Perspectives

May 20, 2013

Rise Up or Die

This post originally appeared at Truthdig.

FILE - In this Sept. 18, 2008 file photo, a mountaintop removal mining site at Kayford Mountain, W.Va. with Coal River Mountain, left, in the background. Environmental activists gained more momentum this year than in the past decade against the destructive, uniquely Appalachian form of strip mining known as mountaintop removal. But they have yet to mobilize the millions of supporters they want. (AP Photo/Jeff Gentner, File)

A mountaintop removal mining site at Kayford Mountain, W.Va. (AP Photo/Jeff Gentner, File)

Joe Sacco and I spent two years reporting from the poorest pockets of the United States for our book “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt.” We went into our nation’s impoverished “sacrifice zones” — the first areas forced to kneel before the dictates of the marketplace — to show what happens when unfettered corporate capitalism and ceaseless economic expansion no longer have external impediments. We wanted to illustrate what unrestrained corporate exploitation does to families, communities and the natural world. We wanted to challenge the reigning ideology of globalization and laissez-faire capitalism to illustrate what life becomes when human beings and the ecosystem are ruthlessly turned into commodities to exploit until exhaustion or collapse. And we wanted to expose as impotent the formal liberal and governmental institutions that once made reform possible, institutions no longer equipped with enough authority to check the assault of corporate power.

Chris Hedges (Credit: Dale Robbins)

What has taken place in these sacrifice zones — in postindustrial cities such as Camden, N.J., and Detroit, in coalfields of southern West Virginia where mining companies blast off mountaintops, in Indian reservations where the demented project of limitless economic expansion and exploitation worked some of its earliest evil, and in produce fields where laborers often endure conditions that replicate slavery — is now happening to much of the rest of the country. These sacrifice zones succumbed first. You and I are next.

Corporations write our legislation. They control our systems of information. They manage the political theater of electoral politics and impose our educational curriculum. They have turned the judiciary into one of their wholly owned subsidiaries. They have decimated labor unions and other independent mass organizations, as well as having bought off the Democratic Party, which once defended the rights of workers. With the evisceration of piecemeal and incremental reform — the primary role of liberal, democratic institutions — we are left defenseless against corporate power. MORE

Perspectives

May 19, 2013

Fighting Poverty Through Wall Street Accountability

by Greg Kaufmann, The Nation

We’re proud to collaborate with The Nation in sharing insightful journalism related to income inequality in America. The following is an excerpt from Nation contributor Greg Kaufmann’s “This Week in Poverty” column.

This year, I’ve been focused on how anti-poverty activists can move from a defensive battle defined by trying to save what needs to be saved during these budget debates, to an offensive one, laying out a vision that inspires ongoing, unified action and builds a vibrant movement that connects with people in their communities.

I offered one modest proposal for an “anti-poverty contract” — five issues that impact both low-income and middle class people — around which activists and groups could organize. The Western Center on Law & Poverty and a handful of other national and local groups are trying to build an effort around that idea.

However, when you consider the scale of the problems we face — and what inspires people to take action — clearly much, much more is needed. As I wrote previously, to build a new anti-poverty movement will require the kind of organizing and actions that are as creative, visible and gripping as the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Enter Stephen Lerner.

Lerner is a labor and community organizer who has spent more than three decades organizing hundreds of thousands of janitors, farm workers, garment workers and other low-wage workers into unions. These efforts resulted in increased wages, first-time health benefits, paid sick days and other improvements on the job. The architect of the historic Justice for Janitors campaign, he is currently working with unions and community groups across the country to break Wall Street’s anti-democratic grip on our politics and our economy.

Lerner lays out a powerful case about the intersection between poverty and Wall Street accountability — and how a Wall Street accountability movement can transform an economy that offers so few pathways out of poverty, and so many ways to keep people impoverished.

Here is our conversation: MORE

Perspectives

May 19, 2013

The Hollowing-Out of Government

by Robert Reich

This video was originally posted on Town Square.

The deadly explosion at a West, Texas, fertilizer plant was absolutely preventable. The plant was had not been inspected since 1985, and heavily violated safety standards. Why did this happen? The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is the government agency set to ensure workplace safety, but it’s been steadily hollowed out by Republicans, it’s been denied funds, and its enforcement has been severely shaved down.

This problem isn’t just for OSHA though — it’s all kinds of government agencies, including the IRS. Reducing IRS enforcement is extremely counterproductive to our budget, but is that what Republicans are truly looking out for?

What about taxes on corporations? Big banks? Must essential programs be hollowed out and dismantled in favor of greed? MORE

Perspectives

May 16, 2013

Why the DOJ’s AP Action Threatens Press Freedom

by BillMoyers.com Staff

Photo: Dale Robbins

Moyers & Company’s Gina Kim sat down with Danielle Brian, the executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, to discuss the Justice Department’s decision to seize phone records for 20 Associated Press reporters and editors. The move marks the latest chapter in the recent crackdown on leakers and whistleblowers, and an unprecedented challenge to the freedom of the press protected by the First Amendment. Brian and Kim discuss the many reasons why Brian’s watchdog organization finds this latest example of government overreach problematic. “It’s as though there is no sense of discretion on when to prosecute what matters and when to make sure that we’re protecting our free speech,” Brian told Kim.

On this week’s episode of Moyers & Company, Brian and Sheila Krumholz, the executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics and OpenSecrets.org, talk with Bill about the importance of transparency to our democracy, and their efforts to document who’s giving money, who’s receiving it and what’s expected in return. MORE

Perspectives

May 16, 2013

Billionaires Unchained

by Andy Kroll, TomDispatch

This piece first appeared at TomDispatch. Read Tom Engelhardt’s introduction.

Billionaires with an axe to grind, now is your time. Not since the days before a bumbling crew of would-be break-in artists set into motion the fabled Watergate scandal, leading to the first far-reaching restrictions on money in American politics, have you been so free to meddle. There is no limit to the amount of money you can give to elect your friends and allies to political office, to defeat those with whom you disagree, to shape or stunt or kill policy, and above all to influence the tone and content of political discussion in this country.

Today, politics is a rich man’s game. Look no further than the 2012 elections and that season’s biggest donor, 79-year-old casino mogul Sheldon Adelson. He and his wife, Miriam, shocked the political class by first giving $16.5 million in an effort to make Newt Gingrich the Republican presidential nominee. Once Gingrich exited the race, the Adelsons invested more than $30 million in electing Mitt Romney. They donated millions more to support GOP candidates running for the House and Senate, to block a pro-union measure in Michigan, and to bankroll the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other conservative stalwarts (which waged their own campaigns mostly to help Republican candidates for Congress). All told, the Adelsons donated $94 million during the 2012 cycle — nearly four times the previous record set by liberal financier George Soros. And that’s only the money we know about. When you add in so-called dark money, one estimate puts their total giving at closer to $150 million. MORE

Perspectives

May 11, 2013

Homeland Insecurity

by Peter Van Buren, TomDispatch

This piece first appeared at TomDispatch. Read Tom Engelhardt’s introduction.

What do words mean in a post-9/11 world? Apart from the now clichéd Orwellian twists that turn brutal torture into mere enhanced interrogation, the devil is in the details. Robert MacLean is a former air marshal fired for an act of whistleblowing. He has continued to fight over seven long years for what once would have passed as simple justice: getting his job back. His is an all-too-twenty-first-century story of the extraordinary lengths to which the U.S. government is willing to go to thwart whistleblowers.

First, the government retroactively classified a previously unclassified text message to justify firing MacLean. Then it invoked arcane civil service procedures, including an “interlocutory appeal” to thwart him and, in the process, enjoyed the approval of various courts and bureaucratic boards apparently willing to stamp as “legal” anything the government could make up in its own interest.

And yet here’s the miracle at the heart of this tale: MacLean refused to quit, when ordinary mortals would have thrown in the towel. Now, with a recent semi-victory, he may not only have given himself a shot at getting his old job back, but also create a precedent for future federal whistleblowers. In the post-9/11 world, people like Robert MacLean show us how deep the Washington rabbit hole really goes. MORE

Perspectives

April 22, 2013

Writing From Jail on Earth Day

by Sandra Steingraber

The latest from environmental activist Sandra Steingraber, who was Bill’s guest on Moyers & Company the day before she began her fifteen day sentence for blckading a gas compression rig. Her letter, written from the Chemung County jail in Elmira, NY, is reprinted here, courtesy of Common Dreams.

This morning – I have no idea what time this morning, as there are no clocks in jail, and the fluorescent lights are on all night long – I heard the familiar chirping of English sparrows and the liquid notes of a cardinal. And there seemed to be another bird too – one who sang a burbling tune. Not a robin–wren? The buzzing, banging, clanking of jail and the growled announcements of guards on their two-way radios – which also go on all night – drowned it out. But the world, I knew, was out there somewhere.

Sandra Steingraber

The best way to deal with jail is to exude patience, and wrap it around a core of resolve and surrender. According to New York state law, all inmates upon arrival are isolated from the general population until they are tested for tuberculosis and that test comes back negative. Typically, that takes three days. Isolation means you are locked inside your cell with no access to the phone (the phone for cell block D happens to be located, tantalizingly, four feet from my bars – just out of reach); no access to books (the two books I have in my cell, lent to me by an empathetic inmate, are the Bible and Nora Roberts’ Carolina Moon, which is a 470-page paperback whose opening sentence is, “She woke in the body of a dead friend.”); and, of course, no access to wi fi, cell phones, e-mail or the internet.

I am writing with a borrowed pencil on the back of the “Chemung County Inmate Request Form,” which is a half sheet of paper. I am writing small and revising in my head. (Forgive the paragraphing – I’m trying to save space.)

Yesterday, I was told that no medical personnel were available to administer my TB test. When I was called down to the nurse this morning, she asked why I didn’t have my TB test yesterday. Of course, she was available yesterday. The resulting delay means that I will join the prison population and be released from 24 hour lock-down on Monday, rather than Sunday.

Frustration will be counter-productive and place me closer to despair. Let–it–go surrender, ironically, keeps me in touch with my resolve.

So, Monday, which is Earth Day, I will emerge from my cell and join the ecosystem of the Chemung County Jail, where the women’s voices are loud and defiant. Stingray (not her actual nickname), broke a tooth yesterday. When she showed it to officer Murphy’s Law (that’s his actual nickname) and said, “the other half is in my cell,” Murphy’s Law replied, “So, you think the tooth fairy’s going to come?” And then he left. MORE

Perspectives

April 15, 2013

Where are Ordinary Black Youth in Pop Culture?

by Reniqua Allen

Being young and black in America today must be hard. The experiences of black youth are so often left out of the national discourse, it probably seems like no one really understands their plight. On the few occasions that stories about them appear in pop culture, particularly television and film, they’re often shown in one of two ways — the overachiever, the kid that “makes it” despite the odds, like Jay-Z, or the lazy underachiever, the thugs and welfare moms that so many on the right often allude to.

While it’s a great testament to our nation’s progress to have stories about Will Smith’s talented kids and Obama’s smart girls, we need to make “ordinary” black kids a commonplace as well.

The voices of these at-risk youth need to be heard and their stories need to be told, but there’s another perspective that we also need to hear — that of positive, average black kids. In their own way they’re invisible — kids that are more like The Beaver and Wally than gangster Frank Lucas, and are neither marginalized or at the proverbial mountaintop. Their stories seem to be regarded as unrelatable to a mainstream America that still values blonde hair and white picket fences.

It’s easy to understand why this happens. In the more than four decades since the Civil Rights Movement, black youth are still lagging behind. Many of the statistics and stories that we hear about young African Americans, much like the ones Bryan Stevenson shared on recent Moyers & Company shows, are abysmal. Add in the other “isms” that all too many black youth are familiar with, like classism and sexism, and you can see why there’s an anxiety about the state of young black America.

One of the stories that did receive a lot of media attention in the recent past is the Trayvon Martin case. He was the teen killed last year in Florida by a man who allegedly thought he was threatening his life. Putting the politics of the case aside, Trayvon, a young middle-class black kid, with two involved (if not together parents), who liked hoodies, his girlfriend, Twitter and Skittles, is probably a good example of your average black kid. But how much does America really know about the Trayvons of the world except when violence intervenes? When do their stories get told? When do we understand that most black kids aren’t all that different from white kids? MORE

Perspectives

April 14, 2013

In Obama’s Budget, Poverty Initiatives Face an Uphill Battle

by Deborah Weinstein

We’re proud to collaborate with The Nation in sharing insightful journalism related to income inequality in America. The following is an excerpt from The Nation’s “This Week in Poverty” blog.

President Barack Obama speaks to reporters in the White House briefing room in Washington, Friday, March 1, 2013, following after meeting with congressional leaders regarding the automatic spending cuts. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)

President Obama speaks to reporters in the White House briefing room in Washington. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)

There are certain facts of life reflected by the FY 2014 Obama budget proposal: first, anything really worth having is going to be hard to get; and, the regrettable corollary — some things you don’t want are a lot closer to reality.

There are new and even historic anti-poverty proposals in this budget. But the better they are, the more they fall into the “hard to get” category. On the other hand, Social Security cuts in the form of smaller cost-of-living adjustments could far more easily become real.
MORE

Perspectives

April 13, 2013

A Tax Day Plan for Righting the Republic

by Mattea Kramer, National Priorities Project

This piece first appeared at TomDispatch. Read Tom Engelhardt’s introduction.

Patrick Will of Eaton, N.Y., holds an American flag during a tax day tea party rally in Albany, N.Y. (AP Photo/Mike Groll)

Patrick Will of Eaton, N.Y., holds an American flag during a 2009 tax day tea party rally in Albany, N.Y. (AP Photo/Mike Groll)

After heroic feats of arithmetic and a your-guess-is-as-good-as-mine interpretation of opaque rules and guidelines, millions of Americans will file their taxes by this Monday, April 15.

Then there’s the bad news.

For anyone who takes a peek at where his or her income tax dollars are going, Tax Day can be maddening. Outsized chunks of our taxes fund the military, rising healthcare costs, and interest on the federal debt. Comparatively tiny amounts go to education, science, alternative energy, and the environment.

Category by category, this is contrary to what Americans want — and what we the people want is pretty clear. Despite near-constant news about how polarized our nation is, a careful look at opinion polls indicates that a strong majority of Americans actually have a coherent to-do list for Washington: we want more jobs, smaller deficits, more education funding, reduced reliance on fossil fuels, higher taxes on the wealthiest, plus — the kicker — Medicare and Social Security benefits preserved. You know, it’s the typical story of wanting to have our cake and gobble it down, too. Right?

Wrong. What’s virtually unacknowledged is that all these things could be done at once. Far from being an impossible set of demands, the collective opinion poll version of the wisdom of the American people is, in fact, a smart set of solutions — or at least it would be, if we had a government capable of following our wishes. That collective wish list would address most of this nation’s urgent challenges, while making us smarter, safer, healthier, less indebted, and better invested in our long-term future. Here’s how. MORE