Citizen, Ink.

The New America Is Not About Identity Politics

Some interesting thoughts to chew on as we roll into 2013:

The prevailing narrative is that President Obama's re-election and hopes for long-term Democratic Party control are rooted in a demographic revolution, in which Hispanics, African-Americans and other nonwhite minorities are becoming the new American majority. This view is not wrong, but it is incomplete and misleading. 

The deeper narrative is economic, pointing to a socio-economic transformation in which majorities of all races depend increasingly on government protection and public investment. The two narratives, while they agree on the demographic statistics, have different policy implications, with the current interpretation of the demographic story belying the deeper change that both parties must make. 

via truth-out.org

10 Steps to Repair American Democracy

This article has an excerpt from Steven Hill's book, 10 Steps to Repair American Democracy. Here's the introduction to the conclusion of Hill's book. Check out the full article at the link below the excerpt:

In 2008, an economic crash of historic proportions shook the world. Without a politics that could rein in the economics, Wall Street honchos turned American banks and the financial system into their personal casinos that had to be bailed out by taxpayers. But that economic collapse was preceded by a long-standing political collapse. The U.S. political system had been captured by wealthy elites who gutted crucial regulations and oversight of the out-of-control financial system, and drained the wealth of the nation into fewer and fewer pockets. Today, American democracy finds itself plagued by out-of-control campaign spending, choiceless elections, paralyzed government, superficial debate, backward voter registration laws, a filibuster-gone-wild U.S. Senate, mindless media, untrustworthy voting equipment, even a partisan Supreme Court. In his new book, 10 Steps to Repair American Democracy: 2102 Election Edition, political reformer Steven Hill outlines a blueprint for renewing the American republic by enacting fundamental political and media reforms. In this excerpt, Hill concludes his book by presenting two alternative futures: a dystopia of post-democracy, if the U.S. continues along the current futile path; or a brighter future if fundamental reform is enacted, rescuing Americans from our nation's downward trajectory.

Read Hill's Conclusion at Truthout.

Prosperity, Not Austerity - In These Times

After playing a key role in President Obama’s re-election, the labor movement must pivot immediately to a new task: moving the president away from a potentially disastrous policy of “austerity economics” and toward a second-term adoption of more worker-friendly “prosperity economics.” In the weeks after the election, Obama will negotiate with the hard-right House Republicans about the looming threat of automatic across-the-board cuts.

Read more at www.inthesetimes.com

This article has an interesting link to Prosperity Economics: Building and Economy for All (pdf 1MB) by Jacob Haecker and Nate Lowentheil, who debunk austerity as a flawed strategy and argue for government investment in research, infrastructure, education, improved economic and environmental security for working families, constraints on corporate political power, and more widespread unionization.

Is Tennessee ready to re-enact the Civil War?

"Union sympathizers decry legislation"

NASHVILLE - About 200 union sympathizers waved signs and cheered Wednesday as speakers denounced Republican-sponsored legislation that would curb collective bargaining and political activities of public employee associations and unions.

Hmmm. I was really interested in the choice of words for this headline in a Knoxville, Tennessee newspaper. And check out this quote on the next line down:

"They have said that they introduced these bills because they believe that unions are an obstacle to progress," said Mary Mancini. "We're here today to state unequivocally that they are the obstacle to progress."

My interest in the use of "Union sympathizers" in Tennessee -- where citizens split within the state just as the South split with the North (Union) -- may need little explanation. The quote from Ms. Mancini is interesting because -- depending on where I as a reader hear the emphasis on "they" -- it's not clear if she is saying that it is unions or legislators that are an obstacle to progress.

I personally am a "union sympathizer" either way you look at it. I know some folks who participated in the rally, and, based on their politics, I would guess that Ms. Mancini thinks the legislators are the obstacle. If that's true, I agree with her  wholeheartedly.

I got really curious about all this because it is through media of all kinds that we often get clues that in essence read the more subtle energies swirling just below our collective consciousness. So my next step -- because I was not sure where the author might stand personally -- was to check out his archive.

Tom Humphrey is the Nashville Bureau Chief for the News-Sentinel. The first article I found was posted just a few days ago and was entitled State's rights nothing new in Nashville. In it, Humphrey notes that:

Declaration of support for states' rights dominated the 33rd General Assembly, which was controlled by Democrats and which is now officially off the record.

He then comments on the current session of the Tennessee Legislature:

Maybe such declarations are not dominating the 107th General Assembly, which is controlled by Republicans. But there is a lot of on-the-record support for assertions of independence from the federal government.

So maybe it's worth a brief look back into state government history as the nation moves toward the sesquicentennial of the Civil War. Not to suggest that history is repeating itself, for there are dramatic differences of degree and basis of the assertions.

And then he further discloses his interest in the subject:

Still, if you'll indulge a Tennessee history buff who spent a bit of time in amateurish research recently, including a brief visit to the Legislative Library, those differences on the states rights theme are worth noting.

The rest of the article was very helpful to me as Yankee transplant, as well as a psychoanalyst who loves psychohistory, and I recommend this and other articles by Humphrey to anyone interested in Tennessee politics.

For the final word on the observations and questions noted in this post so far, we'll just have to stand by and see what unfolds. By the looks of legislation introduced so far in Tennessee and elsewhere, I'm sure I'll be posting more on them. I will also be interested to see what comes up around the Civil War this year. Ever since I moved to Tennessee, it has been painfully obvious that there are traumatic leftovers yet to be healed. And I suspect that in the "union" question in Tennessee we might find several historical threads connecting it to  "states rights" "slavery" and other "Civil War" issues, at least here. (See in particular the article by Mike Papantonio linked below.)

For now, I'd like to throw out this idea out for further exploration:

Ideas and feelings that are unconscious or not-to-be-spoken nevertheless leave clues in everything we say and do -- individually or in the groups and ideologies with which we identify. From the point of view of psychoanalysis, history will repeat itself until we find and transform those core beliefs and identifications that keep us circling the drain instead of revitalizing our politics, our economy, our society, our Earth.

 

RELATED LINKS:

Mike Papantonio (23 September 2009) Why They Hate Their Emancipated President

Respected Civil War scholars have written mountains of books explaining that the driving force for that war was that an aristocracy wanted to perpetuate its slavery money machine. But it was different for the typical confederate soldier. Their war of "Northern Aggression" was ginned up more from a fear that their social status might fall to the point that there would be no class distinction between themselves and emancipated slaves.

Kirk Johnson (March 2010) States' Rights Rallying Cry for Lawmakers

Whether it’s correctly called a movement, a backlash or political theater, state declarations of their rights — or in some cases denunciations of federal authority, amounting to the same thing — are on a roll.

James Loewen (January 2011) Five myths about why the South seceded

One hundred and fifty years after the Civil War began, we're still fighting it -- or at least fighting over its history. I've polled thousands of high school history teachers and spoken about the war to audiences across the country, and there is little agreement even on why the South seceded. Was it over slavery? States' rights? Tariffs and taxes?

 

It's not too late to build real homeland security with a Department of Peace

Anything built on fear will have a shaky foundation for the rest of its life.

On September 10, 2001, there were two notable bills in Congress that addressed homeland security from very different points of view:

One was HR 1158, the National Homeland Security Agency Act, that had been introduced on March 21, 2001 by Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-TX). The bill followed recommendations of the Hart-Rudman Commission (AKA U.S. Commission on National Security in the 21st Century), and called for creation of a National Homeland Security Agency that would combine several agencies and infrastructure offices under one agency that would be responsible for activities related to homeland security.

The other was HR 2459, a bill introduced by Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), with 37 co-sponsors, on July 11, 2001, that would establish a Department of Peace. This bill also had its precedents. It's an idea that is about as old as the War Department itself, and was put forward by Benjamin Rush in his 1793 essay, A Plan of a Peace-Office for the United States, first published by African-American scientist, Benjamin Banneker, in one of his Almanacs. Between 1935 and 1969, more than 90 pieces of legislation calling for a department of peace (or something related) were introduced in Congress.

I love reading "preambles" or "findings" sections of bills because they usually encode what I would call an integrated energy reading of the collective body-mind-heart-spirit that put the bill together. It seemed to me, reading them side by side, that the "findings of Congress" in HR 1158 and HR 2459 suggest very different ways of thinking about ourselves as people of one nation, and evoke the possibility for very different futures.

Just so you get the idea, I'll quote the first two findings from each bill (but I invite the explorers among you to check out each of the documents in full).

HR 1158:

(1) The security of the United States homeland from nontraditional and emerging threats must be a primary national security mission of the United States Government. Attacks against United States citizens on United States soil, possibly causing heavy casualties, are likely during the next quarter century, as both the technical means for carrying out such attacks, and the array of actors who might use such means, are proliferating despite the best efforts of United States diplomacy.

(2) Attacks on United States soil may involve weapons of mass destruction and weapons of mass disruption. As porous as United States physical borders are in an age of burgeoning trade and travel, its cyber borders are even more vulnerable, and the critical infrastructure upon which so much of the United States economy depends can now be targeted by governments as well as individuals. The preeminence of the United States makes it more appealing as a target, while its openness and freedoms make it more vulnerable.

HR 2459:

(1) On July 4, 1776, the Second Continental Congress unanimously declared the independence of the 13 colonies, and the achievement of peace was recognized as one of the highest duties of the new organization of free and independent States.

(2) In declaring, `We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness', the drafters of the Declaration of Independence, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the World, derived the creative cause of nationhood from `the Laws of Nature' and the entitlements of `Nature's God', such literal referrals in the Declaration of Independence thereby serving to celebrate the unity of human thought, natural law, and spiritual causation.

Essentially, in the early morning hours of September 11, both bills were still alive and making their way through legislative process. I had heard of the Kucinich bill and was following its progress, but I can't say that it was on my mind when I woke up that morning. I was still feeling a bit edgy from a disturbing dream I'd had a couple of days earlier. In the dream, I was in a city that was being bombed:

I was huddled in a building with some other folks -- mostly women, children and old people, some of whom were wearing burqas. We adults were doing our best to shield the children with our own bodies, and all of us were all praying that our shelter would be spared. After the bombing stopped, I looked out through a shattered wall of the building to see piles of rubble. Amazingly, the air was clear of dust, the sun was up, and the sky was a brilliant blue.

Still, I didn't really connect to this dream as a possible premonition until I saw some images of Ground Zero many days later, after the smoke and dust were gone. It was like deja vu: one or two of those images were so familiar that they might as well have been taken inside my dream before the events of 9/11 ever unfolded.

On October 7, 2001, the United States began the bombing of Afghanistan and on October 11th, Sen. Lieberman introduced S 1534, a bill that followed the language of Thornberry's HR 1158, and called for the establishment of a Cabinet-level Department of National Homeland Security. By this time I remember having some concerns that, in the fog of national trauma, the United States might take actions that would someday be regrettable, and my sense of this crescendo-ed right on through Bush's "axis of evil" SOTU speech in January 2002.

Still, I don't think I specifically began to reflect on the missed opportunity to establish a Department of Peace until June 2002 when President Bush proposed legislation to create a permanent Cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security. Here's how that document  begins:

Our Nation faces a new and changing threat unlike any we have faced before—the global threat of terrorism. No nation is immune, and all nations must act decisively to protect against this constantly evolving threat.

We must recognize that the threat of terrorism is a permanent condition, and we must take action to protect America against the terrorists that seek to kill the innocent.

From there, Congress took us to HR 5005 and PL 107-296, the Homeland Security Act of 2002, that officially created the new Department of Homeland Security. 

I find it interesting to follow the changes in language of these documents -- and the more subtle energy messages that attach to the words -- as the United States moved into a post-9/11 era. The patterns of violence and hate in the United States continues to be documented through media of all kinds, from professional journalists to citizen bloggers and video-makers.

We need a Department of Peace. The peace envisioned here is one that includes a more workable encounter with fearsome and loathesome aspects of our personal and collective being -- the shadow qualities that we too often pitch out onto the world and then feel obliged to pick a fight with. It's a meaning of peace that invites exploration and respectful dialogue rather than disconnection, isolation, hate speech. It's about peace in the world, peace in the family, peace within ourselves.

In recent national outbreaks of bigotry, homophobia, bullying, and Islamophobia is the evidence that we desperately need a department of peace and nonviolence. Whether it manifests as an agency of government or develops through the powerful, peaceful infrastructure of the collective human heart, a path of peace is our ultimate homeland security.

Please check out the website of The Peace Alliance Campaign for a Department of Peace and the Youth PROMISE Act to see how you can help.

 

Michael Winship | The Pulpit of Bullies

I gotta thank Michael Winship bigtime for this OpEd. Watching the unraveling of the Empire on the news every night has often left me in a state of not knowing whether to laugh or cry. Winship sufficiently mirrored, in language, the unbelievable outrageousness of it all enough to tip me into the laugh zone -- at least for a few minutes:

Here in New York State, of course, we have Republican gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino, who combines the boyish charm of J. Edgar Hoover with the sunny quirkiness of Pol Pot. So extreme are Paladino's views, so volatile his temper, that even Rupert Murdoch's right-wing New York Post has endorsed Democrat Andrew Cuomo, which is a bit like the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano dissing the Pope and singing the praises of Lutherans.

Winship goes on to call out some of the others behaving badlly. You may want to read those paragraphs in broad daylight, or with a trusted friend, or however you usually watch scary movies. But I loved his conclusion and it brought me out of dark regions, back into the light:

Scuffling with the press and others may seem minor, but it's just the beginning. In states where there is early balloting, already there are allegations of voter harassment, primarily in minority neighborhoods.

The only way to fight back against bullies and thugs is to stand up and tell them to go to hell. To do otherwise is to give an inch and prepare to be taken for the proverbial mile. That way lies madness. And worse.

Amen, brother!

Love is the key to a strong America, but do we have a national will to power it up?

Great article by William Rivers Pitt reflects on the love that seems to be missing in a country where:

Five gay teenagers - Tyler Clementi, Justin Aaberg, Billy Lucas, Asher Brown and Seth Walsh - killed themselves in the last month after enduring a sustained onslaught of bullying because they were gay. A Town Supervisor in New York wants bodies removed from a local cemetery because the deceased were Muslim. Tea Partiers in Medicare-funded scooters want to annihilate funding for the care of other people's woes, because those other people are not them.

Earlier this year, Pitt disclosed his own experience of bullying in his post at truthout, Here There Be Monsters:

When I was 13, the daily violence I endured had reached a terrible peak. My grades were failing, I was withdrawing even further from the world, and my school's response to the ongoing harassment was to give the students a lecture about chickens and the "pecking order." To wit, when one chicken develops a bloody spot from an injury, the other chickens swarm the wounded one and peck that bloody spot until the wounded bird is killed. The principal admonished the student body to not be like those chickens. The end result of the lecture was that my tormentors would punch me as hard as they could whenever they saw me and yell, "Peck!"

After an especially brutal day of torture at the hands of classmates, Pitt says it all got to be too much:

I went home after school and gobbled a full bottle of pills. I lost my nerve a few minutes later, made myself throw up, and drank as much water as my stomach could hold, but the drugs had already entered my system. For the next two days, I laid in a semi-delirious stupor which my mother believed was a bad flu. I did not tell her about what really happened that day until many years later, and have told very few others about it until now.

I like his article today (Come Wake Me Up) because he ties the hateful behavior that is being enacted on so many fronts -- hatred that he has personally experienced -- to the inherent inclusiveness of both love and the political foundations of our nation:

America is hard. Nowhere in human history has any place made the deliberate choice to take all comers, to throw open the doors to any and all who want something better and are willing to play by the rules...probably because doing so is an invitation to bedlam.

"All we have in common," suggests Pitt, "are a few old pieces of parchment telling us our primary right is to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

He goes on to make a good case that, ultimately, love may be the glue that allows us to stay with the chaos but hold ourselves together in a more civil society. Read the whole article here.

Jim Britell: Top censored stories of the last 25 years

This is a really interesting list by retired grassroots activist and organizer, Jim Britell. Read the whole thing here. Thanks to my friend Andy Mahler at Heartwood for the heads up on Britell.com!

Some years ago I wrote a piece giving my candidates for the most censored stories of the last 25 years; it got published in papers all over the country; but the most important item somehow disappeared in the editing! Here is the original version of the piece.

via www.britell.com

Will the next governor of Tennessee protect our right to clean water?

Over the past few years, Tennessee's rivers and streams have been under assault by a number of folks elected to the state legislature. We had the limited resource waters bill, selenium bill, wet weather conveyance bill (which is now law), just to name a few. What may be even more worrisome is that other bills introduced would essentially have worked to limit the power of the people to have a say in what happens to the streams in their communities. (See examples here, here, here.)

Quite frankly, I'm more than a little worried about the outcome of Tennessee's 2010 gubernatorial race. I've heard from several sources that -- depending on who is elected -- some of the same players who introduced those dangerous water bills could assume even more power to flush what gains have been made toward stronger protection of streams down a capitol toilet.

This summer, the Tennessee Clean Water Network sent out a questionnaire to gubernatorial candidates -- for their trouble they only heard back from one of them:

On July 15, 2010 TCWN released its first gubernatorial questionnaire on water issues.  The questionnaire was sent to the candidates and their response was required by July 26, 2010. Only Michael McWherter returned the questionnaire.  To read the questions and Mr. McWherter's response, click here.

Who were the folks who did not respond? According to the candidates page at the Tennessean, that would be Kyle, McMillain, Gibbons, Haslam, Ramsey and Wamp.

We already have clues about where some of them stand on matters of environmental justice. Wamp's take is scary enough to have inspired me to start this blog. You can read other horror stories about Ramsey and Wamp and other Tennessee politicians at Jeff Woods' great blog, Pith in the Wind.

Well, here's a clue I would offer to all politicians, in Tennessee or elsewhere: if you think we can loosen up on protecting nature, then you don't care about people either. The environment -- water, air, land, plants, animals -- provides the necessary ground and conditions for life upon which human beings build their communities. People and nature are interdependent. If you trash one, you trash the other.

This is a fundamental spiritual principle. This is what environmental justice is all about. I would also point out that this interdependence is not just conceptual. It has a very embodied practical reality that the communities of people who were here in North and South America prior to the arrival of European colonists understand well: nature cannot continue to produce what humankind needs for life without protection of the life of Earth by people.

In a way that perhaps was not even consciously nor fully conceived, the Tennessee Water Quality Act reflects this principle where it states that all citizens of this state have a right to clean water, and then sets out how the state will protect those waters. But in the past few years I've seen significant efforts by legislators, in cahoots with corporate interests, to simultaneously dismantle protection and disempower people so that Tennessee industries can produce, produce, produce at will -- at the expense of both natural and human communities.

As a citizen of Tennessee, I intend to use my vote at every opportunity to keep politicians -- and the corporate interests that have bought them off -- accountable. I hope you will too.

Tikkun Daily Blog » Faith in Our Founders: Jefferson on Taxation

We are hearing much these days about the founders and their views on taxation.  Many people who oppose “big government”, deficit spending, and taxation are warning against socialism.  They argue that current tax policy amounts to a redistribution of wealth, that it is class warfare, that it is unconstitutional and against the original intent of the founders.  This is a kind of ancestor worship.

via www.tikkun.org

Citizen's notes: Interesting post from Valerie Elverton-Dixon writing at Tikkun for anyone who has ever invoked the founding fathers to support an argument.