Author: Tom Sullivan

2015: Imagine greaterby Tom Sullivan “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.”
— Ursula Le Guin, accepting the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, 2014 National Book Awards So much of what bloggers write about is serendipity. Sometimes focusing fiercely on a single topic and searching out components to flesh out an idea, or else grazing the Net at random for articles that spark one, or sometimes just happening upon ideas floating around that connect in ways that say something about the zeitgeist. This morning I ran across this post on Raw Story featuring Ursula Le Guin’s speech at the National Book Awards ceremony in November:

I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries — the realists of a larger reality. … Books, you know, they’re not just commodities. The profit motive often is in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art — the art of words. I have had a long career and a good one. In good company. Now here, at the end of it, I really don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. We who live by writing and publishing want — and should demand — our fair share of the proceeds. But the name of our beautiful reward is not profit. Its name is freedom.

The very next link led to a terrific read by Rebecca Solnit at Salon. In a San Francisco junk shop, she had come upon a document dating from the French Revolution that reminded her of the very Le Guin speech I had just seen:

That document I held was written only a few years after the French had gotten over the idea that the divine right of kings was an inescapable reality. The revolutionaries had executed their king for his crimes and were then trying out other forms of government. It’s popular to say that the experiment failed, but that’s too narrow an interpretation. France never again regressed to an absolutist monarchy and its experiments inspired other liberatory movements around the world (while terrifying monarchs and aristocrats everywhere). Americans are skilled at that combination of complacency and despair that assumes things cannot change and that we, the people, do not have the power to change them. Yet you have to be abysmally ignorant of history, as well as of current events, not to see that our country and our world have always been changing, are in the midst of great and terrible changes, and are occasionally changed through the power of the popular will and idealistic movements. As it happens, the planet’s changing climate now demands that we summon up the energy to leave behind the Age of Fossil Fuel (and maybe with it some portion of the Age of Capitalism as well).

The rest is about the global fight to rein in fossil fuels and combat climate change. But most inspiring is her account of a battle by Mayor Gayle McLaughin and progressive residents of Richmond, California to take on — and defeat — Chevron in a company town and get the firm to pay an additional $114 million in taxes to clean up the town and lower its crime rate:

For this November’s election, the second-largest oil company on Earth officially spent $3.1 million to defeat McLaughin and other progressive candidates and install a mayor and council more to its liking. That sum worked out to about $180 per Richmond voter, but my brother David, who’s long been connected to Richmond politics, points out that, if you look at all the other ways the company spends to influence local politics, it might be roughly ten times that. Nonetheless, Chevron lost. None of its candidates were elected and all the grassroots progressives it fought with billboards, mailers, television ads, websites, and everything else a lavishly funded smear campaign can come up with, won.

Since Democrats’ losses in the November elections, most news outlets have focused what the left lost across the country, while ignoring such victories. I point out to any who will listen that while Democrats lost across the South, here in North Carolina, even as Sen. Kay Hagan narrowly lost her reelection bid, Democrats gained seats in the state legislature. And in districts drawn to be safe Republican seats. Instead of wringing our hands over what went wrong, progressives might want to look more closely at places like Richmond to learn from what went right. “The Richmond progressives won,” Solnit writes, “by imagining that the status quo was not inevitable, no less an eternal way of life.” Imagine greater is not just a cable channel’s slogan. Who ever thought we’d see a pope advocating progressive ideas? Pope Francis is jumping into the climate change fight in a big way in 2015, including issuing a much-anticipated encyclical and taking on Vatican conservatives on the climate issue:

According to Vatican insiders, Francis will meet other faith leaders and lobby politicians at the general assembly in New York in September, when countries will sign up to new anti-poverty and environmental goals. In recent months, the pope has argued for a radical new financial and economic system to avoid human inequality and ecological devastation. In October he told a meeting of Latin American and Asian landless peasants and other social movements: “An economic system centred on the god of money needs to plunder nature to sustain the frenetic rhythm of consumption that is inherent to it. “The system continues unchanged, since what dominates are the dynamics of an economy and a finance that are lacking in ethics. It is no longer man who commands, but money. Cash commands. “The monopolising of lands, deforestation, the appropriation of water, inadequate agro-toxics are some of the evils that tear man from the land of his birth. Climate change, the loss of biodiversity and deforestation are already showing their devastating effects in the great cataclysms we witness,” he said.

Imagine that.

Addicted to fear
by Tom Sullivan

Dave Weigel sees all the fuss over The Interview and threats from “Guardians of Peace” hackers against theaters as another case of public overreaction to a perceived threat:

The incident-free Interview screenings should be remembered alongside two other overhyped 2014 fears: the Ebola panic and the reaction to ISIS. The latter stories were handled even worse, because they happened during an election, and because some candidates created a feedback loop of childish speculation that Ebola could spread by sneezes, or that virus-laden ISIS terrorists could stalk across the Mexican border. All of these people were wrong, and thanks to the amnesiac nature of the news cycle, they might never have to answer for that. (Being wildly wrong on live TV during crises is a good way to secure a return invitation.)

Weigel quotes Ohio State University professor, John Mueller, who tracks terrorist incidents: “The lifetime chance of an American being killed by international terrorism is about one in 80,000–about the same chance of being killed by a comet or a meteor.”

But the 9/11 attacks have so shaken this country’s confidence that Americans now routinely overreact to the slightest perceived threat. It is something Osama bin Laden knew would happen and something the American right’s Noise Machine has used to jerk its listeners’ chains for years. Americans of a certain sort are easily spooked.

After six years of Obama’s tyrannical, iron-fisted rule, I’m still waiting for his jack-booted thugs to kick in my door and confiscate my weapons. Since he took office, the NRA has promised us Obama would be coming for my guns, and so far nada. He’s running out of time the way gun stores have been running out of ammo.

Staying afraid is almost an addiction. After enough regular doses, I wonder if the brain takes a certain “set” the way depression can become a habit?

(Updated to correct spelling of John Mueller.)

What’s in a racial label?
by Tom Sullivan

Esther J. Cepeda’s Washington Post op-ed discusses a study by Emory University researchers, “A rose by any other name?: The consequences of subtyping ‘African-Americans’ from ‘Blacks’”. Specifically, the study looked at how white people responded to the two terms and their attached stereotypes. Notice, there’s as much class as race here:

The researchers conducted four distinct studies in the realms of employment, media and criminal justice to determine the perceptions of the two labels in different contexts.

The data they collected point to whites believing that the label “Black” evokes a mental representation of a person with lower socioeconomic status, education, positivity, competence and warmth than the label “African-American.” And whites “will react more negatively” toward “Blacks” than toward “African-Americans.”

Even more chilling, the researchers found that use of the label “Black” in a newspaper crime report is associated with more negative emotional words than in an article featuring the words “African-American.” And whites view a criminal suspect more negatively when that person is identified as “Black” versus “African-American.”

Wonder how they’d react to calling them “citizens” or “people”? Or “neighbors”?

I noticed how both Cepeda and I both typed lower case above when writing “white” as though it is an ordinary adjective and less of a racial label, while the study prefers “White.” Race is always there, Cepeda notes, because “no matter how post-racial any of us thinks we are, we’re all carrying around varying degrees of racial and ethnic bias.”

For example, this reference in the report to another study jumped out at me for some reason:

Participants, who were predominantly White Americans, rated “poor Blacks” low in both warmth and competence and perceived them similarly to poor Whites and welfare recipients (Figure 1, p. 885, 887, Fiske et al., 2002). Conversely, participants rated “Black professionals” as having high competence and high warmth and perceived them similarly to Americans, the middle class, Christians, the Irish, and housewives (Figure 2, p. 638, Cuddy et al., 2007).

The Irish? HEY! What’s up with that?

We love a good redemption story

by Tom Sullivan

Casablanca, Groundhog Day, Meet John Doe, It’s A Wonderful Life, Miracle on 34th Street, A Christmas Carol. We love a good redemption story. Especially at this time of year.

So many of those stories, if not about personal redemption proper, are about cynics and misanthropes rediscovering a connection with the rest of humanity. With an economy out of whack, and with a justice system glaringly separate and unequal — one rigged for the rich and powerful, and another for the rest — there are probably enough Scrooges and Potters in this country to keep the Ghosts of Christmas busy 365-1/4 nights a year.

But with Ghosts of Christmas in short supply, Lynn Stuart Parramore of AlterNet’s New Economic Dialogue Project project believes bringing back a sense of shame in these Dickensian times might help hasten the revolu … um, redemption:

History shows that in cases when the law or public consensus has rendered an act reprehensible, society has contrived an impressive array of shaming devices — the dunce cap, the pillory, ducking chairs to plunge the guilty into rivers and ponds and tarring and feathering. The idea, of course, is to not only punish the culprits but also to deter other potential wrongdoers from following suit.

What would be appropriate for CEOs who pinch the wages of their employees while earning hundreds of times more than the lowest paid among them? A scarlet G for “greed” sewn to their lapels? Don’t laugh: Some judges have been known to get creative with sentencing when the ordinary route of punishment doesn’t seem to work. A Los Angeles Times op-ed noted that a judge in La Habra, California, ordered a slumlord to live in his own rundown building under house arrest for two months, and a Cleveland judge sentenced a man who had bullied a neighbor and her handicapped children to stand on the side of the highway carrying a sign describing his crimes. Perhaps a judge equipped with the latest CEO pay disclosures could sentence some corporate titan found guilty of stealing wages to live on the salary of his lowest-paid employee for a time. There is something rather satisfying about ideas like that.

Dickens himself might approve.

Rewarding failure by design?


by Tom Sullivan

For the investor class, it is a tragedy of the commons when they don’t get a cut from it. That’s why, for example, they are so hot to see a middle man in every middle school.
Since the GOP took over in North Carolina in 2011, we’ve been warning about efforts by industry and ALEC to privatize public schools and public infrastructure:

Public private partnerships are a hot, new investment vehicle. PPPs are a way for getting public infrastructure — that you, your parents, and their parents’ parents paid for and maybe even built with their own hands — out of public hands and under the control of private investors who are more than happy to sell your own property back to you at a tidy profit. A turnpike here, an airport there, or your city’s water system.
Psst. Hey, bud. C’mere. I got this bridge in Manhattan …

In fact, the Macquarie Group is “buying” a bridge in Manhattan. As the nature of public-private partnership deals (P3s) for new highway expansions became clear, both the left and the right have found a common adversary: kleptocrats stripping America for parts.
David Dayen wrote yesterday at Salon about Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s opposition to investment banker, Antonio Weiss, President Obama’s nominee for Treasury Department undersecretary for domestic finance. One of Weiss’ biggest clients is Brazilian private equity fund 3G. Dayen describes deals that would make Paul Singer blush. (Okay, maybe not.) They seem almost designed to reward failure:

The deals also exhibit the modern hallmark of corporate America: financial engineering. Decisions are made to satisfy shareholder clamoring for short-term profits rather than any long-term vision about building a quality business. The manager class extracts value for their own ends, and the rotted husk of the company either sinks or swims. It doesn’t matter to those who have already completed the looting.

So now, back to those P3 deals. North Carolina’s senator-elect Thom Tillis’ 50-year I-77 “Tholl Road” deal with Spain-based Cintra Infraestructures continues to draw scrutiny this week. Time Warner Cable News in Charlotte interviewed Nicholas Rubio, the U.S. president of Cintra (sorry, no video embed, watch it at the link):

The company’s project on Highway 130 in Texas came close to bankruptcy this summer before it restructured $1 billion in debt. Another Cintra toll road in Indiana did file for bankruptcy to restructure nearly $6 billion in debt.
Time Warner Cable News asked Rubio if North Carolinians should be worried because of those financial issues.
“Rather than worry, they should be comforted,” Rubio said. “At the end of the day, part of the advantage of this business is you are passing the traffic risk to private developers.”

Uh, not exactly. As I wrote in September:

Here’s how those “innovative ideas” have worked elsewhere:

Just yesterday (9/22/14), debt-ridden Spanish-Australian Cintra-Macquarie infrastructure group filed for bankruptcy on its 75-year contract to operate the Indiana Toll Road. After just eight years.
Moody’s, the rating agency, declared Cintra’s 50-year Texas toll road concession in default in July.After just two years.
After opening in 2007, Macquarie’s 35-year concession for the South Bay Expressway (San Diego) went bankrupt in 2010. After just three years.
Nevertheless, North Carolina is signing contracts with Madrid-based Cintra for a 50-year toll lane project (HOT lanes – High Occupancy Toll) on I-77 north of Charlotte in Speaker Thom Tillis’ district, with Tillis’ enthusiastic support and backed with federal and state tax dollars. Yours.

In “A Blueprint for Bankruptcy,” here’s how Randy Salzaman of Thinking Highways described these deals for Truthout in October:

Beginning with the contracting stage, the evidence suggests toll operating public private partnerships are transportation shell companies for international financiers and contractors who blueprint future bankruptcies. Because Uncle Sam generally guarantees the bonds – by far the largest chunk of “private” money – if and when the private toll road or tunnel partner goes bankrupt, taxpayers are forced to pay off the bonds while absorbing all loans the state and federal governments gave the private shell company and any accumulated depreciation. Yet the shell company’s parent firms get to keep years of actual toll income, on top of millions in design-build cost overruns.

US and state taxpayers are left paying off billions in debt to bondholders who have received amazing returns on their money, as much as 13 per cent, as virtually all – if not all – of these private P3 toll operators go bankrupt within 15 years of what is usually a five-plus decade contract.

A “staggering” number go bankrupt, Salzman continues.

Of course, no executive comes forward and says, “We’re planning to go bankrupt,” but an analysis of the data is shocking. There do not appear to be any American private toll firms still in operation under the same management 15 years after construction closed. The original toll firms seem consistently to have gone bankrupt or “zeroed their assets” and walked away, leaving taxpayers a highway now needing repair and having to pay off the bonds and absorb the loans and the depreciation.

But wait! There’s more. These projects are frequently sold both to governments and to investors on the basis of inflated traffic/revenue projections. Creditors of failed projects such as American Roads LLC’s Detroit Windsor Tunnel are suing. This account of the legal proceedings, for example, from 2013:

In the little publicized litigation in the State Supreme Court of New York Syncora alleges that the financing and spinoff by Macquarie involved fraud and misrepresentation, in particular that Macquarie had a secret and improper relationship with Australian traffic and revenue forecaster Maunsell Australia Pty Ltd (since absorbed into Aecom) to produce unrealistically high traffic and revenue forecasts.

American Roads was originally a creation of Australian financial services giant, Macquarie Group/Macquarie Capital. It paid undisclosed “success fees” for those rosy projections. The judge was not amused and ruled against Macquarie:

Schweitzer continued: “Syncora argues, and the court agrees, that the undisclosed conflict of interest under which Maunsell operated, in addition to secret success fees that Maunsell was paid… do amount to a material misrepresentation or omission of fact.”
This, the judge said, was “plainly actionable as fraud.”

Aecom and a competitor, CDMSmith, keep turning up as sources of the inflated traffic and revenue projections in failed project after failed project. Aecom performed traffic studies in California in 2003 (South Bay Expressway – BANKRUPT); in Virginia in 2006 (US Route 460, planned); Texas in 2009 (Dallas North Tarrant Express); Texas in 2010 (SH-130 – BANKRUPT/Restructured); and Michigan in 2010 (Detroit’s Windsor Tunnel – BANKRUPT); and in Indiana in 2006 (Indiana Toll Road – BANKRUPT). CDMSmith performed traffic studies in Virginia (Dulles Toll Road), in South Carolina (Greenville Southern Connector – BANKRUPT).

There’s something oddly “designed to fail” about these P3 infrastructure deals. And awfully, awfully familiar. Remember the Brazilian private equity fund, 3G, from above? Remember securitized mortgages and credit default obligations? The phrase, “this is not a boat accident,” comes to mind.
(Barry Summers of Making Progress: News for a Change contributed to this post.)

Why you … you want to punish success!
by Tom Sullivan

I wanted to follow up on Steve Fraser’s comments to Bill Moyers. Fraser is wondering when people in this new Gilded Age age will rise up to oppose the robber barons, as our forebears did 100 years ago. He spoke of how, out of the social upheavals that ended the Gilded Age, Americans created a social safety net, a “civilized capitalism that protects people against the worst vicissitudes of the free market.” But the wealth worshipers of the second Gilded Age have shredded it, and an even deeper, more pervasive corruption has overtaken Washington, and with a direct line to Wall Street:

It is the consummate all embracing expression of the triumph of the free market ideology as the synonym for freedom. In other words, it used to be you could talk about freedom and the free market as distinct notions. Now, and for some time, since the age of Reagan began free market capitalism and freedom are conflated. They are completely married to each other. And we have, as a culture, bought into that idea. It’s part of what I mean when I say the attenuating of any alternatives.

That is, TINA. (There Is No Alternative.) Yet that’s just what many jobless Millennials are searching for.

“It is axiomatic in our current political culture,” says Fraser, “that when we say freedom we mean capitalism.” I would add, that when we say capitalism, we mean, principally, one particular style for organizing a business: the modern corporation.

What Milton Friedman called capitalism in 1962 looks more like an economic cult today. Question the basic assumptions behind corporate capitalism, publicly point out its shortcomings and suggest we are overdue for an upgrade, and the Chamber of Commerce practically bursts through the door like the Spanish Inquisition to accuse you of communism and heresy. Why you … you want to punish success! It’s weirdly reflexive and a mite hysterical. What their blind fealty and knee-jerk defense of this one particular style for organizing a capitalist enterprise says about them, I’ll leave for now. It suffices to say I find it rather peculiar.

We think we invented capitalism. Yet there have been “capitalist acts between consenting adults”* since before Hammurabi. We don’t call one capitalist enterprise the world’s oldest profession for nothing. There’s a restaurant in China that has been in operation for nearly 1000 years. And pubs in England that have been in business for 900. All without being incorporated in Delaware or the Cayman Islands. (Communists?)

The fetish for the current economic model isn’t about money or ideology, but, like The Matrix, about control. For some and not for others. Working people in the first Gilded Age, says Fraser, “summoned up a kind of political will and the political imagination” to civilize capitalism,” to say to themselves, “we are not fated to live this way.”

Kudzu invasion, by FrenchKheldar via Creative Commons

Now, corporate capitalism is pretty successful at what it does. But then, so is kudzu, another invasive species. I used to live on the edge of a field of kudzu. In the summer, I had to cut it back with a machete each week to keep it from taking over my yard and eating my house. On those hot, summer afternoons, not once did a passing neighbor wag a finger in my face and accuse me of “punishing success.”

Corporate capitalism has become an invasive species that has taken over government of, by, and for the People. Sen. Elizabeth Warren very publicly called out one such creeping pest recently. She suggested it was time we cut it back. She’s right.

We upgrade our hardware and software every couple of years. When was the last time capitalism got a new operating system? And what might that look like?

* h/t Robert Nozick

Fables of freedom
by Tom Sullivan

Bill Moyers’ guest, historian Steve Fraser, deconstructs how the second Gilded Age differs from the first. Then, people banded together and rose up to challenge their newfound serfdom. But these are “acquiescent times,” says Fraser. We live in a fable of capitalism as “a democracy of the audacious who will make it on their own, while in fact most of the people are headed in the opposite direction.”

There is way too much in this conversation to unpack this morning. Fraser’s key obstacle to our exiting the second Gilded Age? Capitalism and freedom have become so conflated that we lack the language to question the current system and to explore alternatives.

BILL MOYERS: You talk about the vocal right. And there’s a powerful movement that seems to like the way the country is going. That seems to think this is the way it ought to be and that Occupy Wall Street and Steve Fraser, and others, they just represent the malcontents of a system that is really working for them.

STEVE FRASER: Yes. It is the consummate all embracing expression of the triumph of the free market ideology as the synonym for freedom. In other words, it used to be you could talk about freedom and the free market as distinct notions. Now, and for some time, since the age of Reagan began free market capitalism and freedom are conflated. They are completely married to each other. And we have, as a culture, bought into that idea. It’s part of what I mean when I say the attenuating of any alternatives.

[snip]

STEVE FRASER: … there’s a philosopher who said that language is the house of being. It’s where we live. And if you’re living in a language that’s been denuded of some of its key furniture like certain concepts like that, you’re homeless. You have no way, you have no way to challenge even when you’re faced with wholesale larceny. I mean on the part of the major banking institutions. I mean what — let’s call a spade a spade. These were thieves. And yet the we lack the kind of linguistic wherewithal, which is much more, it’s spiritual, to confront it.

Thanks a lot, Milton.

Your little darlings are their cash cows


by Tom Sullivan

Nicholas Kristof provides an opening this morning to spend more time discussing education with his celebration of Conor Bohan, founder of a college scholarship program for Haitian students: the Haitian Education and Leadership Program (HELP).

“Education works,” Bohan said simply. “Good education works for everybody, everywhere. It worked for you, for me, and it works for Haitians.”

It’s a noble effort. But it’s the attack on public education in this country that gets under my skin. Kristof explains why:

Over time, I’ve concluded that education may be the single best way to help people help themselves — whether in America or abroad. Yet, as a nation, we underinvest in education, both domestically and overseas. So, in this holiday season, I’d suggest a moment to raise a glass and celebrate those who spread the transformative gift of education.
A few days ago, we saw the news of the horrific Pakistani Taliban attack on a school in Peshawar. The Taliban attacks schools because it understands that education corrodes extremism; I wish we would absorb that lesson as well. In his first presidential campaign, President Obama spoke of starting a global education fund, but he seems to have forgotten the idea. I wish he would revive it!

Education corrodes extremism is a pretty concise explanation for why Wall Street has joined forces with the religious right in this country in a cynical effort to undermine public education
under the rubric of “choice.” For the Big Money Boyz, the “education market is ripe for disruption.” Education reform is about mining public education and transferring as much as possible of that steady, recession-proof, government-guaranteed stream of public tax dollars to the investor class by expanding charter schools. For the religious right, it’s about shielding their kids from knowledge they perceive as in conflict with their religious views. Like other fundamentalists, they want to keep modernism at bay. Because freedom. And because they resent having their tax dollars fund public education and not their religious schools.

Whether you’re James Dobson, Charles Koch, or the Taliban, education corrodes extremism, and we can’t have that.

At the Education Opportunity Network, Jeff Bryant offers a detailed, year-end roundup of vulture capitalism’s predations. It’s been a big year for charter school scandals:

Here and there, stories emerged: a charter school trying to open up inside the walls of a gated community while a closed one continued to get over $2 million in taxpayer funds. Stories about charter operators being found guilty of embezzling thousands of taxpayer dollars turned into other stories about operators stealing even more thousands of dollars, which turned into even more stories about operators stealing over a million dollars.
While some charter schools schemed to steer huge percentages of their money away from instruction toward management salaries and property leases (to firms connected to the charter owners, of course), others worked the system to make sure fewer students with special needs were in their classrooms.

Then the steady drip-drip from local news sources turned into a fire hose in May when a blockbuster report released by Integrity in Education and the Center for Popular Democracy revealed, “Fraudulent charter operators in 15 states are responsible for losing, misusing, or wasting over $100 million in taxpayer money.”
The report, “Charter School Vulnerabilities to Waste, Fraud And Abuse,” combed through news stories, criminal records, and other documents to find hundreds of cases of charter school operators embezzling funds, using tax dollars to illegally support other, non-educational businesses, taking public dollars for services they didn’t provide, inflating their enrollment numbers to boost revenues, and putting children in potential danger by foregoing safety regulations or withholding service.

That’s just a sampling.

As I keep saying about the new “education industry”:

The impulse among conservatives to privatize everything involving public expenditures – schools included – is no longer just about shrinking government, lowering their taxes and eliminating funding sources for their political competitors. Now it’s about their opportunity costs, potential profits lost to not-for-profit public-sector competitors. It’s bad enough that government “picks their pockets” to educate other people’s children. But it’s unforgivable that they’re not getting a piece of the action. Now they want to turn public education into private profits too.

Your little darlings are their cash cows.

Whistling towards Dixie


by Tom Sullivan

A week ago I wrote about a suspected lynching under investigation along the coast in North Carolina. Eerie stuff. Up here in the mountains, we’ve got this Scot-Irish thing happening that defines local attitudes (the kind of thing Sara Robinson has written about for years). But things are hardly static. Inmigration is changing the South. In the wake of Michael Tomasky’s recent “dump Dixie” column, Chris Kromm at the Institute for Southern Studies counters with why that’s a bad idea.

Southern clout is expected to grow with population, he writes. “Southern states are projected to gain another five Congressional seats and Electoral College votes in 2020. Ignoring the South just isn’t an option if Democrats want to be relevant in national politics.”

And the South is not Democrats’ biggest problem. Democrats’ Senate candidates may have lost by an average of 18 points in the South, but they lost by an average of 26 points in the Great Plains. “But for some reason,” Kromm writes, “we’re never treated to post-Election Day screeds from Northern pundits about the Great Plains being a cesspool of ‘prejudice’ and ‘resentment.'”

Thirdly, “Nearly half of all African Americans in the country live in 13 Southern states.” And that population is growing, a “two-decade trend of return migration of blacks to the South.” Those people are a large chunk Democrats’ base voters. Abandoning them is to cut off one’s nose to spite the face. And besides those, Kromm writes, “Southern states also have among the fastest-growing Latino and Asian communities. The South ranks at the top for both migration from other states and immigration from abroad. The number of counties in the South that are majority people of color is projected to double within a generation.”

But demography is not enough. The left may gloat over the point spread by which women favor Democrats over Republicans, but when Democrats are losing white, working-class voters by 30 points in off-years when young voters generally stay home, the result is 2014.

Undoing that (and the redistricting post 2010) will not be quick or easy. The NC Supreme Court just yesterday upheld the GOP’s 2011 redistricting maps. Because of a computer glitch on Election Night 2008, our local Board of Elections had trouble uploading vote totals to Raleigh. Barack Obama had already won, but John McCain still led in North Carolina by 3,000 votes. The only county left to report with any votes in it was ours. A colleague fresh from the Board downtown slid up to me at the watch party and slipped a printout into my hands: 17,000 votes net for Obama. We’d won every race in the county. In 2014, when Democrats everywhere else across the South lost ground, we gained it here.

Why what we saw was totally not torture


by Tom Sullivan

All the news about the CIA torture program reminded me of those batches of FBI emails the ACLU obtained through FOIA requests. The ones Sen. Dick Durbin held up and described to colleagues like this:

“If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime — Pol Pot or others — that that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners.”

After about ten days of epic, right-wing hissy fit, a tearful Durbin apologized to the U.S. Senate. After the release of the SCCI report, doesn’t he feel like an idiot?

(I have this image in my head of Bill Frist accepting Durbin’s apology, walking solemnly back to his office, closing the door, and doubling over laughing. The Art of the Hissy Fit is simply alpha dog behavior — showing who’s boss by barking loudly in the other dog’s face until he rolls over on his back and pees in the air. This is called winning. Torture serves a similar function, doesn’t it?)
A May 22, 2004 FBI email described techniques used at Guantanamo Bay that agents on site found disturbing. Although the techniques listed seem not as harsh as those used by the CIA or at Abu Ghraib, the FBI still considered them torture, and said so. Basically, Special Agents were pointedly NOT reporting to superiors that what they’d seen were crimes.

The EC [Electronic Communication] states that “if an FBI employee knows or suspects non-FBI personnel has abused or is abusing or is mistreating a detainee, the FBI employee must report the incident.”

See, they write, what we saw would be a crime we’d have to report except we’re really not reporting that because the interrogators have an Executive Order from President Bush that makes the illegal techniques legal, therefore by definition not “abuse” and our bureau people are totally NOT involved in any of it. At all.

The agents made sure to repeat “Executive Order” ten times in two pages so no one could miss it. The White House later claimed no such order existed and the FBI and the Pentagon said the directive originated with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

An earlier email from December 5, 2003 suggested that DOD interrogators at GITMO were impersonating FBI agents to their prisoners.

The e-mail concludes “If this detainee is ever released or his story made public in any way, DOD interrogators will not be held accountable because these torture techniques were done [sic] the ‘FBI’ interrogators. The FBI will [sic] left holding the bag before the public.”
The document also says that no “intelligence of a threat neutralization nature” was garnered by the “FBI” interrogation, and that the FBI’s Criminal Investigation Task Force (CITF) believes that the Defense Department’s actions have destroyed any chance of prosecuting the detainee. The e-mail’s author writes that he or she is documenting the incident “in order to protect the FBI.”

But to protect the FBI from what? Digby linked to a Pew poll the other day showing lots of public support for the use of torture. A Washington Post-ABC News poll produced similarly grim results.
No wonder former vice president Dick Cheney feels he can brag about torturing people on TV with impunity. Because in America our convictions are a mile wide and an inch deep. We are better at boasting about them than sticking to them.

It’s annual holiday fundraiser time. Your support is very much appreciated.