Monday, March 28, 2011

Emails show steps considered to punish Dems who fled state

SCOTT BAUER | Associated Press

Everything from taking away computers to denying a year of service in the state retirement system was considered to punish the 14 Wisconsin Senate Democrats who fled to Illinois for three weeks to block passage of a bill taking away union bargaining rights, newly released emails show.

Members of Republican Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald's staff bounced ideas off one another and the Legislature's attorneys for days about how to pressure the Democrats to return and penalize them, according to records released Wednesday by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

The watchdog group obtained the emails from Fitzgerald's office under Wisconsin's open records law.

The emails show that Fitzgerald's staff members were as worried about the public relations campaign as they were actually figuring out a way to get the Democrats to come back.

"I would just be somewhat cautious in whatever we do so that it doesn't end up creating sympathy for the Dems," Tad Ottman, a Fitzgerald aide, wrote to his chief of staff John Hogan on Feb. 20. "The more directly we can tie whatever action we take to what they are doing the better it will be."

Democrats left the state on Feb. 17 to deny quorum in the Senate and block passage of Gov. Scott Walker's bill that took away all collective bargaining rights, except over salary, for Wisconsin's public employees.

Their departure helped fuel protests in opposition to the bill that grew to more than 75,000 people. Senate Republicans finally used a maneuver to pass the bill without the Democrats present on March 9, a move now being challenged in court. Democrats returned after the bill passed.

Senate Republicans approved a number of sanctions during their absence, most notably voting to find the missing Democrats in contempt and ordering police to compel them to return. The emails show that Fitzgerald's staff knew the state constitution barred them from actually arresting the senators other than for committing a crime or acts of treason.

"It now seems that monetary penalties and removal of privileges may be our only recourse," Fitzgerald legislative aide Rob Richard wrote on Feb. 20, citing the constitutional prohibition on arrest.

The Senate voted on March 3 to find the Democrats in contempt and ordered the sergeant at arms to use police force to compel the senators to return. Fitzgerald said at the time that while the action was technically not an arrest, under Senate rules police could force absent members to return.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics has filed a complaint with the state Government Accountability Board, arguing that Fitzgerald should be sanctioned for earlier sending state patrol officers out to look for the missing senators.

The group said the emails show that Fitzgerald knew the senators could not be arrested when he sent the troopers out.

A spokeswoman for Fitzgerald did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Fitzgerald said after the bill passed that the Senate would no longer seek to impose any of the penalties it approved, including $100 a day fines, taking away parking spaces and restricting access to Capitol copying machines.

The emails show there was a lot of discussion with legislative attorneys about how to legally impose fines on the missing senators and other steps that could be taken against them and their staff.

"I say we not only make it hurt for them, we have to make it hurt for their staff as well," Richard wrote on Feb. 20.

One idea Ottman suggested in a Feb. 20 email was cutting the size of each Democratic senator's staff by one person "since one person from each of their office is failing to show up for work (the Senator)."

That idea and several others, like reducing or taking away per diem payments and denying a year's service in the retirement system, were not pursued. Richard pointed out in the same Feb. 20 email that taking away a year of retirement service would likely engender a court fight.

The emails also show there were discussions about what would happen if the Democrats returned unexpectedly. Fitzgerald's chief of staff Hogan asked the Senate chief clerk in a Feb. 21 email what would happen if a Democrats showed up in the Capitol but not on the floor of the Senate.

"Then I assume we compel them back to the chamber via Ted/Trooper/TV cameras," Hogan wrote, referring to sergeant at arms Ted Blazell. "We should just be ready with a precedure in case it happens."

http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/govt-and-politics/article_f459f88e-557a-11e0-9e5e-001cc4c002e0.html

Who’s Bashing Teachers and Public Schools and What Can We Do About It?

Published on Monday, March 28, 2011 by Rethinking Schools
by Stan Karp

The short answer to this question is that far too many people are bashing teachers and public schools, and we need to give them more homework, because very few of them know what they’re talking about. And a few need some serious detention.

But the longer answer is that the bashing is coming from different places for different reasons. And to respond effectively to the very real attacks that our schools, our profession, and our communities face, it’s important to pay attention to these differences.

The parent who’s angry at the public school system because it’s not successfully educating his/her children is not the same as the billionaire with no education experience who couldn’t survive in a classroom for two days, but who has made privatizing education policy a hobby, and who has the resources to do so because the country’s financial and tax systems are broken.

The educators who start a community-based charter school so they can create a collaborative school culture are not the same as the hedge fund managers who invest in charter schools because they see an opportunity to turn a profit or because they want to privatize one of the last public institutions we have left.

The well-meaning college grad who joins a Teach for America program out of an altruistic impulse is not the same as the corporate managers who want to use market reforms to create a less expensive, less secure, and less experienced teaching force.

And the hard-pressed taxpayer who directs frustration at teachers struggling to hang on to their health insurance or pensions—which far too few people have at all—is not coming from the same place as those responsible for the obscene economic inequality that is squeezing both.

In my home state of New Jersey, there’s a man named David Tepper who manages the Appaloosa Hedge Fund. Last year, Tepper made $4 billion as a hedge fund manager. This was equal to the salaries of 60 percent of the state’s teachers, who educate 850,000 students. But Gov. Christie rolled back a millionaire’s tax and cut $1 billion out of the state school budget, so people like Tepper would have lower taxes. It’s not only impossible to sustain a successful public school system with such policies, it’s also impossible to sustain anything resembling a democracy for very long.

What’s at Stake

I’ve spent a large part of my adult life criticizing the flawed institutions and policies of public education as a teacher, an education activist, and a policy advocate. But these days I find myself spending a lot of time defending the very idea of public education against those who say, sometimes literally, it should be blown up. Because the increasingly polarized national debate around education policy is not just about whether teachers feel the sting of public criticism or whether school budgets suffer another round of budget cuts in a society that has its priorities seriously upside down.

It’s really not even about the hot-button reform issues like merit pay or charter schools. What’s ultimately at stake is more basic. It’s whether the right to a free public education for all children is going to survive as a fundamental democratic promise in our society, and whether the schools and districts needed to provide it are going to survive as public institutions, collectively owned and democratically managed—however imperfectly—by all of us as citizens. Or will they be privatized and commercialized by the corporate interests that increasingly dominate all aspects of our society?

The corporate reformers’ larger goal, to borrow a phrase from the Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), a political lobby financed by hedge fund millionaires that is a chief architect of the current campaign, is to “burst the dam” that has historically protected public education and its $600 billion annual expenditures from unchecked commercial exploitation and privatization.

This is not some secret conspiracy. It’s a multisided political campaign funded by wealthy financial interests like hedge fund superstar Whitney Tilson and rich private foundations like Gates, Broad, and Walton. And it’s important to keep this big picture in mind, even as we talk about specifics like merit pay and charters, because these issues are the dynamite charges being put in place to burst the dam.

What is really new and alarming are the large strides that those promoting business models and market reforms have made in attaching their agenda to the urgent need of poor communities who have, in too many cases, been badly served by the current system.

The narrative of public education as a systematic failure has been fed in recent years by the shifting of federal policy away from its historic role as a promoter of access and equity in public education through support for things like school integration, extra funding for high-poverty schools, and services for students with special needs, to a much less equitable set of federal mandates around testing, closing schools, firing school staff, and distributing federal funds through competitive grants to “winners” at the expense of “losers.” Taken together these policies, embodied first in NCLB and now in a “Race Over the Cliff,” have helped create an impression of public education as a failure that is steadily eroding the common ground it needs to survive.

Democrats have been playing tag team with Republicans to build on the test-and-punish approach. Just how much this bipartisan consensus has solidified came home to me when I picked up my local paper one morning and saw Gov. Christie, the most anti-public education governor New Jersey has ever had, quoted as saying, “This is an incredibly special moment in American history, where you have Republicans in New Jersey agreeing with a Democratic president on how to get reform.”

Under NCLB this bipartisan consensus used test scores to move decisions about teaching and learning away from classrooms, schools, and districts to state and federal bureaucracies. Test score gaps have been used to label schools as failures without providing the resources and strategies needed to eliminate the gaps.

Today a deepening corporate/foundation/political alliance is using this same test-based accountability to drill down further into the fabric of public education to close schools, transform the teaching profession, and increase the authority of mayors and managers while decreasing the power of educators.

What we’re facing is a policy environment where bad ideas nurtured for years in conservative think tanks and private foundations have taken root in Congress, the White House, and the federal education department, and are now aligned with powerful national and state campaigns fueled with unprecedented amounts of public and private dollars.

Unless we change direction, the combined impact of these proposals will do for public schooling what market reform has done for housing, health care, and the economy: produce fabulous profits for a few and unequal access and outcomes for the many.

The corporate/foundation crowd has successfully captured the media label as “education reformers.” If you support charters, merit pay, and control of school policy by corporate managers you’re a reformer. If you support increased school funding, collective bargaining, and control of school policy by educators, you’re a defender of the status quo. This is hardly a surprise in a media culture that allows FOX News to call itself “fair and balanced,” but it does make intelligent debate about education policy more difficult.

Confronting Poverty

This is particularly true when it comes to the way the issue of poverty is being framed.

One lesson I’ve learned over the years is that school power comes in many pieces. And these pieces, large or small, can be used to promote social justice. Not only on big issues like funding equity or federal and state policy, but also daily inside our classrooms in the choices we make in our teaching, assessment, and curriculum practices; in the relations between our schools and the communities they serve; and in the way our unions advocate for the needs and rights of our students and families along with our own interests as teachers.

Serving schools with high numbers of students in poverty is no excuse for bad teaching, poor curriculum, massive dropout rates, or year after year of lousy school outcomes. We need accountability systems that put pressure on schools to respond effectively to the communities they serve. In my experience, parents are the key to creating that pressure, and teachers are the key to implementing the changes needed to address it. Finding ways to promote a kind of collaborative tension and partnership between these groups is one of the keys to school improvement.

But the idea that schools alone can make up for the inequality and poverty that exist all around them has increasingly become part of the “no excuses” drumbeat used to impose reforms that have no record of success as school improvement strategies. In fact, many are not educational strategies at all, but political strategies designed to bring market reform to public education. We used to hear that the “single most important school-based factor” in student achievement was the quality of the teacher. Now even the school-based qualification is being left out. Instead we’re hearing absurd claims about how super-teachers can eliminate achievement gaps in two or three years with scripted curricula handed down from above, and how the real problem in schools is not the country’s shameful 23 percent child poverty rate or underfunded schools. Instead, it’s bad teachers.

Now it’s absolutely true that effective teachers and good schools can make an enormous difference in the life chances of children. And it’s also true that struggling teachers who don’t improve after they’ve been given support and opportunities to do so need to go manage hedge funds or do some other less important work.

But when it comes to student achievement—and especially the narrow kind of culturally slanted pseudo-achievement captured by standardized test scores—there is no evidence that the test score gaps you read about constantly in the papers can be traced to bad teaching, and there is overwhelming evidence that they closely reflect the inequalities of race, class, and opportunity that follow students to school.

Teachers count a lot. But reality counts, too, and “reformers” who discount the impact of poverty are actually the ones making excuses for their failure to make poverty reduction and adequate and equitable school funding a central part of school improvement efforts. The federal government has put more effort into pressing states to tie individual teacher compensation to test scores and eliminate caps on charter schools than encouraging them to distribute more fairly the $600 billion they spend annually on K-12 education.

Instead, at a time when corporate profits and economic inequality are at their highest levels in the history of the country, the U.S. secretary of education says that schools must get used to the “new normal” and do more with less. For Arne Duncan and Bill Gates, cutting education budgets is not a problem, it’s an opportunity. They are now traveling the country proposing that schools save money by increasing class sizes, ending pay for teachers’ experience and advanced degrees, closing schools, and replacing real classrooms with virtual ones.

At the same time they want to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to create more tests based on the new common core standards and use those tests to implement merit pay plans.

No Value in ‘Value Added’

At this point spending more money on standardized tests to track academic achievement gaps is like passing out thermometers in a malaria epidemic. People need better health care, more hospitals, and better-trained doctors. They don’t need more thermometers.

There is no research that shows that paying teachers to raise test scores improves student achievement, raises graduation rates, increases college participation, narrows academic gaps, or produces any of the positive school outcomes that policy makers say they seek.

Test-based teacher evaluation systems have the potential to seriously damage the teaching profession. The National Academy of Sciences found 20 to 30 percent error rates in “value-added” ratings systems based on their own dubious premises. Teachers in the bottom group one year were often in the top group the next and vice versa. The same teachers measured by two different standardized tests produced completely inconsistent results. The basic assumptions of these testing systems are at odds with the way real schools actually work. Bending school practices to accommodate them could negatively affect everything from the way students are assigned to classes to the willingness of teachers to serve high-needs populations and the collaborative professional culture that good schools depend on for success. They would also require yet another massive increase in standardized testing to deal with the fact that less than 25 percent of teachers in most school systems teach math and language arts, which is what most states currently test.

When you add the practice now under way in cities like Los Angeles and New York of publishing these psychometric astrology ratings in the paper next to the names of individual teachers, you have a recipe for community chaos and educational tragedy.

These plans are not about helping schools develop better systems to support teacher effectiveness; they are obstacles to it. For example, in Maryland, the Montgomery County Education Association negotiated a professional growth system that included test scores as one part of an evaluation process that looks at student outcomes, classroom performance, professional responsibilities, advanced degrees, and other factors. The process requires all new teachers and teachers who’ve been identified as struggling to work with well-trained teacher coaches over a two-year period to improve their practice and results. The system has resulted in a significant increase in teacher quality, including decisions, jointly supported by the union and administration, to remove several hundred teachers from the classroom over a period of years. But last year Maryland won a Race to the Top grant that, under federal pressure, requires 50 percent of teacher evaluations to be based strictly on test scores. The grant threatens to destroy a successful system developed by collective bargaining that actually works to improve results for teachers and students.

The Changing Character of the Charter Movement

The last issue I want to discuss is charter schools. As you know if you’ve seen Waiting for “Superman,” charter schools are being hailed as a kind of new magic reform bullet.

Charter schools have an interesting history that has often been overlooked in the current debate. The first charter schools were initiated by Albert Shanker and the American Federation of Teachers in New York City in the late ’80s and ’90s. They were originally designed as teacher-run schools that would serve students who were struggling inside the regular system and would operate outside the reach of the administrative bureaucracy and the highly politicized school board. These first charters also drew on early rounds of small high school experiments initiated by teachers or community activists as alternatives to large comprehensive high schools. But, after a few years, Shanker became concerned that the charters and small schools were fragmenting the district, creating unequal tiers of schools serving different populations of students with unequal access, and also weakening the collective power of the teachers’ union to negotiate with the administration about districtwide concerns. So he pulled back at a time when there were still very few charters. Instead, he and other union leaders focused on the standards movement, which for them became the primary engine for reform.

But charters continued to grow slowly. Individual states, beginning with Minnesota, began to pass laws to promote the formation of charters, partly as a model of reform and partly as the construction of a parallel system outside the reach of both teachers’ unions and, in some cases, the federal and state requirements to serve and accept all students. And this charter movement gradually began to attract the interest of political and financial interests who saw the public school system as a socialist monopoly ripe for market reform.

In the past 10 years, the character of the charter school movement has changed dramatically from community-based, educator-initiated local efforts to create alternatives for a small number of students to nationally funded efforts by foundations, investors, and educational management companies to create a parallel, more privatized system.

Today there are about 5,000 charter schools in the United States that enroll about 4 percent of all students. Although charter laws are different in each state, in general charter schools are publicly funded but privately run. Few justify the hype they receive in Waiting for “Superman,” and those that do, like the schools featured in the film, are highly selective, privately subsidized schools that have very limited relevance for the public system. It’s like looking for models of public housing by studying luxury condo developments.

The most complete study of charter school performance, by Stanford University, found that only 17 percent of charter schools had better test scores than comparable public schools and more than twice as many did worse. And, unlike charter schools, traditional public schools accept all children, including much larger numbers of high-needs students and students without the heroic, supportive parents seen in the film. In most states charters do not face the same public accountability and transparency requirements that public schools do, which has led to serious problems of mismanagement, corruption, and profiteering.

Charter school teachers are, on average, younger, nonunionized, and less likely to hold state certification than teachers in traditional public schools. In other words: less expensive.

As many as one in four charter school teachers leaves every year, about double the turnover rate in traditional public schools. The odds of a teacher leaving the profession altogether are 130 percent higher at charters than traditional public schools, and much of this teacher attrition is related to dissatisfaction with working conditions.

Charter schools typically pay less and require longer hours. But charter school administrators often earn more than their school district counterparts. Geoffrey Canada of the Harlem Children’s Zone and Eva Moskowitz of the Harlem Success Academy, two schools featured in the film, are each paid close to half a million dollars.

This is not to deny the reform impulse that is a real part of the charter movement. Many times during my 30 years of teaching at my large dysfunctional high school in Paterson, I wanted to start my own school. And many of the issues that public school advocates like myself criticize in charters—like the tracking, creaming, and unequal resources—exist within the public system too. But public schools have federal, state, and district obligations that can be brought to bear. There are school boards, public budgets, public policies, and public officials to pressure and hold accountable in ways that privatized charters don’t allow. In post-Katrina New Orleans, where more than 60 percent of all students now attend unequal tiers of charter schools, there are students and parents who cannot find any schools to take them.

In too many places, charters function more like deregulated “enterprise zones” than models of reform, providing subsidized spaces for a few at the expense of the many. They drain resources, staff, and energy for innovation away from other district schools, often while creaming better prepared students and more committed parents. This is especially a problem in big city public systems that urgently need renewal and resources but are increasingly being left behind with the biggest challenges. Nowhere have charters produced a template for effective districtwide reform or equity.

No one questions the desire of parents to find the best options they can for their children. But at the level of state and federal education policy, charters can provide a reform cover for dismantling the public school system and an investment opportunity for those who see education as a business rather than a fundamental institution of democratic civic life. This doesn’t mean charter school teachers or parents are our enemies. On the contrary, we should be allies in fighting some of the counterproductive assessment, curriculum, and instructional practices raining down on all of us from above. We should find more and better ways to integrate charters into common systems of accountability and support. Where practices like greater autonomy over curriculum or freedom from bureaucratic regulations are valid, they should be extended to all schools.

But any strategy that promotes charter expansion at the expense of systemwide improvement and equity for all schools is a plan for privatization, not reform.

What Are We Fighting For?

It took well over a hundred years to create a public school system that, for all its flaws, provides a free education for all children as a legal right. It took campaigns against child labor, crusades for public taxation, struggles against fear and discrimination directed at immigrants, historic movements for civil rights against legally sanctioned separate and unequal schooling, movements for equal rights and educational access for women, and in more recent decades sustained drives for the rights of special education students, gay and lesbian students, bilingual students, and Native American students. These campaigns are all unfinished and the gains they’ve made are uneven and fragile. But they have made public schools one of the last places where an increasingly diverse and divided population still comes together for a common civic purpose.

But the system’s Achilles’ heel continues to be acute racial and class inequality, which in fact is the Achilles’ heel of the whole society.

Those who believe that business models and market reforms hold the key to solving educational problems have, as noted, made strides in attaching their agenda to the urgent need of communities that have been poorly served by the current system. But their agenda does not represent the real interests or the real desires of these communities:

* It does not include all children and all families.
* It does not include adequate, equitable, and sustainable funding.
* It does not include transparent public accountability.
* It does not include the supports and reforms that educators need to do their jobs well.
* It does not address the legacy or the current realities of race and class inequality that surround our schools every day.

Where we go from here, as advocates and activists for social justice, depends in part on our ability to reinvent and articulate this missing equity agenda and to build a reform movement that can provide effective, credible alternatives to the strategies that are currently being imposed from above.

Because, in the final analysis, what we need to reclaim is not just our schools, but our political process, our public policy-making machinery, and control over our economic and social future. In short, we don’t only need to fix our schools, we also need to fix our democracy.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/03/28-11

EXCLUSIVE: Radio Chain Dropping Beck Because His Rants Hurt Ratings

March 28, 2011 2:48 pm ET by Joe Strupp

A radio chain that dropped Glenn Beck from five of its stations since January did so, in part, because the show's content was hurting ratings, the company's president said Monday.

"He bounces around pretty radically, I thinkhe confuses people, they're not sure where he is coming from," said Rick Buckley,president of Buckley Radio of Greenwich, Conn., who spoke with Media Matters. "It can change day to day, hour to hour. Consistency is, I think, the path to success in broadcasting, in radio for sure, whether it be music or talk. Glenn is sort of all over the park from time to time."

Buckley spoke just days after his company announced it would pull Beck's show from four stations in Connecticut. -- WDRC-AM, WWCO-AM, WSNG-AM, and WMMW-AM. Those stations simulcast programming and will no longer air Beck's morning show, replacing it with two local personalities.

"Some of his direction has changed over the last year and a half,"Buckley said. "He is preaching a lot more than entertaining."

The move comes just months after WOR Radio, the chain's flagship station in New York, replaced Beck with a local host in January.

"In the last six months or so, he has tended to be more and more taking a religious point of view ... It didn't do well here in the east," Buckley said. "It has not gotten real traction. If you want a religious point of view, we've got plenty of religious stations. You can get it 24/7."

Buckley, whose father started the company in the 1950s, said
Beck's show had changed and taken on more of a religious tone since his August 2010 rally in Washington, D.C.

"There is no question I think he had a big change after his Washington conclave. Something hit him down there. His show changed after that," Buckley said. "In its basic elements that he had been doing for a long, long time. He got much more into the doomsday and a lot more talking of the religious aspects of people's lives and stuff like that. For us in New York and in Hartford, we just felt that a local program would be better."

In recent months, Beck's show has frequently veered into apocalyptic religiosity.

Asked about the WOR change, Buckley said he had expected Beck's ratings to improve in that market, but they did not after two years on the air.

"WOR ... we gave it a two-year shot, it just didn't seem to get traction, it didn't get the traction we thought it would, especially with all the publicity and P.R. he's had, you'd have thought it would be a runaway. It was going the other way," Buckley said. "I don't know whether he is a little off the reservation in trying to prove his point for the masses ... the listening audience."

Citing the WOR ratings in New York, Buckley said: "They weren't down, but they weren't up. We'd thought they'd go up. The other talk station in New York, WABC, had gone through a lot of changes and you would have thought consistency would have helped [Beck]. We'd have thought we'd see some movement, but we didn't see anything."

Beck's show will remain on one Buckley station, KNZR-AM in Bakersfield, Calif. The company owns 17 stations in three states.


http://mediamatters.org/blog/201103280021

Analysis: Spending would increase under Walker budget

By Jason Stein of the Journal Sentinel
March 28, 2011 11:34 a.m.

Madison — If new quasi-public agencies are included, Gov. Scott Walker's proposed budget would increase overall spending by 1% over two years rather than reduce it as the administration had said earlier this month.

A report released Monday by the non-partisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau showed the state would spend a proposed $64.1 billion in state and federal dollars over two years after including amounts that are being transferred to quasi-public authorities like the University of Wisconsin-Madison. That would amount to $609.5 million more over the 2011-'13 budget.

When Walker unveiled his budget proposal on March 1, he said it would cut spending of all dollars by more than $4 billion, or 6%. But those amounts didn't include spending cuts that simply amounted to transferring entities like UW-Madison and a new agency to replace the state Department of Commerce off the state's books.

Walker spokesman Cullen Werwie said that much of the new spending was to help eliminate a more than $3 billion deficit over two years that came from state bills being pushed off into the future as well fast-growing spending in areas such as health-care programs for the poor.

"We're trying to pay off the bills that were due in the past that were not accounted for," Werwie said.

The analysis showed that the number of positions in state government equivalent to full-time employees will drop by 1,200 after accounting for other positions that will be removed from the state's books but not eliminated.

Spending in just the state's main account would go up by $488.4 million, or 1.7%.

Under the proposal, the state would finish the two-year proposed budget on June 30, 2013, with tissue-thin financial reserves of $107.3 million in its main account to handle any unexpected problems. That's enough to run state government for about three days.

The governor's budget proposal also eliminates a provision in state law that requires state agencies to study the costs of outsourcing work worth more than $25,000 against the cost of having state workers handle it. The so-called cost-benefit analyses would be retained only for engineering services at the state Department of Transportation.

Former Gov. Jim Doyle, a Democrat, had also sought unsuccessfully to remove the provision, saying it limited flexibility for his administration. Werwie had no immediate comment.

Walker's proposal would also double the minimum amount needed to trigger competitive bids for state contracts from $25,000 to $50,000. It would also require the Department of Administration to maintain a list of banned contractors who have violated contracts with the state.


http://www.jsonline.com/news/statepolitics/118779749.html

GE Pays No Incomes Taxes and Now Wants Workers to Make Concessions

By Tara Lohan | Sourced from AlterNet
Posted at March 28, 2011, 1:19 pm

You've likely already read Lauren Kelley's piece from last week about how GE is milking the system like you've never seen before. The company made $14.2 billion, $5.1 billion of which came from the US, but, through some creative bookkeeping, GE paid no US taxes. That's right, none. And to make matters worse they actually claimed a $3.2 billion tax benefit. So, that means we owed them money!

Can this story get any worse?

Apparently, yes. Mike Elk reports, "After not paying any taxes and making huge profits, ThinkProgress has learned that General Electric is expected to ask its nearly 15,000 unionized employees in the United States to make major concessions."

Elk writes that GE is negotiating contracts with 14 unions representing 15,000 workers and the company is looking for these workers give up benefits.

Among the major concessions GE has signaled that it will ask of union workers is the elimination of a defined contribution benefit pension for new employees, a move the company has already implemented for its non-union salaried employees. Likewise, GE is signaling to the union that it will ask for the elimination of current health insurance plans in favor of lower quality health saving accounts, a move the company has already implemented for non-union salaried employees as well.

In addition, General Electric may ask some workers for a wage freeze.

Say what? Making billions, not paying taxes and then stiff-arming your workers?! GE is apparently shameless. But the workers aren't taking this -- "They have planned a rally that is expected to attract 10,000 workers from all over the country at the General Electric Locomotive Factory in Erie, PA on June 4th," writes Elk. Let's give them our support.



http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/542076/ge_pays_no_incomes_taxes_and_now_wants_workers_to_make_concessions/

A Social Experiment

by ~asmilingmalice


I wrote this on January 22, 2011. At first I wanted to keep this story between me and a few close friends, but in light of what has just recently happened at the Islamic Center of America, I feel that I have to share this story. This is no longer an issue on religion. This is outright discrimination and intolerance. If my story can inspire others, or at least affect someone on a personal level, then I've done all that I can do.


A Social Experiment

Yesterday, I went to the Islamic Center of America. I felt incredibly out of place, being a non-Muslim who wasn't wearing a hijab, and I was very nervous when stepping into the office. Out of respect, I did the best I could to hide my hair by pulling up my coat's hood. I went to the lady at the desk, greeted her with "assalamu alaikum," and she was very happy to answer my questions about the mosque and where to buy a hijab, among other things. She told me that I could observe the prayers, gave me an e-mail to a man who could give me a tour of the center, and told me how to properly wear the hijab. It was a surprisingly warm welcome and I felt pretty at ease.

After observing the service, I noticed a man was selling something in one of the hallways. I walked over there and saw a collection of jewelry and hijabs. I decided that if I were to come back, I should have more than just my coat's big hood. So I bought a pretty green hijab, then stepped into the lady's room to try it on. It's there I met Sona. She was 27-years-old and had converted to Islam a year ago. She helped me with the hijab, we exchanged numbers, and she told me that she would answer any questions I had about the religion, the culture, among other things.

After we parted ways, an idea occurred to me when I was driving home from the mosque. Back in high school, I wanted to do a social experiment for my Sociology class. My sister gave me the idea to wear a hijab out in public to see how people treated me. Back then, I didn't know where to find a hijab. Now that I had one, I thought I would give that experiment another shot. So I put on my new hijab and set out to three public places: a bookstore, the mall, and a restaurant.

The bookstore wasn't entirely unpleasant. There weren't too many people there to begin with, and because the ones there were absorbed in books, it explained why they didn't pay all that much attention to me. One of the ladies who worked there asked me if I needed any help and showed me where the bookstore kept the Qur'an. Overall it was pretty nice.

The mall and the restaurant were quite different.

I wrote this in my status on Facebook: Muslims put up with some of the worst customer service. I am not exaggerating when I say this.

When I stepped into that mall, I realized just how different this particular outing was going to be from others I've had in the past. The first store I walked into was Best Buy, but I visited every store in the mall at least once. No sooner did I step into Best Buy, I noticed how different things were. First of all, the person at the door didn't greet me like he did to other customers entering the store. I didn't think nothing of it at first, and instead I went over to look at the CDs and DVDs in the store. Usually when a customer is browsing the store, one of the employees will approach them and ask if they need any help finding something. This didn't happen once, not even when I made direct eye contact with an employee whom I went to school with. She didn't recognize me. I can't blame her for it, since my long hair was covered up, but I couldn't help but feel that all she saw was my hijab and not me, let alone a customer.

The salespeople at the mall were pretty much the same. There were only a select few who actually said more than one word to me. The employees would not welcome me into their stores. They wouldn't ask if I needed help. They wouldn't ask if I wanted to try on an outfit, even when I was holding it in my hands. They never said "We hope to see you again!" or "Have a nice day," when I left the store. Judging by this consistent reaction from salesperson to salesperson, I couldn't help but feel that they were glad to be rid of me and most definitely didn't hope to see me again. To make matters uncomfortably worse, in every store I went into, I noticed that the same security guard was there. From Spencer's to Borders, this security guard wasn't making it a secret that he was following me everywhere I went.

I want it noted that when I stepped into the mall, I was not wearing a burqa (Muslim clothing that covers all of the body and the face), a chador (Iranian clothing that covers the entire body) or a niqab (a veil that covers the hair and face which reveals only the eyes). In post-September 11th America, the clothing listed would understandably be considered suspicious in case of a burglary or a bomb threat. The clothing makes it difficult, if not impossible, to make a clear identification in case of those threats. Had I been wearing those, I would understand the neglectful salespeople and the security guard trailing me, but all I wore was a hijab. All I was covering was my hair.

I also want it noted that when I entered the mall, I was all smiles: I looked people in the eye and smiled at them. I waved to children. I was just as happy and as approachable as I would have been without the hijab. If I were to smile at someone's child without covering my hair, parents wouldn't get defensive over it and give me dirty looks. They would have smiled back at me. If I wasn't wearing my hijab and smiled at a person who was walking my way, they wouldn't turn their head away from me or refuse to make eye-contact. They would have smiled back. If I had walked into a JC Penny's, a Macy's, a Hot Topic, a Spencer's, or a Forever 21 without my hijab on, people wouldn't have ignored me and avoided me. They would have greeted me and jumped to assist me. If I wasn't wearing my hijab and walked around the mall, I wouldn't have a security guard following me into every store, because they probably would be hounding some other Muslim woman.

All I did was cover my hair. I didn't insult these people. I never did anything to these people. I didn't get into an argument with them, or threaten them, or cause any sort of trouble that would warrant this cold behavior, let alone the attention of a security guard. All I did was cover my hair.

However, I feel that the greatest display of outright discrimination took place at the restaurant. This was my former workplace and many of my ex-coworkers were still working there. None of them recognized me, and as soon as I walked into the restaurant, the hostess (a former co-worker who was looking me right in the face) looked positively stunned that a Muslim woman walked into the place. She didn't recognize me, but led me to a table. I took my seat and opened up the menu, but at the same time my eyes were scanning the area. This table was assigned to a waittress, but a waittress never came to me. Usually, after a person is seated, the waittress comes to the table immediately and asks you if you want a drink. I had to wait for at least five to ten minutes before the hostess returned and asked me if I wanted anything to drink.

None of the waittresses ever came to my table to take my order. None of them asked me if I wanted a refill for my water. None of them asked if I was doing alright or if I needed anything else. To make matters worse, it is expected of the waittresses to ask the customers these questions even if they are not waiting on them. Not one of these waittresses wanted to make eye contact with me, nor did they want to come by me.

It wasn't until I waved at one of my former managers that he even recognized me. It was then that my hostess recognized me. After I told her about everything that happened today, she looked positively shocked. I would hope that she recognized the same discrimination being carried out in this establishment as it did in the previous ones. If this is how the waittresses would treat a girl with just her hair covered, they would definitely treat an actual Muslim woman in this way.

When I was younger, I would hear how people truly felt about Native Americans. Since I look more like my mother and less like my father, these people would be more open about their opinions around me than they would have if my hair was black and my skin was darker. I still get defensive when something like this happens and I've always felt that it was discrimination. However, this was the very first time in my life that I have truly felt discriminated against. When people were talking about Native Americans, they weren't thinking of the white, blond haired woman with 1/4 Ojibwa in her. But when people were ignoring me, glaring at me, following me, denying me service, and weren't welcoming me into their stores or their restaurants, they did it to me. In their eyes, they knew exactly what I was and they didn't want anything to do with me. Even though I did nothing to them but smile.

If this is how we treat Muslims in this country, there will never be peace. There will never be an understanding between religions and cultures. If we shun them, ignore them, and make it blatantly obvious that we don't want them here, we are going against everything that this country is supposed to stand for. And if we carry this ideology that "we don't want them here," "we don't want you to come back here," and "it would be better if you just weren't here at all," how does that make us different from Al Queda, the Nazis, the Westboro Baptist Church, the Ku Klux Klan, or the many other various hate groups in the world? It is this ignorance and this thought process that leads to holocausts.

Look beyond the veil.

UPDATE:
A week after visiting the Islamic Center of America, a man was arrested for attempting to bomb it.

Only a few days ago, Florida Pastor Terry Jones traveled all the way to Dearborn, Michigan to burn a Qur'an infront of the Islamic Center of America.

This is the same pastor who wanted to burn hundreds of Qur'ans on September 11th.

I wanted to keep this story private. But I can't anymore. This is me. This is my experience. And I feel now, more than ever, that it's important to share this with all of you.


EDIT: First of all, thank you so much for the Daily Deviation. It is a tremendous honor.

Now, onto the real matter at hand. I of all people understand how it can be tons of fun to rile up people on the Internet, especially ones who have no respect at all for your opinion. However, I am going to have to draw a few lines because of this particular deviation.

First and foremost: I do not have a problem if you are going to criticize this work. You can tell me what I did wrong and what I could do in order to do better. Even if the criticism may be harsh or overly critical, I welcome it. I am a writer, and I will take what you have to say into consideration if it will help me improve.

HOWEVER, I will have no tolerance for hateful comments. As of right now, anybody who leaves hateful comments about the Muslim community will be marked as spam and the person will be blocked. If you disagree with the religion, I can respect that. What I CANNOT respect are comments on how the Muslims are all evil, hateful people BECAUSE of that religion. It is ignorant and it is not true. This also goes for the people who will leave comments that talk down upon others for being theists. If you want to be an athiest and don't want to believe in any religion, I'm not about to talk down upon you for your lifestyle, but I would like to think that YOU wouldn't want to enforce your beliefs upon others who believe differently. After all, it seems quite unpleasant when it happens to you.

That being said, thank you all for the positive feedback, for sharing your stories with me and for wanting to share my story with others. I have far too many comments to read all of them, but I am very thankful for the ones I've read.

Thank you all.


http://asmilingmalice.deviantart.com/art/A-Social-Experiment-202124891

Indiana Dems returning today as heroes

Monday, March 28, 2011


Teamsters rally for workers' rights in Indiana on March 10.

After 36 days in exile, Indiana's Democratic state representatives are coming back. Republican lawmakers agreed to abandon much of their anti-worker agenda. Right-to-work is dead in the Hoosier State, at least for now.

The Democrats, you'll recall, left to prevent a quorum so the Republican-dominated Legislature couldn't pass a host of anti-worker legislation.

According to Talking Points Memo, the deal looks like this (at least in part):
• Labor: Republicans have agreed to scrap the controversial right-to-work law that led the Democrats to shut things down back on Feb. 22. Republicans have also pledged not to pass a law making the state's existing ban on collective bargaining for state workers, created by (Gov. Mitch) Daniels executive order, permanent.
• Education: Daniels' signature policy agenda for this legislative session was a proposal to create a state-funded private school voucher system for low- and middle-income families. That plan will be curtailed considerably in the deal with House Republicans.
We understand the deal isn't perfect, but according to the head of the Democratic caucus, Rep. Patrick Bauer,
We've protected working people from a march to the minimum wage. We've protected collective bargaining rights for Hoosier workers and teachers. We've softened the blow to public schools and prevented a bill for private takeover of public schools. This timeout gave millions of Hoosiers a real voice in their state government.
The Indiana AFL-CIO tells us:
Today, these representatives are returning to Indianapolis to bring the fight to the General Assembly. Hundreds of working men and women will be gathering outside the Indiana Statehouse to thank these elected officials for their courageous stand for Indiana's working families.


Posted by Teamster Power

http://teamsternation.blogspot.com/2011/03/in-dems-returning-today-as-heroes.html

Why Dick Durbin is Right, and Peter King is Wrong

Posted on 28 March 2011 by Danios

Much has been said of the so-called “Muslim Radicalization” Congressional Hearings headed by Rep. Peter King: they were rightfully condemned as “un-American”, “discriminatory”, and “Islamophobic”.  These hearings unjustly singled out the Muslim-American community, an already embattled minority, and amounted to a modern-day witch hunt. King’s hearings will be included in the dark chapter of U.S. history alongside the McCarthy hearings and the internment of Japanese-Americans.

One courageous senator, Dick Durbin of Illinois, decided to take a heroic stand against these hearings, and responded by announcing that he would hold his own committee hearings on the civil rights of Muslim-Americans.  Many have understood this as a “check” or “counter-balance” to King’s hearings, and–considering the timing–it is not difficult to see the connection.  It seems fair to say that this was Sen. Durbin’s attempt to reach out to the Muslim-American community, as if to say: “I’m there for you.”

Naturally, the right-wing went absolutely bonkers when they heard of Durbin’s hearings.  The genocidal Pamela Geller, a sweetheart of conservatives, called Durbin a “useful idiot”, and more absurdly, a “dhimmi”.  (To Geller, any non-Muslim who doesn’t revile Islam is by definition a dhimmi.)  But more importantly, Rep. Peter King himself responded to Dick Durbin’s hearings.

King must have thought himself very witty for coming up with the following retort:

Why not have a hearing on everyone’s civil rights? Since they told me I should have my hearings on not just Muslim radicalization but radicalization in all communities, I would say why doesn’t the Senate have a hearing on everyone’s civil rights?

The New York Observer wrote a title entitled “King Turns the Tables on Durbin’s Muslim Hearings”.  But did he?  Even though King was no doubt beside himself for his cunning comeback, the reality is that his response was nothing but 100% Weak Sauce.  Here’s why:

(1) Yes, we–and many others–argued that if radicalization hearings were deemed to be necessary, then they ought to have been held about all communities, not just Muslims.  The reason we were opposed to making them “Muslim-only” was because this would be singling out, targeting, and demonizing one community.  Tell me, Mr. King, which community is singled out, targeted, or demonized by Durbin’s hearings about Muslim civil rights? Durbin’s hearings, unlike King’s anti-Muslim hearings, do not single out, target, or demonize any one community.  Therefore, King’s attempt at striking an equivalence fails miserably.

(2) We’d have absolutely no problem with holding hearings about the civil rights of all communities.  We’re liberals, and we love protecting civil rights.  We wouldn’t get our panties in a bunch like King did over his hearings not being able to single out one community in specific. But…

(3) …Since King already held the congressional hearings about Muslim radicalization–and not about radicalization in all communities–then it makes all the sense in the world to hold the civil rights hearings about Muslims.  This is, after all, a check and counter-balance to the anti-Muslim madness.  How about we hold congressional hearings on civil rights for all communities once King holds his hearings on radicalization of all communities–including the Irish-American community he comes from?

(4) King has tried turning the question around on us, but we can equally turn this around on him: if King had no problem holding Muslim-only hearings about radicalization, then he should have no problem holding Muslim-only hearings on civil rights, right?

King then tried to downplay the issue of Muslim civil rights, citing the FBI database:

King noted that the F.B.I.’s numbers show anti-Semitic attacks outnumbered instances of hate crimes against Muslims in the U.S. last year by about nine to one, and that attacks on Christians and Muslims were about equal. (Of course, Christians far outnumber Muslims in the U.S., and there are about three times as many Jews as Muslims.)

And yet, during his own hearings Rep. King ignored the FBI’s numbers about terrorism.  According to the official FBI database, only 6% of terrorist acts on U.S. soil from 1980-2005 were from Islamic extremists.  This was less than from Jewish extremists.  King is able to see that more anti-Semitic hate crimes occur than anti-Muslim hate crimes, but then becomes blind when it comes to the fact that more acts of Jewish terrorism have occurred than Islamic.  Latinos accounted for over 40% of terrorist attacks on U.S. soil: should we hold hearings against the Latino population?  (We shouldn’t give Republicans any ideas, since they would love to target Latinos.  Nothing scarier to a Republican than a gay Latino Muslim.)

Peter King’s attempt to downplay the assault on Muslim civil rights has echoed throughout the right wing blogosphere.  Said King:

I’m not trying to excuse it, I’m just saying in the overall context it’s sometimes more dangerous to be Jewish than Muslim.

These right wing nuts act as if civil rights begins and ends with hate crimes.  During the 1960′s, hate crimes were just one indicator of discrimination.  It is not the end-all be-all.  For example, job discrimination was a major issue for blacks (and continues to be so)…It is also a problem that Muslim-Americans face today: do you know how hard it is to get a job with the name Muhammad Ahmad Abdul Basit?  No wonder Pakistani-Americans often pose as Indians to get hired.

And is it Muslim-Americans or Jewish-Americans who face severe opposition to building houses of worship–not just a few blocks from Ground Zero but anywhere in the United States?  But amazingly, Peter King doesn’t hold this to be a form of prejudice (let me guess, it’s about parking!):

A press release from Durbin’s office cited “restrictions on mosque construction,” as an example of rising anti-Muslim sentiment, King denied that opposition to new mosques—including his fierce opposition to the so-called “Ground Zero mosque” in downtown Manhattan—should be considered an example of prejudice.

Of course, none of this “counts”.  All acts of terrorism by people of other religions “don’t count” and all acts of prejudice against Muslims “don’t count”.  Meanwhile, even a Muslim-American quietly farting in the corner of his room certainly counts (it is after all a biological weapon–and the fact that he did it silently is surely a form of “stealth jihad”).  This is similar to the arguments about the Quran and the Bible: everything violent in the Quran “counts” and everything violent in the Bible “doesn’t count”.

Aside from discrimination in the workplace and with regard to houses of worship, there are even more sinister breeches of Muslim civil rights during the War on of Terror.  The Patriot Act and other un-American legislation have eroded the civil rights of all Americans, but Muslims have been at the forefront.  Here are some civil rights that Muslim-Americans have lost recently: the right not to be the victim of warrantless wiretapping, the right not to be entrapped by law enforcement, the right not to be subject to illegal surveillance,  the right to habeas corpus, the right to be protected from illegal search and seizure, the right to an attorney, the right to face one’s accuser, the right not to be tortured, and the right not to be assassinated at the order of the president.

Most Americans could care less about these affronts to civil liberties so long as it is those Dark-Skinned Foreign-Looking Moozlems with Weird Sounding Names who bear the brunt of these un-American laws.  But that’s why a congressional hearing aimed at protecting the rights of Muslim civil rights would benefit all Americans: once this erosion of civil rights is given precedent (even if it be just against Muslims), it will be institutionalized and could be used against every single one of us.

http://www.loonwatch.com/2011/03/why-dick-durbin-is-right-and-peter-king-is-wrong/

Rolling Stone publishes graphic photos and videos from notorious Afghan ‘kill team’

By David Edwards
Monday, March 28th, 2011 -- 11:14 am

Warning: This report links to highly graphic and disturbing photos


Last week, the German magazine Der Spiegel was the first to publish three photographs from a group of drug-addled American soldiers who posed with innocent Afghans they had killed.

The Der Spiegel article [1] was disturbing enough, with blurred photos of several U.S. soldiers holding up the head of a dead Afghan, and another photo of two dead Afghan men posed together.

The 17 additional photos [2] published by Rolling Stone Sunday (without blurring out the faces of victims) took the horror to the next level.

The Rolling Stone article [3] accompanying the graphic photos is titled simply, "The Kill Team."

One photo shows soldiers from Joint Base Lewis-McChord's 5th Stryker Brigade following the military protocol and cutting off the clothes [4] of Gul Mudin, an Afghan farmer.

A smiling Cpl. Jeremy Morlock [5] and Pfc. Andrew Holmes [6] are also pictured breaking protocol by holding Mudin's head up by his hair, posing with him in subsequent photos.

Another photo [7] shows an Afghani that had been stabbed by "the kill team."

The magazine also noted that the Army may have been trying to suppress evidence of wrongdoing outside the 3rd Platoon. One photo [8] that may have been taken by another platoon shows two dead Afghan men bound together and placed alongside a road.

A sign around the neck [9] of one dead man reads: "TALIBAN ARE DEAD."

Army prosecutors insist that blame for the killings rests with Calvin Gibbs, a squad leader in 3rd Platoon. Morlock, along with five other soldiers, pleaded guilty last week to lesser crimes in exchange for their testimony.

Morlock has been sentenced [10] to 24 years in prison.

URL to article: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/03/28/rolling-stone-publishes-graphic-photos-and-videos-from-notorious-afghan-kill-team/

URLs in this post:

[1] Der Spiegel article: http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/fotostrecke-65976.html

[2] 17 additional photos: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/photos/the-kill-team-photos-20110327/0602176

[3] article: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-kill-team-20110327

[4] cutting off the clothes: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/photos/the-kill-team-photos-20110327/0742506

[5] Cpl. Jeremy Morlock: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/photos/the-kill-team-photos-20110327/0232760

[6] Pfc. Andrew Holmes: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/photos/the-kill-team-photos-20110327/0859078

[7] photo: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/photos/the-kill-team-photos-20110327/0834034

[8] photo: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/photos/the-kill-team-photos-20110327/0699404

[9] sign around the neck: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/photos/the-kill-team-photos-20110327/0520785

[10] has been sentenced: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/asia-pacific/us-soldier-sentenced-to-24-years-over-afghan-civilian-deaths/article1953340/

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/03/28/rolling-stone-publishes-graphic-photos-and-videos-from-notorious-afghan-kill-team/

Liberalism, Conservatism, and Insanity

Or

That’s The Stupidest Thing I’ve Heard In a Long Time

From the blog, Stonekettle Station
posted Friday, May 29, 2009

- even in the bastion of Neocon central, i.e. South Central Palinville, Alaska.


Saw this in Wasilla yesterday:

image

* Note: Clicking on the picture will take you to Jarbina.com where you can purchase a T-shirt with this phrase for $17.50. (Also note: the T-shirts are tight and form fitting, so if you’re built like the typical Neocon they’re going to make you look queer as Ted Haggard in a wet t-shirt man-boob contest. You should probably order a baggy XXXL. Think of the children. Just sayin’)

The bumper-sticker was affixed to the approved neoconmobile, a Ford pickup, complete with rust, a pit bull mix with spiked collar, beer cans, and gun rack – though the weapon in the rack appeared to be a Daisy BB rifle (Seriously, WTF is this? Alaskan Redneck Lite?). The bumper-sticker was prominently placed next to the requisite “Abortion is Murder,” “Marriage = 1 Man + 1 15-year old Cousin” (Ok, it might have said “1 Woman” there was dirt on it and I couldn’t quite make it out), “NObama," “McCain/Palin” and, as required by law in Wasilla, Alaska, the mandatory National Rifle Association sticker. The only thing missing was Jesus and a pregnant under-age local politician’s daughter.

Liberalism is a mental illness.

This phrase, of course, comes from the title of a book by ultra conservative font of verbal vomitus and host of radio talk show The Savage Nation, Michael Weiner, AKA Michael Savage (apparently conservative test audiences began hyperventilating uncontrollably and secretly visiting Castro Street bath houses when first exposed to The Weiner Nation, hence the nom de guerre). A self proclaimed combination of Plato, Henry Miller, Jack Kerouc, Moses, Jesus (yes, Jesus), and, um, Frankenstein, Weiner is nothing if not humble. The book ended up on the NYTimes Best Seller list, in the top ten no less, which just goes to show you that conservatives will buy books other than the bible and Guns & Ammo, as long as they are bound in vellum made from the warty skin of Charlton Heston’s massive scrotum and printed in bitter black inky tears collected from members of the Michigan Militia.

The book, Liberalism is a Mental Illness, doesn’t explain or provide proof or references from actual mental health experts on why liberals are certifiably nuts, Savage manages to aptly dodge that little burden of proof. Mostly the book is 272 pages of frothy spittle about why gays, the ACLU, feminists, immigrants, lawyers, liberals, the courts, and most especially the Goddamned Muslims should be imprisoned or worse. Sort of like a “bathroom reader”, Liberalism is a “bunker reader,” i.e. something neocons can toss off to in the root cellar by the flickering yellow light of their generators while clutching their AR-15’s in one hand and themselves in the other.

But it makes a catchy phrase, doesn’t it?

Liberalism is a mental illness.

Let’s review shall we?

Generally, liberalism divides basically into two categories, Cultural and Social.

In the US, Cultural Liberalism is a view of society that stresses the freedom of the individual. Generally people that are culturally liberal believe that:

- All religions, including none, should be tolerated, i.e. religious belief is a personal issue – providing that said religion does not infringe on personnel freedom (Liberals might “suffer a witch to live” for example, but not if she sacrifices neighborhood children on a pyre to the Earth Mother. However, liberals aren’t going to let Christians burn witches at the stake or press them into piecrust under large stones either).

- While all religions, including none, should be tolerated, religion itself has no business in government. Period. Religion is between individuals and their God, gods, or other such mojo. Government is an agreement between people, God has nothing to do with it – just the same as with legal contracts which are enforced by law, not the Divine. What’s the phrase? In God we trust, all others pay cash.

- They believe strongly in freedom of expression, and are opposed to censorship. For example, those of us in uniform used to say, “I don’t agree with what you said, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.” That, exactly that.

- They believe that family and marriage and sexual orientation should be left up to individuals and that no lifestyle is inherently better than another, again providing that said lifestyle does not harm individuals or involuntarily restrict personal freedom as defined by the affected individual him or herself.

(Holy crap! That sounds a lot like the, gasp, Constitution!)

Social Liberalism is a view of government that believes strongly in personal freedom, but acknowledges the reality that the majority of citizens cannot fully benefit from an advanced and crowded and expensive society without at least some assistance. That assistance being things like, oh, education, law enforcement, public services and safety, enforcement of human rights, welfare - no not Welfare, but rather that which could include medical, unemployment, retirement, and emergency services of some kind, not always and not all the time and not for “free” and not without restrictions, but there when you need it because if the strong do not help the weak what’s the point of society in the first place?

As a group, liberals tend to believe that:

- peace is better than conflict and that diplomacy is preferred over saber rattling and that national pride is not a reason for going to war.

- we are stewards of the Earth, not its owners, and that wantonly destroying the life-support system without replenishment is a bad idea, especially since it’s the only one we have.

- we have a moral obligation to take care of the less fortunate members of our community, society, and world – even if it means that we have to tax people to do it. Liberals tend to believe strongly that it is immoral for children of the richest nation in the world to starve to death or die from neglect or lack of care. And yes, many liberals believe that it might have been better if some of these kids hadn’t been born, or at least that their mothers should be the ones to make that choice.

- and that, here in America at least, we are capitalists, but like anything else capitalism must be regulated so that a tiny minority doesn’t end up with everything, including goods and power and money and services and education, to the determent of the majority (not that that’s ever happened, mind you. Lately), i.e. we are a civilization, not a mob.

There’s more, of course. Much more. Infinitely more, in infinite variation. But that’ll do in broad outline. And I’m obviously simplifying things drastically. It’s not that cut and dried, it never is. Liberals hardly share a unified vision and social compact, and in point of fact if there’s any group that liberals vehemently disagree with more than conservatives, it’s other liberals – such is the nature of individualism and personal freedom. Exhort people to think freely and differently, and they will.

Now, certainly, some extreme far left Liberals seem to hate the human race and would kill us all to save the bunnies. They are provably a tiny minority. These people are probably insane to some degree of obsessive maladaption.

Some far left Liberals are socialists and/or Marxists – even if they don’t realize it. Some of them believe that all wealth should belong to the state and the state should care for every citizen in equal measure from cradle to grave in some kind of idealized hippy utopian wet-dream. They don’t know or don’t care that wealth can be created, or seem to understand that wealth is not intrinsically evil in and of itself, nor is there anything noble or enlightening about poverty. They seem to think that eliminating wealth will somehow eliminate poverty, when just the opposite is demonstratively true – and in fact history shows repeatedly that when individual wealth is universally redistributed the result is not a universal middle class but rather universal poverty without the concentrated wealth to do anything more than maintain the slowly decaying status quo. These people ignore the lessons of history, specifically that socialism carried to extremes leads directly and inevitably and inexorably and without fail to tyranny and a complete loss of that individual freedom they value so much. These too are a minority. I don’t know that these people are insane per se, but a number of them are clearly deluded and engaged in self deception.

Some less far left Liberals seem to think that if we all just held hands and sang Kumbaya and gave Osama a pony all men would magically become brothers through the miraculous power of rock and roll and we’d all live in an endless Age of Aquarius like a worldwide Burning Man Festival. These people do not understand that no country would survive more than a day past the demise of its military. And they simply cannot seem to grasp that most people are bastard flavored bastards with bastard filling and little bastard sprinkles on top and without the constraints of society they would rapidly shed the thin veneer of civilization and slit your throat for the change in your pocket (What? You don’t believe me? Go visit any country in the current Horn of Africa, or the Congo, or Haiti of five years ago, or Cambodia of 30 years ago, or right here in America in the Watts Riots or Southern lynchings or the witch trials and get back to me. Go on, I’ll wait). These Liberals are also in the minority, some are clearly in need of help, most are just supremely ignorant – and a number are simply stoned and have been since the 60’s.

But the vast, vast majority of liberals are not afflicted with mental illness and I find it more than a little disingenuous and more than a little hypocritical, and more than a little mentally ill, that ultra-conservatives would label liberalism, all liberalism, as a mental defect.

Is desiring peace over war, diplomacy over conflict, life over death, a mental illness?

Or is the belief that killing people will solve your problems a sign of mental health? Shooting doctors to save children, using murder because you didn’t get your way in court, is that rational? Is beating a gay man to death because you believe a supposedly loving Son of God who spoke passionately of peace, love, and tolerance wants you to commit murder, is that sane? How about declaring war on false pretexts, knowing that the pretext is false? How about persisting in the rightness and righteousness of that war, despite having it abjectly demonstrated to you that the justification for it was a lie? How about the complete and total inability to admit error based on blind patriotism or the inability accept criticism or to perform critical and objective self analysis? Last time I checked denial and delusions of grandeur and the willingness to do violence without regard for the law were sure signs of mental illness.

Is the desire to understand others a mental illness?

Or is xenophobia a trait of the mentally stable? How about constant hatred, fear, and paranoia? Hatred of those that are different from you, fear of the unknown, paranoia that everyone is out to get you? How about basing your entire worldview on that hatred, fear, and paranoia? And persisting in that worldview even when it is shown to be abjectly false and utterly wrong – say like the belief that gay marriage somehow harms traditional marriages, despite all evidence to the contrary and in fact cannot be shown to have harmed children or destroyed American values (whatever those are) or in any way whatsoever to have impacted even one traditional marriage in the slightest fashion. And when confronted with this simple fact, actually concoct fictitious anecdotes and fabricated justifications solely in order to persist in this irrational hatred? The mental wards are full of dangerous nuts like this. What about blaming and hating and calling for the extermination of the people of a particular religion, because certain members of their belief system did you harm? Is genocide a sign of sanity? When Hitler and Stalin and Amin and Milosevic did it, we said they were crazy, but when conservatives such as Limbaugh and Coulter and the savage Weiner call for the extermination of Muslims that’s a sign of sanity? Why then not call for the extermination of Christians after Timothy McVeigh committed a heinous act of terrorism against Americans? No, that would be crazy, wouldn’t it?

Is the desire to know the world a mental illness? Is a thirst for understanding a mental illness? What about a belief in those things you can see, feel, and touch? The quest for knowledge? Is that a mental illness?

Or is mental health a belief, without a single shred of evidence, in angels and demons and fairies and invisible beings who live in the sky? Is mental health a denial of hundreds of years of scientific advancement - backed up and reinforced by multiple disciplines and error checking mechanisms – in order to maintain a persistent belief that the Earth is 6,000 years old because a book written by stone-aged sheep herders and translated and edited dozens of times is deemed to be the literal word of God and utterly infallible and utterly without human error and true in every regard despite numerous and glaringly obvious contractions and demonstrably false statements – such as the Earth is flat or that a man could live inside a whale or that two of every kind of animal lived within walking distance of Noah’s house. That is, of course, what sane people do, isn’t it?

Is the desire for personal freedom a form of mental illness? Were our ancestors, those men and women who fought against tyranny, who forged this country, who spoke passionately of law and liberty and justice for all, who wrote the Constitution – were they mad?

Or does the rational mind believe that doing evil is acceptable, as long as you mean well? Is torturing another human being something that sane people do? Is torture something that sane people want their government, or their military, or their nation to do? Are sane people proud when their government tortures humans beings, creates secret prisons, and disappears people? Truly, is that what sane people think? How about the failure to see the contradiction in claiming to be for smaller government, and yet being responsible for the single largest increase in government growth since the founding of the country including a massive new internal secret security apparatus? How about claiming to be fiscally responsible while driving up the single largest debt in history in order to prosecute a war started on false pretext – and then blaming the debt on somebody else? Is that sane? Are denial and shifting the blame and rationalization the marks of sanity?

Is a desire to protect the environment we all live in a form of mentally illness? Is making sure that our children - those same children certain conservatives are willing to kill for - have a world to grow up in a mental illness?

Or is wanton and rapacious consumption of resources without regard for the consequences the viewpoint of a rational and mature civilization? Do rational people go about systematically destroying their food supply and contaminating their drinking water? Do they? Do sane people regard demonstratively limited resources as bottomless and infinite and endless, and do nothing to plan for the future except party like it’s 1999? If an astronaut died because he deliberately fouled his suit, poisoned his air, and shit in his food supply would we say he was sane? But doing the same thing on a global scale is, right?

Is a desire to help others a sign of mental illness? Is it? Is compassion and a sense of justice mental illness?

Or is rationalizing poverty as the just station of the poor and thereby beyond our responsibility the sign of the perfectly functioning mind? Is killing to ensure children are born, and then claiming that you have no further responsibility for them rational? Is waving the flag and marching in parades and beating the ever living shit out of people for not being patriotic enough to suit you, but seeing nothing wrong with letting tens of thousands of Americas go without decent jobs or a living wage or adequate food or shelter or medical coverage or education sane? Is it?

Is a desire to see all citizens equal before society a hallmark of mental illness?

Or Is a fanatical belief that you are superior because of your race or sex or religion or income or station or car or home or looks or job or inheritance or the state you were born in or luck or overblown sense of entitlement make you sane? Does it? Is a sense of smug superiority a trait of sanity? Is a belief that your own shit doesn’t stink, that you can’t make mistakes, that you are marked for destiny, that you are God’s chosen one, and a belief that all others are inferior and consequently get what they deserve because of it – is a God Complex sanity? How about if you believe that you are “Plato, Henry Miller, Jack Kerouc, Moses, Jesus, and Frankenstein all rolled into one – but you’re too afraid to use your own name when you make that claim? Is that sanity?

If Liberalism is a mental illness, then Neo-Conservatism is the bugshit, barking at the moon, lead paint swilling, self mutilating, piss drinking, dirt eating, kidnapped by space aliens, playing with invisible friends, gibbering in the land of de Nile, born again shut in the closet and covered in your own shit, screaming wackaloon of mental disorders.

Liberalism is a mental illness, my ass.

In fact, just the opposite is true: attempting to resolve conflict without resorting to violence, promoting tolerance within broad and reasonable limits, seeking equality for all, protecting the world we live in so that we can go on living in it, and taking care of the weak and the less fortunate are the hallmarks of the mature and the rational and the healthy and the sane mind.

And in point of fact, these very things are the founding principles of nearly every mainstream religion, but most especially Christianity – Jesus was the ultimate Liberal. If you claim to be a Christian and you’re a NeoCon then you are a Goddamned hypocrite.

These are the founding principles of every major conservative service organization, from the Masons, to the Elk’s Lodge, to the Boy Scouts of America.

And these are the founding principles of the United States itself.

Liberalism is what sanity looks like.

No wonder Neocons don’t understand it.


http://www.stonekettle.com/2009/05/liberalism-conservatism-and-insanity.html

Tax Time? Not for Giant Corporations

Sanders Calls for Shared Sacrifice

BURLINGTON, Vt., March 27 - While hard working Americans fill out their income tax returns this tax season, General Electric and other giant profitable corporations are avoiding U.S. taxes altogether.

With Congress returning to Capitol Hill on Monday to debate steep spending cuts, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said the wealthiest Americans and most profitable corporations must do their share to help bring down our record-breaking deficit.

Sanders renewed his call for shared sacrifice after it was reported that General Electric and other major corporations paid no U.S. taxes after posting huge profits. Sanders said it is grossly unfair for congressional Republicans to propose major cuts to Head Start, Pell Grants, the Social Security Administration, nutrition grants for pregnant low-income women and the Environmental Protection Agency while ignoring the reality that some of the most profitable corporations pay nothing or almost nothing in federal income taxes.

Sanders compiled a list of some of some of the 10 worst corporate income tax avoiders.

1) Exxon Mobil made $19 billion in profits in 2009. Exxon not only paid no federal income taxes, it actually received a $156 million rebate from the IRS, according to its SEC filings.

2) Bank of America received a $1.9 billion tax refund from the IRS last year, although it made $4.4 billion in profits and received a bailout from the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department of nearly $1 trillion.

3) Over the past five years, while General Electric made $26 billion in profits in the United States, it received a $4.1 billion refund from the IRS.

4) Chevron received a $19 million refund from the IRS last year after it made $10 billion in profits in 2009.

5) Boeing, which received a $30 billion contract from the Pentagon to build 179 airborne tankers, got a $124 million refund from the IRS last year.

6) Valero Energy, the 25th largest company in America with $68 billion in sales last year received a $157 million tax refund check from the IRS and, over the past three years, it received a $134 million tax break from the oil and gas manufacturing tax deduction.

7) Goldman Sachs in 2008 only paid 1.1 percent of its income in taxes even though it earned a profit of $2.3 billion and received an almost $800 billion from the Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury Department.

8) Citigroup last year made more than $4 billion in profits but paid no federal income taxes. It received a $2.5 trillion bailout from the Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury.

9) ConocoPhillips, the fifth largest oil company in the United States, made $16 billion in profits from 2007 through 2009, but received $451 million in tax breaks through the oil and gas manufacturing deduction.

10) Over the past five years, Carnival Cruise Lines made more than $11 billion in profits, but its federal income tax rate during those years was just 1.1 percent.

Sanders has called for closing corporate tax loopholes and eliminating tax breaks for oil and gas companies. He also introduced legislation to impose a 5.4 percent surtax on millionaires that would yield up to $50 billion a year. The senator has said that spending cuts must be paired with new revenue so the federal budget is not balanced solely on the backs of working families.

"We have a deficit problem. It has to be addressed," Sanders said, "but it cannot be addressed on the backs of the sick, the elderly, the poor, young people, the most vulnerable in this country. The wealthiest people and the largest corporations in this country have got to contribute. We've got to talk about shared sacrifice."

http://blogs.suntimes.com/sweet/2011/03/ten_giant_us_companies_avoidin.html

Mainstream Coverage of WikiLeaks Has Fallen Far Short

Monday 28 March 2011
by: Andrew Kennis, t r u t h o u t | News Analysis

War crimes, which deliberately targeted and killed civilians; covert bribery and spying to undermine progress on global warming and to lessen opposition by poor countries the most afflicted by climate change; underreporting of thousands upon thousands of Iraqi and Afghan civilian casualties; US knowledge of and inaction against the torture of Egyptian and Iraqi detainees, as well as active support for the "extraordinary rendition" program; secretly authorized air strikes in Yemen and combat operations by special forces in Pakistan resulting in civilian deaths.

Four major leaks, which included one harrowing video and a trove of classified military documents released by the online whistleblowing site, WikiLeaks, revealed these troubling instances and much more. Secret internal communications and documents displayed actions that stood in stark contrast to past US public proclamations on important foreign policies.

Through interviews with Truthout, experts and members of the public interest community characterized news media coverage of WikiLeaks as being poor, inadequate and more akin to soap opera-ish tabloid coverage rather than serious journalism assessing revelations of US foreign policy abuses. When news coverage was more serious, a friendly frame of reference to successive US administrations was often used, with concerns about the standing of US diplomacy - not its revealed disregard for democratic values - taking front and center.

Unsurprisingly, reactions to WikiLeaks from the Obama administration officials have been rife with charges of "cyber-terrorism" and contradictory stances that the WikiLeaks' revelations did not contain anything new or important, but somehow also inflicted significant damage upon US diplomatic relationships.

Supporters of WikiLeaks also counter such claims by pointing to recent uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Jordan, Iran, Bahrain and Libya. With the toppling of Tunisia having first occurred, many pointed to it as having sparked the protests in Egypt, which also resulted in a historic resignation of yet another long-time US-backed dictator.

Simultaneously coinciding with protests in Tahrir Square, many revelations were published which detailed a long and sordid history of US support, knowledge of and involvement in the human rights violations systematically committed by the Mubarak regime it supported. US financial and diplomatic support for Egypt has been greater than that of any other nation in the world - with the exception of Israel - for decades.

Julian Assange himself did not shy away from drawing connections between the successful Tunisian uprising and WikiLeaks. Unsurprisingly, the State Department rejects such connections, as its lead spokesperson, P.J. Crowley, proclaimed simply in a Tweet from his feed: "Tunisia is not a Wiki revolution." What is not in doubt, however, is that the Tunisian protests preceded what has been described as a "rolling rebellion" throughout the region, and that the leaks were prominently published in an Arab-language, Lebanon-based newspaper.

Relevant questions should be raised about US news media coverage and its responsibility in delivering information to help the populace - both in the US and beyond - settle these controversial topics. What were the most important revelations published by WikiLeaks and their significance as a whole? How have the news media addressed these questions?

A detailed investigation by Truthout into news media coverage was undertaken to assess media coverage. All leading and major US-based press sources were reviewed, as well as coverage appearing on ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, CNN and MSNBC.

Analyses revealed that reporting generally fell sharply in line with stances taken by government officials, as most accounts deemed that WikiLeaks did not reveal anything new and was only important to the extent that it impacted administration priorities. US-based news media manifested greater interest in the details and intrigues behind sex allegations against Assange, as well as personalized accounts of him. More attention was also given toward what could be learned about non-US countries, as opposed to US policies and the stances of US diplomats.

Soap Opera Coverage

Peter Phillips, the founder of the media watchdog program Project Censored, described news media coverage on WikiLeaks as largely being that of a "soap opera." Phillips criticized coverage for prioritizing "sexual exposés and Julian Assange's trial," over that of more substantive issues related to WikiLeaks revelations. "What we're seeing in corporate America is managed news that is in closer cooperation with the Pentagon, State Department and the White House," bemoaned Phillips, "and cooperating with them on how they want it spun as opposed to reporting it in an independent fashion."

Leading coverage by the nation's most important news outlets, particularly that of The New York Times, which was the only US-based publication to be privy to the leaked documents before their public release by WikiLeaks, confirms these criticisms.

In the wake of the largest single leak of secret military documents on Iraq, The New York Times chose to lead with a long story on Assange, criticized as a "sleazy hit piece" by investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald. The author of the story drew the ire of readers to the point of subsequently remarking to Yahoo! News  that he had never previously "been the subject of such absolutely, relentless vituperation" during the course of his 35-year career at the Times. The personalized article resembled another New York Times front-page story, filed in the August wake of the publication of the Afghan War logs. The article focused on the personal intrigues and childhood development of Bradley Manning, describing him as a "geek" and the victim of being made fun of for being "gay."

In a long think piece published in The New York Times, its executive editor described relations between his publication and WikiLeaks as being "rocky" at various important points. Further, Assange himself was characterized as "arrogant, thin-skinned, conspiratorial and oddly credulous."

The New York Times was far from the only news outlet guilty of spilling a lot of ink on personalized accounts of Assange and related parties at the expense of more substantive coverage. Much news media attention was given by US-based outlets toward an arrest warrant issued for Assange, described as an "international manhunt" by NBC. Coverage offered up dramatic details and allusions to how, "Assange reportedly altered his appearance, dying his unmistakable white hair and uses encrypted cell phones to avoid being tracked" (NBC News, December 2).

Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst and regular columnist for ConsortiumNews.com, took issue with the often voiced media characterization that WikiLeaks' revelations are neither important nor novel: "I've been in Washington for 48 years and I have seen a lot of change. But this one sea change dwarfs all others in significance." However, McGovern also expressed disappointment at press coverage of the information released, stating: "Unfortunately though, we no longer have press that is independent enough to cover the most important parts of it."

Does McGovern's media characterization hold water when coverage is closely examined? Investigating US-press coverage on the most important revelations revealed a range between sparse to nonexistent reporting, coupled with news accounts which played down the significance of those leaks which most implicated US policy makers.

Egypt and WikiLeaks

WikiLeaks released a batch of diplomatic cables during the height of the protests in Egypt, mostly between January 31 and February 3. In the releases, diplomatic cables acknowledged a long history of US support for the Mubarak dictatorship despite its contempt for human rights.

Omar Suleiman, anointed vice president by Mubarak in the midst of the protests, was the point person in the "extraordinary rendition" program between Egypt and the CIA. Critics have dubbed the program "torture by proxy," as suspects of interest to the US were detained without charge and interrogated in Egypt. Cables termed the record of abuses stemming from this program, "most successful."

Other cables reveal awareness at the highest levels of the US government of an assortment of repressive measures undertaken by the Mubarak regime, all mentioned without objection and often noted with outright support. These include: systematic torture against suspected political opponents, described as "endemic" and "widespread"; intimidation, harassment and imprisonment of Egyptian bloggers; round-ups of suspects by police who hung them by their arms from ceilings for weeks on end; the monitoring and harassment of a plethora of non-governmental organizations; and impunity for state personnel undertaking torture and other abuses.

Criticism, much less discussion of these cables, was noticeably absent in US press coverage. In a rare instance of a mention even being made of the leaked cables, CNN's prime-time news program (6 PM EST, February 6) chose instead to feature Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) and an expert who went to lengths to justify continued US aid to the Mubarak regime during the height of the protests. Both anchor Don Lemon and reporter Chris Lawrence parroted such sentiments:

Lemon: Chris, cutting that funding really, it's not that easy, is it?

Lawrence: No, no, not at all. I mean, Don, $1 billion is one heck of a trump card, but to actually play it, that could push the US right out of the game. And you've got to remember, no matter what sort of civilian government eventually takes power in Egypt, it's a safe bet that the Egyptian military is going to be a major force in that country - and that's what this money is going directly for, the Egyptian military.

Along similar lines, instead of noting or criticizing the US refusal to use aid as a bargaining chip to lessen or eliminate human rights violations, The Washington Post dug deep into the cables in an attempt to find a few instances where officials claimed to have asked Mubarak to do as much. Instead of describing the most troublesome cables related to support and knowledge of systematic human rights violations, the Post merely noted in a back-page article, "US diplomats for years have been aware of Mubarak's views and Egypt's problems." Going farther, the Post reported a justification for such awareness, by noting the purported, "limited impact that US diplomacy can have on a country" (February 8).

"Collateral Murder"

The release of a leaked and encrypted video cracked by WikiLeaks and entitled "Collateral Murder" was arguably the most explosive single release that was ever published by the online-based outlet. Many point to the leak as being what put WikiLeaks "on the map."

In the video, several US soldiers were shown from their Apache helicopter to have callously gunned down Iraqi civilians and several Reuters journalists. The killings occurred in July 2007 during daytime hours in a Baghdad neighborhood.

The video release drew instant criticism from prominent whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, who stated at the time: "the killing of men who are lying on the ground in an operation where ground troops are approaching and perfectly capable of taking those people captive, but meanwhile you're murdering before the troops arrive. That's a violation of the laws of war and of course what the mainstream media have omitted from their stories is this context" (see min. 16:13 here).

No major US-based news outlet seriously explored the extent to which the video depicted war crimes. The most thorough US-based mainstream media coverage came from The New York Times, which nonetheless failed to mention "war crimes" in any of its three reports on the incident (two on April 7, "Airstrike Video Brings Attention to Whistle-Blower Site" and "For 2 Grieving Families, Video Reveals Grim Truth," and an April 6 piece, "Video Shows US Killing of Reuters Employees."

"Collateral Murder" attracted well over four million YouTube viewings at the time and now totals close to 11 million. However, not only was the context missing in much media coverage, even the actual killing in the video itself was not initially aired on CNN, nor was the attack on the rescue van, which killed the rescuers and critically injured several children reported (April 5). When a larger portion of the video was shown on the next day, it was only done so with a former general who had a long history of "explaining" away human rights violations, who did as much in this instance as well.

Nothing New or Important Except Impressive Diplomacy?

A subtle justification for news attention on inconsequential matters was offered by US-based news media through press claims that the actual WikiLeaks' revelations did not contain especially "new" or "important" information. Such descriptions, however, are disturbingly consistent with governmental positioning. Nevertheless, this was a common refrain in mainstream news media coverage.

The Associated Press (AP) wrote on November 29 that, "none of the disclosures appeared particularly explosive." Another AP piece quipped, "US, Canada are close allies. That's classified?" (December 9), while yet another parroted official concerns about a tarnished image, diplomatically speaking ("WikiLeaks has hurt US foreign relations," December 7).

In this vein, a number of news outlets, as the media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) went to lengths to document, went so far as to interpret the leaks as revealing desirable traits of US foreign policy making. Time published a piece ("WikiLeaks Shows the Skills of US Diplomats," December 2) which referred to WikiLeaks' revelations as being "actually quite reassuring about the way Washington - or at least the State Department - works." The Washington Post ran an article which claimed that the leaks show how, "US diplomats pursue pretty much the same goals in private as they do in public" (December 7). The New York Times described revelations about Obama's foreign policy approach and "American diplomacy" as being nothing short of "rather impressive" (December 5) and "admirable" (November 30).

Given these mainstream news media realities, it is perhaps unsurprising that on the other end of the media spectrum, some conservative-leaning foreign policy analysts have gone so far to suggest that the Obama administration may have leaked the cables themselves. In this vein, a columnist for The National Interest questioned whether WikiLeaks was, "a carefully orchestrated plot by the American government," because of how the leaks clearly "create a comforting feeling among the American public that officials aren't asleep at the switch."

Importance of Revelations in Iraq, and Afghan War Logs Diminished or Uncovered

One of the major revelations from the Iraq war logs, which totaled over 400,000 secret military documents, was that torture of Iraqi detainees received tacit authorization by US authorities. US news media once again failed to highlight culpability when it came to contextualizing what the cables revealed. Clear references to the possibility that war crimes were committed was marginalized in coverage or disregarded altogether. Of all major US-dailies, only The Los Angeles Times led its cover (October 23) with a feature on the US authorization of torture, also noting as much in a follow-up piece (October 24). Concerns by Amnesty International about war crimes were quoted, but only at the tail end of a front-page story. Aside from a vague reference in a Washington Post, back-page article (October 24), human rights representatives were otherwise shut out of most US news media coverage on this topic.

With the release of the war logs, WikiLeaks revealed about 15,000 unreported Iraqi civilian casualties as well as the Pentagon's knowledge of those casualties. The same knowledge of unreported civilian casualties was true in Afghanistan as well, as shown by the Afghan War Logs released on July 25. US news media failed to cover or emphasize these unreported casualties and their implication, which stood in stark contrast to European press coverage.

The unreported Iraqi civilian fatalities were positioned at the very last paragraph of a lead piece appearing in The Washington Post shortly after the release of the war logs (October 24). Similarly and as FAIR duly pointed out, civilian deaths were not mentioned in the lead article of The New York Times until the tenth paragraph, while a Guardian UK piece led with the problem. Still worse, FAIR showed how several outlets (CBS and Washington Post, July 27) mistakenly reported that only 195 deaths were revealed by the Afghan War Logs, as if the figure was a "ceiling" or comprehensive figure for all civilian deaths (in actuality, credible estimates pin the number at being no less than several thousand non-combatant deaths).

Unreported or Underreported: Secret Combat Operations in Yemen and Pakistan

Writing for the nonprofit and independent magazine, The Nation, investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill gave a devastating account (December 1, 2010), referencing revelations from CableGate, of how the US had actively collaborated with Pakistan to facilitate US Special Forces undertaking "offensive combat operations" in spite of having claimed otherwise to the press on several occasions (including one instance in which Scahill's own prior reporting was labeled "conspiratorial" by a Pentagon spokesperson).

The details of Scahill's scoop were not picked up by major US news media, which instead focused on the culpability at the Pakistani end of the spectrum, a common refrain in much WikiLeaks news coverage, as the actions of other countries captured much more ink than those of US leaders. Several stories noted how high-ranking Pakistan officials authorized drone strikes and lied to the Pakistani public about them (CNN, "WikiLeaks: Pakistan quietly approved drone attacks, US special units," December 1; Los Angeles Times, "Cables reveal US misgivings about Pakistan," December 3; Washington Post, "In cables from Pakistan, US struggles for Leverage," December 7), as opposed to focusing on how US officials lied to their own people.

While Pakistan was revealed to have secret US military combat operations, Yemen was revealed to have secretly authorized US airstrikes, also resulting in civilian deaths. President Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen was shown to have assured US officials that Yemeni forces would take credit for US military airstrikes and any related civilian deaths. As reported by Salon, the US has long (falsely) denied such arrangements, since exposed by WikiLeaks. Has US news media criticized this false posturing about US airstrikes undertaken secretly abroad?

The only article to have covered this story was an AP wire piece ("US: WikiLeaks has hurt US foreign relations," December 7) passed up by most news outlets. Even so, the piece itself did not mention the fact that dozens of civilians had died in the US airstrikes and instead, highlighted the concern that the released cable may have hurt US diplomatic relations (which, as already noted, was a very common refrain in US news coverage). Instead of quoting the human rights community and exploring the disturbing legal and human rights implications of such a revelation, major media outlets largely decided to forgo reporting the issue altogether. A long New York Times think piece (December 5) did make a passing mention of the then-secret and lied-about arrangement, but did so without raising any objections. This was the same piece that referred to how "American diplomacy looked rather impressive."

Revelations Concerning Dubious Climate Change "Diplomacy," Unreported

While coverage and exploration of possible war crimes revealed by WikiLeaks was sparse or nonexistent, there was a US news media blackout altogether on the issue of climate change and related revelations from "CableGate," which first started being released on November 30. Diplomatic cables clearly exposed how US diplomats worked behind the scenes dangling billion-dollar offers of financial aid to the countries most vulnerable to climate change, sending out diplomats on spy missions and isolating the president of the European Union and his efforts to bring about a more stringent accord against global warming. Through a detailed investigation of the issues raised by diplomatic cables (see here, here, and here), the Guardian elucidated this double dealing to an extent that no US news media outlet duplicated. In fact, no mainstream US news media outlet even reported the story.

This investigation, coupled with interviews of leading experts and critical analysts, reveals a laundry list of media failings: a soap opera accounting of Assange and overpersonalization of a substantive and serious story; systematic oversight or underreporting of the most serious revelations from WikiLeaks; a failure to explore the many possible war crimes revealed and the related duplicitous behavior of high-ranking public officials; and lastly, a heightened focus on the behavior of officials from other nations at the expense of a focus on US official culpability. A media performance along these lines, on what was arguably the most important news story of the year, presents troubling implications in terms of US mainstream media holding foreign policy makers accountable to the law and to the public they purport to represent.

*   *   *   *   *

The Ten Most Important Revelations of 2010, by WikiLeaks

The following is a list of the most important revelations by WikiLeaks, in terms of the severity of the revelation. Most US-based news media attention did not squarely focus on these revelations, much less the extent that US culpability was at play in relation to deeply flawed US foreign policy making.

1) Deliberate Civilian Killings, War Crimes

War crimes were revealed in an otherwise overlooked and underheralded video in April, providing Pentagon awareness coupled with a lack of action about a serious violation of the Geneva accords.

The Guardian UK, April 5, 2010: WikiLeaks reveals video showing US air crew shooting down Iraqi civilians; Footage of July 2007 attack made public as Pentagon identifies web site as threat to national security.

Video.

2) Underreporting of Iraqi and Afghan Civilian Casualties

Thousands upon thousands of unreported Iraqi civilian casualties were revealed, along with Pentagon knowledge about as much. To a lesser but nonetheless important degree, the same was the case with Afghan civilian casualties as well.

On Iraq: 

See here and here.

On Afghanistan:

See here.

3) US Bribed Countries and Surveilled Diplomats to Undermine Climate Change Talks

Environmentalists around the world have criticized the Copenhagen Accords for having been a watered down version of what is necessary in order to prevent climate change and global warming from continuing to take course and worsen. Diplomatic cables revealed that the US undermined opposition to US policies on climate change by undertaking strong-armed tactics including bribery and surveillance.

The Guardian, December 3, 2010: 

WikiLeaks cables reveal how US manipulated the climate accord; Embassy dispatches show America used spying, threats and promises of aid to get support for Copenhagen accord.

  • WikiLeaks cables: Cancún climate talks doomed to fail, says EU president.
  • Cancún climate change summit: Week one in pictures.

3) Iraq Torture Authorized

Torture authorization by the US for Iraqi authorities, as well as lists of secret torture sites, were revealed as were lies related to both matters.

The Guardian, October 22, 2010: 

Iraq war logs: secret files show how US ignored torture.

  • Massive leak reveals serial detainee abuse, 15,000 unknown civilian deaths in war.

See here and here.

4) Awareness of Illegality of Coup in Honduras

Embassy accounts revealing awareness of an illegal coup in Honduras were unearthed, despite official positions to the contrary of this accounting.

FAIR described the matter in the following terms: "The US ambassador to Honduras concluded that the 2009 removal of president Manuel Zelaya was indeed a coup, and that backers of this action provided no compelling evidence to support their legal claims (Robert Naiman, Just Foreign Policy, 11/29/10). Despite the conclusions reached in the cable, official US statements remained ambiguous. If the Obama administration had reached the same conclusion in public as was made in the cable, the outcome of the coup might have been very different."

Also, the Center for Constitutional Rights has a detailed legal analysis of this important revelation.

5) Task Force 373

The existence of a secret task force was officially confirmed and its operations was revealed to have resulted in dozens of civilian casualties and injuries, as opposed to successful "captures" or "kills" from a list of purported insurgents. Importantly, the task force was revealed to have been reporting directly to the White House.

Al Jazeera, October 2010, searching for accountability: As WikiLeaks prepares to release more documents on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, will greater accountability follow?

The Guardian, July 25, 2010: 

Afghanistan war logs: Task Force 373 - special forces hunting top Taliban; Previously hidden details of US-led unit sent to kill top insurgent targets are revealed for the first time.

6) Secret Special Forces Operations Inside Pakistan

The US's longest running military operation is its occupation of Afghanistan, the "long war" as many analysts and observers have come to call it. Diplomatic cables, however, pointed toward aggressive US military activities which continue to go largely unacknowledged. Pakistan is not only regularly subjected to drone attacks, it was revealed, but also to activities by US secret special force unites operating inside the country.

The Nation, Jeremy Scahill, "The (Not So) Secret (Anymore) US War in Pakistan."

7) Secret Air Strikes in Yemen Resulting in Civilian Deaths

While secret US forces are operating in Pakistan, secret airstrikes resulted in the deaths of a litany of civilians in Yemen. FAIR described the matter in the following terms, referencing an article run in Salon.com:

FAIR: "WikiLeaks coverage has often emphasized that Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh reassured US officials that he would claim US military airstrikes in his country were the work of Yemeni forces. But as Justin Elliot pointed out (Salon, 12/7/10), the United States has long denied carrying out airstrikes in the country at all. The secret attacks have killed scores of civilians."

Salon: "The Obama administration has secretly launched missile attacks on suspected terrorists in Yemen, with the Yemeni government taking responsibility and consistently lying about it. While the attacks have drawn relatively little public attention, dozens of civilians along with some suspected terrorists have reportedly been killed." Salon's account of the Yemen revelation is here. The January 2010 cable describing a meeting between Yemen's president and Gen. David Petraeus is here.

8) and 9) US Illegally Interferes With Spanish and German Judicial Systems

Judicial interference was revealed in the case of a Spanish journalist who was killed in Iraq, and also in the German legal system. FAIR described both matters, while referencing articles run in Harpers, El Pais (a Spain daily) and The New York Times, accordingly:

FAIR: "The US worked to obstruct Spanish government investigations into the killing of a Spanish journalist in Iraq by US forces, the use of Spanish airfields for the CIA's 'extraordinary rendition' program and torture of Spanish detainees at Guantánamo" (El Pais, 12/2/10; Scott Horton, Harpers.org, 12/1/10.

FAIR: "The US attempted to prevent German authorities from acting on arrest warrants against 13 CIA officers who were instrumental in the abduction and subsequent torture of German citizen Khaled El-Masri." (Scott Horton, Harpers.org, 11/29/10.; New York Times, 12/9/10.)

10) War Crime: Highway Rampage Revealed

A highway rampage by US soldiers in Afghanistan, full of civilian casualties and deaths to children and the elderly was revealed, including details that were lied about and suppressed.

The Guardian, July 26, 2010: 

Afghanistan war logs: How US marines sanitized record of bloodbath. War logs show how marines gave cleaned up accounts of incident in which they killed 19 civilians.

Al Jazeera, October 2010, searching for accountability: As WikiLeaks prepares to release more documents on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, will greater accountability follow?

2011 Cables Related to Tunisia, Egypt, Appear to Have Significant Impact

While these ten sets of revelations led 2010 in terms of the most important WikiLeaks releases, arguably the most important release WikiLeaks has ever published were cables related to Tunisia and Egypt. This is because of the subsequent impact, which supporters maintain the cables accomplished. Assange himself, told an Australian broadcaster, "It does seem to be the case that material that we published through a Lebanese newspaper was significantly influential to what happened in Tunisia ... [and] there's no doubt that Tunisia was THE example for Egypt, and Yemen and Jordan and all the protests that have happened there." (See here.)

Please note: Some of the WikiLeaks links may not always work due to the instability of their site. -TO/sg

http://www.truth-out.org/wikileaks-coverage68570