Open Left - Bill Moyers

Shut Down the O'Reilly Harassment Machine

ZP Heller — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 19:15:00 GMT

Ready to shut down Bill O'Reilly's Harassment Machine? Think Progress has responded to O'Reilly's ambush of blogger Amanda Terkel by launching a campaign demanding accountability from O'Reilly's corporate advertisers. This certainly wasn't O'Reilly's first journalistic ambush; in fact, Think Progress counts 40 instances in which O'Reilly has used his henchmen producers to go after everyone from Barack Obama to Bill Moyers to our own Robert Greenwald.

Going after O'Reilly through his corporate sponsors seems like a fitting punitive measure, considering O'Reilly's manic obsession with his imaginary enemy NBC and their parent company GE. O'Reilly even managed to use the Terkel ambush to continue his assault on his network nemesis, which was particularly strange since Terkel has nothing to do with NBC whatsoever. (In fact, as Terkel told Keith Olbermann, she derived her initial report from a News Hounds post on O'Reilly's despicable comments regarding the rape of Jennifer Moore.) It was even odder when O'Reilly tried desperately to make the connection between Terkel, NBC, GE, and Iran in less than one minute!

The bottom line is O'Reilly's thuggish brand of gotcha journalism has got to end, and you can hold O'Reilly to a higher standard by dropping his corporate sponsors a quick note telling them to shut down the O'Reilly Harassment Machine.

Obama's Vietnam?

Paul Rosenberg — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 01:00:00 GMT

We've been tightly-and rightly-focused on the stimulus and the bailout of late. But if Obama's economic moves, reflecting his economic team ("no one could have foreseen...") have been disappointing tilted towards the conventional stupidity that got us into this mess in the first place, that's not the only realm in which this pattern holds true, as was signaled most blatantly by his retention of Bush's Secretary of Defense, Iran/Contra second-string player Robert Gates.

It took less than a week for Obama to start bombing civilians, just like his predecessor. Thankfully, for small favors, Bill Moyers, as LBJ's one-time press secretary, has seen this movie before, up close and personal, and he put on one helluva segment last night directly taking on this ominous step into darkness. His guests included Marilyn Young, whose book, Vietnam Wars 1945-1990 is, for my money, the best single overview of the war ever written, and Pierre Sprey, one of Robert McNamara's "whiz kids" who went on to help found the military reform movement in the last 1970s, and between the two of them they left little doubt of just how disastrous a course of action Obama appears to have set out on.
First, the intro:

BILL MOYERS: LBJ said we want no wider war, but wider war is what we got, eleven years of it.
Now military analysts and historians, including my two guests are wondering aloud - could Afghanistan become "Obama's war," a quagmire that threatens to define his presidency, as Vietnam defined LBJ's?
Marilyn Young is a professor of history at New York University. She's published numerous books and essays on foreign policy, including The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990, The New American Empire and Iraq And The Lessons Of Vietnam. She is the co-editor of a collection of essays to be released next month titled Bombing Civilians: A Twentieth-Century History.
Pierre Sprey is a former Pentagon official, one of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara's famous "whiz kids" who helped design and develop two of the military's most successful airplanes, the F-16 Falcon Fighter and the A-10 Warthog Tankbuster. But in the late 1970s, with a handful of Pentagon and congressional insiders, Sprey helped found the military reform movement. They risked their careers taking issue with a defense bureaucracy spending more and more money for fewer and fewer, often ineffective weapons.
You will find an essay with his shared by-line in this new book, America's Defense Meltdown, published by the Center for Defense Information.

So why isn't Obama listening to people like them? People who've actually learned from history? People who can actually remember history?

Because they might be disappointed with him?

BILL MOYERS: Marilyn, what did you think last weekend when four days into the Obama administration we read those reports of the strikes in Pakistan?
MARILYN YOUNG: My heart sank. It absolutely sank. It had been very high. I had been, like I think the rest of the country, feeling immensely encouraged and inspired by this new administration and by the energy and vigor with which he began. And then comes this piece of old stuff on approach to a complicated question that in comes in the form of a bomb and a bomb in the most dangerous of all places. And, yeah, my heart sank, literally.

Because they can't be bull-shitted?

BILL MOYERS: Our military, Pierre, says it's sure that it's striking militants in Pakistan and Afghanistan. And that they're not targeting civilians. Can they be sure? From your experience, can they be sure?
PIERRE SPREY: I'm sure that their purpose is to strike militants. I have no doubt of that whatsoever. But with the weapons they use and with the extremely flawed intelligence they have.
MARILYN YOUNG: Yes.
PIERRE SPREY: I'd be astonished if one in five people they kill or wound is in fact, a militant.
BILL MOYERS: What do you mean "flawed intelligence"?
PIERRE SPREY: You can't tell with a camera or an infrared sensor or something whether somebody's a Taliban. In the end, you're relying on either, you know, some form of intercepted communications, which doesn't point at a person. It just, you know, points at a radio or a cell phone or something like that. Or, most likely, you're relying on some Afghani of unknown veracity and unknown motivation and who may, may very well be trying to settle a blood feud rather than give you good information.

Because they would tell him that "acting tough and decisive" the way a Democrat "has to do" is just incredibly stupid?

PIERRE SPREY: And what happens on the ground is for every one of those impacts you get five or ten times as many recruits for the Taliban as you've eliminated. The people that we're trying to convince to become adherents to our cause have turned rigidly hostile to our cause in part because of bombing and in part because of, you know, other killing of civilians from ground forces....
BILL MOYERS: Are you suggesting that these strikes could be contributed to the destabilization of Pakistan, one of our allies?
MARILYN YOUNG: It's clear that they're doing that. I mean, there never was before an organization called Taliban in Pakistan. This didn't exist as an organization. It does now. It's unclear to me as well the relationship between our punitive enemy, al Qaeda, and the Taliban. That's unclear. And it's, it's very unclear what American policy will be with respect to either group. Mainly what's unclear is what our goal is in Afghanistan. It's really unclear.

Because they would tell him, "You've already squandered your good name? And-utterly without realizing it-you've potentially set off on a policy that could be as dangerous as anything that Dick Cheney ever dreamed up"?

BILL MOYERS: There was a photo the other day of a protest in Pakistan, a few days after a drone attacked. The banner reads, quote, "Bombing on tribes. Obama's first gift to Pakistan." Now, that's part of the blowback, isn't it?
PIERRE SPREY: That's incredibly dangerous.
MARILYN YOUNG: Yeah.
PIERRE SPREY: I mean, I don't think people in America have any sense of how dangerous that is. By bombing into those areas, those traditional Pashtun areas, that the Pakistani government long ago made a pact, you know, at the founding of the state of Pakistan to never invade those areas and to leave the Pashtun to govern themselves. And we are forcing the Pakistanis to break that pact, both on the ground with their army. And we're breaking it by bombing the Pashtun in Pakistan. That is taking a weak and also rotten Pakistani government and crumbling it. That's putting them on the horns of a dilemma that they don't need. Why is that so dangerous to us? Because this is a nuclear armed country. And when they fall apart and fall into the hands of people like, people that are running Afghanistan, you could have a nuclear war with India, you know? I mean, we're talking about not just blowback but we're talking about catastrophe could result.

Because they might say, "Everything Bush did was utterly, and totally wrongheaded, and millions of people flocked to you, because they thought that you realized that, just like they did. Only now it turns out that behind the façade of technical competent, you're basically just as clueless as Bush"?

PIERRE SPREY: This is not a war on terror. You know? And anybody who starts from the premise that it's a war on terror is heading straight into disasters error.
MARILYN YOUNG: Yeah.
PIERRE SPREY: And he said-
BILL MOYERS: I don't understand that because George W. Bush defined this as a war on terror. And I think Obama must be using the same invocation, you know?
PIERRE SPREY: Exactly.
BILL MOYERS: This is all part of the war on terror. He said it in his inaugural address.
PIERRE SPREY: Yes, he said that. I was appalled. You talk about our hearts sinking.
PIERRE SPREY: 9/11 was not an act of war.
BILL MOYERS: What was it?
PIERRE SPREY: It was a criminal act. It was a simple.
MARILYN YOUNG: Right.
PIERRE SPREY: Criminal act by a bunch of lunatic fanatic violent people who needed to be tracked down and apprehended and tried exactly as you would with any other lunatic violent person, like we do with our own domestic terrorists, like the guy who bombed the Oklahoma federal building.
BILL MOYERS: Federal building. Right.
PIERRE SPREY: You know? Exactly the same thing we did to him is what we should have launched on a huge basis, of course, on a huge international police basis and not called it.
MARILYN YOUNG: And there would have been totally international support.
PIERRE SPREY: It's not a war.
MARILYN YOUNG: Right.
PIERRE SPREY: We, by calling it a war, we have glorified al Qaeda. We have glorified the cause of violent radical Islam. All that tiny minority have become heroes. And we made them heroes. We made their propaganda. We made their case for them.

And, because they might tell Obama, "When you're finished not learning the lessons of Bush's folly, you're busy not learning the lessons of the Soviet's folly"?

BILL MOYERS: Let me read you an excerpt from the official White House statement on foreign policy under President Obama. Quote, "Obama and Biden will refocus American resources on the greatest threat to our security, the resurgence of al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan. They will increase our troop levels in Afghanistan, press our allies in NATO to do the same, and dedicate more resources to revitalize Afghanistan's economic development." There you have a very clear statement of their intentions that we're going to concentrate on the war. And in fact by the end of this year there'll be 60,000, not 30,000 American troops in Afghanistan. And there's no indication the strikes, the air strikes that are killing civilians are going to stop.
PIERRE SPREY: And the 60,000-
MARILYN YOUNG: No.
PIERRE SPREY: -will be useless.
MARILYN YOUNG: Yeah.
PIERRE SPREY: You know, the Russians at the peak of their invasion - who dealt with the Afghanis a good deal more brutally than we did - had over 150,000 and a trained a 250,000 man Afghan army. And they lost. 60,000 is a recipe for failure, defeat, and ultimately a disgraceful withdrawal by the United States. One way or another, no matter how nice a face we put on it, we'll be kicked out of there just like we were kicked out of Vietnam.

And because these two experts would remind Obama that there is absolutely no history of the strategy you're now embracing ever working?

PIERRE SPREY: There's a moral dimension to every kind of bombing that destroys civilians, particularly bombing that destroys more civilians than military people. You can't avoid it. There's nothing notable about the drones that changes that. And the moral dimension is very simple. And it dates back to the original theologian of bombing, Julio Doue, a rather fanatical Italian from World War I who first hypothesized, wrongly, that you could destroy an enemy's morale, exactly what you said, and win victories without any ground armies if you simply bombed them enough. And secondly, that the bombers would always get through, that they would always defeat fighter opposition and antiaircraft opposition. Both propositions have been provided in history over and over and over again to be not only wrong but thumpingly wrong.
BILL MOYERS: Has civilian bombing ever been effective, Marilyn?
MARILYN YOUNG: I can't think. Can you?
PIERRE SPREY: The answer is no.
MARILYN YOUNG: No.
PIERRE SPREY: Very simply, no.

Is that why Obama doesn't listen to them?

I can certainly understand that. Because if Obama listened to them, he'd have to do something else.

And that would make David Broder & Company very, very mad. They might even want to find some pretext to impeach him.

And that could get very, very messy. Best to just keep bombing the hell out of whoever it is who's on the receiving end this week, this month, this year.

The Media Circus on Gaza: Bill Moyers and 60 Minutes

shergald — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 15:07:27 GMT

PLEASE NOTE: This video essay contains images of the Israeli and Palestinian casualties - including children - in Gaza as well as the Pulitzer prize-winning photo of the nude Vietnamese girl running from napalm bombing. Some viewers may find the images disturbing, but they are in context and germane to the subject matter.
Media Circus: Bill Moyers, 60 Minutes' Bob Simon and the backlash was posted by Cecilie Surasky of Muzzlewatch, the anti-propaganda site sponsored by Jewish Voice for Peace, which discusses the recent backlash to commentary by Bill Moyers of PBS, who finally spoke out about the plight of the Palestinians, in this case, in response to the Gaza turkey shoot conducted by Israel that resulted in enormous casualties among innocent adults and children. We have been hearing backlash against Israel for its brutality, especially after breaking the ceasefire conditions, but apologists on the other side quickly became active after Moyers' criticism. Frankly, we have yet to hear the flack against Bob Simon for his 60 Minutes piece, which broke barriers, but we will have to wait and see.

My sister recently stumbled on a blog post by a far right pseudo-journalist that accused me, her peace-love-and-justice baby sister and the keeper of our family's terrible Holocaust history archives, of being a Nazi sympathizer. Her reaction was a mix of horror at the viciousness of the post, and amusement at its unintentional camp hilarity. My response to her was, "Welcome to my world. This is what it's like to work on Israel-Palestine issue. Every day." (I am on staff with Jewish Voice for Peace, which works to end Israel's 41-year occupation.)
Most journalists don't cover Israel-Palestine every day, and so they are unaccustomed to the inevitable tsunami of hyperbolic nastiness sure to come their way should they dare to touch the topic.
Bill Moyers, however, one of America's most respected journalists and moral voices, could not have been surprised by the response last week to his powerful video commentary in which he condemned Hamas and asserted Israel's right to defend itself, but also said,

Brute force can turn self defense into state terrorism. It's what the US did in Vietnam with B-52s and napalm, and again in Iraq with shock and awe. By killing indiscriminately, the elderly, kids, entire families... Israel did exactly what terrorists do and exactly what Hamas wanted. It spilled the blood that turns the wheel of retribution.

He presciently went on to describe exactly the muzzled world in which we live here in the U.S.

Our political elites show neither independence nor courage by challenging the consensus that Israel can do no wrong. Although one recent poll found Democratic voters overwhelmingly oppose the Israeli offensive by a 24 point margin, Democratic party leaders in Congress nonetheless march in lockstep to the hardliners in Israel and the White House. Rarely does our mainstream media depart from the montonous monologue of the party line. Many American Jews know, as Aaron David Miller writes in the current edition of Newsweek, that the destruction in Gaza won't do much to address Israel's longer term needs. But those who raise questions are accused by a prominent reform rabbi of being "morally deficient". One Jewish American activist told me this week, that never in 30 years has he seen such blind and binding conformity in his community. You'd never know, he says, that it is the Gazans who are doing most of the suffering.

Moyers' analysis, it turned out, was prescient because the backlash of calls and letters calling him a rabid anti-Semite, and one would presume Nazi-sympathizer, was so strong-even good old Abe Foxman of the ADL got into the fight- forced him to take the rather unusual step of addressing the onslaught of criticism at the top of his next show. (Sorry Bill, welcome to my world.)
A satirical columnist for the SF Chronicle learned a similar lesson this week an off-hand reference about "recalcitrant Israelis," part of a humorous litany.

I knew I'd hear from American supporters of Israel, because that's what happens. Any journalist can tell you that - pro-Israeli journalists, Jewish journalists, any writer who says anything that might be taken by somebody as a criticism of Israel or its current policies is gonna get reamed out. Dead babies are frequently mentioned, and crazed Palestinian fanatics - these folks go right for the top of the rhetorical ladder.

Finally, we can only imagine what awaits 60 Minutes' Bob Simon for this generally fantastic and in the U.S, downright courageous piece of journalism, Time Running Out for a Two-State Solution? (below) (I say generally, because at times it erroneously gives the impression that "reasonable" voices like Tzipi "there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza" Livni are drowned out by the extremist settlers. In fact, Likud, Labor and Kadima have all been deeply complicit in the settlement project and the violation of human rights of Palestinians.)
Video of Bob Simon's on 60 Minutes:

Reprinted by permission (see the original for links).

Bill Moyers Shines Light On Hate Radio--But Deep Shadows Remain

Paul Rosenberg — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 20:50:05 GMT

Last night, the first segment on Bill Moyers Journal dealt with rightwing hate radio, using the late July shootings at the Knoxville Unitarian Church as the entry point. It was an unusually raw and unvarnished look at what hate radio does--examining specific examples: Michael Savage, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh--and yet, there were some significant critical avenues that were left unexplored. Still, the media has been so neglectful of this for so long, it was heartening to see this virulent cultivation of mass hatred finally get a spotlight thrown on it. Rick Karr was the correspondent reporting the story. He began reporting like this:

RICK KARR: On a steamy Sunday morning in July a man armed with a twelve-gauge shotgun burst into this church in Knoxville, Tennessee and opened fire. Seconds later, one person lay dead, another mortally wounded, and six injured.
REVEREND CHRIS BUICE: The man who walked into this sanctuary on July 27th was armed with a gun but he was also armed with hatred, he was armed with bitterness, he was armed with resentments, he was armed with indiscriminate anger. He was armed in body and spirit.
RICK KARR: Members of the congregation wrestled a fifty-eight-year-old, unemployed truck driver named Jim David Adkisson to the floor and held him until police came. At first it seemed like just another inexplicable outburst of violence until a police news conference the next day.
POLICE CHIEF STERLING OWEN: It appears that what brought him to this horrible event was his lack of being able to obtain a job, his frustration over that, and his stated hatred for the liberal movement.

The Unitarian Universalist Pastor Responds

The report continues:

RICK KARR: Why did Adkisson hate "the liberal movement"? Police said that he told them "that all liberals should be killed ... because they were ... ruining the country, and that he felt that the Democrats had tied his country's hands in the war on terror and ... ruined every institution in America...." Police said that Adkisson had targeted the Unitarian Universalist Church "because of its liberal teachings." The church advocates social justice and tolerance, and it openly welcomes gay, lesbian, and transgendered members. According to police, Adkisson said that, "Because he could not get to the leaders of the liberal movement that he would target those that had voted them in to office."In the weeks following the tragedy, the congregation and its pastor, Reverend Chris Buice struggled with what they were learning about Adkisson.
REVEREND CHRIS BUICE: Some have suggested that his spiritual attitudes, his hatred of liberals and gays, was reinforced by the right wing media figures. And it is beyond dispute that there are a plethora of books which have labeled liberals as evil, unpatriotic, godless and treasonous.
RICK KARR: During that recent sermon Buice told his congregation, some of who had risked their own lives to stop the shooting, that he has been reading some of those books.
REVEREND CHRIS BUICE: One of the books has the title "Deliver Us from Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism and Liberalism". If that author was here in this room right now I would introduce him to some good liberals who acted decisively on that Sunday, acted quickly and courageously to stop the terror that came into our church building. I would introduce him to some good liberals who know how to fight terror with more than just their mouths.

At that point, members of the congregation rose up and gave a standing ovation. This is what we need to see much more of in America today--liberals standing up and applauding their own for standing up to the hatred and violence mobilized against them.

Of course, it goes without saying that a liberal pastor would want to understand the source of the evil that entered his church and took the lives of his congregents. After all, that is what makes us liberals and leftists--we want to know the truth, however dark that truth may be. But for far too long we have not fought back against purveyors of evil and untruth nearly as hard and consistently we need to.

Michael Savage Talks Like Hitler

The report continues by taking a look at Michael Savage, author of one of the books police found in the shooter's apartment:

RICK KARR: Buice says even with the outpouring of sympathy from around Knoxville and across the country, Adkisson's lethal anger has left him angry and full of questions.
REVEREND CHRIS BUICE:People were killed in my sanctuary of my church which should be the holy place, a safe place. People were injured. A man came in here totally dehumanized us. Members of our church were not human to him. Where did he get that? Where did he get that sense that we were not human?
RICK KARR: Buice admits that no one knows for sure and says that Adkisson alone, is responsible for the shootings. But he keeps thinking about some books that police found in Adkisson's apartment, books by popular right-wing talk-radio personalities who berate and denigrate liberals. One of the books police found in Adkisson's apartment was Michael Savage's "Liberalism is a Mental Disorder". In it, Savage calls liberals "the enemy within our country;" "an enemy more dangerous than Hitler"; "traitors" who are "dangerous to your survival" and who "should be placed in a straightjacket". Like Adkisson, Savage accuses liberals of "[tying] the hands of our military".
Savage isn't just a bestselling author: he also hosts a syndicated radio show.
ANNOUNCER:"And now American's most exciting radio talk show...THE SAVAGE NATION...THE MICHAEL SAVAGE SHOW."
RICK KARR: Savage reaches more than eight and a quarter million listeners a week. And when it comes to demonizing liberals, he's the same on the air as he is in print.
MICHAEL SAVAGE:"Liberalism is, in essence, the HIV virus, and it weakens the defense cells of a nation. What are the defense cells of a nation? Well, the church. They've attacked particularly the Catholic Church for 30 straight years. The police, attacked for the last 50 straight years by the ACLU viruses. And the military, attacked for the last 50 years by the Barbara Boxer viruses on our planet."

Here is where we can see two important points that deserve intense scrutiny which Karr and Moyers did not follow up. The first is that Savage uses the same extreme dehumanizing language that Hitler used, portraying his enemies as germs. The only difference is that Savage updates it a bit, substituting "virus" instead. When dehumanization becomes this extreme, it passes on to a qualitatively different realm--that of eliminationism. After all, what else does one do with a disease? One wipes it out. This is the inexorable logic of such talk, and there are countless examples of it from rightwing media figures over the past two decades.

The second important point is that Savage, who uses Hitlerian language, projects his own Hitlerian proclivities onto liberals, calling them "an enemy more dangerous than Hitler." Projection is a virtually all-pervasive feature of rightwing political discourse. Sometimes it is in the forefront, sometimes in the background, but it is virtually always there somehow. People are rightwingers because they cannot find effective means to cope with the problems they face, and so they create or latch onto elaborate narratives that shift the darkness within onto others. Of course it doesn't work, and so the darkness only grows, and with it grows the hatred of the others who are blamed.

The report went on to briefly show Savage's attacks on gays, immigrants and children with autism as well. Then it turned to other hate radio examples.

Other Examples: Glenn Beck, Michael Reagan, Neal Boortz

RICK KARR: Michael Savage isn't the only right-wing talk-radio host who launches blistering, even violent, verbal attacks on people and groups he doesn't like. Glenn Beck, for instance, fantasized about murdering a liberal filmmaker.
GLENN BECK:"I'm thinking about killing Michael Moore and I'm wondering if I could kill him myself, or if I would need to hire somebody to do it. No, I think I could. I think he could be looking me in the eye, you know, and I could just be choking the life out of him. Is this wrong?"
RICK KARR: Michael Reagan, son of the former president, suggested that people who claim that "nine-eleven was an inside job," a U.S. government conspiracy, deserve to die.
MICHAEL REAGAN: "Take them out and shoot them. They are traitors to this country, and shoot them. But anybody who would do that doesn't deserve to live. You shoot them. You call them traitors, that's what they are, and you shoot them dead. I'll pay for the bullet."
RICK KARR: Neal Boortz went after victims of Hurricane Katrina.
NEAL BOORTZ:"That wasn't the cries of the downtrodden. That's the cries of the useless, the worthless. New Orleans was a welfare city, a city of parasites, a city of people who could not, and had no desire to fend for themselves. You have a hurricane descending on them and they sit on their fat asses and wait for somebody else to come rescue them."
RICK KARR: Muslims are some of Boortz's favorite targets.
NEAL BOORTZ:"It's Ramadan and Muslims in your workplace might be offended if they see you eating at your desk. Why? I guess it's because Muslims don't eat during the day during Ramadan. They fast during the day and eat at night. Sorta like cockroaches."

Boortz is using Hitlerean language as well. Bugs and germs. Bugs and germs. Wipe them all out. The Nazis, too, spoke of cockroaches.

With Beck and Reagan, the eliminationist fantasy is right out there, front and center. The desire to kill liberals could not be more clear. But this is not simply an expression of desire, it is clearly an incitement. These are wealthy, successful public figures telling anyone who will listen, "Look, this is an acceptable thing to think about, acceptable to talk about to an audience of millions. There's nothing wrong with it. Nothing wrong with it at all."

Talk Radio And Genocide

While Hitler remains the classic example, you don't have to look back as far as Hitler to see how dangerous such language can be, as the program went on to note:

RICK KARR: Reverend Chris Buice says he's heard that kind of language before.
REVEREND CHRIS BUICE: If you look at the history of like situations like in Rwanda in 1994, the talk radio was a big part of leading to the conditions that created a genocide. The Hutu radio disc jockeys would call the Tutsi cockroaches. There's the sense that these aren't human beings. You know, they're not human beings with children or grandchildren. These are cockroaches. And when you hear in talk radio that liberals are evil, that they are traitors, that they are godless, that they are on the side of the terrorist. That's hate language. You don't negotiate with evil people. You don't live in community with people you consider to be traitors.
RICK KARR: Millions of Americans tune in to right-wing talk radio every day. Rory O'Connor is a media critic and a liberal himself who's written a book on shock-talkers. He says not all of these broadcasters use violent language. But they do all share a predilection for outrage and, he says, they're all practically addicted to constantly cranking up that outrage.
RORY O'CONNOR: Here's the real problem. When you shock somebody, if you come back the next time and you apply the same stimulus, it's not shocking any longer. It's already happened. So you have to ratchet it up a little bit. So how do you cut through? How do you really shock? I think that in order to continue to outrage, you have to constantly be jacking up the pressure. And ultimately, there's gonna be some deranged person out there in that audience who's gonna say, "You know what? That's a good idea. Let me act on that."

Indeed, one could argue that the violence carried out by Jim David Adkisson was a foreseeable consequence of the overt eliminationist talk of the most extreme hate radio jocks. As such, they could be held liable for manslaughter, for acting with a depraved indifference to human life. That's not the course of action I would advise. But I do think it's important to note that there is a credible violation of criminal law involved here, which only sereves to strengthen that argument that sensible government regulation--of the sort we used to have--is fully warranted.

Two Further Wrinkles

RICK KARR: Right-wing talk radio hosts usually reserve their ad hominem attacks for liberal figures. Jim Quinn has his own name for the National Organization for Women.
JIM QUINN: "The National Organization for Whores, they're whores for liberal politics in general, and they were whores for Bill Clinton in particular."
RICK KARR: Glenn Beck tried to connect former Vice President Al Gore's efforts against global warming with Nazism.
GLENN BECK: "What was the first thing they did to get people to exterminate the Jews? Now, I'm not saying that anybody's going to, you know, Al Gore's not going to be rounding up Jews and exterminating them. It is the same tactic, however[...]you got to have an enemy to fight. And when you have an enemy to fight, then you can unite the entire world behind you, and you seize power. That was Hitler's plan. His enemy: the Jew. Al Gore's enemy, the U.N.'s enemy: global warming."

Two comments. First, about Quinn: Demeaning women is second nature to rightwingers. They've been doing it since the dawn of time. Whoever is not completely obedient to male authority is automatically "a whore" or a lesbian, or both. It may be hard to believe that an entire political movement is based on deep feelings of personal inadequacy, but when it comes right down to it, that's simply the way it is.

Second, about Beck: This is a truly remarkable passage. Not only does Beck project his own Hitlerean mindset onto Gore, he equates demonization and the recognition of large-scale problems.

Think about it. Hitler taking the Jews as a problem required expulsion at the least, and ultimately extermination. Al Gore, the UN and the world's climate scientists taking global warming as a problem requires shifting to new mix of carbon-neutral energy sources. No bloodshed. No one rounded up in the middle of night. Just windmills, photovoltaic cells, double insulation, more mass transit, and the like. How are these two in any way similar?

Simple: They aren't. This is just the reductio ad absurdum of the rightwing attempt to eliminate opposing viewpoints as well as opposing people. You can't even talk about a major problem, because then you're acting just like Hitler!

An Inconclusive Conclusion

The end of this powerful report was provided by Bill Moyers himself, in a curiously subdued conclusion:

BILL MOYERS:We may never know what finally triggered the killer's rage, unless he chooses at his trial or later to tell us. But not for a moment do I think any of the talk show hosts mentioned by the police would have wished it to happen.

Excuse me! After all your report has just exposed, you think these guys are what? Just joking around? Hell-o-oh! Roll the tape again, Bill. The part about Rwanda:

REVEREND CHRIS BUICE: If you look at the history of like situations like in Rwanda in 1994, the talk radio was a big part of leading to the conditions that created a genocide. The Hutu radio disc jockeys would call the Tutsi cockroaches. There's the sense that these aren't human beings. You know, they're not human beings with children or grandchildren. These are cockroaches. And when you hear in talk radio that liberals are evil, that they are traitors, that they are godless, that they are on the side of the terrorist. That's hate language. You don't negotiate with evil people. You don't live in community with people you consider to be traitors.

That's what Moyers himself has just aired, and here in his conclusion he's telling us, essentially, that he doesn't believe his own warning! This is simply incredible.

His conclusion continues:

We asked several radio hosts to come on this broadcast and talk about the story; they either declined or didn't return our calls.

Gosh, the bullies are cowards! Who knew?

The issue of course is not their right to say anything they want on the air. The First Amendment guarantees their free speech as it does mine. Government shouldn't be the arbiter of what the Bill of Rights leaves to one's own sense of fair play.

Um, excuse me Bill, but why the hell not? Not in terms of what purely private people do, of course. But we're talking about people using the public airwaves to spew eliminationist rhetoric, which history shows can lead to actual genocide. The news hook for your story was a vivid, bloody example of what this looks like on a microcosmic scale.

We used to have a clear public policy against allowing this sort of thing. The airwaves were to be used in the public interest--this was built into the foundation of our telecommunications law. In fact, it's still there, in principle. On top of that, for decades we had the Fairness Doctrine, which required that views on matters of public controversy be balanced--a common-sense requirement if the public airwaves are to further the ideals of self-governance in a democratic republic.

What's more, we used to have ownership limits and at least the formal apparatus for reviewing whether stations really did serve the public interest. All that is gone now, and so it is very easy for broadcasters and/or syndicators to do darned near whatever they like. This is why even "market forces" have ceased to be an effective check. Even in the liberal Bay Area, rightwing talk radio radio took over the airwaves, despite a potential audience that was diametrically opposed.

On a national level, Jim Hightower was on a strong upward trajectory, with over a million regular listeners, when Disney bought ABC, and quickly kicked him off the air. These are not market-driven business decisions, any more than MSNBC's firing of Phil Donohue when he was their top-rated program before the Iraq War.

These are the result of a long-term rightwing Gramscian "culture war"--a struggle to control the cultural institutions that define our shared reality for us. That culture war intersects with corporate strategies involving much larger sums of money, currying favor with rightwing politicians in order to secure yet more anti-competitive advantages worth billions of dollars over the long term.

There is nothing "free market" or "free speech" about any of this. And it's time for good liberals like Bill Moyers to wake up and smell the coffee. Ths funny thing is that Moyers knows all this. He even talks like this himself sometimes. But he all too often wimps out like this at the end.

And speaking of the end, this is how he concluded this segment:

Watching that report, however, I was reminded of a story from folk lore about the tribal elder telling his grandson about the battle the old man was waging within himself. He said, "My son it is between two wolves. One is an evil wolf: anger, envy, sorrow, greed, self-pity, guilt, resentment, lies, false pride, superiority and ego. The other is the good wolf: joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, generosity, truth, compassion and faith." The boy took this in for a few minutes and then asked, "Which wolf won?" His grandfather answered, "The one I feed." So, too, America's public life. The wolf that wins is the wolf we feed. Media provides the fodder.

Although invidual choice still matters, it matters more when forged into collective aciton. And ultimately, the way we decide which wolf is fed is through public policy. Do we empower monopolies of hate? Or do we empower a true democratic dialogue?

Slavery By Another Name

Paul Rosenberg — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 22:30:00 GMT

Last night, on Bill Moyers Journal, one of the topics was an amazing new book, Slavery By Another Name by Douglas Blackmon, the Atlanta bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal. It's about the way in which virtual slavery was reimposed on the Southern black population, and lasted well into the lifetime of people still alive today.

This involved much, much more than legal segregation under Plessy, as Moyers describes, and Blackmon explains below. This is incredibly important not only in its own right, but because of the light it throws onto the strikingly similar way that drug laws and other punitive measures have been used in the last several decades to largely crush the promise of the Civil Rights movement for millions of poverty-struck black Americans, people who are, themselves, the descendents of generations who had their freedom stolen from them a second time after supposedly being freed by the Civil war.

Moyers begins:

BILL MOYERS: At one time there were thousands of slaves in our county. And after Richmond fell to Union troops, my home town became, briefly, the military headquarters of the Confederacy. But in twelve years of public schools I cannot remember one of the teachers I deeply cherished describe slavery for what it was. Nor did they, or anyone I knew, talk about how our town's dark and tortured past in restoring white supremacy after the Civil War, prevented the emancipated slaves from realizing the freedom they had been promised. Across the South, from Texas and Louisiana to the Carolinas, thousands of freed black Americans simply were arrested, often on trumped up charges, and coerced into forced labor. And that persisted right up into the 1940s, when I was still a boy.
....
This is truly the most remarkable piece of reporting I have read in a long time. I honestly cannot recommend it highly enough. What you report is that no sooner did the slave owners, businessmen of the South, lose the Civil War, then they turned around, and in complicity with state and local governments and industry, reinvented slavery by another name. And what was the result?

Blackmon responds on the flip.

DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Well, the result was that by the time you got to the end of the 19th century, 25 or 30 years after the Civil War, the generation of slaves who'd been freed by the Emancipation Proclamation, and then the constitutional amendments that ended slavery legally this generation of people, who experienced authentic freedom in many respects tough life, difficult hard lives after the Civil War but real freedom, in which they voted, they participated in government.
BILL MOYERS: They farmed?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: They farmed. They carved out independent lives. But then, this terrible shadow began to fall back across black life in America, that effectively re-enslaved enormous numbers of people. And what that was all about, what that was rooted in, was that the southern economic, and in a way, the American economy, was addicted to slavery, was addicted to forced labor. And the South could not resurrect itself.
And so, there was this incredible economic imperative to bring back coerced labor. And they did, on a huge scale.
BILL MOYERS: You said they did it by criminalizing black life.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Well, and that was that was a charade. But the way that happened was that, of course, before the Civil War, there were Slave Codes. There were laws that governed the behavior of slaves. And that was the basis of laws, for instance, that made it where a slave had to have a written pass to leave their plantation and travel on an open road.
Well, immediately after the Civil War, all the southern states adopted a new set of laws that were then called Black Codes. And they essentially attempted to recreate the Slave Codes. Well, those that was such an obvious effort to recreate slavery, that the Union military leadership that was still in the South, overruled all of that. Still, that didn't work. And by the time you get to the end of Reconstruction, all the southern legislatures have gone back and passed laws that aren't called Black Codes, but essentially criminalized a whole array of activities, that it was impossible for a poor black farmer to avoid encountering in some way.
BILL MOYERS: Such as?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Vagrancy. So, vagrancy was a law that essentially, it simply, you were breaking the law if you couldn't prove at any given moment that you were employed. Well, in a world in which there were no pay stubs, it was impossible to prove you were employed. The only way you could prove employment was if some man who owned land would vouch for you and say, he works for me. And of course, none of these laws said it only applies to black people. But overwhelmingly, they were only enforced against black people. And many times, thousands of times I believe, you had young black men who attempted to do that. They ended up being arrested and returned to the original farmer where they worked in chains, not even a free worker, but as a slave.
BILL MOYERS: And the result, as you write, thousands of black men were arrested, charged with whatever, jailed, and then sold to plantations, railroads, mills, lumber camps and factories in the deep South. And this went on, you say, right up to World War II?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: And it was everywhere in the South. These forced labor camps were all over the place. The records that still survive, buried in courthouses all over the South, make it abundantly clear that thousands and thousands of African-Americans were arrested on completely specious claims, made up stuff, and then, purely because of this economic need and the ability of sheriffs and constables and others to make money off arresting them, and that providing them to these commercial enterprises, and being paid for that.

I have known the broad outlines of this story for a long, long time. But listening to the telling of it in such specific detail, and knowing that there was an entire book of meticulously researched information on this system of de facto slavery, I could not help but be struck at how chillingly similar this system was to the current conditions under which the inner city black community lives today. The wildly disproporationate arrest, trial and incarceration rates for black vs. white drug users is a very well-documented and long-established fact.

For example:

# "At midyear 2006 more black men (836,800) were in custody in State or Federal prison or local jail than white men (718,100) or Hispanic men (426,900) (table 13). Black men comprised 41% of the more than 2 million men in custody, and black men age 20 to 29 comprised 15.5% of all men in custody on June 30, 2006.
"Relative to their numbers in the general population, about 4.8% of all black men were in custody at midyear 2006, compared to about 0.7% of white men and 1.9% of Hispanic men. Overall, black men were incarcerated at 6.5 times the rate of white men. The incarceration rate for black men was highest among black men age 25 to 29. About 11.7% of black males in this age group were incarcerated on June 30, 2006. Across age groups black men were between 5.7 and 8.5 times more likely than white men to be incarcerated."
Source: Sabol, William J., PhD, Minton, Todd D., and Harrison, Paige M., Bureau of Justice Statistics, Prison and Jail Inmates at Midyear 2006 (Washington, DC: US Department of Justice, June 2007), NCJ217675, p. 9.

And beyond the incarcerated, and even the formerly incarcertaed, there is an entire community--indeed, and entire race that is kept down. As I noted in a diary back in March, "Two Long Recessions", the Black unemployment rate is double the white unemployment rate, in good times and bad. As a result, there are no good times for the black community as a whole. Permanent recession is their lot:

As I noted in that diary:

Perhaps, you might think this is because blacks just aren't as good job prospects as whites--lower skill, or whatever. Not so much...

In April, 2005, Princeton University sent out a press release :

Many New York employers discriminate against minorities, ex-offenders
by Steven M. Schultz · Posted April 1, 2005; 10:56 a.m.
Black applicants without criminal records are no more likely to get a job than white applicants just out of prison, according to a Princeton University study of nearly 1,500 private employers in New York City.
The study, "Discrimination in Low Wage Labor Markets," was conducted by sociology professors Devah Pager and Bruce Western . It is the largest and most comprehensive project of its kind to date.
The study, which investigated discrimination against young male minorities and ex-offenders by employers, also showed:
• Young white high school graduates were about twice as likely to receive positive responses from New York employers as equally qualified black job seekers;

• Ex-offenders face serious barriers to employment; a criminal record reduced positive responses from employers by about 35 percent for white applicants and 57 percent for black applicants.

Even without criminal records, however, black applicants had low rates of positive responses, about the same as the response rate for white applicants with criminal records. Hispanics also faced discrimination by employers, but were preferred relative to blacks.

Note that these ratios--"about twice" and a reduction of 35% compared to 57%--are quite in line with blacks having twice the unemployment rate of whites.

So, yes, the general shape of this history was not a surprise to me. Not a surprise at all. But Blackmon's book puts all this recent history into a bone-chilling, almost Lovecraftian perspective. We live today in a system of organized evil that has not materially changed at its core since the era of slavery.

It's not just dark romantic poetry when Leonard Cohen sings:

Everybody knows the deal is rotten
Old Black Joe is still picking cotton
For your ribbons and your bows.
Everybody knows."

It's the stone cold truth.

And electing a black man as President won't do a damn thing to change it. If anything, it will be one more facile excuse for continuing to ignore the legacy of systemic evil that still lives in our midst.

Note: I will be out when this diary posts, so if you comment and I don't respond right away, please be patient. Thanks.

The Versailles Media Got Nothing Wrong

Paul Rosenberg — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 18:25:54 GMT

(Another diary about Bill Moyers last night. There's a message here: watch his show! Failing that, the full transcript is here.)

The Republican Party is not the enemy this November. They are a pathetic wreck. Hegemony is the enemy, and the Republican Party's recent inability to enforce hegemony has been superbly compensated for by the corporate media.

As Wikipedia explains:

Cultural hegemony is a concept coined by Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci. It means that a diverse culture can be ruled or dominated by one group or class, that everyday practices and shared beliefs provide the foundation for complex systems of domination.

Or, as I like to put it, "Hegemony is ideology in common sense drag."

A key aspect of Gramsci's theory is that various different cultural institutions each fulfills their own function, often in ways that purportedly have nothing to do with one another-and yet they are actually functioning like various different units in an army-or nowadays an integrated fighting force, involving everything from infantry to satellites in space.

The media is an excellent example of this. In the 1990s, the media led the charge to depose Bill Clinton. As Gene Lyons meticulously documented in Fools for Scandal: How the Media Invented Whitewater, the New York Times and Washington Post persistently, repeatedly, and egregiously misreported virtually every major aspect of the so-called "Whitewater scandal." When that failed, and the Monica Lewinsky scandal emerged in its place, dozens of leading newspapers editorialized that Clinton should resign. Sixty percent of the American people disagreed, but they couldn't get a word in edgewise-which is where, when and how MoveOn.org was founded.

In contrast, George W. Bush has not merely subverted the most central aspects of our constitutional order with his dictatorial theories of unchecked executive power, he has shredded the Magna Charta as well as the Constitution, and yet the media persists in lying that only the "loonie left" thinks that there's anything amiss.

That's hegemony for you. And they do it, in large part, by following the supposedly "nuetral" rules of professional journalism. Although he makes no mention of Gramsci, Jeremy Iggers does a masterful job of showing that journalism ethics itself is the problem here in his 1998 classic, Good News, Bad News: Journalism Ethics And The Public Interest. So long as people think that the trouble with journalism is Jason Blair, not Judith Miller and her editors and publisher, then Houston, we have a problem. (Iggers, writing in the 1990s uses early Reagan-era examples, but the comparative misdeeds are eerily similar.)

With all that in mind, here's an excerpt of the discussion that Moyers had last night with John Walcott, Washington Bureau Chief of McClatchy News, one of his ace reporters, Jonathan Landay , and Greg Mitchell, editor of Editor and Publisher magazine, and author of So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits--and the President--Failed on Iraq, The Campaign of the Century: Upton Sinclair's Race for Governor of California and the Birth of Media Politics, and Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady : Richard Nixon vs Helen Gahagan Douglas-Sexual Politics and the Red Scare, 1950. It begins on the flip...

BILL MOYERS:There's been all this media frenzy about Scott McClellan's book. Did McClellan, whom you know, did McClellan do a good thing in writing this book?
JOHN WALCOTT: I think on balance, yes. This is one of the first times, I think, that a member of the President's inner circle, one of the Texans who came to Washington with him was regarded as being very close to him, has gone this far in denouncing what the Administration did with respect to Iraq and has come right out and said that they deceived the American people. And that is news.
BILL MOYERS:But you've been - you started writing that five years ago-
GREG MITCHELL: Right.
BILL MOYERS:-six years ago.
GREG MITCHELL: Well, that's what I mean. It's not news-
BILL MOYERS:You were saying that the Press Corps, television and press in Washington, complicit.
GREG MITCHELL: Right. Well, that's - again, it's different coming from the chief White House spokesman than coming from me - you know, for better or worse. But you know, I - that's what I mean. I think what's troubling to me is the response to that. The media has not responded by saying, "Boy, we really got caught out here, and we really need to look at what we did wrong. And we're, you know, we need to report on what the mistakes we made and what we - you know, what we've really learned now."
JONATHAN LANDAY: What's disappoints me is that here was an opportunity, once again, but a very large opportunity for major news organizations to do the mea culpa they never did, to admit that they indeed failed to do what they're supposed to do, failed to be the watchdogs they're supposed to be.
And yet we saw exactly the opposite for the most part. And I was just I was left breathless by some of the things that I heard where you heard correspondents say, "Well, we did ask the tough questions. We asked them to the White House spokesmen," Scott McClellan and others. And you say to yourself, "And you expected to get real answers? You expected them to say from the White House podium - 'Yeah, well, there were disagreements over the intelligence, but we ignored them'" when the President made his speeches and the Vice President made his speeches. No, I don't think so.
GREG MITCHELL: Yeah, what Charles Gibson said. We wouldn't - I don't think we would ask any different questions. I mean, it's shocking...
JOHN WALCOTT: Well...
GREG MITCHELL: ...to me that someone would say we would even with the chance to relive this experience and so much we got wrong - going to war is - which is still going on over five years later, all the lost lives, all the financial costs of that. And then to look back at this, you know, this terrible episode in history of American journalism and say that if I could do it all over again, I'm not sure we would ask any different questions.

"The operation was a spectacular success. Unfortunately, the patient died."

The rigid refusal to the rethink anything in the light of such spectacular failure is a testiment to the incredible power of hegemony. It's not just thought, it's attitude bred deep in the bone. It's the very air they breath, the five-star restaurants they eat in, the parties they attend-except when that kill-joy Stephen Colbert shows up. It is, quite simply, not what they do. It is who they are.

They are Versailles. We are America.

The conversation contimued:

JOHN WALCOTT: Well, I'm not - I don't know what questions ABC or anybody else asked. They may have asked all the right questions. The trouble is they asked all the wrong people.
BILL MOYERS:Yeah, if asking the question you all proved that asking the question is not essential unless you ask it to the person who can really tell you what you need to know.
JONATHAN LANDAY: And you have to take the time to find those people. It's not in-
GREG MITCHELL: And you have to play it up a lot.
JONATHAN LANDAY: It's not-
GREG MITCHELL: You can't bury it.
JONATHAN LANDAY: You know, these people are on the - this, you know, this grind to get the thing out, you know? We gotta get it out right away. You know, we got live television going on. We've got, you know, 24-hour cable TV news. We gotta - when do you have the time to sit and cultivate sources to get them to talk to you about what essentially is top secret information?
JOHN WALCOTT: Yeah, but there are some terrific reporters in television - you know, at the Defense Department in particular. Jim Miklashevski at NBC, David Martin at CBS. What I think happened in part was another problem, which is they have sources. Believe me. I wish I had some of the same sources they have. But whatever information came from those unnamed anonymous sources is trumped by Donald Rumsfeld at the podium or Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice saying, "We can't allow the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."
BILL MOYERS:Over and over again.
JOHN WALCOTT: Over and over again on camera. And that trumps the kind of reporting that John and Warren Strobel did from these mid-level guys who actually know that there's no prospect of any smoking gun let alone a mushroom cloud. And so when it gets to packaging television news, it's picture driven, it's celebrity driven, and that doesn't allow much room for this kind of hard-nosed reporting under the radar.

Truth be damned. We have our conventions to follow. As Stephen Colbert so painstakingly explained:

The President makes decisions. He's the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put 'em through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration? You know, fiction!

Back to Bill Moyers:

JONATHAN LANDAY: I also want to say one thing I think that it behooves the media to come out - major companies to say, "Yes, we got it wrong," because if you look at surveys today, the American public has lost an enormous amount of trust in the news media, in the people who are supposed to be watch, their watchdogs over government. And yet the number of people who trust the media is, like, 25, 26 percent.
So at a time when you have this problem, doesn't it behoove you to try and start fixing it?
GREG MITCHELL: There's been numerous opportunities actually just in the last few weeks for the media to do this self-assessment. And you remember the fifth anniversary of the start of the war. Almost no media self-assessment at that time. Pointing fingers at everybody but themselves. There was the 4,000 deaths in Iraq. There was the fifth anniversary of "mission accomplished." Another great opportunity for this. We had the scandal of the Pentagon media generals, as I call them.
We had that opportunity. Now we've had Scott McClellan. There's been at least six opportunities in the last two months for the media to do this long delayed and much needed self-assessment, self-criticism to the American public and it hasn't happened.

In the biz, they're called "news hooks." You have a larger story that needs telling, but to tell it properly, you've got to have people's attention, and at least their potential motivation to listen to a story that's got broader horizons to it. And Mitchell-who knows the biz as well as anyone-was absolutely right. The media has just had an unbelievable series of news hooks on which to hang a serious re-examination of itself-if, of course, they had even the slightest inclination to do so.

But since when did King Louis say, "Off with my head!"?

Let them eat mistakes. God knows that's one thing there's an endless supply of.

Progress???

Paul Rosenberg — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 15:27:28 GMT

On Bill Moyers Journal last night, Moyers played a clip of John F. Kennedy. He did it as a way of talking about how far-and how surprisingly we've come to have a black presidential nominee. But I noticed something different. See if you can spot it:

BILL MOYERS: Welcome to the Journal.
I never thought we'd see this in my lifetime. When I was growing up in the segregated south the Democratic Party was the bastion of white male supremacy. The inequality of the races was a given, God-ordained and immutable. Women were okay, as long as they kept to their place. And now look what's happened. A black man and a white woman battled each other to the wire for the nomination by a party that turned itself upside down, inside out, and around in my lifetime. Barack Obama was born the year John F. Kennedy took the oath of office as President of the United States.
JOHN F. KENNEDY: I, John Fitzgerald Kennedy do solemnly swear. . .
BILL MOYERS: At his inauguration, I stood in the clear, cold weather and felt a shiver, not from the weather, but from the hint of things to come. Two years later, Obama was a toddler, and I was 27, and there was Kennedy on television proposing a civil rights bill to end the awful discrimination enforced on black people throughout America's history. It was 45 years ago next week - June 11, 1963 - and the President asked, "Are we to say to the world - and much more importantly to each other - that this is the land of the free, except for the Negroes; that we have no second-class citizens, except Negroes; that we have no class or caste system, no ghettoes, no master race, except with respect to Negroes."
JOHN F. KENNEDY: The Negro baby born in America today, regardless of the section of the State in which he is born, has about one-half as much chance of completing a high school as a white baby born in the same place on the same day, one-third as much chance of completing college, one-third as much chance of becoming a professional man, twice as much chance of becoming unemployed. . .
BILL MOYERS: Tragically, Kennedy was assassinated as Congress was still battling over his civil rights bill and Lyndon Johnson was thrust into the White House. I went with him and saw Johnson take up the cause. Martin Luther King marched, and Lyndon Johnson maneuvered, and on the 2nd of July in 1964 the President signed the Civil Rights Act into law. The fight wasn't over; he knew it. The President told me, "I think we've just handed the South to the Republican Party for the rest of my life - and yours." Sure enough, the backlash was so bitter, and the Republican Party, once the party of Lincoln, so exploited it, that I figured this country would have a serious woman candidate for President long before any person of African descent. As the choice came down this year to one or the other, is one of those shifts that democracy and history take when we least suspect it.
BARACK OBAMA: Because of you, tonight I can stand before you and say that I will be the Democratic nominee for President of the United States.

Did you see it?
Here it is again:

JOHN F. KENNEDY: The Negro baby born in America today, regardless of the section of the State in which he is born, has about one-half as much chance of completing a high school as a white baby born in the same place on the same day, one-third as much chance of completing college, one-third as much chance of becoming a professional man, twice as much chance of becoming unemployed. . .

Now, high school graduation rates are a subject of some controversy But no one doubts that a substantial racial graduation rate persists to this day. College statistics are much more solid, but again, no one doubts that there are still substantial gaps. Kennedy's figures for "professional men" seem quite high for the time. It was still quite commonplace in the early 1960s for black college graduates to hold menial jobs. A college degree did not mean a college degree job, and the same was true for professionals as well.

These figures that Kennedy threw out were troubling to me, but it would take some time to dig out the relevant figures, and assure myself that they were not in dispute. But unemployment?

Well, as it happens, the US Government didn't actually keep employment figures by race at the time that Kennedy gave that address. But the figure of twice the unemployment rate was quite believable. And since that time, the unemployment rate by race has been quite well documented. In fact, I wrote about right here at Open Left not too long ago, in a diary called, "Two Long Recessions". The first recession was in quality of life generally, as measured using by indices such as the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI). Here's part of what I wrote at the beginning of my discussion of the second long recession:

Black America's Perpetual Recession

Obviously, Black America suffers disproportionately from the long depression described above. Income inequality--one of the factors measured by GPI--affects Black America disproportionately. Negative externalities--such as exposure to pollution--also impact Black America much more severely than they affect America as a whole. But Black America also suffers a perpetual depression in conventional economic terms as well.

The Institute for Southern Studies was founded in 1970 by veterans of the civil rights movement, and has published its journal, Southern Exposure since 1973. It also has a blog, where Executive Director Chris Kromm recently wrote:

Black America is in a permanent recession
Pundits are working themselves into a dither about whether the U.S. is or isn't officially "in a recession." But for at least one segment of the country, the question is settled: African-Americans are deep in recession, and have been for a while.
In fact, black America is in what should be called a permanent recession.
In January, economist Algernon Austin at the Economic Policy Institute pointed out that even in good times, huge numbers of African-Americans are being left behind:
In the best of times, many African American communities are forced to tolerate levels of unemployment unseen in most white communities. The 2001 recession pushed the white annual unemployment rate up from a low of 3.5% in 2000 to a high of 5.2% in 2003. During the same period, the black unemployment rate shot up from 7.6% to 10.8%.

In the "one picture/one thousand words" department:

As we see, the black unemployment rate is routinely significantly higher than white unemployment rate--so much higher, in fact, that black unemployment at its lowest only briefly dipped below the highest levels for white unemployment since record-keeping began. White unemployment rose above 7.5% in the early 1980s, considered a period of wrenching hard times. But black unemployment only dipped below these record levels for a few years during Clinton's second term--a period of broad economic expansion that blacks remember fondly as a period of economic opportunity! Indeed, this experience is one of the chief reasons that Hillary Clinton initially mantained such broad black support against Barack Obama, until his victory in Iowa caucuses among white voters.

Looking at the chart above, it looks to the naked eye as if the white and black unemployment rates go up and down together, but that the black rate is roughly twice that of the white rate, and indeed, if we graph the difference between the two rates, we see that this is generally so, as the difference between the rates closely tracks the black rate itself:

What this tells us is quite significant--generally speaking there are twice as many blacks as whites, percentagewise, looking for work, regardless of how tight the labor market is.

If one black worker in six is looking for work, then one white worker in twelve will be looking, too. If things improve, and one black worker in twelve is looking for work, then one white worker in twenty-four will be looking for work. If things improve even more, and one black worker in twenty-four is looking for work... well, that's never happened. The economy has never been that good.

In this one respect, clearly, nothing has changed for black America since Kennedy gave his speech--a speech that was in itself historic... and yet has left so much still to be done.

Black America's endless recession will not end, just because Barack Obama gets elected President. Make no mistake about it, Obama's election will be an historic event. No one can doubt it. But it will not magically change everything in the twinkling of an eye.

Black America's endess recession is just one statistic that's indicative of the "two Americas" that John Edwards spoke of. The "two Americas" divide is not solely racial, but those on the wealthy side are overwhelmingly white, and those who are not, are not. And so we should be very clear about this-in electing Barack Obama, rather than John Edwards, we are taking the cheap and easy way out.

Wright Is Right-On Bill Moyers Last Night

Paul Rosenberg — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 19:03:53 GMT

Note: I have to apologize for late and light posting this weekend. I've had a series of calamaties, leaving me, at one point with no car, no computer, and--seemingly, at least--no electricity. My prep work for several diaries is on a copmuter I'm just about to take to the shop, and a good 8 hours of lost time means, well, like I said, light posting this weekend. But I did save the beginnings of this in draft form just before my electricity went off around 3 AM, and I've just whipped together the rest...

Reverend Jeremiah Wright appeared on Bill Moyers Journal (video and transcript), and proved yet again-as if we needed it-how utterly disconnected from reality our politics has become. I've defended Reverent Wright on this website before, but what was fundamentally refreshing about Wright's appearance with Bill Moyers was how far beyond all that he was, how utterly undefensive, how open, and how centered he was.

In fact, he was so centered, so equinanimous-which is not to say self-satisfied or smug-that at first I was disappointed. I had fully intended to blog about his appearance, but it was all so normal that it seemed there was nothing to blog about at first: "News Flash! Jeremiah Wright appears on Bill Moyers-He does not have horns!" But, of course, that's the point. We've become so accustomed to phony-controversy, junk-food tv that plain, old-fashioned honest truth-telling bores us, or at least makes it difficult to find a place to engage.

In retrospect, though, here's an excellent place to start, because it shows Wright recalling an incident, which was, in one sense, a typical reminder that blacks are constantly under suspicion. Yet Wright did not tell the story to make that point, nor did he recall it in bitterness. He was, in fact, a bit bemused by it. And yet, it was there. And that simply fact of witnessing to what is so-ultimately that has been Wright's great sin in the eyes of the Versailles media. He has not become complicit in his own brainwashing, and that is something that Versailles simply cannot forgive:

BILL MOYERS: He served six years in the military: two as a marine, and four in the Navy as a cardiopulmonary technician. That's where our paths crossed for the only time.
That's Jeremiah Wright, behind the I.V. pole, monitoring President Lyndon Johnson's heart as he was recovering from gall bladder surgery at Bethesda Naval Hospital. And right behind him is a very young me. I was the President's Press Secretary.
REVEREND WRIGHT: As you know, the President had to be operated on and out of surgery by 9:00 when the stock market opened. And talking and wide awake. So, we scrubbed in, like, 3:00 in the morning.
When he awakened, unlike other patients, you did not move him to recovery. You didn't move him to ICU. They kept him right there for security reasons. Secret Service all around, there was secret service in the whole operating suite and nobody else allowed in the operating suite except Secret Service.
So, after about an hour and a half, I went to get some coffee. And as I was coming back from the lounge where the coffee was, going back to monitor, I saw the guys talkin' into their wristwatches and I was nodding, speaking to them. So, I turn to go into the room to check the pace. And secret service guys standing there grabbed me, knocked the coffee outta my hand, burned me with the hot coffee, twisted my arm up behind my neck and screams into his phone, "I got him." And I was, "Got him?" And I'm screamin' in pain. And my assistant comes running out of the booth. He sees me jacked up and he starts laughing. I said, "Joe, don't laugh. Tell him who I am." And he said, "He's been here all morning."
BILL MOYERS: Standing above the President.
REVEREND WRIGHT: Guy looked at me, pulled my mask up over face, "Oh, yeah." And that was it.

But, of course, what Reverend Wright can afford to be bemused by is but the tip of the iceberg that can casually crush a young child in his congregation. And so he is not complacent when it comes to saving the lives of those entrusted to his care. This makes him even more unforgivable....
Here, Moyers asks Wright about the beginning of his ministry, which should help make it clear exactly what he is all about:

BILL MOYERS: After the military, Wright graduated from Howard University, then went to the University of Chicago Divinity School for a Masters in Religious History.
But his path took a turn back to his first calling - when he was asked by that struggling little church on the South Side of Chicago to become its pastor.
BILL MOYERS: So, when you looked out on that handful of worshippers that first Sunday morning, 87 members, I'm sure all of them weren't there--
REVEREND WRIGHT: Oh, yeah. They all knew they heard this new kid was there with a big natural. So, they came to see--
BILL MOYERS: They were there.
REVEREND WRIGHT: Yeah.
BILL MOYERS: So, what did you see and what did you think you had to do?
REVEREND WRIGHT: Well, actually a good friend of yours, I believe, and one of my professors, got me in the predicament I'm in today, Dr. Martin Marty, one of my professors at the University of Chicago--
BILL MOYERS: One of the great distinguished historians of religion in America.
REVEREND WRIGHT: He put a challenge to us in 1970, late '69, early '70, I'll never forget. He said, "You know, you come into the average church on a Sunday morning and you think you've stepped from the real world into a fantasy world. And what do I mean by that?" He said pick up the church bulletin. You leave a world, Vietnam, or today you leave a world, Iraq, over 4,000 dead, American boys and girls, 100,000, 200,000 depending on which count, Iraqi dead. Afghanistan, Darfur, rapes in the Congo, Katrina, Lower Ninth Ward, that's the world you leave. And you come in; you pick up your church bulletin. It says, there is a ladies tea on second Sunday. The children's choir will be doing. He said, "How come our bulletins, how come the faith preached in our churches does not relate to the world in which our church members leave at the benediction?" Well, it hit me. And it hit me several different ways. Number one, I know there's a church publication, the bulletin, the weekly bulletin. But what about the ministry? And what about the prophetic voice of the church that's not heard? We're talking about things that our members are wrestling with a whole bunch of other things. And the sermons and the ministries of the church don't touch those things.

That sets the table. And from what's been said so far-please note-there is nothing specific to being black in America. Wright continues speaking, and the story moves on, taking us inside the origins of contemporary black liberation theology, on a very down-to-earth level. Contrary to the sound of the terminology, it's remarkably bland and commonsensical, when you get right down to it:

So, when, I looked and said this church had said to me, in fact not just to me, the church, the congregation has said, "OK, we were started by a white denomination. We were started in this community to be an integrated church. Ten years, that hasn't happened. Are we gonna be a black church in this community? What are we doing for this community?" They put together a statement that shows all the candidates for the pulpit. I was one of the candidates. They said, "Can you lead us in this new direction? How do we minister to this community in which we sit?" Not just on Sunday, first you have to attract people to come-- or even be interested in our worship experiences on Sunday. But what do we do in ministry that speaks to the community and the world in which we sit? That's Martin Marty. That's Martin Marty.
BILL MOYERS: Marty told me that you launched a strenuous effort to help the members of that church overcome the shame, and I'm quoting him, "they had so long been conditioned to experience." What was the source of that shame?
REVEREND WRIGHT: What Carter G. Woodson [a favorite of social conservatives] calls the miseducation of the Negro. That Africa is ignorant, Africans are ignorant; there is no African history, there is no African music, there is no African culture, anything related to Africa is negative, therefore you are not African. Chinese come to the country, they're still Chinese-American. We have Chinatown. Koreans come, they're still Korean. They have Koreatown. Africans come, they're colored. They're Negro. They're anything but Africa. In fact, we don't even call them Ebbu, Ebibu, Fulani, Fanti, Ga, no, no, no -- they're all "Negro." Portuguese, "Negro" Spanish. They're all gettin' lumped into black, but we're not black, we are Negro with a capital N.
The shame of being a descendant of Africa, was a shame that had been pumped into the minds and hearts of Africans from the 1600s on, even aided and abetted by the benefit of those schools started by the missionaries, who simply carried their culture with them into the South and taught their cultures being synonymous with Christianity. So that to become a Christian, you had to let go of all vestiges of Africa and become European, become New Englanders and worship like New England, worship God properly and right. Well, that shame was a part of the shame that many Africans in the '60s and the '70s were feeling.
Dr Reuben Sheares is my predecessor -- he was the interim pastor at Trinity -- coined the phrase "unashamedly black," where blacks coming outta the '60s were no longer ashamed of being black people, nor did they have to apologize for being Christians. Because many persons in the African-American community were teasing us, Christians, of being a white man's religion. And no, we're not ashamed of Christianity. And we don't have to apologize for who we are as African-Americans. So that, I think, is what Marty was talking about.

Okay, here's the money shot:

BILL MOYERS: So, when Trinity Church says it is unashamedly black and unapologetically Christian, is it embracing a race-based theology?
REVEREND WRIGHT: No, it is not. It is embracing Christianity without giving up Africanity. A lotta the missionaries were going to other countries assuming that our culture is superior, that you have no culture. And to be a Christian, you must be like us. Right now, you can go to Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal, and see Christians in 140-degree weather. They have to have on a tie. Because that's what it means to be a Christian. Well, it's that kind of assuming that our culture, "We have the only sacred music. You must sing our music. You must use a pipe organ. You cannot use your instrument." It's that kind of assumption that in the field of missions, people say, "You know what? We're doing this wrong. We need to take Christ and leave culture at home. We need to learn the culture of people into which we're moving, and preach the methods of Jesus Christ using the culture that we are a part of." Well, the same thing happened with Christians in this country when they said, "You know what? Because those same missionaries who went south, they didn't let us sing gospel music." That was not sacred--

Of course, the vast majority of ministries around the world have adopted this approach today-"to take Christ and leave culture at home." It's regarded as common sense. And yet, it still remains controversial, when it suits certain political purposes.

Skipping down a bit-even though they're already talking about black liberation theology, Moyers now brings it up by name:

BILL MOYERS: Lots of controversy about black liberation theology. As I understand it, black liberation theology reads the bible through the experience of people who have suffered, and who then are able to say to themselves that we read the bible differently, because we have struggled, than those do who have not struggled. Is that a fair bumper sticker of liberation theology?
REVEREND WRIGHT: I think that's a fair bumper sticker. I think that the terms "liberation theology" or "black liberation theology" cause more problems and red flags for people who don't understand it.
BILL MOYERS: When I hear the word "black liberation theology" being the interpretation of scripture from the oppressed, I think well, that's the Jewish story--
REVEREND WRIGHT: Exactly, exactly. From Genesis to Revelation. These are people who wrote the word of God that we honor and love under Egyptian oppression, Syrian oppression, Babylonian oppression, Persian oppression, Greek oppression, Roman oppression. So that their understanding of what God is saying is very different from the Greeks, the Romans, the Egyptians. And that's what prophetic theology of the African-American church is.
BILL MOYERS: Yeah. But talk a little bit about that. The prophets loved Israel. But they hated the waywardness of Israel. And they were calling Israel out of love back to justice, not damning--
REVEREND WRIGHT: Exactly.
BILL MOYERS: Not damning Israel. Right?
REVEREND WRIGHT: Right. They were saying that God was--in fact, if you look at the damning, condemning, if you look at Deuteronomy, it talks about blessings and curses, how God doesn't bless everything. God does not bless gang-bangers. God does not bless dope dealers. God does not bless young thugs that hit old women upside the head and snatch their purse. God does not bless that. God does not bless the killing of babies. God does not bless the killing of enemies. And when you look at blessings and curses out of that Hebrew tradition from the book of Deuteronomy, that's what the prophets were saying, that God is not blessing this. God does not bless it- bless us. And when we're calling them, the prophets call them to repentance and to come back to God. If my people who are called by my name, God says to Solomon, will humble themselves and pray, seek my faith and turn from their wicked ways. God says that wicked ways, not Jeremiah Wright, then will I hear from heaven.

Which, of course, is a lead in to playing an extended clip, so that we get the full context of the notorious "God damn America" soundbite. And I urge folks not to just read this transcript, but to clip the link above, and to see and hear it for yourselves, because that's the only way you'll see exactly how it was presented, the only way that you will really get it in context:

BILL MOYERS: One of the most controversial sermons that you preach is the sermon you preach that ended up being that sound bite about Goddamn America.
[TAPE]REVEREND JEREMIAH WRIGHT: Where governments lie, God does not lie. Where governments change, God does not change. And I'm through now. But let me leave you with one more thing. Governments fail. The government in this text comprised of Caesar, Cornelius, Pontius Pilate - the Roman government failed. The British government used to rule from East to West. The British government had a Union Jack. She colonized Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad and Hong Kong. Her navies ruled the seven seas all the way down to the tip of Argentina in the Falklands, but the British government failed. The Russian government failed. The Japanese government failed. The German government failed. And the United States of America government, when it came to treating her citizens of Indian descent fairly, she failed. She put them on reservations. When it came to treating her citizens of Japanese descent fairly, she failed. She put them in internment prison camps. When it came to treating citizens of African descent fairly, America failed. She put them in chains. The government put them on slave quarters, put them on auction blocks, put them in cotton fields, put them in inferior schools, put them in substandard housing, put them in scientific experiments, put them in the lowest paying jobs, put them outside the equal protection of the law, kept them out of their racist bastions of higher education and locked them into position of hopelessness and helplessness. The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law, and then wants us to sing God bless America? No, no, no. Not God bless America; God damn America! That's in the Bible, for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating her citizen as less than human. God damn America as long as she keeps trying to act like she is God and she is supreme! [END TAPE]
BILL MOYERS: What did you mean when you said that?
REVEREND WRIGHT: When you start confusing God and government, your allegiances to government -a particular government and not to God, that you're in serious trouble because governments fail people. And governments change. And governments lie. And those three points of the sermon. And that is the context in which I was illustrating how the governments biblically and the governments since biblical times, up to our time, changed, how they failed, and how they lie. And when we start talking about my government right or wrong, I don't think that goes. That is consistent with what the will of God says or the word of God says that governments don't say right or wrong. That governments that wanna kill innocents are not consistent with the will of God. And that you are made in the image of God, you're not made in the image of any particular government. We have the freedom here in this country to talk about that publicly, whereas some other places, you're dead if say the wrong thing about your government.

Now, you may not think this is politic to say such things. And you'd be right. Wright is not a politician. He's a preacher. And that is what preaching is.... Or maybe, even, a little bit of prophesy.

And that is, at bottom, why the religious right is so keen on joining church and state--so that they can use the power of the state to utterly extinguish competing religious views, particualarly ones that hew so closely to the original intent of the Hebrew prophets and the Gospels.

"Two Americas" IS Reagan's Legacy

Paul Rosenberg — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 19:53:59 GMT

Yesterday, both Amy Goodman (Democray Now!) and Bill Moyers had David Cay Johnston on to talk about his new book, Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and StickYou with the Bill). This is a book about Reagan's real legacy--or one of them, anyway. (9/11, obviously, was another.) And while I would disagree with Obama's characterization that Reagan was really the prime mover involved, he was most definitely the front man, which is why it is impossible for many high-information activists to go quietly with the idea of sweeping it all under the rug.

From Democracy Now!:

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Well, I was struck, listening to the program from Kenya [previous segement], where they talked about the president and his power to give money to people, give land, and that's why many people identify with it. We have created in the United States, largely in the last thirty years, a whole series of programs-a few of them explicit, many of them deeply hidden-that take money from the pockets of the poor and the middle class and upper middle class and funnel it to the wealthiest people in America. And among the biggest recipients of these subsidies are the wealthiest family America, the Waltons; George Steinbrenner; Donald Trump; a whole host of healthcare billionaires. And these are policies that either have not been reported on or the news reporting on them generally has not informed people about what they really are.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, I was struck-you have numerous chapters in the book on the various aspects of this transfer, but I was especially struck by your material on the New York Yankees and Steinbrenner and Joyce Hogi, who you mention in the book, who I know well, and this whole issue of sports teams across America and how the public is subsidizing them. Could you elaborate on that part of it?
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Sure. George Steinbrenner is getting over $600 million for the new Yankee Stadium in New York. The New York Mets are getting over $600 million. In fact, the City of New York gave them money to lobby against the taxpayers to get more money. Rudy Giuliani gave $50 million to the two teams for that purpose.

That last part is the real killer--Guiliani gave the Yankees and the Mets $50 million of taxpayer money to lobby against the taxpayer's own public interest.

That's the legacy of Ronald Reagan in a nutshell.
He also talked about how Bush got wealthy by picking taxpayers' pockets. It's a story I knew well back in 1999, and I foolishly thought it would bar him from winning the presidency. I could understand whyh the Texas press didn't make a big deal about it, but once the national press started taking a closer look at Texas, all that would change, I naively believed.

Of course, the national press still hasn't taken a closer look at Texas--or anything else, for that matter, that isn't nammed "Brittney." They just don't do closer looks any more. It's not their thing.

David Cay Johnston is the exception that proves the rule:

AMY GOODMAN: Speaking of sports teams, talk about President Bush and where you believe, really, ultimately, he got his wealth.
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Well, it isn't a function of belief, Amy. I've got the documents. President Bush, who will go down in history as the great tax cutter, owes almost all of his fortune to a tax increase that was funneled into his pocket. What happened is, an oil man named Eddie Chiles wanted to sell his money-losing Texas Rangers baseball team. They played in a little stadium, smaller than the one we have here in Rochester, New York, and of course couldn't make any money. So George Bush put together a group of very wealthy investors to buy the team. He put up himself $600,000 of borrowed money. The partners then gave him a 10 percent stake as the managing partner. That's a very common arrangement in business. Then they held a special election in January of the year in question to increase the sales tax in the town of Arlington, Texas, by one half-cent. That money was used to build a new baseball stadium. It's an incredibly nice baseball stadium.
Then the power of government to seize land by eminent domain-and I go back to what was talked about in Kenya, the leader there can give you land, he can presumably therefore also take it away-the government used its power of eminent domain to seize land from people, not for a public purpose-not for a military base, for a school, for a highway, for a sewer plant-but because it was coveted by President Bush and his friends, and they were unwilling to go into the market and buy it through market economics. So the government seized this land. People were paid far less than they were owed, and we know that because one family fought back, and a jury, after being out just a matter of minutes, awarded them about six times what they had been offered by the government of Arlington.
The value of this subsidy, according to Ray Hutchison, who is the husband of Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, is a prominent Republican insider in Texas and is the leading authority on municipal bond finance in Texas, was $202.5 million. The profit that President Bush and his partners made when they sold the team was $164 million. What does that tell you? Every single penny of additional money President Bush got from that investment, his gain, came from the taxpayers. He did not add one cent to the value of that team through his skill as an MBA manager. This gets repeated all over the country.
And then when President Bush filed his tax return, he should have reported that the 10 percent share he had, the one that was given to him as compensation for being general manager, was wage income. And, of course, we tax wages at a higher rate than we do capital income, like capital gains. President Bush therefore shorted the government $3.4 million. Under our system, you sign your tax return subject to audit. If you're not audited and you don't pay the government the right amount, if it's too much, the government keeps it, if it's too little, you short the government, but nothing happens to you.

Both interviews [Goodman Moyers ] are excellent, packed with example after example to give the full flavor of how widespread the pattern is. The massive, intensely destructive subsidies of big box retailers is another subject he talks about in some detail, for example.

But he also talks about the big picture, as well. Amy asked him about Obama praising Reagan, and while I would disagree with Johnston characterizing Reagan as the agent of that change, as opposed to it's spokesmodel/frontman, the overall picture he paints is powerful, comprehensive, and deeply damning:

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you about Barack Obama's comments, David Cay Johnston, who praised-
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Well, one thing, Amy, I don't do, Amy, I don't talk about the presidential campaign, because-
AMY GOODMAN: Oh, you don't have to-you don't have to talk about them-
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: OK.
AMY GOODMAN: -but just the substance of what he had to say, which was very interesting, as he talked about former President Ronald Reagan. He was in an interview with the Reno Gazette-Journal, appearing to express admiration for what he called Reagan's "clarity" and "optimism" and overcoming "excesses" of the '60s and '70s. This is what he said.
SEN. BARACK OBAMA: I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that, you know, Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path, because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like, you know, with all the excesses of the '60s and '70s and, you know, government had grown and grown, but there wasn't much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. And I think people just tapped in-he tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity, we want optimism, we want, you know, a return to that sense of dynamism and, you know, entrepreneurship that had been missing.
AMY GOODMAN: In response, rival candidate John Edwards said Reagan "did extraordinary damage to the middle class and working people, created a tax structure that favored the very wealthiest Americans and caused the middle class and working people to struggle every single day." He said, "I can promise you [this: I will] never use Ronald Reagan as an example for change." So, David Cay Johnston, without getting into presidential politics, you write extensively about Ronald Reagan in this book.
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Yes. Well, Ronald Reagan, whether you love Ronald Reagan or you hate Ronald Reagan, was a great leader. He did, in fact, dramatically change the country.
Between 1945 and the election of Ronald Reagan, we had a government that was focused on creating and nurturing the middle class. When I was a young man, I was able to go to college only because it was free. It didn't matter that I didn't have any money-my dad was a 100 percent disabled veteran, and I went to work when I was ten years old and full time since I was thirteen-because it was free.
Today, the cost of a college education, a state college education, is about $10,000 a year. The average income of the bottom half of taxpayers-that's not families, that's taxpayers-is about $15,000. Think you can go to college if two-thirds of your income would have to go to college? I don't think so.
Well, Mr.-what Mr. Reagan did in 1980 was he asked a question that had a very powerful effect. He said, "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" And Americans said no, they weren't. And they elected him to office, and they set in motion a major change in government policy, a change that I think has been perverted. I do not believe Reagan intended all of the things that have been done since he started this happening.
But I'm asking the question in Free Lunch: Are you better off than you were in 1980? And on the surface, America is much better off. The country is more than twice as wealthy in real terms as it was in 1980. Per person, adjusted for inflation, the economy now puts out $1.70 for every dollar that it put out in 1980. Those are absolutely tremendous economic numbers.
So how come we're not all really well-off? Why is it one-in-seven families has filed bankruptcy in the last twenty-five years? Why is it people are so mired in debt that television ads are just full of debt relief and take on more debt ads, sometimes at 99 percent interest? Why is it that so many people don't have health insurance and so many people no longer have a retirement plan?
And by the way, the average income of the bottom 90 percent of Americans, what I call the vast majority, is smaller today than it was in 1980. And since the year 2000, when we really got serious about this tax cut business, the average income of Americans every year-2001, '02, '03, '04, '05-has been smaller than it was in 2000. There have been some gains in 2004 and '05, but they haven't gotten up to equal 2000. And of those gains in the year 2000-it's either '05 over '04 or '04 over '03-half went to people who make over a million dollars a year. What's happened is-
AMY GOODMAN: Didn't that wealth transfer massively begin-I mean, accelerate with Reagan?
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Oh, yes. No, that's-I'm sorry, that's exactly my point, Amy, is that what happened is that we put in place all sorts of new programs, many of which were never written about in the news media, that got no attention whatsoever. We created healthcare billionaires while making healthcare unavailable to one-in-seven Americans. And we did this with government money. We allowed people to buy public assets for, in some cases, a fraction of a penny on the dollar and then poured government money into them.
And, you know, our national myth that Ronald Reagan ran for office on was that there were all these welfare queen Cadillacs-welfare queens driving Cadillacs out there. I think there was, in fact, one scam artist who went to prison. But what's really going on is welfare at the top, and way beyond what's been reported in the news media as corporate welfare. We have built into the scaffolding of the new economy rules that funnel money to the top.
And that this has happened really shouldn't surprise us, because under our campaign finance system, which has gotten worse and worse and worse with campaign finance reform that hasn't worked, politicians running for high office spend a great deal of their time talking not to you and me and school teachers and police officers and firefighters and factory workers, but to rich people and their paid representatives. And they hear about their concerns and what they say they need to make things fair.

The problem, of course, is that the Versailles Dems are not just as compromised as the Republicans, which Johnston also talks about. This is from the end of the Moyers interview:

BILL MOYERS: You point out, by the way, that Bill Clinton as president gave the super rich a larger tax break than George Bush's tax cuts, right?
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Yeah, I love to trot this one out when somebody goes, "Oh, you're from the New York Times. You must be, you know, pro-Democrat or liberal or whatever." I'm the guy who broke the story and reported on the fact that Bill Clinton gave the super rich, the 400 highest income people in America a big tax cut. They were paying 30 cents out of each dollar of their income to the federal government when he came into the office. When he left, it was down to 22. Bush has lowered it to 17. Now, first of all, notice you're probably paying more than 17 cents. May well be paying more than 22. But Bush gave them an eight cent tax cut-- I'm sorry. Clinton gave an eight cent tax cut and Bush only gave them five cents.
BILL MOYERS: Let me read you this quote from one of your critics, Larry Kudlow of NATIONAL REVIEW online and CNBC. He wrote this a couple of years ago after in response to something you had reported in the New York Times about how Bush's tax cuts on dividends and capital gains had helped people with the highest incomes. Quote: "These entrepreneurs use their God-given talents within the Reagan-esque free market framework that deregulated, slashed tax rates, and provided the first strong dose of economic incentives since the 1920s. A rising economic tide over the last 20 years has lifted living standards, productivity, and employment throughout America. Everyone got richer with a full $39 trillion in new wealth created during this period. Fair?
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: No. Not accurate either. First of all a rising tide lifts all boats unless you're in the dinghy tied to the dock. And then you get swamped. The poor America, and it's not like being poor in the third world, but the poor America are worse off. Most Americans have seen their incomes stagnate or decline slightly. People have fewer fringe benefits. They have less in retirement. They have an enormous amount of debt. For every additional dollar since 1980 the people have gotten in equity in their homes, they've taken on $2 of debt. That's not a prescription for getting well off.
Entrepreneurs? Entrepreneurs are people who are going to perform no matter what. And we had our greatest economic growth when we had much higher tax rates. You want entrepreneurs. You need entrepreneurs to have a good society. I don't have any problem with entrepreneurs. But we need to have a system that also fairly distributes-- and government rules affect the distribution of this; it is not in a vacuum-- the burdens of society and the benefits of society. And so when we have people who make billion dollar a year incomes and pay 15 percent taxes and janitors who pay the same tax rate and school teachers who pay a 25 percent tax rate, something's amiss.
BILL MOYERS: But did you notice what happened when the Democrats briefly toyed with the idea of removing that tax break from the hedge fund and private equity managers Congress thought very briefly about removing it. And then the industry held a big party for-- Harry Reid, Senate Democratic majority leader down in Las Vegas, and he came back from that big party and said, "I don't think we'll be taking that up anytime soon."
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: The problem of the political donor class's outsized influence and its grip on Congress is bipartisan. There's one party in Washington. It's the party of money. It has different wings and factions. But Washington is the party of money. And the wealthiest people in America, the large corporations in America, are busy milking the government for everything they can get. And you are paying the price of their free lunch.

Now, if only John Edwards were doing as good a job in his forum as Johnston is in his, I would be an enthusiastic Edwards supporter. And Obama's failure to speak honestly about this legacy when he's given such a prominent place in the national spotlight is a huge strike against him, in my book. And Clinton? Well, what her husband did sort of says it all, now doesn't it?

Which is why the netroots really does have to maintain its independence. You can support whoever you chose, but do not sacrifice your indepedent judgement or your unqualified support to anyone.

Oh yeah. And read the damn book!

Lyndon B. Johnson: We Shall Overcome

Paul Rosenberg — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 16:01:58 GMT

I want to address a fundamental misunderstanding that seems to be directed at just about everyone here at Open Left-the notion that just because we frequently critricize Obama, we therefore hate him. This is, quite frankly, such an absurd notion on its face that I've been remise in not addressing it sooner. So let me be as clear as possible: To criticize a politician is not necessarily to attack him. Indeed, it is simply the most basic duty of a citizen, and a necessary precondition for the politician being criticized to reach their full potential.

Our leaders are not kings, indeed, they are not even our leaders. They are followers of the true leaders-those who recognize injustice and refuse to accept it.

Left: Civil Rights marchers paid the price of freedom in Selma, Alabama a week before LBJ took up their cause and introduced the Voting Rights Act, using their rallying cry, "We Shall Overcome." Congressman John Lewis was among those beaten.

Officeholders, on the other hand, may not be true leaders, but they are (1) public servants and (2) official leaders. On both counts, listening and responding to public criticism is, quite simply, an integral part of the job they've taken on. Bad things happen when they forget this-but worse things happen when the people themselves forget this. And that's what we seem to be in danger of, when Obama supporters start treating him like a man who can do no wrong, a man that none of us should criticize. We rightly criticize coservatives for taking this same attitude toward palapable fools, but the atttitude itself is fust as flawed when directed toward far superior men.

And that's where Lynodon Johnson comes it. You see, the Vietnam War was such a terrible event in our history, such a long, drawn-out, bloody crime, that it's difficult for most people to remember all the other things that Lyndon Johnson did-the things that, unlike the Vietnam War, he actually believed in. In order to really understand how bad the Vietnam War was, morally and political for our nation, you have to appreciate how good Lyndon Johnson really was. He was, in terms of his domestic record, the second greatest President of the 20th Century-second only to FDR. Part of his greatness was born of his own intentions, and part of it came from his openness to others.
I planned this diary yesterday afternoon, and then, in the evening, Bill Moyers made it immensely easier by talking precisely about the incident I was going to focus on, and how Johnson got there-that is, LBJ's speech introducing the Voting Rights Act, in which he took up the Civil Rights Movement's rallying cry, and said, on behalf of the entire nation, "We Shall Overcome."

Taking advantage of this fortuitous coincidence, I'll let Bill Moyers-who was a White House staffer at the time-carry the ball, striking a near-perfect balance:

BILL MOYERS:... Many many years ago, I was a young White House Assistant, when President Johnson at first wanted Martin Luther King to call off the marching, demonstrations, and protests. The civil rights movement had met massive resistance in the south, and the south, because of the seniority system, controlled congress, making it virtually impossible for congress to enact laws giving full citizenship to black Americans, no matter how desperate their lives. LBJ worried that the mounting demonstrations were hardening white resistance.
He had been the master of the Senate, the great persuader, who could twist your arm with such flair and flattery you thought he was actually doing you a favor by wrenching it from its socket. He reckoned that with a little time he could twist enough arms in Congress to end, or neutralize, the power of die-hard racists - all of them, including some of his old mentors, white supremacists who threatened to bring the government, if not the country, to its knees before they would see blacks eat at the same restaurants, go to the same schools, drink from the same fountains, and live in the same neighborhoods as whites.
As the pressure intensified on each side, Johnson wanted King to wait a little longer and give him a chance to bring Congress around by hook or crook. But Martin Luther King said his people had already waited too long. He talked about the murders and lynchings, the churches set on fire, children brutalized, the law defied, men and women humiliated, their lives exhausted, their hearts broken. LBJ listened, as intently as I ever saw him listen. He listened, and then he put his hand on Martin Luther King's shoulder, and said, in effect: "OK. You go out there Dr. King and keep doing what you're doing, and make it possible for me to do the right thing." Lyndon Johnson was no racist but he had not been a civil rights hero, either. Now, as president, he came down on the side of civil disobedience, believing it might quicken America's conscience until the cry for justice became irresistible, enabling him to turn Congress. So King marched and Johnson maneuvered and Congress folded.
NEWS COVERAGE: President Johnson calls for all Americans to back what he calls a turning point in history.
BILL MOYERS: The Civil Rights Act of 1964 ended segregation in public places.
MARCHERS: "We shall overcome...
BILL MOYERS: But they weren't done. King kept on marching, this time for the right to vote, and once again Johnson kept his word, and did the right thing. As one of his young assistants, I stood on the floor of the House that ides of March when morality and politics converged, and watched the faces of congress transfixed...mesmerized... knowing they were riding the surf of history as the president of the United States enlisted all of us in the cause.
LYNDON JOHNSON: It's all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.
BILL MOYERS: As he finished, Congress stood and thunderous applause shook the chamber. Johnson would soon sign into law the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and black people were no longer second class citizens. Martin Luther King had marched and preached and witnessed for this day. Countless ordinary people had put their bodies on the line for it, been berated, bullied and beaten, only to rise, organize and struggle on, against the dogs and guns, the bias and burning crosses. Take nothing from them; their courage is their legacy. But take nothing from the president who once had seen the light but dimly, as through a dark glass - and now did the right thing. Lyndon Johnson threw the full weight of his office on the side of justice. Of course the movement had come first, watered by the blood of so many, championed bravely now by the preacher turned prophet who would himself soon be martyred. But there is no inevitability to history, someone has to seize and turn it. With these words at the right moment - "we shall overcome" - Lyndon Johnson transcended race and color, and history, too - reminding us that a president matters, and so do we.

This was Johnson's-and America's-finest hour, and it's the true measure of classical Greek tragedy that it should be all but forgotten due to how differently Johnson reacted to the issue of the Vietnam War-a war he did not believe, but that he felt he had to fight, or risk losing the political power to accomplish anything else, or even, possibly, risk beng impeached. Because it should not be forgotten, I'd like to quote some passages from Johnson speech, which was given shortly after the first Selma-to-Montgomery march had been stopped by a bloody police riot at the Edmond Pettis Bridge-an event known as "Bloody Sunday."

One week later, before the third, and ultimately successful march was held, Johnson gave the following speech-in effect letting the marchers know that they had already won over the nation.

Johnson said, in part:

I speak tonight for the dignity of man and the destiny of Democracy. I urge every member of both parties, Americans of all religions and of all colors, from every section of this country, to join me in that cause.
At times, history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man's unending search for freedom. So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama. There, long suffering men and women peacefully protested the denial of their rights as Americans. Many of them were brutally assaulted. One good man--a man of God--was killed.
There is no cause for pride in what has happened in Selma. There is no cause for self-satisfaction in the long denial of equal rights of millions of Americans. But there is cause for hope and for faith in our Democracy in what is happening here tonight. For the cries of pain and the hymns and protests of oppressed people have summoned into convocation all the majesty of this great government--the government of the greatest nation on earth. Our mission is at once the oldest and the most basic of this country--to right wrong, to do justice, to serve man. In our time we have come to live with the moments of great crises. Our lives have been marked with debate about great issues, issues of war and peace, issues of prosperity and depression.
But rarely in any time does an issue lay bare the secret heart of America itself. Rarely are we met with a challenge, not to our growth or abundance, or our welfare or our security, but rather to the values and the purposes and the meaning of our beloved nation. The issue of equal rights for American Negroes is such an issue. And should we defeat every enemy, and should we double our wealth and conquer the stars, and still be unequal to this issue, then we will have failed as a people and as a nation. For, with a country as with a person, "what is a man profited if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?"
There is no Negro problem. There is no Southern problem. There is no Northern problem. There is only an American problem.
And we are met here tonight as Americans--not as Democrats or Republicans; we're met here as Americans to solve that problem. This was the first nation in the history of the world to be founded with a purpose.
The great phrases of that purpose still sound in every American heart, North and South: "All men are created equal." "Government by consent of the governed." "Give me liberty or give me death." And those are not just clever words, and those are not just empty theories. In their name Americans have fought and died for two centuries and tonight around the world they stand there as guardians of our liberty risking their lives. Those words are promised to every citizen that he shall share in the dignity of man. This dignity cannot be found in a man's possessions. It cannot be found in his power or in his position. It really rests on his right to be treated as a man equal in opportunity to all others. It says that he shall share in freedom. He shall choose his leaders, educate his children, provide for his family according to his ability and his merits as a human being.
To apply any other test, to deny a man his hopes because of his color or race or his religion or the place of his birth is not only to do injustice, it is to deny Americans and to dishonor the dead who gave their lives for American freedom. Our fathers believed that if this noble view of the rights of man was to flourish it must be rooted in democracy. This most basic right of all was the right to choose your own leaders. The history of this country in large measure is the history of expansion of the right to all of our people.
Many of the issues of civil rights are very complex and most difficult. But about this there can and should be no argument: every American citizen must have an equal right to vote....
The Constitution says that no person shall be kept from voting because of his race or his color.
We have all sworn an oath before God to support and to defend that Constitution. We must now act in obedience to that oath. Wednesday, I will send to Congress a law designed to eliminate illegal barriers to the right to vote. The broad principles of that bill will be in the hands of the Democratic and Republican leaders tomorrow....
This bill will strike down restrictions to voting in all elections, federal, state and local, which have been used to deny Negroes the right to vote....
The command of the Constitution is plain. There is no moral issue. It is wrong--deadly wrong--to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote in this country.
There is no issue of state's rights or national rights. There is only the struggle for human rights. I have not the slightest doubt what will be your answer....
But even if we pass this bill the battle will not be over. What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and state of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life. Their cause must be our cause too. Because it's not just Negroes, but really it's all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.
And we shall overcome....

I remember hearing that speech as a young teenager. It was one of the few times-indeed, perhaps the only time-when a President's speech has moved me to tears. First, it sent shivers down my spine. Then, it moved me to tears. I have no doubt that Lyndon Johnson was a great man and a great President, in part because of that speech, and the legislation that followed from it. But classic Greek tragedies only befall great men, and within a couple of years, I would be one of those who marched against the Vietnam War, and chanted, among other things, "Hey! Hey! LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?" I regret chanting that, not because it was wrong. I regret chanting that, because it was necessary in response to a great man who had lost his way.

As a result, I shall always deem it necessary to speak out and criticize our leaders, and do so sooner rather than later. It is a dire mistake to "give our leaders the benefit of the doubt," when silence betrays our own conscience, and potentially paves the way for enormous folly. This is, if anything, all the more true for a leader who is "one of our own." I have never felt the degree of respect for a President that I felt for Johnson after that speech, and after he signed the Voting Rights Act that that speech introduced. And I have never felt more betrayed by a President, either, after he dug in his heels on Vietnam.

So, with that past in mind, please be assured that whatever criticism I have today, of Barack Obama or any other Democratic leader, is only a pale echo of the criticism I had of LBJ. They have, after all, not fallen nearly so far. They have never come close to his heights. I may never be able to change that. But I will do everything in my power to prevent them from falling to his depths.

That is my simple duty as a citizen of the United States.

Racial Bargainers Are A REAL Bargain-Shelby Steele on Bill Moyers Journal

Paul Rosenberg — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 18:23:17 GMT

Black conservative Shelby Steele appeared on Bill Moyers Journal last night. Moyers, though demonized by the right like everyone to the left of Attila the Hun, has a long history of engaging with various conservatives, and treating them with far more dignity and intellectual respect then they deserve. It's one of the ways in which liberals repeatedly get themselves into trouble, and last night was no exception.

Steele's main conceit of the night was his schema of bargainers vs. challengers-a schema that makes perfect sense within the limited schema of conservative thought, in which there is no such thing as social responsibility, only "personal responsibility," which always seems to be deployed downward: like Leona Helmsly famously said about taxes, it's for "little people." All of this is to say that there's some truth in what Steele has to say-but it's not quite the truth he imagines it to be.

From the transcript:

SHELBY STEELE: .... I think that the black community in general has been very conflicted about Barack Obama. Precisely because he's been so successful among whites. And that makes black people nervous.
BILL MOYERS: Yeah. You say in here, white people like Barack Obama a little too much for the comfort of many blacks.
SHELBY STEELE: Yes. Yes.
BILL MOYERS: Why?
SHELBY STEELE: Well, the black American identity, certainly black American politics are grounded in what I call challenging. It's basically, they look at white America and say we're going to presume that you're a racist until you prove otherwise. The whole concept is you keep whites on the hook. You keep the leverage. You keep the pressure. Here's a guy who's what I call a bargainer who's giving whites the benefit of the doubt.

I work with a young black man. He's our managing editor. Like all young black men, he knows what you do when the police pull you over. "Assume the position." It's so routine, most blacks don't even bother talking to whites about it. But, it does give folks a good reason to presume that white America as a whole is still racist. Steele, like all conservatives, engages in a blurring strategy between the individual and the group. The purpose of the post is to engage in a bit of strategic unblurring.

The interview continues:

BILL MOYERS: Give me a simple definition of what you call a bargainer. And a simple definition of what you call a challenger.
SHELBY STEELE: A bargainer is a black who enters the American, the white American mainstream by saying to whites in effect, in some code form, I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt. I'm not going to rub the shame of American history in your face if you will not hold my race against me. Whites then respond with enormous gratitude. And bargainers are usually extremely popular people. Oprah Winfrey, Bill Cosby, Sidney Poitier back in the Sixties and so forth. Because they give whites this benefit of the doubt. That you can be with these people and not feel that you're going to be charged with racism at any instant. And so they tend to be very successful, very popular.
Challengers on the other hand say, I presume that you, this institution, this society, is racist until it proves otherwise by giving me some concrete form of racial preference.
BILL MOYERS: Affirmative action.
SHELBY STEELE: Affirmative action. Diversity programs. Opportunities of one kind or another. And so, there is a much more concrete bargaining on the case of challengers. And you go into any American institution today and they're all used to dealing with challengers. They all have a whole system of things that they can give to challengers, who then will offer absolution.

[Snarky aside:

quid

pro quo

loves

Note how directly Steele blurs the individual and the instutional: Bargainers put individual whites at ease, "Challengers on the other hand say, I presume that you, this institution, this society, is racist until it proves otherwise by giving me some concrete form of racial preference."

But why is a critical attitude toward white institutions perceived as an attack on white individuals? Why can't whites say, "Yes, that's unfair?" Why do they have to feel responsible for something they had no part in creating? Conservatives often complain that blacks are blaming white people today for historical grievances that today's whites had no part in. But an institutional critique is not an attack on individual whites. The confusion here does not come from blacks seeking equitable treatment, it comes from whites with confused loyalties-and from conservatives who do their darnedest to keep folks confused.

In part, this is done because they can't help themselves. This goes back to Robert Kegan's schema of cognitive development, in which each successive stage takes as object (those aspects/configurations of self and world that it can act on consciously) that which was formerly subject (the subconscious background/context used to apprehend what is object). Here, again, is the table showing how this works through a succession of levels:

Kegan's Subject/Object Schema of Cognitive Development
Stage	We Are: Subject (structure of knowing)	We Have: Object (content of knowing)	Underlying Structure
1	Perceptions SOCIAL PERCEPTIONS Impulses	Movement Sensation
2	Concrete POINT OF VIEW Enduring Dispositions	Perceptions SOCIAL PERCEPTIONS Impulses
3 Traditionalism	Abstractions MUTUALITY/ INTERPERSONALISM Relationship Inner states	Concrete POINT OF VIEW Enduring Dispositions Needs, Peferences
4 Modernism	Abstract Systems INSTITUTION Relationship-Regulating Forms Self-authorship	Abstractions MUTUALITY/ INTERPERSONALISM Relationship Inner states Subjectivity Self-consciousness
5 Post- Modernism	Dialectical INTER- INSTITUTIONAL Self-transformation	Abstract Systems Ideology INSTITUTION Relationship-Regulating Forms Self-authorship Self-regulation Self-formation

Conservatives confuse individual and social/individual criticism for a very simle reason: conservatism is the natural philosophy of level 3, the level at which the individual subject is defined by its social roles and relationships. The capacity to stand outside these roles and relationships, to take them as object, and alter them, if necessary, does not emerge until level 4. This capacity is the same capacity to alter marriage, for example. It was employed in the past to alter marriage from primarily a material, familial alliance to a romantic, individual one-a move that conservatives staunchly opposed at the time. In the same way, it is being employed today to alter marriage from being solely a heterosexual alliance to being one defined irresepective of sexual orientation.

Thus, there is a consistent inadequacy of conservative thought that is built into it at the fundamental cognitive level. Unable to separate the individual from the group, multiple confusions ensue, while vital critical distinctions simply make no sense, because they lack the critical distance needed to see them.

However, it is important to realize that not all conservatives are at level 3. Many are not. But their political philosophy is locked in at that level-at a maximum. In fact, their politics often devolves to level 2 or lower. When they conceive of people in terms of their fixed, immutable nature, this is a form of "durable category" which is characteristic of level 2. I do not believe that Steele is necessarily functioning at level 3 in his everyday life. But his political commitments bind himself to seeing the world in terms that only make sense conditioned by the limits of level 3.

And so it is that Steele speaks in terms of "absolution":

you go into any American institution today and they're all used to dealing with challengers. They all have a whole system of things that they can give to challengers, who then will offer absolution.

This personalized language and approach to talking about public policy is a further indication of level 3 thinking. There are no larger universal principles involved. (Level 3 thinkers are capable of thinking in terms of abstractions-but not abstract systems.) There are only individual acts of accusation, absolution, challenging, bargaining, etc. This is a profoundly trivialized view of public policy. Indeed, it is all of one piece with the white conservatives who refer to civil rights leaders as "race hustlers.' Shelby Steele is more genteel than that. He calls them "challengers" instead. But he thinks of them in the same sort of limited framework that cannot systematically organize principles into a larger coherent framework. He can invoke abstract principles, such as justice, but he cannot reason about them in a systematic fashion, because doing so requires level 4 thinking. At level 3, abstract principles are a given, embedded in the same subjective, unexaminable context that the self itself is embedded in and constructed out of.

Next let's skip back to near the beginning. Here we see why Steele migh have been a good novelist. Novelists, after all, can do just fine writing exclusively on level 3, and they can express profound insights on that level. (You can even have profound insights on level 2: the Linean system of classifying all living things is one such example. The Periodic Table of Elements is another.)

BILL MOYERS: But you go on to say why he can't win. Now, that would seem to suggest you don't think he can become President.
SHELBY STEELE: My gut feeling is that he's going to have a difficulty-- a difficult time doing that. The reason I think that we don't yet know him. We don't yet quite know. What his deep abiding convictions are. And he seems to have, you know, almost in a sense kept them concealed. And a part of the I think infatuation with Obama is because he's something of an invisible man. He's a kind of a projection screen. And you sort of see more your - the better side of yourself when you look at Obama than you see actually Barack Obama.
BILL MOYERS: You say in here that his supporters want him not to do something, but to be something.
SHELBY STEELE: Yes.
BILL MOYERS: To represent something. What do you think they want him to be?
SHELBY STEELE: I think to be very blunt about it, in a lot of that support is a desire for convergence of a black skin with the United States Presidency, with power on that level - the idea is that to have a black in that office leading a largely white country would be redemptive for America.
BILL MOYERS: Redemptive?
SHELBY STEELE: Redemptive. Would take us a long way. Would indicate that we truly have moved away from that shameful racist past that we had.
BILL MOYERS: That's perfectly logical isn't it?
SHELBY STEELE: Yes, it is.
BILL MOYERS: And desirable. You seem to--
SHELBY STEELE: I want it.

However, such yearning for symbolic redemption has a very different meaning if it does not change the lives of ordinary people. This is a major lesson of South Africa, where the ruling black majority has adapted itself to the international neo-liberal order, and kept the vast majority of its voting base in abject poverty. There is severe discontent with this arrangement, and a dissident populist leader has just been elected to head the African National Congress. It requires a level 4 conseciousness to properly appreciate the symbolic redemption along with its limits and contradictions. This is what the great 19th century social novelists possessed in abundance, They wrote almost exclusively at level 3, while thinking at level 4. It was the juxtaposition of diverse level 3 stories that revealed underlying contradictions and conveyed a level 4 view of the world to people normally incapable of seeing the world that way. It was, in prose, analogous to the Renaissance discovery of perspective in drawing. Steele may well possess a level 4 consciousness, but it cannot be expressed in his level 3 ideology. Still, his level 3 insight is profoundly right, so far as it goes.

There is, of course, a tragic undertone when he speaks of Obama as "an invisible man." One cannot hear this phrase, even casually, without conjuring up Ralph Ellison's novel, particularly its beginning:

I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allen Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids--and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination indeed, everything except me.

To have a black man become President, and yet still, in some sense, be Ellison's protagonist....

This is not just an idle speculation on my part, as will be seen below.

But first, we need to leaven Steele's insight with his profound stupidity-and, sadly, Bill Moyers' willingness to join in with him. Picking up at the tail end of a passage quoted earlier:

SHELBY STEELE: Affirmative action. Diversity programs. Opportunities of one kind or another. And so, there is a much more concrete bargaining on the case of challengers. And you go into any American institution today and they're all used to dealing with challengers. They all have a whole system of things that they can give to challengers, who then will offer absolution.
BILL MOYERS: And what are the--
SHELBY STEELE: Then we'll say this institution is vetted now. It's not racist anymore.

Oh, really???

BILL MOYERS: One of the worst things that can happen to you in this country is to be charged with being racially biased.

Oh, really???

SHELBY STEELE: Yes.
BILL MOYERS: Racial stigma.
SHELBY STEELE: You never get over it. On your obituary, it'll be the first line. And there's almost no redemption. The good side of that is it makes the point of how intense this society is in its desire to overcome racism and its past.

Oh, really??? Then why the fuck did the Supreme Court just reverse Brown v. Board of Education???

BILL MOYERS: Yes.

Oh, my bad!

SHELBY STEELE: So it's a good thing on the other hand. On the other hand, the bad side of it is that it has become a form of cruelty. And all you're doing is terrifying whites. I wrote in the last book, WHITE GUILT. Whites live under now, we've underestimated the power of this. Whites live under now this threat of being stigmatized as race. Our institutions live under this threat of being stigmatized as racist and they're almost panicked over it. What makes me sad there is then whites look at what happened to Don Imus. And now, they're never going to tell me what they really feel.

So, we've moved on from black thugs terrifying whites (even though most crime occurs between members of the same race) to blacks in general terrifying whites with the threat of being called racist. Because, of course, all whites identify with Don Imus, they sit around all day with their friends talking in non-stop racial stereotypes, that's just how white folks are. (Is there any race Steele doesn't insult?)

Whites know never tell blacks what you really think and what you really feel because you risk being seen as a racist.

If you're Don-fucking-Imus!

And the result of that is that to a degree, we as blacks live in a bubble. Nobody tells us the truth.

Don Imus tells the truth???

Nobody tells us what they would do if they were in our situation. Nobody really helps us. They use us. They buy their own innocence with us. But they never tell us the truth. And we need to be told the truth very often.

So, Don Imus was helping black folks?

Yeah, that's the ticket!

You know, America is a great society, a great country. Has all sorts-- the values have gotten us to this place where we are the world's greatest society in many ways. Well, those values, yes, we had a history of terrible racism. But those same values will work for blacks. They will help us join the mainstream, become a part of it. But whites can't say that because then they seem to be judgmental. They're seen as racist. And so, no one says it to us.

Are we talking "no one" as in Don Imus? Or "no one" as in every single conservative blowhard in the known universe??? [Hmmmm. Rush Limbaugh as "Invisible Man." Who knew?]

This is where Bill Moyers Journal suffers grievously in comparison with Showtime at the Apollo. Shelby Steele has been onstage looooong after he should have been yanked.

After all, as I noted in my last diary, the racial wealth gap means that middle class blacks, who have done everything right, learned all those lessons, gone to college, gotten degrees and professional jobs, are still living a marginal existence in America, especially compared to whites who are making the exact same income.

But, then, magically, he veers back to his singular insight, talking about bargainers again:

BILL MOYERS: So you can understand though, why some whites would look to Obama as a redeemer from that--
SHELBY STEELE: They think that Obama is a way out of all of that. That he will bring an American redemption. And whites are very happy for that bargain and show gratitude and even affection for bargainers. Oprah Winfrey is the classic bargainer who has also a kind of magic about her that I think again reflects the aspirations of white America.
BILL MOYERS: But she never challenges white America.
SHELBY STEELE: No. She--
BILL MOYERS: She's successful in part because she makes us.
SHELBY STEELE: She makes you feel that this aspiration is possible. That-- it's-- real. White American women love Oprah. Love Oprah. And so, she makes them feel that way.
BILL MOYERS: Bill Cosby did that with his--
SHELBY STEELE: Bill Cosby did that.
BILL MOYERS: Cliff Huxtable.
SHELBY STEELE: Yeah.
BILL MOYERS: Remember? The--
SHELBY STEELE: But he made a big mistake, Bill Cosby.
BILL MOYERS: What?
SHELBY STEELE: He finally in the last few years has one of the iron clad rules for bargainers is they can never tell you what they actually think and feel. They can never reveal their deep abiding convictions. Because the minute they do that, they're no longer an empty projection screen. They become an individual. And whites begin to say, well, I didn't know you felt that way. I didn't know you believed that. And the aura dissipates. If Barack Obama starts to say, you know, I really think there's a value to racial preferences even though it conflicts with equality under the law, people are, you know, that that's a little too-- that's a little too revealing of who he might really be.

Of course, even with so-called "racial preferences" the ones who can't "equality under the law" are B-L-A-C-K, but we take that sort of conservative canard for granted from the likes of Steele. But look what's he's just said: a bargainer can't be a person! He can't have his own ideas! He can't be an individual!

And here the whole standard conservative line is the black masses lead by racial hustlers versus the enlightened, independent, individual blacks, learning the lessons of America... "America is a great society, a great country. Has all sorts-- the values have gotten us to this place where we are the world's greatest society.... those same values will work for blacks. They will help us join the mainstream, become a part of it." But now Steele is admitting that the would-be alternative for blacks is to disappear! To not be an individual at all! To be invisible!

Not just my words. It's where Steele himself is headed:

BILL MOYERS: So you're saying he can not serve the aspirations of one race without antagonizing the other?
SHELBY STEELE: That's right. That's right. They're two different agendas. And so his answer, this is the answer of all bargainers in a sense is to remain invisible as much as possible.
BILL MOYERS: What do you mean invisible? Because he's all over television.
SHELBY STEELE: He's all over television. But if you listen to his -- speeches 'change,' 'hope.' I mean, it's a kind of-- it's an empty mantra. I mean a surprising degree of emptiness, of lack of specificity. What change? Change from what to what? What direction do you want to take the country? What do you mean by hope? There's never any specificity there because specificity is dangerous to a bargainer.
BILL MOYERS: But, to be a successful politician in a presidential campaign in particular you have to engage a larger public. That's why so many politicians use ambiguity.
SHELBY STEELE: In Obama's case, there's more ambiguity. We have a pretty good idea. I mean, Hillary Clinton does the same thing, uses ambiguity. But we still have a pretty good idea of who she really is and what she wants to do with the country and so forth. John Edwards has probably got the straightest, most concrete message of any of them. We really know who he is. But Obama is still more invisible. We don't quite-- we don't know what he would do.

Which, of course, is the problem I've had all along with Obama.

Now, maybe, just maybe, Obama really does have a very good idea who he is, and what he's going to do. But if even the benighted level 3 Shelby Steele can make the Obama/Ellison connection, it really is time that we seriously faced that reality, and asked ourselves, what can we do about it?

Because it wasn't Ellison's narrator who made himself invisible. It was everyone else.