Undernews for 24 March 2011

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Morning Line: The dysfunction beat

Sam Smith

The other day on a talk show I found myself saying something I had thought about but hadn't put in words. In responding to a question about another absurd act by the Republicans, I told the host that I thought he needed a psychiatrist and not me to answer that one.

Never in my life have the gutters of American politics been so filled with the flow of madness - nonsensical statements, illogical actions, bizarre claims. And most of it - albeit far from all - is coming from Republicans.

There are two major subcultures of the GOP these days: the crazy and the criminal. The latter has always been a part of politics but it is at record levels. And the former is often so intrinsically mixed with the latter that it becomes impossible at times to tell them apart.

I use the word criminal to differentiate from the word corruption. The corrupt politics we read about of the Tammany years or in James Michael Curley's Boston welled up from the bottom. What defined politics was an unbroken chain of human experience, memory and gratitude. It was the voter as well as the politician who was in on the deal.

Tammny's brand of corruption got down to the streets. Manipulation of the voter and corruption describe both Tammany and contemporary politics. The big difference is that in the former the voter could with greater regularity count on something in return.

Today, the bribery of private campaign financing, especially following the Supreme Court's full approval of corporate contributions, has drastically changed the game. The public doesn't have to be enticed with public works, public jobs and public short cuts. Today's assumption is that with sufficient funds to mislead the public on TV, what the public thinks it thinks no longer matters. The typical politician is no longer an intermediary between grand and small constituencies and no longer feels the need to even tithe to the voter. It is enough to have the money to buy enough ads to deceive them.

While the major participants in this sort of politics these days are Republicans, it is probably fair to date its universal application to the Clinton years. After all, Democrats were supposed to represent the little guy, to do the most for the most. Clinton made it clear that he would go with the highest bidder. And the Obama economic recovery programs - so twisted to aid the large over the small - continues this trend.

It is not, however, that the Democrats are more evil than the Republicans, only that when they sell out, there is no one left to represent the rest of America. If Obama won't defend the unions or those threatened with foreclosure, then who will?

It is difficult to tell where the money ends and madness begins, and this too has a bipartisan quality to it.

Consider a report from ABC's Jake Tapper:
||| In an interview with Univision, President Obama re-defined the term “exit strategy,” and said our exit strategy in Libya would begin this week.“The exit strategy will be executed this week,” President Obama said, “in the sense that we will be pulling back from our much more active efforts to shape the environment. We will still be in a support role. We will be supplying jamming, intelligence and other assets unique to us."

Planes in the air? Ships in the Mediterranean? Intelligence being provided? Doesn’t sound like an exit strategy at all.

What it does recall is Lewis Carroll.

"'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less." ||||

Since it is hard to imagine someone as well educated by Obama being confused as to what an exit is, one must assume he is lying to us, just as he did about his Iraq exit strategy.

But at least Obama keeps it down to a dull roar.

For the Republicans, perseveration, ignorance, hyperbole, and distortion are not tools of last resort. They are the modus operandi. Thus, reports Alternet, "More than half of the incoming Republican caucus denies the validity of climate change science. Some 74 percent of Republicans in the U.S. Senate now take that stance, as do 53 percent of GOP in the House."

The difference between these Republicans and Obama is that the president lies like lawyer- with the considered manipulation of a con artist - while the GOP lies are not merely the work of the bribed but too often are truly believed by the politicians themselves.

It is this mixture of madness, imbecility and money that is hard to sort out.

I have increasingly come to think of our situation as that of a truly dysfunctional family, one in which the garb of the normal conceals deep inability to achieve any such thing.

Some, for example, have talked a lot about the need for more civil debate. But when, for example, has Michelle Bachman indicated any comprehension of what that might be, let alone an inclination to attempt it?

Indeed, any debate collapses in a culture in which facts and logic are held in such contempt. And how does the journalist balance properly the arguments of the rational and the mentally disjointed? What is the objective manner in which to cover someone being paid large sums to say the absurd, nasty or cruel things and who probably agrees with them anyway?

We are treating this all as politics as usual, but it isn't.

Perhaps it would help if more with psychiatric training would weigh in our political affairs. What is the best way to handle a Scott Walker or a Sarah Palin when they're having one of their fits? How does one debate with the paranoid, the aggressively ignorant or the pathological liar?

As a journalist, I feel that things seem to be moving beyond my skills. I know how to write about the traditionally corrupt, evil and stupid. But what does one do when members of one of the two major parties become so bizarrely irrational and, with no small help from the media itself, gain a constituency large enough to give them office? When madness is no longer a individual clinical matter but a popular consensus?

Recovered history: One reason we have a labor movement

Near closing time on March 25, 1911, a fire broke out at the Triangle Waist Factory. Within 18 minutes, 146 people were dead as a result of the fire.- Cornell University

Brunswick Times Record editorial, ME - On March 25, 1911, a fire broke out at the Triangle Shirtwaist Co. in New York City. It spread quickly through the factory, which made women’s blouses, known as “shirtwaists,” and occupied the top three floors of the building.

Most of the workers could not escape the flames, since doors leading to the roof were locked and flames prevented workers from descending stairwells or by an elevator that eventually buckled under the heat. The fire caused the deaths of 146 garment workers, most of them immigrant women, who either died in the flames or jumped to their deaths from the factory windows.

It was the deadliest industrial disaster in the city’s history, the fourth deadliest in the United States.

The fire, and the acquittal of the two owners in a criminal trial, helped spur factory workers to organize and join labor unions that would advocate for them against sweatshop working conditions, low wages and 50-hour work weeks. . .

A young woman named Frances Perkins was appointed as the lead investigator of the commission looking into how to prevent a similar tragedy from happening again. The commission took four years to complete its seven-volume report…

Perkins later become the first woman to hold a Cabinet post, serving as secretary of labor for the 12 years of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency. Her mind as well as her heart seared by what she had learned in the Triangle fire investigation, she was the driving force behind most, if not all, of FDR’s “New Deal” reforms. Among them:

- The Wagner Act, which gives workers the right to organize unions and bargain collectively.

- The Fair Labor Standards Act, which established for the first time a minimum wage and gave us the 40-hour work week.

- The Social Security Act of 1935, legislation she literally nagged FDR to support, astutely recognizing that the dire conditions of the Great Depression were probably the only way such a sweeping economic security package would gain public support.

How easily we forget our own labor history.

NY Times, 2001 - Rose Freedman, the last survivor of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire in which 146 of her co-workers perished in 1911, died on Thursday in her apartment in Beverly Hills, Calif., her daughter said. She was 107.

Mrs. Freedman, who at the time of the Manhattan fire was two days shy of 18, escaped death in 1911 by following company executives to the roof to be rescued. She became a lifelong crusader for worker safety, telling and retelling the story that the Triangle workers died because the owners were not concerned with their welfare.

The disastrous factory fire, in which girls and young women leapt from eighth- and ninth-story windows, their flaming skirts billowing in the wind, horrified the nation and led to some of the first city, state and federal laws dealing with workers' safety. It gave a powerful impetus to the fledgling labor movement, greatly strengthening the building of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, which two years before the fire had led a three-month strike to focus attention on conditions in workplaces like the Triangle factory.

On the day of the fire, Mrs. Freedman escaped the inferno by stopping to consider what the executives were doing. She somehow thought they would be safer, and went up to the 10th floor, where their offices were, to find out. They were taking the freight elevator to the roof, where firefighters pulled them to the roof of an adjacent building. She did the same.

The alternative was jumping.

"Girls in shirtwaists, which were aflame, went flying out of the building so that you saw these young women literally ablaze flying out of the windows," she said in a Public Broadcasting System documentary, "The Living Century," shown in December and January.

More on the Shirtwaist fire

Passings: Jonathan Rowe

Sam Smith

The best post-graduate course you could ever take would have been to run into Jon Rowe on the street. Jon, who died unexpectedly on March 20, was one of the most remarkable people I ever knew. Luckily that knowledge spanned nearly four decades, with his first article in this journal - then the DC Gazette - appearing 1972. The piece, written with Fred Doolittle, began:
"Would you like your property taxes cut by one-third? We could chop about that much off property tax bills across the country, says Professor Lester Snyder of the University of Connecticut Law School, if we just went back to the basic idea of this tax. That is, if we made it again a tax on all property, instead of just on real property. There are about $7 trillion worth of assets ¬ property value ¬ in the United States, according to a 1971 study done for the Securities and Exchange Commission. But the property tax now reaches only about $1.5 trillion of this ¬ about l/5th. The burden of the property tax has been dumped on homeowners, other real property owners and renters. . ."

In the years to follow, Jon never shied away from an idea for the petty reasons that it was too big, too new, or too unlikely to be considered seriously by major media. At times an activist, at others a journalist, and still others a little of both, Jon saw the world as a place that could be changed for the better if we just willing to look beyond traditions and cliches.

And so he was not afraid, along with Edgar Cahn, to write the earliest book about time dollars in 1992. Today the concept has spread to almost two dozen countries. In America it has been used in hospitals and by a law firm that represented a community in return for the time dollars of its residents' volunteer work.

Tomales Bay Institute

Jon was also a great lot of fun to disagree with, which he and I managed to do on many occasions over the years. I was far more cynical than he but somehow always saw me as curable in the long run and fun to tweak in the short run. For me, it was honor just to hold my own. Besides, he was flexible so, within a few sentences, I could appear to him hopeless, amusing, misguided or profound all of which he would explain gentlely well.

Jon moved to the west coast and among my last contacts were occasional ones on the Marin radio station KWMR, where I would be a guest from time to time. With Jon as the host, there was plenty of explaining to do, all the more so because of the periodic participation of his wonderful producer/engineer Amy Schliftman, who would raise matters Jon had neglected. The show lasted seven years and Amy, in a note to me, described it as a "special bubble" and how she loved "being a volunteer captive audience."

In the coming days, we're gong to be publishing short items and article excerpts by Jon. I think you'll find it a pleasure as it was when I first read them and a relief from the trite and disingenuous arguments that pass for political debate these days.

Utne Reader, 2002 - Jonathan Rowe has been thinking and writing about the commons throughout his career¬indeed, long before he even realized this was the 'mother idea' of his many journalistic interests. Even when writing about baseball, Rowe was pondering the idea of common ground; in that case baseball fields, which he believed could soothe tensions between the United States and Cuba.

Rowe, 56, who worked for Ralph Nader in the early ’70s, says that while in Washington, D.C., he became interested in the social value of institutions other than corporations and centralized government. Over the years, this third realm¬the commons¬has become harder and harder to locate in American life. Now, Rowe says, 'if the commons is going to be reclaimed, it has to start in our own lives. Not as an idea, but as an activity.'

So in 2000, Rowe¬along with Peter Barnes, co-founder of the socially responsible long distance phone company Working Assets, and Harriet Barlow, a respected social and environmental activist¬created the Tomales Bay Institute, a small 'thought farm' currently focused on promoting the idea of the commons for the 21st century.

Rowe, who works out of his home in Point Reyes Station, California, is originally from Massachusetts. [He is] a contributing editor at Yes! and The Washington Monthly, and a former staff writer for The Christian Science Monitor.

Another reason to stay away from Michigan

Unemployed Workers - The Michigan House passed the Senate ... that would reduce the maximum weeks of eligibility for regular state unemployment benefits to 20 weeks from the national standard of 26 weeks...

Great moments in the law

Woman suing Carnival cruise line because the ship she was on made her seasick.

Libya: Another war that could go on forever

Jason Ditz, Anti War - Speaking during a visit to Cairo, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates confirmed that the war in Libya is open-ended. Gates pointed out that UN Security Council Resolution 1973, upon which the US-led war is predicated, is “not time-limited” and that he therefore thought it wasn’t reasonable to set a timeline for when the war would actually end. I think no one was under any illusions that this would be an operation that would last one week, or two weeks, or three weeks,” Gates insisted. More concerning is that they don’t appear to have any endgame at all.

Obama assaults Miranda ruling

Glenn Greenwald, Salon - The Obama DOJ unveiled the latest -- and one of the most significant -- examples of its eagerness to assault the very legal values Obama vowed to protect. The Wall Street Journal reports that "new rules allow investigators to hold domestic-terror suspects longer than others without giving them a Miranda warning, significantly expanding exceptions to the instructions that have governed the handling of criminal suspects for more than four decades." The only previous exception to the 45-year-old Miranda requirement that someone in custody be apprised of their rights occurred in 1984, when the Rehnquist-led right-wing faction of the Supreme Court allowed delay "only in cases of an imminent safety threat," but these new rules promulgated by the Obama DOJ "give interrogators more latitude and flexibility to define what counts as an appropriate circumstance to waive Miranda rights."

Local heroes: Michigan high court rules police activity is public business

Michigan Messenger - The Michigan Supreme Court ruled in favor of rapper Dr. Dre in a case involving a very important legal principle ¬ whether the police have a right to privacy while performing their duties. The state high court said no.

The suit was filed by Gary Brown, now a Detroit City Councilman but formerly a high-ranking police official. He and other officers were videotaped while threatening to shut down a concert featuring Dre and Eminem if they showed a sexually explicit video. The video was then included in a DVD produced about the tour.

The court, in a 6-1 ruling, dismissed the suit, saying that there is no right to privacy for police while on the job. The implications of this ruling are far more important than they may seem initially because it explicitly makes it legal in the state of Michigan to record the police while they perform their duties. This is incredibly important because cell phone videos of police officers have revealed misconduct, abuse and lying on reports in case after case around the country. But in some states, like Illinois, it is illegal to videotape the police in the performance of their duties.

Subprime candidate for top FBI job

CNS News - The Obama administration reportedly is considering former Clinton administration official Jamie Gorelick, among others, to become the next director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The Wall Street Journal’s Evan Perez first reported the news last week, citing “U.S. officials” familiar with the situation. Gorelick served as vice chairman of the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) when the government-sponsored enterprise began bundling subprime loans into securitized financial instruments. Prior to that, she served as deputy attorney general in the Clinton Justice Department under then-Attorney General Janet Reno from 1994 to 1997.

Catherine Austin Fitts - Much has been written about the use of the War on Drugs to intentionally disenfranchise poor people and engineer the centralization of political and economic power in the U.S. and globally, including an explosive rise in the U.S. prison population. ...

The Clinton Administration took the groundwork laid by Nixon, Reagan and Bush and embraced and blossomed the expansion and promotion of federal support for police, enforcement and the War on Drugs with a passion that was hard to understand unless and until you realized that the American financial system was deeply dependent on attracting an estimated $500 billion-$1 trillion of annual money laundering. Globalizing corporations and deepening deficits and housing bubbles required attracting vast amounts of capital.

One of the first major initiatives by President Bill Clinton was the Omnibus Crime Bill, signed into law in September 1994. This legislation implemented mandatory sentencing, authorized $10.5 billion to fund prison construction that mandatory sentencing would help require, loosened the rules on allowing federal asset forfeiture teams to keep and spend the money their operations made from seizing assets, and provided federal monies for local police...

The potential impact on the private prison industry was significant. With the bill only through the house, former Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti joined the board of Wackenhut Corrections, which went public in July 1994 with an initial public offering of 2.2 million shares. By the end of 1998, Wackenhut’s stock market value had increased almost ten times. When I visited their website at that time it offered a feature that flashed the number of beds they owned and managed. The number increased as I was watching it ¬ the prison business was growing that fast.

On February 4, 1994, U.S. Vice President Al Gore announced Operation Safe Home, a new enforcement program at HUD. Gore was a former Senator from Tennessee. His hometown of Nashville was home of the largest private prison company, Corrections Corporation of America...

Behind the scenes what all this meant was big budget increases for DOJ and the portions of the agencies that were focused on profitable enforcement and the War on Drugs. Big budget increases meant big contract budget increases as government outsourced more and more work...

Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick, who according to the New York Times article had overseen the new policy of prison privatization, left DOJ in 1997. She then became a Vice Chair of Fannie Mae, a “government sponsored enterprise.”

Pocket paradigms

Our world is unlike any in human history - a world in which the destruction of cultural and individual variety is high on the agenda of the earth's political and business leaders; our human nature being to them not a reason for existing but just another obstacle in their path to power. The strategies by which this onslaught can be countered depend on the imagination, passion, obstinacy, and creativity of ordinary people who refuse their consumptive assignments in the global marketplace, who develop autonomous alternatives, and who laugh when they are supposed to be saluting. The business of constructing culture is no longer an inherited and precisely defined task but a radical act demonstrating to others that they are not alone and to ourselves that we are still human. - Sam Smith

Personal to our Ohio readers

WEWS, Cleveland - Due to the risk of severe weather across central and southern Ohio, the statewide tornado drill has been canceled . . . .

Stripping for Private Manning

The Register - Supporters of Bradley Manning stripped down to their skivvies outside the office of US Senator Dianne Feinstein to protest the treatment of the suspected WikiLeaker, who is being held in solitary confinement, often without being allowed to wear clothes.

Music concerts of all sorts losing audience

Miller-McCune - A new study by the NEA suggests omnivores, or those who regularly attend varying art events from museum exhibits to operas, are on the decline. . . Omnivores ¬ defined by sociologists as people who regularly participate in a broad range of cultural activities ¬ represent a small minority of the population, but a large portion of the arts audience. In a new analysis recently released by the National Endowment for the Arts, author Mark J. Stern concludes that this engaged, energetic group is both shrinking in size and becoming less active.

Stern notes that, in recent decades, there has been “a precipitous decline in attendance” at art museums, plays, operas, dance performances, and concerts of both jazz and classical music. According to NEA statistics, classical music attendance has declined at a 29 percent rate since 1982, with the steepest drop occurring form 2002 to 2008. The only art form that did not record a statistically significant drop between 2002 and 2008 ¬ and the one that has had the smallest decline overall since 1982 ¬ is musical theater.

The most comprehensive study of how to write and pronounce that Libyan thug's name

Search Engine Land - I checked several major news publications in the United States, as well as the UK, Canada and some for India and Japan. You can see the lack of agreement, even among the three major wire services, AP, AFP and Reuters, which I also checked:

Gaddafi: Reuters (Wire), Washington Post (US), Huffington Post (US), The Guardian (UK), The Telegraph (UK), The Times (UK), The Mirror (UK), The Sun (UK), The Mail (UK), Bild (Germany), Times Of India (India), Daily Yomiuri (Japan). Asahi Shimbun (Japan)

Gadhafi: Associated Press (Wire), Wall Street Journal (US), USA Today (US), San Jose Mercury News (US), Chicago Tribune (US), Toronto Star (Canada), The Globe & Mail (Canada)

Kadafi: Los Angeles Times (US)

Khadafy: New York Daily News (US) & New York Post (US)

Kadhafi: AFP (Wire)

Qaddafi: New York Times (US)

At first glance, most publications seem to go with “Gaddafi,” but that’s largely due to the UK. Every major UK publication I checked used that spelling, unlike the disagreement among US papers and the wire services. Two major Canadian papers went with “Gadhafi.”. . .

For the record, here’s the official Library of Congress rundown on how to spell ol’ whatsisname:

(1) Muammar Qaddafi, (2) Mo’ammar Gadhafi, (3) Muammar Kaddafi, (4) Muammar Qadhafi, (5) Moammar El Kadhafi, (6) Muammar Gadafi, (7) Mu’ammar al-Qadafi, (8) Moamer El Kazzafi, (9) Moamar al-Gaddafi, (10) Mu’ammar Al Qathafi, (11) Muammar Al Qathafi, (12) Mo’ammar el-Gadhafi, (13) Moamar El Kadhafi, (14) Muammar al-Qadhafi, (15) Mu’ammar al-Qadhdhafi, (16) Mu’ammar Qadafi, (17) Moamar Gaddafi, (18) Mu’ammar Qadhdhafi, (19) Muammar Khaddafi, (20) Muammar al-Khaddafi, (21) Mu’amar al-Kadafi, (22) Muammar Ghaddafy, (23) Muammar Ghadafi, (24) Muammar Ghaddafi, (25) Muamar Kaddafi, (26) Muammar Quathafi, (27) Muammar Gheddafi, (28) Muamar Al-Kaddafi, (29) Moammar Khadafy, (30) Moammar Qudhafi, (31) Mu’ammar al-Qaddafi, (32) Mulazim Awwal Mu’ammar Muhammad Abu Minyar al-Qadhafi.

Only a small portion of this scholarly work

Poverty: Past Present, Future

From an interview with Peter Edelman by Greg Kaufman in the Nation

GK: What are some of the key differences between taking on poverty now compared to antipoverty work in the 1960s and ’70s?

PE: We were more of a mind to tackle poverty then.

We made food stamps into a national program, and we passed Medicare and Medicaid which have had an enormous antipoverty effect. We created Pell Grants, and vouchers for low-income housing, the earned-income tax credit¬things that made a huge difference and without which we would have a much higher level of poverty than we have.

But we never focused fully on the changes that were taking place in the economy in the 1970s. The deindustrialization¬the loss of the good jobs that didn’t require a lot of education¬and the shift to a much more low-wage job based economy.

Also, the increasing problem of the concentration of poverty¬of intergenerational and persistent poverty. It’s a smaller part of poverty, but the part that creates the political controversy. So the whole question of welfare was allowed to fester over a long period of time because we didn’t have any serious effort to help people find jobs and get off the welfare rolls.

Fast-forward to now: number one, we now have this tidal wave of low wage jobs which is different from where we were in the 1960s. The other thing is we have so many more families that are headed by a single parent, usually a mom. The poverty of households headed by a single woman is over 30 percent.

So, the change in family composition is significant in thinking about what to do about poverty. The right wing says it’s all about the dissolution or destruction or breakup of the American family. Factually, I think most of us would like to see children growing up with two parents. But how do you do that? The basic way is to do something about economic opportunity for everybody.

GK: So what are the kinds of things that need to be done in that vein?

PE: One of the things we know is that there are millions of people who have low-wage jobs, whether they are technically poor or not. You have all of these people who are doing their very best¬working two or three jobs and so on. And whatever they are able to cobble together is not enough to get them to the point where they can pay all their bills.

So what do you do about that? Well, labor unions should be stronger. Minimum wage should be raised and indexed to inflation. But you’re still going to have a gap.

Very fundamentally you need two things: one, you need wage supplements¬that’s the earned-income tax credit. The other is you need all the social investments that are necessary and that are the obligation of the society to provide. They’re not a wage supplement, but they have an income affect, and that’s health coverage, and childcare, strong K-12 and pre-K, access to higher education and help with housing.

But the federal childcare only reaches about one in seven who qualify for it; and federally-funded housing help reaches about one in four who qualify for it. So, all of those things cost money. And we’re not ready to admit that we have this structurally broken economy.

The fundamental question about poverty in this country¬putting aside those who need the safety net¬is facing up to the fact that the economy is broken. It has a structural flaw for millions and millions of people: low-wage work. . . .

Personal to surgeons among our readership

Marc Abrahams, Guardian, UK - There's practical advice in Rectal Foreign Bodies: Case Reports and a Comprehensive Review of the World's Literature, a medical study. It's full of handy, workaday hints ... if your work involves doing surgery to recover objects that have strayed, as a variety of objects seem to do, from their more usual locations.

The authors, American surgeons David Busch and James Starling, also manage to tell good stories. They do it tersely:

"Light bulbs have been safely removed by padding the glass bulb with fine mesh gauze or cheesecloth followed by deliberate shattering of the object. Other ingenious mechanisms to remove light bulbs include a threaded broom handle and two large kitchen spoons."

"In one instance a drinking glass was removed by packing the rectum with plaster of Paris to include an anchoring rope after the plaster of Paris had set.". . . .

All in the Family: The Bush-Clinton connection

We recently ran a clip about Bill Clinton and George Bush slopping over each other at a public ceremony. Clinton, in his usual disingenuous manner, made it appear as thought their relationship had only blossomed in recent years. But the Review has noted this familial relationship for years and as we commented a few years ago, in this case the term "family" should be thought of more in the prosecutorial rather than biological sense.

Greg Pierce, Washington Times, 2006 - President Bush says Bill Clinton has become so close to his father that the Democratic former president is like a member of the family. Former President George Bush has worked with Mr. Clinton to raise money for victims of the Asian tsunami and the hurricane disaster along the Gulf Coast. Asked about his father and Mr. Clinton, Mr. Bush quipped, "My new brother." "That's a good relationship. It's a fun relationship to watch," Mr. Bush said in an interview on CBS' "Face the Nation" on Sunday. While attending Pope John Paul II's funeral, Mr. Bush said, "It was fun to see the interplay between Dad and Clinton. One of these days, I'll be a member of the ex-presidents' club. . . I'll be looking for something to do." He said ex-presidents share rare experiences that others cannot understand. "And so I can understand why ex-presidents are able to put aside old differences," he said. Mr. Bush said he has checked in with Mr. Clinton occasionally. "And you know, he says things that makes it obvious -- that makes it obvious to me that we're kind of, you know, on the same wavelength about the job of the presidency. Makes sense, after all, there's this kind of commonality," he said. Mr. Bush jokingly referred to speculation that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, the former president's wife, will seek the Democratic nomination for president. He had earlier referred to the former first lady as "formidable." "Bush, Clinton, Bush, Clinton," he said, referring to how Bill Clinton had followed his father, and Hillary Clinton could follow him.

Progressive Review, 2006 - Clinton served as a regional facilitator for the Reagan-Bush administration activities in Latin America including the notorious operation at Mena, from which the CIA shipped arms south with drugs reportedly coming back on the return flights. The job of someone like Clinton was to look the other way and not squeal on Reagan and Bush, especially about the drug trade in Arkansas. The elder Bush has considerable reason to be grateful. .

- [In 1984] Clinton bodyguard, state trooper LD Brown, applies for a CIA opening. Clinton gives him help on his application essay including making it more Reaganesque on the topic of the Nicaragua. According to Brown, he meets a CIA recruiter in Dallas whom he later identities as former member of Vice President Bush's staff. On the recruiter's instruction, he meets with notorious drug dealer Barry Seal in a Little Rock restaurant. Joins Seal in flight to Honduras with a purported shipment of M16s and a return load of duffel bags. Brown gets $2,500 in small bills for the flight. Brown, concerned about the mission, consults with Clinton who says, "Oh, you can handle it, don't sweat it." On second flight, Brown finds cocaine in a duffel bag and again he seeks Clinton's counsel. Clinton says to the conservative Brown, "Your buddy, Bush, knows about it" and of the cocaine, "that's Lasater's deal."

- In 1984, Ronald Reagan wants to send the National Guard to Honduras to help in the war against the Contras. Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis goes to the Supreme Court in a futile effort to stop it but Clinton is happy to oblige, even sending his own security chief, Buddy Young, along to keep an eye on things. Winding up its tour, the Arkansas Guard declares large quantities of its weapons "excess" and leaves them behind for the Contras.

- In 1985, Terry Reed is asked to take part in Operation Donation, under which planes and boats needed by the Contras "disappear," allowing owners to claim insurance. Reed has been a Contra operative and CIA asset working with Felix Rodriguez, the Contra link to the CIA and then-Vice President Bush's office. Reed later claims he refused, but that his plane was removed while he was away.

- In 1987 Terry Reed's plane is returned but, according to his account, he is asked not to report it because it might have to be "borrowed" again. Reed later says that he had become aware that the Contra operation also involved drug running and had gotten cold feet. He also believed that large sums of drug money were being laundered by leading Arkansas financiers. He went to Felix Rodriguez and told him he was quitting. Reed was subsequently charged with mail fraud for having allegedly claimed insurance on a plane that was in fact hidden in a hanger in Little Rock. The head of Clinton's Swiss Guard, Capt. Buddy Young, later assistant FEMA director, will claim to have been walking around the North Little Rock Airport when "by an act of God" a gust of wind blew open the hangar door and revealed the Piper Turbo Arrow.

Sam Smith, Shadows Of Hope, 1994: [Clinton] appears willing to ignore the great residue of Reagan-Bush offenses, especially those growing out of the war on drugs and attempts to gag and intimidate government and defense workers. And he seems similarly disinterested in unclosed cases of political racketeering such as those involving BCCI and BNL. Said one activist lawyer who has met with Attorney General Reno: "She's closing her ears to all of that."

Reno, who was clearly more interested in protecting law enforcement agencies than in finding the truth about the Waco massacre, also early bought the Bush administration line in the BNL bank case. She agreed to a plea bargain by Christopher P. Drogoul, the former Atlanta manager of the Italian bank who had claimed that US intelligence officials were aware of loans made to Iraq. Reno declared that she did not think the case had been mishandled by the Bush administration, despite a federal judge's charge that Drogoul and his Atlanta bank colleagues were "pawns and bit players" in a secret deal to provide arms for Iraq and that the Clinton administration's exoneration of its predecessors was only possible "in never-never land."

- The select House committee looking into the transfer of secret technology to China has filed a secret report on how it happened, illustrating once again the first principle of intelligence: don't let the American people know what the other side already does. As a result of this bipartisan clamp on the scandal, we have no idea as to whether the egregious practices of the Clinton administration were matched by those of Reagan and Bush or not. The implication is, of course, that everybody does it, which means that everybody for the past 20 years has been helping American corporations build up the Chinese economy just as we allowed American industry to transform Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union into worthy adversaries. We do know that the Clinton Administration took large sums of barely laundered campaign contributions from the Chinese government and ignored its own national security and diplomatic advisors in loosening export restrictions. The two biggest beneficiaries: Hughes, primarily a Republican donor; and Loral, primarily a Democratic one. The biggest losers: Americans and the security of their country.

Sick Republican of the day orders removal of labor history mural

Portland Press Herald - Maine Gov. Paul LePage has ordered the removal of a 36-foot mural depicting the state's labor history from the lobby of the Department of Labor headquarters building in Augusta.

In addition, the LePage administration is renaming several department conference rooms that carry the names of pro-labor icons such as Cesar Chavez.

LePage spokesman Dan Demeritt says the mural and the conference room names are not in keeping with the department's pro-business goals and some business owners complained.

Record number of anti-science bills in state legislatures

Mother Jones - State governments are grappling with massive budget deficits, overburdened social programs, and of mountains of deferred spending. But never mind all that. For some conservative lawmakers, it's the perfect time to legislate the promotion of creationism in the classroom. In the first three months of 2011, nine creationism-related bills have been introduced in seven states-that's more than in any year in recent memory. . .

Ohio GOP governor wants to privatize just about everything

Toledo Blade - Ohio would sell off five state prisons to raise $200 million, cut half a billion that would have headed to local governments, and privatize the state’s liquor system for a lump sum of $1.2 billion under Gov. John Kasich’s first two-year budget proposal. He’s proposed doubling the state’s school voucher program and eliminating the cap on the number of charter schools in the state while cutting overall support for public K-12 schools to reflect the evaporation of one-time stimulus dollars. . .

The plan does not propose privatizing the Ohio Turnpike or the Ohio Lottery, but he said Tuesday that more privatizations are likely to come.. . .Mr. Kasich’s budget cuts 25 per cent in local government funds next year and 50 percent in 2013 saving the state $167 million next year and $388 million more in 2013. . .

Republican governor orders unconstitutional drug tests

St Augustine Record, FL - Gov. Rick Scott signed an executive order that will require random drug testing of many current state employees as well as pre-hire testing for applicants. . U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle [has] ruled that the Department of Juvenile Justice was violating the Fourth Amendment in ordering random drug testing. Hinkle ordered the agency to halt the random drug testing and pay the employee who sued, Roderick Wenzel, $150,000.

It's not clear whether the agency ever did stop its random drug testing... "I'm not sure why Gov. Scott does not know that the policy he recreated by executive order today has already been declared unconstitutional," ACLU of Florida Executive Director Howard Simon said in a statement. "The state of Florida cannot force people to surrender their constitutional rights in order to work for the state. Absent any evidence of illegal drug use, or assigned a safety-sensitive job, people have a right to be left alone."

Even the White House isn't quite sure what we're up to

The Hill - The White House strongly denied that regime change is part of its mission in Libya, despite a statement earlier in the day that characterized the goal there as “installing a democratic system.”

Ben Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser, issued a statement acknowledging that President Obama would like to see a democratic government in Libya, but explained that the aim of the U.S. military’s intervention there is not to enact regime change. "We're clarifying, as we’ve said repeatedly, that the effort of our military operation is not regime change, that as we actually say in this readout, it’s the Libyan people who are going to make their determinations about the future,” Rhodes said.

Earlier on Tuesday, a White House-issued readout of a phone call between Obama and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that installing a democratic system in Libya was a goal of the two leaders.

Morning Line: Free markets, enslaved minds

Sam Smith

One of the myths of the economaniacs is that everything in life is a function of how money is used and who uses it. To be sure, it was, as previously noted here, fortunate that economists discovered money before manure or we would be faced with a Really Gross National Product and our lives would driven by defecatory trends as interpreted by academic and media experts.

But there is, in fact, one largely undiscussed way in which our economic approach truly reaches deep into all aspects of our culture: the massive corporatism under which we live (concealed under the guise of free market capitalism) is making us dangerously dumb.

This not only affects our purchases but every aspect of our lives. Consider, for example, where the average American learns things. At the top the of list would have to be advertising on television combined with the news and programming created to attract that advertising.

There are, to be sure, other influences such as schools, but how many teachers can sell common sense or useful skepticism as well as advertising agencies sell products and the values that lead one to buy them? And consider the time spent in the education compared with the time spent before the tube - even by the young, let alone by adults.

There is also organized religion, which - in its sadly most typical forms these days - is a prime encourager of myths potentially disastrous to the earth, including denial of climate change and opposition to birth control.

But still greater is the ubiquitous influence of the corporados not just on our wallets but on our minds. And it's not just the messages we receive through the television. It can be found in the distortion in values of non-profits now seeking to meet corporate standards and, perhaps most dangerously, in the policies and rhetoric of our politicians.

In the end, it will not be what we buy - foolish as that may be - that will do us in, but what we think. And the free market every minute is teaching us wrong things - in as many as 3,000 messages for each American every day.

As the anti-worker developments in Michigan, Wisconsin and Maine warn us, we are even losing the ability to perceive our own self interest. And when that happens, we cease being citizens and become helpless victims.

How to write a manifesto

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Pocket paradigms

Let's go to a time and place so distant that no one knows when or where it was, a time and place whose importance is as infinite as its obscurity. The moment we are seeking is the one during which a single individual, or a small group of individuals, did something so unusual that it helped free their ilk forever from the shackles of the environment and genetics -- grabbing destiny from the tree of nature and making it human. . . On the first day of my freshman anthropology class, the professor drew an invisible evolutionary time line on the wall of the lecture hall. As we twisted in our seats the eras, periods, and epochs of musical name and mystical significance boldly circumscribed the room. Finally we came back to where the professor stood and when there was nearly no place further to go, he announced that this was the beginnings of us. We were only inches from the first fire maker. - Sam Smith

50 unusual photographs

BUZZFLASH

South Dakota passes worst anti-abortion bill in the country

CNN-- A new South Dakota law requiring a woman to get counseling at a "pregnancy help center" and wait 72 hours after a physician assessment before having an abortion appears destined for a legal challenge. Law opponents say the waiting period would be the longest in the nation.

"Planned Parenthood's legal team has determined that this bill is such an egregious violation of the Constitution, that we will file suit if the governor signs it," said the Planned Parenthood office for Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota before Daugaard's action. "The law also purports to ensure that women are 'informed' before consenting to an abortion, but actually imposes requirements that are both impossible to meet and require physicians to flood their patients with false and misleading information," the group said in a statement.

Why you don't want to listen to the Chamber of Commerce

Bill McKibbon, Huffington Post - From the outside, you'd think the U.S. Chamber of Commerce must know what it's doing. It's got a huge building right next to the White House. It spends more money on political campaigning than the Republican and Democratic National Committees combined. It spends more money on lobbying that the next five biggest lobbyists combined. And yet it has an unbroken record of error stretching back almost to its founding.

Take the New Deal, which historians have long since credited as saving capitalism in the U.S. FDR was dealing with a nation ruined by Wall Street excess -- a quarter of the country unemployed, Americans starving and hopeless. He gave his first fireside chat of 1935 on April 28, and outlined a legislative program that included Social Security. The next morning, a prominent official of the Chamber of Commerce accused Roosevelt of attempting to 'Sovietize' America; the chamber adopted a resolution "opposing the president's entire legislative package."

Fast forward to the next great challenge for America. FDR, having brought America through the Depression, was trying to deal with Hitler's rise. In the winter of 1941, with the British hard-pressed to hold off the Germans, FDR proposed what came to be called the Lend-Lease program, a way of supplying the allies with materiel they desperately needed.

Only 22% of Americans opposed the Lend Lease program -- they could see who Hitler was - -but that sorry number included the Chamber of Commerce. The lead story in the New York Times for February 6, 1941 began with the ringing statement from the Chamber's president James S . Kemper that "American business men oppose American involvement in any foreign war."

It's not just that this was unpatriotic; it was also plain stupid, since our eventual involvement in that "foreign war" triggered the greatest boom in America's economic history. But it's precisely the kind of blinkered short-sightedness that has led the U.S. Chamber of Commerce astray over and over and over again. They spent the 1950s helping Joe McCarthy root out communists in the trade unions; in the 1960s they urged the Senate to "reject as unnecessary" the idea of Medicare; in the 1980s they campaigned against a "terrible 20" burdensome rules on business, including new licensing requirements for nuclear plants and "various mine safety rules."

As Brad Johnson, at the Center for American Progress, has detailed recently, the U.S. Chamber has opposed virtually every attempt to rein in pollution, from stronger smog standards to a ban on the dumping of hazardous waste....

Detroit experiences 25% population drop

NY Times - Census data showed that Detroit’s population had plunged by 25 percent over the last decade. It was the largest percentage drop in history for any American city with more than 100,000 residents, apart from the unique situation of New Orleans, where the population dropped by 29 percent after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, said Andrew A. Beveridge, a sociologist at Queens College. The number of people who vanished from Detroit ¬ 237,500 ¬ was bigger than the 140,000 who left New Orleans.

Personal to Hudson River Valley readers

"John Halle's rock-infused setting of Sam Smith's poignantly hilarious essay Apology to Younger Americans opens the second half of the program with immensely talented soprano Lucy Dhegrae displaying her amazing ability to blend classical and popular vocal styles." At Bard College on April 1 and the Colony Cafe in Woodstock, April 2

RIP: Pine Top Perkins

Youtube: Pine Top plays in Austin

New York Times obit

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