (letting the Bush tax cuts expire, as was initially planned) to help balance the budget. Two-thirds of the American people think those taxes SHOULD be raised on the wealthiest. Therefore, whose interest are Republicans serving?

Signs of the Times

• The rich hire protection from the economically-depressed masses: "These Guys will Stop you from Killing your Boss," Josh Harkinson, Mother Jones, July/August 2011 issue.
  
  
  
• Is poverty being criminalized?: "Turning Poverty into an American Crime," Barbara Ehrenreich, The Nation (originally posted on TomDispatch.com), 9 August 2011.
  
  
  
• Why is there such hatred of the poor as the poor get poorer and the richer get richer?: "Nebraska AG Jon Bruning Compares Welfare Recipients to Scavenging Raccoons," Benji Sarlin, Talking Points Memo, 9 August 2011.
  
  
  
• What is happening to the middle-class in America?": "Can the Middle Class be Saved?," Don Peck, The Atlantic, September 2011 issue. 
 
• The unemployed need not apply: "The Help-Wanted Sign comes with a Frustrating Asterisk," Catherine Rampell, The New York Times, 25 July 2011.

• London burns in riots "led by gangs of young people and organized in part via BlackBerry instant messaging." The riots began in economically-depressed neighborhoods and have spread to other cities: "London Burning: A Foreign Policy Slide Show"; also "Why London Exploded Last Night," Michael Goldfarb, Salon, 9 August 2011.
  
  
• Social media used by criminals to create flash mobs to cover for crimes: "For Flash Mobsters, Crowd Size a Tempting Cover," Eric Tucker and Thomas Watkins for Associated Press, Salon,  9 August 2011.
  
  
  
• Voluntary citizen clean-up crews in London use Twitter to organize after rioting: "Londoners Turn to Technology to Stop the Looting,", Adam Clark Estes, The Atlantic Wire, 9 August 2011.
  
  
  
  
• governmental coverups--Severity of radiation exposure downplayed by Japanese government: "Japan Held Nuclear Data, Leaving Evacuees in Peril," Norimitsu Onishi and Martin Fackler, The New York Times, 8 August 2011.
  
  
  
• regulation coverups--Is the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the U.S. doing its job?: "Whistleblowers Say Nuclear Regulatory Commission is Losing Its Bite," John Sullivan and Cameron Hickey, ProPublica,  27 July 2011.
  
  
  
  
  just a few.....

Sunset

This is a photo of the sun setting in Mississippi yesterday evening. I took the photo while I was driving back to my home after taking my daughter, my youngest, back to university in another state. Like the sun here, I am no longer at Astronomical Noon in my children's lives. One must adjust emotionally, of course. I just hadn't realized that it would be this difficult.

Cynicism Redux

I've been following the debt ceiling debate with growing--and now matured--cynicism. Today, House Minority Leader Harry Reid has evidently offered the Republicans a debt plan that includes $2.7 million in spending cuts, with no new taxes, with the stipulation that the debt ceiling be raised through 2012. (h/t Brian Beutler at TPM). As Matt Yglesias points out, however, the House Republicans don't want to accept this plan that nominally meets their publicly stated requirements because it doesn't repeal Medicare and it doesn't take future tax increases off the table. The Bush tax cuts are supposed to expire in 2012:

In particular, the plan doesn’t cut Medicare, which means that Democratic party candidates for office in November 2012 and 2014 can accurately remind voters of the content of the Republican budget plan. In case you forgot, this plans repeals Medicare. Having repealed Medicare, it then gives seniors vouchers to purchase more expensive private health insurance. And having replaced Medicare with a voucher system, it then ensures that the vouchers will grow steadily stingier over time. It was only after voting for this plan that Republicans seem to have realized that repealing Medicare is unpopular. Since that time, they’ve been trying to entrap Democrats into reaching some kind of Medicare détente with them, which would immunize them from criticism. Reid’s plan doesn’t do that. "Harry Reid Calls House Republicans' Bluff"

Politicians hope that people won't REALLY understand what they're up to: Repealing Medicare is unpopular with the American people, so Republicans have tried to sell their voucher plan. Yet the Republican voucher plan for Medicare will increase costs for old folks and thus result in denial of services. Republicans hope that no one will notice the switcheroo in their plan. (Ca-ching--another coin in the cynicism bank)

And, dang it, those tax cuts are SUPPOSED to expire. Not only that, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, "middle-income Americans are now paying federal taxes at or near historically low levels, according to the latest available data. That’s true whether it comes to their federal income taxes or their total federal taxes." "Federal Income Taxes on Middle-Income Families at Historically Low Levels."

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities also points out just what is responsible for our current debt crisis:

If not for the Bush tax cuts, the deficit-financed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the effects of the worst recession since the Great Depression (including the cost of policymakers’ actions to combat it), we would not be facing these huge deficits in the near term. By themselves, in fact, the Bush tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will account for almost half of the $20 trillion in debt that, under current policies, the nation will owe by 2019. The stimulus law and financial rescues will account for less than 10 percent of the debt at that time. "Economic Downturn and Bush Policies Continue to Drive Large Projected Deficits"

And a graph in the New York Times handily compares the results of new budget policies under Bush and Obama, based on data from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities: "Policy Changes Under Two Presidents"--A $5.07 trillion increase under Bush and a $1.44 trillion increase under Obama.

As Steve Benen points out: "And now these same Republicans [who helped turn a large surplus into a massive deficit] claim the high ground on fiscal issues, and demand that President Obama clean up their mess immediately. Worse, they demand he do so in a way they find pleasing, or next week, they’ll crash the economy on purpose." "Blame Where Blame is Due"

Kevin Drum describes the Republican narrative that too many people are buying into:

Up until very recently, Republicans were mostly taking a hard line on the deficit and weren't shy about making sure everyone knew it. The hard line itself hasn't changed since then, but over the past few weeks they've come to realize that it doesn't make for very good PR. So now their enablers in the media are furiously pushing the story that it's really Obama who's completely intransigent and insincere, rejecting deal after deal no matter how much Republicans try to accomodate his crazed desire to punish the rich. This narrative, as near as I can tell, is now virtually unanimous among conservative commenters.

So the question is, will anyone buy this? It's so self-evidently preposterous that it doesn't seem possible, but then, I wouldn't have figured that they could successfully make the world so quickly forget that they were responsible for the deficit in the first place, nor that they were also responsible for the most epic financial meltdown since the Great Depression. But they have. Their ability to shape popular narratives can hardly be underestimated. "Republicans and the Deficit Narrative"

It's amazing to me that anyone still takes these Republicans seriously. Oh, I know that there are conservatives who are speaking out against the rash policies of these radicals, but those folks aren't in power.

It's like a bunch of whiny kids who trashed a house at a party. Another group of kids come in to clean up and have to buy supplies to do so. The ones responsible for the mess then scream about the costs of the clean-up and convince bystanders that the clean-up crew is responsible for all the costs and damages. Unbelievable.

Cynicism

My children tell me that I am very cynical, so when they confront some evidence of a younger me--in my writing or the writing of friends--who comes across as naive and trusting, they seem surprised. Of course, our children never really know us, do they? They weren't witness to many of the events (our own failings as well as the failings of others) that transformed us over time--either because they were not present or because they were too young to understand what was going on. I'll admit that a little bit of faith in humanity remains in me, but in the last several years, that bit of faith has received a beating.

The Republicans taking hostage of the debt ceiling is a big disappointment; I mean, they didn't have difficulties with debt ceilings under President Bush. Why so recalcitrant now? (That's a rhetorical question). But the treatment of Elizabeth Warren by Republican Congressmen is in a category by itself, I think. Or maybe not. Given some thought, I could probably come up with other similar examples. Here is a very smart woman who speaks plainly and who has worked to help make financial matters more transparent to consumers, that is, people such as I.

Here is Elizabeth Warren speaking on those credit card contracts that none of us can understand:
"Elizabeth Warren on Credit Card 'Tricks and Traps'," at Now, online, 2 January 2009.

Here she is talking about bankruptcy caused by medical bills and "aggressive hospital collections":
Interview 1
Interview 2

Here she is talking about subprime mortgages in 2004--raising the alarm before subprime mortgages, bundled up as toxic assets, helped to almost blow up our economy:
on "Books of our Time"

People with this kind of sense, with this kind of concern for ordinary families, evidently have no place in our government, according to the Republicans who refused to accept her as the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Agency. Their condescending questioning and unrelenting demonization of this woman is a travesty of public service.

In The New York Times, Joe Nocera reviews Elizabeth Warren's travails with Republican 'leadership,' in this, her last week with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: "The Travails of Ms. Warren," posted on Friday, 22 July 2011.

Here is an example of Warren's own lack of cynicism. She thought that if she could make clear to Congress what the mission of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau would be, the accusations and demonization would stop:

“I’ve never been an ideologue,” she told me. “And I thought the best way to deal with that perception was to put our vision out there. The vision is clear. Consumers should be able to tell the price and risk of any credit product before they buy it. We want to mow down the fine print. I thought once that was on the table, and it was clear that we were executing on it, the accusations would go away.” Nocera, "The Travails of Ms. Warren"

But: " House Republicans regularly brought her before their committees and acted as if this were the second coming of Joe McCarthy....Republicans would cut off her answers and speak to her in tones ranging from contempt to condescension. The treatment wasn’t just disrespectful. It was ugly. And it never stopped."

As I have stated in a previous post, I would have loved having an Elizabeth Warren looking out for my interests. Unfortunately, bankers and financial institutions have far more money than I have and far more influence over those Republicans who made sure that Elizabeth Warren would never direct the agency she was responsible for helping to create.

It's a real shame. Add another coin to my cynicism bank.

Let's Remember This...

As the investigation of the phone hacking of News of the World reporters and private investigators continues, let's remember, as Christopher Hitchens reminds us, that it was a newspaper that investigated and brought to light the misdeeds of News of the World:

The prime minister's office showed itself incapable of conducting an investigation; the courts and the prosecutors appeared to have no idea of the state of the law, and the police were too busy collecting their tip-off fees. Admittedly, it isn't usually the job of these institutions to keep the press honest. (Indeed, I could swear that I read somewhere that the whole concept was the other way about.) Still, it's encouraging to record that when the press needed a housecleaning, there was a paper [the Guardian] ready to take on the job.

Other Views: Media Moguls, Rupert Murdoch

For what it's worth, here are some links to articles with a little more positive attitude toward Rupert Murdoch and British tabloids:

• Nicholas Lemann, "Paper Tigers," The New Yorker, 13 April 2009.
  
• Toby Young, "Three Cheers for Murdoch," Salon, 8 July 2011.

Darker and Deeper: Murdoch and the Phone Hacking Investigation

The investigation into how reporters for Rupert Murdoch's News of the World hacked into voicemail of murder victims and their families, members of the royal family, celebrities, and, perhaps even dead soldiers and victims of the London Underground bombing continue. Why should we care here in our bright "city on a hill"? Well, Murdoch is a media mogul whose print and cable media stretch from Australia to Great Britain to the United States (Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post) to Asia. The woman who managed the newspaper charged with these illegal acts, Rebekah Brooks, is very close to Murdoch. He treats her almost as his own daughter. But even more importantly, as print, cable, television, and online media become more and more consolidated, under the control of one corporation or one multi-billionaire, the news we receive is all the more susceptible to being manipulated by people with immense power. I think we have to be vigilant and to fight against misuse of that kind of power.

First, a little bit of background about the despicable practices of Rupert Murdoch's reporters, from the epicenter of the scandal  [h/t to Jack Shafer for most of these links]:

• A timeline of the scandal: "Phone hacking: timeline of scandal," The Telegraph, 5 April 2011.
  
• Nick Davies and Amelia Hill, "Missing Milly Dowler's voicemail was hacked by News of the World," Guardian, 4 July 2011.
  
• Sandra Laville and Vikram Dodd, "News of the World Paid bribes worth L100,000 to up to five Met officers," Guardian 7 July 2011.
  
• A British reporter deconstructs Rupert Murdoch's statement about the investigation: Roy Greenslade, "Phone hacking: reading between the lines of Murdoch's statement," Guardian 6 July 2011.
  
• Andy McSmith, "Behind Rupert Murdoch's Throne: The story of Rebekah Brooks," The Independent Press, 6 July 2011.
  
• On Murdoch's decision to allow Rebekah Brooks to lead an internal investigation on the phone hacking: Helene Mulholland, "Letting Rebekah Brooks lead enquiry is 'extraordinary,' says PCC chair," Guardian, 7 July 2011.
  
• On News of the World journalists spying for murder suspects: Nick Davies, "News of the World surveillance of detective: what Rebekah Brooks knew," Guardian, 6 July 2011.  

Another connection between our shores and the shores of the white cliffs of Dover:

Peter Hutchison, "Phone hacking: Rupert Murdoch brings in Joel Klein to oversee investigation," The Telegraph 7 July 2011.

Today's headlines at The New York Times online:

• Sarah Lyall and Jo Becker, ""Woman Rises to the Top in Male Tabloid Culture," The New York Times, 7 July 2011.
  
• Sarah Lyall and Alan Cowell, "Murdoch to Close Tabloid Amid Fury over Hacking,", The New York Times, 7 July 2011.
  
• Jeremy W. Peters and Brian Stelter, "The Murdoch Style, Under Pressure," The New York Times, 6 July 2011.

Today, Jack Shafer turns the investigation into film noir on Slate: "Rupert Murdock: Film Noir Villain"

And, for background on Rupert Murdoch, The Atlantic provides a link to an article in their archives by James Fallows: "The Age of Murdoch," first published in 2003.

We Know Who has the Real Power

Well, here are two seemingly contradictory quotes in an article by Jodie Ginsberg, writing for Reuters, posted on Talking Points Memo website:

British politicians have said in the past they feared criticizing any of the Murdoch papers because they feared their own private lives might be exposed.

The [British] government has maintained that the hacking scandal should not influence its decision [on allowing Rupert Murdoch "to secure the 61 percent of broadcaster BSkyB he does not already control in a deal expected to be worth at least $14 billion"], which will be based on whether the takeover will give Murdoch too much power over the British media and politics -- a view Cameron's ministers reject.

Worth Reading

Frank Rich lets loose: "Obama's Original Sin," in New York Magazine's "News and Features," 3 July 2011.

This article would be great to use in a communications class in which one is discussing the art of rhetoric (ethos, logos, and pathos) and the emotional appeal of language (buried metaphors such as "paw print," alliteration, understatement, hyperbole, aphorisms, etc.)

A few excerpts:

• "As the indefatigable Matt Taibbi has tabulated, law enforcement on Obama’s watch rounded up 393,000 illegal immigrants last year and zero bankers."

• "It's as if the Watergate investigation were halted after the cops nabbed the nudniks who did the break-in."

• "What some call a settlement others may find a cover-up."

• "Those in executive suites at the top of that chain have long since fled the scene with the proceeds, while bleeding shareholders, investors, homeowners, and ­cashiered employees were left with the bills. The weak Dodd-Frank financial-reform law that rose from the ruins remains largely inoperative, since the actual rule-writing was delegated to understaffed agencies now under siege by banking lobbyists and their well-greased congressional overlords." (my emphasis--Just listen to the hard "R's" rolling through the first part of that last sentence, only to be let out like air from a tire, with the emphasis on "S's" at the end of the sentence.)

• And--ouch!: "But the president has no one to blame but himself for the caricature. While he has never lusted after money—he’d rather get his hands on the latest novel by Morrison or Franzen—he is an elitist of a certain sort. For all the lurid fantasies of the birthers, the dirty secret of Obama’s background is that the values of Harvard, not of Kenya or Indonesia or Bill Ayers, have most colored his governing style. He falls hard for the best and the brightest white guys."

And the final two paragraphs that one hopes the President (or someone who can influence him) reads and heeds:

“A nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous,” Obama declared at his inauguration. What he said on that bright January morning is no less true or stirring now. For all his failings since, he is the only one who can make this case. There’s nothing but his own passivity to stop him from doing so—and from shaking up the administration team that, well beyond the halfway-out-the-door Geithner and his Treasury Department, has showered too many favors on the prosperous. This will mean turning on his own cadre of the liberal elite. But it’s essential if he is to call the bluff of a fake man-of-the-people like Romney. To differentiate himself from the discredited Establishment, he will have to mount the fight he has ducked for the past three years.

The alternative is a failure of historic proportions. Those who gamed the economy to near devastation—so much so that the nation turned to an untried young leader in desperation and in hope—would once again inherit the Earth. Unless and until there’s a purging of the crimes that brought our president to his unlikely Inauguration Day, much more in America than the second term of his administration will be at stake.

Where's the Outrage?

Since moving to Louisiana, I decided not to connect my television to cable, which means that I won't have access to any television channels beyond what I can access online. In Atlanta, we cut our cable, too, but my husband had to install an antenna on our house to access "free" television channels, and anytime we had a change in weather, the reception pixelated and stalled even though we were just a few miles from major transmitting stations. But here in south Louisiana, we've chosen a television-and-cable-silent zone (except for the Internet), and thus I have no access to the 24/7 chatter of cable news, and we no longer even watch the News Hour on PBS every evening as we did previously. Thus, I've missed all the intensity surrounding the trial of Casey Anthony, who was charged with killing her young daughter.

I have read the occasional news story about the trial, and today I've read several articles about the results of the trial and the public reaction, but I didn't keep up with all the details.  Yes, I sympathize with families who are victims of terrible injustices--kidnapped children, murdered family members, incest, etc.--but those stories, to me, are local stories, unless they represent something significant in the wider culture. I will read an in-depth news story describing such a local tragedy, but I don't get swept up in the minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour, day-by-day inundation of images and analysis though I understand the attraction to such stories. Color me conservative in that I recoil from the emotionalism and voyeurism exhibited in cable coverage of sensational news.

What bothers me is that these sensational stories get all the media attention while stories that have wider significance are relegated to print media that do not capture the attention that cable does--or get overlooked altogether on the back pages of newspapers. Or those stories that should capture our attention are reported by news organizations or bloggers that do not have a national audience.

For example, finally gaining some attention in international media is the story that British tabloids consistently use criminal means to gather information, including hacking the voicemail of celebrities and royals. Rupert Murdoch's News of the World has been caught in extensive hacking of voicemail not only of public figures but of every day citizens experiencing the kind of horror that little Calee Anthony's family has experienced. Private investigators for News of the World hacked the voicemail of Milly Dowler, a young teenager who was kidnapped and murdered. For months the police looked for Dowler, and for a while, the family had some hope that their loved one was still alive, for messages from Dowler's cell phone were deleted as if someone were still using the phone. It turns out that a private investigator working for News of the World had hacked into Milly Dowler's full voicemail and deleted messages so that more messages could be recorded. The reporters were monitoring the calls. Then the reporters interviewed the parents who had regained hope that their daughter was still alive since her voicemail was showing activity.

This kind of reprehensible behavior on the part of reporters is not limited to the shores of Great Britain. We see similar behavior, I think, in the likes of Andrew Breitbart. Breitbart might not be hacking the voicemails of murder victims, but he publishes cleverly edited video that conveys inaccurate information that he passes off as real journalism.

More troubling, however, is Rupert Murdoch's connection to this imbroglio.  Murdoch, of course, owns News of the World, the Times and Sunday Times in England. He also created the Fox Broadcasting Company  in the USA, purchased The New York Post, worked with MCI Communications to create The Weekly Standard, got into USA cable news with Fox News, and recently bought The Wall Street Journal. Is anyone so naive as to think that what happens in the news rooms of News of the World has no impact in the news rooms of Fox or The Wall Street Journal? As Jack Shafer writes in Slate, Rupert Murdoch has:

swept away every scandal--major and minor--he has ever faced because of his special skill at normalizing his malfactions. [my emphasis] He sacked Times of London editor Harold Evans after guaranteeing the paper 'independence.' He deployed his reporters to unearth dirt on business rivals. He purchased the forged Hitler diaries. He repeatedly and cravenly kowtowed to the Chinese. He approved the acquisition of O.J. Simpson's book, If I Did It, and more...We expect the worst from Murdoch, and he lives up to our expectations.

"Normalizing...malfactions" is a real threat to journalism. People mistrust the media already. Sometimes that mistrust is deserved, but often it isn't. If we cannot trust journalists to gather and report to the best of their abilities, we lose an important--necessary--means for evaluating and understanding our world and people in power. 

That trust continues to be eroded. 

The British Daily Mail's website presence, Mail Online, recently published an article that describes how Roger Ailes, president of Fox News and chairman of the Fox Television Stations, had planned as early as 1970 to create a pro-Republican news station to promote then-president Nixon, for whom Ailes worked as executive producer of TV.  Mark Duell reports that "a memo called 'A Plan for Putting the GOP on TV News' was discovered by a Gawker journalist inside the Richard Nixon Presidential Library." Evidently, Ailes hoped that the White House could pay for the station. Ummm...that's called propaganda in reality world.

Melissa Bell includes in an article in the Washington Post a very revealing quote from that early Ailes memo:

Today television news is watched more often than people read newspapers, than people listen to the radio, than people read or gather any other form of communication. The reason: People are lazy. With television you just sit--watch--listen. The thinking is done for you.

 So there you have it: Roger Ailes has finally achieved his goal in Fox News.

And, of course, manipulating a passive public is not limited to Roger Ailes.

These stories should create an outrage, too, for the consequences are far-reaching. Without access to excellent journalism, we cannot act as informed citizens in a democracy.


See the original Gawker article on Roger Ailes' early plans for a GOP-news station here: John Cook, Roger Ailes' Secret Nixon-Era Blueprint for Fox News," 30 June 2011.

See more articles about The News of the World controversy here:
Sarah Ellison, "The Never-Ending Story: News of the World's Andy Coulson Condoned Police Payoffs," in Vanity Fair, 5 July 2011.

"News of the World Phone Hacking Live", The Telegraph 6 July 2011.

Outrage Fatigue

Reading the news online these days gives me outrage fatigue. Today I got out of bed at 4 a.m. because I couldn't sleep. Now, four hours later, I'm exhausted and would like to stay in bed all day to recover. Here is my day's quota of outrage:

• First up, a list of banking crises and bailouts in Paul Krugman's and Robin Wells' article in The New York Review of Books has me wondering why we can't learn from our mistake of not regulating the banking industry (and larger financial industry) more vigorously: The Busts Keep Getting Bigger. Why?". Clearly, some people have been getting very, very rich through insufficiently regulated speculation and trading, but millions of Americans have suffered because of the greed of a few:

  what we have experienced is, in a very real sense, the triumph of Wall Street and the decline of America...[T]the vast sums of money channeled through Wall Street did not improve America’s productive capacity by “efficiently allocating capital to its best use.” Instead, it diminished the country’s productivity by directing capital on the basis of financial chicanery, outrageous compensation packages, and bubble-infected stock price valuations....And what has happened in the aftermath of the 2008–2009 crisis is still worse: all the evidence suggests that the United States is on track to spending the better part of a decade experiencing high unemployment and sub-par growth blighting millions of lives—particularly the old, the young, and the economically vulnerable.

• Next up, an article about how a law to protect pregnant women from domestic violence is being used to criminalize women who have miscarriages: Ed Pilkington's "Outcry in America as Pregnant Women Who Lose Babies Face Murder Charges," The Guardian, 24 June 2011. Women whose addictions may or may not have caused them to abort are being arrested and charged with murder. And this is in a country where abortion is still--theoretically, at least--legal. Now, I believe in a woman's right to have a legal, safe, medically-arranged abortion, a right that is becoming increasingly difficult to attain in states that are throwing up more and more legal barriers. Personally, I don't think abortion is the right way to practice birth control; I would prefer that women and teenagers have cheap and easy access to birth control. However, the same folks who would refuse abortions to women who seek them (or women who require them for medical reasons) also fight to prevent easy access to birth control. I believe that women have the right to make their own decisions about reproduction, and I'm not really sympathetic to the idea that a bunch of cells can have "rights" from the moment of conception. Yet that seems to be where our current anti-abortion groups are leading us--to a place where women's bodies become their prisons, their fetuses--at whatever stage--their jailors. It's difficult for me not to see misogyny in how this law is being pursued:

  At least 38 of the 50 states across America have introduced foetal homicide laws that were intended to protect pregnant women and their unborn children from violent attacks by third parties – usually abusive male partners – but are increasingly being turned by renegade prosecutors against the women themselves.
  
  South Carolina was one of the first states to introduce such a foetal homicide law. National Advocates for Pregnant Women has found only one case of a South Carolina man who assaulted a pregnant woman having been charged under its terms, and his conviction was eventually overturned. Yet the group estimates there have been up to 300 women arrested for their actions during pregnancy. (my emphasis)

  Once again, we have a law whose consequences folks just weren't far-sighted enough to imagine.

• Even David Brooks is calling out the Republicans for obstinancy: "The Mother of All No-Brainers," The New York Times, 4 July 2011. Brooks describes the fanatic movement that has taken over the Republican party as unwilling to compromise, "no matter how sweet the terms," as lacking "moral decency," as deniers of facts (refusing to believe scholars and impartial experts), and as unfit to govern. This is DAVID BROOKS, not some lefty. What I don't get is why so many citizens are influenced by these same fanatics. And I found Michael Lind's article "The Three Fundamentalisms of the American Right" useful, too, in understanding my own outrage at today's conservatism--because today's conservatism isn't the conservatism that I grew up with: it's fundamentalism, not Burkean conservatism. And just as I grew more and more outraged as the Southern Baptist Church, the church in which I was born and reared, became more and more fundamentalist, I have become more and more outraged as conservatism has become fundamentalist. And that makes sense. For, as Lind points out, one cannot have a civil discussion with people who think they are always right--and therefore Good--and anyone who disagrees with them is always wrong--and therefore Evil:

  The rise of triple fundamentalism [Protestant fundamentalism, constitutional fundamentalism, and market fundamentalism] on the American right creates a crisis of political discourse in the United States. Back when conservatism was orthodox and traditional, rather than fundamentalist and counter-revolutionary, conservatives could engage in friendly debates with liberals, and minds on both sides could now and then be changed. But if your sect alone understands the True Religion and the True Constitution and the Laws of the Market, then there is no point in debate. All those who disagree with you are heretics, to be defeated, whether or not they are converted.

Enough outrage for the day. It's mid-morning; I can still salvage the day.

What We Eat and Who Suffers for it

Illegal immigration has been in the news lately as states pass stricter laws to police undocumented immigrants. In Georgia, the law requires that employers verify the legal status of their employees, using E-Verify. In Arizona, immigrants must carry their alien registration papers at all times, and anyone whom law enforcement suspects is in this country illegally can be stopped, questioned, and asked to show such papers. (One can imagine how this part of the illegal-immigrant laws can cause all kinds of problems: racial profiling, harassing people who can't produce papers because they are American citizens with, perhaps, only a driver's license on them when stopped, etc.) As these laws get passed in more and more states, the public's attitude toward those who work in our fields, our houses, and our meat-processing plants become more intolerant, too. Or maybe, the intolerance came first, and then the laws. But the two go hand-in-hand.

Illegal immigration is a difficult problem, but every time the federal government tries to reform immigration, voices speak up loudly to prevent any kind of amnesty for those illegal immigrants who have been living within our borders, working hard, paying taxes on the goods they buy, and raising children in better circumstances than those they left behind.

A few articles that I have read recently have illustrated to me how our country depends upon the work of those who are here illegally and thus have influenced me to believe that we need laws that allow those who are working illegally to work legally. Employers take advantage of people who are scared that they will be deported or arrested and jailed. And those who say that illegal workers are taking away jobs that unemployed Americans could have in this terrible economy need to look at the kinds of jobs that illegal immigrants are doing--jobs that require little or no education. Does anyone really think that a recently layed-off manager of a retail store or a fifty-year-old tax accountant is going to take a job digging out pig brains?

An article in Mother Jones--"The Spam Factory's Dirty Secret," by Ted Genoways--describes how foreign workers, many of them undocumented, toil away in meat-processing factories, juicing pig brains for a thickener used in stir fry. Austin, Minnesota, is very proud of Hormel's location in their city of 24,718 residents. Novelist Tim O'Brien was born there. The contracting company that does the meat-processing for Hormel, Quality Pork Processors, Inc. (whose web site is also in Spanish) is also located in Austin, within the 15-foot privacy wall of the Hormel compound. Within those walls, people kill pigs, cut up pigs, turn pig head meat into sausage, and juice pig brains for that thickener which is exported to Asia. "More than 19,000 hogs" can be processed in a single day.

The work is not easy, and the effects can be life-threatening:

Since 1989, the line speed at QPP had been steadily increasing—from 750 heads per hour when the plant opened to 1,350 per hour in 2006, though the workforce barely increased. To speed production, the company installed a conveyor system and humming automatic knives throughout the plant, reducing skilled tasks to single motions. Workers say nearly everyone suffered from carpal tunnel syndrome or some repetitive stress injury, but by October 2007, there were signs of something else. Workers from QPP's kill floor were coming to Carole Bower, the plant's occupational health nurse, with increasingly familiar complaints: numbness and tingling in their extremities, chronic fatigue, searing skin pain. Bower started noticing workers so tender that they struggled with the stairs to the top-floor locker rooms, high above the roar of the factory line.

Workers at the "head" line, that is, those who dig the meat out of the pigs' heads and pull out the spinal cords, and juice the brains into a frothy mix that looks, according to some, like strawberry milkshake or Pepto Bismol, began exhibiting neurological damage. The article describes the terrible effects of that damage on some of the workers. Interestingly, Customs and Immigration started investigating the documentation of those workers who were ill, illustrating, once again, how we take advantage of undocumented workers. We want them to work in our factories, do the dirty work many Americans won't do (and work for which companies want to pay as little as possible), yet we don't want to pay when those workers are hurt in the process. The CEO of QPP negotiated settlements with "up to a dozen of employees who had filed workers' comp claims": "After attorneys' fees, each received $12,500, a half-year's pay." One man who had been permanently injured received $38, 600.

Two other articles about food production in this country also reminded me of how much we depend upon immigrants. This first one is actually a post by Mark Bittman, on his New York Times blog, about Immokalee, Florida, "the source of almost all the winter tomatoes grown in the United States": "Immokalee, America's Tomato Capital," posted 12 May 2011. The second is a follow-up post written by Jennifer Mascia: "Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Immokalee, Florida", posted 15 June 2011. Bittman's post is a description of his tour of the town where:

tomato workers have gone from enduring slavery, beatings, wage theft (and sub-minimum wage pay) and 12-hour days in the blazing heat with no shade, to a victory that, that, while not quite complete, is possibly the most successful labor action in the United States in 20 years...

In her post, Mascia provides more details of the town and the workers who make sure that tomatoes are available in the produce section of grocery stores. She describes the work that the Coalition of Immokalee Workers has done to prevent slavery and to raise wages and living standards of the people who toil in the fields. Big chain stores fight to get lower prices to pass on to consumers--and the people who suffer are the workers in the field. For after paying for automotive machinery and diesel, where else do farmers have to turn to cut back on costs? Wages.

The production of tomatoes in Immokalee also can be an ecological disaster, as the soil is not rich enough in nutrients to grow crops: "Because of this, the land is bombarded with fertilizers, fungicides and pesticides" (Mascia, "Everything You ever Wanted to Know about Immokalee, Florida"). Also, the tomatoes are picked green and then gassed with ethylene to "ripen" them. Vine-ripened tomatoes, that is, tomatoes too ripe to be gathered and transported, are left on the vines to rot and are ploughed under with the plants after picking, which is done by hand.

Mark Bittman also has a post titled "The True Cost of Tomatoes" (posted 14 June 2011) with more information about the lives of tomato pickers, and Barry Estabrook has written a book detailing the production of tomatoes in Florida and the people who work to get them to the supermarket, Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed our Most Alluring Fruit. Here's an excerpt from his book: "Slavery in the Tomato Fields," published 8 June 2011, in The Atlantic. One can listen to an interview with Estabrook here: "The Tasteless Modern Tomato", posted by Justin Megahan, 21 June 2011, on the website of Creative Loafing, Tampa.

These articles remind me not only to care about the people who put the food on my table but also to be more aware of the food choices that I make. We owe a lot to immigrants in this country. Grappling the problem of illegal immigration requires some humility and mercy, along with justice.

[The photo at the top of the post is one of our own tomatoes, gathered from our first garden since moving in March to south Louisiana.]


Additional comment: Congressman Mo Brooks of Alabama says he's willing to do anything short of shooting illegal immigrants to get rid of them. He says that:

they have no right to be here. They are clogging up our emergency rooms, and making our education system more expensive. If you go to the Madison County Jail, there are far too many illegal aliens there because they have victimized Americans...[He adds that they] need to quit taking jobs from American citizens.

Maybe he will take their places in the tomato fields of Florida or the pig-brain-sucking head table of Hormel in Austin, Minnesota: "Alabama Congressman Mo Brooks Makes Strong Comments on Illegal Immigration Law," WHNT-19 News, Huntsville, Alabama, 29 June 2011.

More about the meat industry here:
Tom Philpott, "How the Meat Industry Turned Abuse into a Business Model," Mother Jones, 29 June 2011.

And on how House Republicans' refusal to fully fund the Department of Agriculture's appropriations bill for next year will hurt small farmers: Monica Potts, "GOP's Tiny Cuts Wound Small Farmers," Grist 23 June 2011.

See also: Monica Potts' "The Serfs of Arkansas," American Prospect, 9 March 2011.