A Call To Action
AlterNet
Making Connections
By Jessica Clark and Tracy Van Slyke, In These Times
Posted on April 27, 2005, Printed on April 27, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/21872/
In March, conservative uber-strategist Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform launched the Media Freedom Project. This new group is the latest entry in a three-decade-long contest between the progressives who want to protect and extend First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and those on the right who view unfettered expression as a danger to the established corporate order.
The Media Freedom Project's first press release, "The Return of the Re-Regulators," warned that Democratic efforts to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine "could mean the end of popular talk show hosts such as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and G. Gordon Liddy." (See "Fairness Now.")
The Media Freedom Project's priorities show why the Fairness Doctrine, which compelled FCC-licensed broadcasters to "afford reasonable opportunity for discussion of conflicting views on matters of public importance," is sorely needed in what commentators like the Media Channel's Danny Schecter are calling a "post-journalism era."
Decades-old journalistic standards of "objectivity" -- and even its less-learned cousin, "balance" -- are on the ropes. Paid political operatives posing as bloggers are taking down journalists like Dan Rather, while progressive "citizen bloggers" expose faux-reporters like Jeff Gannon. (See "The Blogosphere: Insiders vs. Outsiders.") The federal government is filling the airwaves with "video news releases" and hired pundits like Armstrong Williams. (See "The GOP's Quest for Color.") Meanwhile, a study by the University of Pennsylvania's National Annenberg Election Survey revealed that young people who regularly watch "The Daily Show" are "more likely to answer questions about politics correctly than those who don't."
How the Conservatives Came to Dominate
The story of how conservatives have reshaped the media to their own ends has generated plenty of ink. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) founder Jeff Cohen, Salon's Joe Conason and The Nation's Eric Alterman have all written convincingly and at length for both mainstream and progressive outlets about how right-wing media has come to dominate the national debate.
Reformed conservative David Brock explains in The Republican Noise Machine that tarring the mainstream media as "liberal" was the first step in the conservative campaign to dominate the airwaves. Founded in 1969 by anti-communist economist Reed Irvine, Accuracy in Media (AIM) was set up to support President Richard Nixon's Vietnam policies by mobilizing opposition to "liberal" bias in the news. "Irvine was practicing a form of jujitsu" writes Brock. "Seeing itself as a public trust, the media was responsive to calls for accountability and was highly susceptible to criticism." Dan Rather was one of the group's targets during that era and has remained so to this day. AIM mocked his patriotic final broadcast as an "extreme makeover."
Inculcating fear of conservative disapproval in the mainstream press -- and a consequent alienation of advertisers and viewers -- has been the lynchpin of the conservative strategy. It set the stage for the creation of a conservative media machine. In an effort to shift public discourse to the right, conservative foundations, right-wing donors and corporations worked together to create multiple organizations that in turn generated think tanks, issue-based nonprofits and conservative media outlets -- all with their own highly paid and well-coached "experts." Then, the right, ever more loudly denouncing the biased "liberal media elite," inserted these newly minted experts into a mainstream media that was now on the defensive and vulnerable to manipulation.
The goals of the conservative media strategy are multiple and overlapping: to protect business interests, elevate a free-market philosophy, advance a frame of "family values," promote U.S. political dominance, and counter popular movements for civil, women's, consumers' and gay rights that were gaining prominence in the late '60s and early '70s. The traditional Republican right found ready allies in leaders of the Christian right like Pat Robertson, who in 1960 founded the Christian Broadcasting Network, which by the late '70s reached millions of viewers and regularly featured prominent conservatives.
During the '70s and '80s, conservative and corporate funders followed an explicit plan to establish and expand right-wing think tanks such as the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Instititue. The think tanks served as incubators for right-wing ideas and by the '90s were poised to capitalize on emerging -- and unregulated -- media sectors such as cable television, talk radio and Internet commentary. They were complemented by a host of corporate-funded "astroturf" groups created by the public relations industry to counteract genuine grassroots organizations fighting for social, environmental and economic justice.
Like the Bush presidencies, the rise of a conservative media machine has been an elaborate, multi-generational affair. AIM's late-'60s media criticisms were complemented by the critiques of Irving Kristol, the influential co-editor of the conservative journal The Public Interest. Irving is the father of William Kristol, who founded the prominent conservative magazine The Weekly Standard in 1995 with funding from Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch. Small political magazines like these, despite their low circulation, have been standard-bearers for once-radical ideas that have now moved into the mainstream. After several years of editing The Weekly Standard, the younger Kristol used grants from the Bradley Foundation to establish the Project for the New American Century, a nonprofit organization of neoconservative activists who hatched the rationale for President George W. Bush's war in Iraq.
While Murdoch's support for The Weekly Standard has been instrumental in the recent history of conservative media, it's his Fox News that represents the pinnacle of right-wing media strategizing -- a 24-hour station, available to all cable subscribers that militantly masquerades as a "fair and balanced" member of the mainstream media. According to an analysis by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, in 2004 Fox News anchors and reporters included their own opinions in 73 percent of the stories they reported on Iraq. In contrast, only 2 percent of CNN reporters did so. The report notes, "Those findings seem to challenge Fox's promotional marketing, particularly its slogan, 'We Report. You Decide.' "
The 24-hour news cycle has also spawned its own virulent brand of media manipulation: repetitive, coordinated and incessant. For example, every Wednesday morning, the Media Freedom Project's Norquist convenes an invitation-only meeting of high-level GOP strategists, Congressional and White House staffers, and corporate leaders to formulate the "talking points" for the week. In a January 2004 profile of Norquist in Mother Jones, Michael Scherer wrote:
There is no time for canned political rhetoric. The focus is on winning. Here, strategy is honed. Talking points are refined. Discipline is imposed. ... In building his coalition, Norquist has made a conscious strategic decision to go with a big-tent approach. At his weekly meetings, social issues like gay rights and abortion, which can divide the electoral base of conservatives and libertarians, are played down in favor of issues like tax cuts, tort reform, and the rollback of federal regulations and rules. These are the broad-appeal political winners on which Norquist is pinning the movement's future. And they're a strong lure for the corporate community, some of whose members -- Philip Morris, Pfizer and Time Warner, for instance -- also happen to supply funding for Americans for Tax Reform.
Where does this leave progressives? Stuck, as they are, with defending old-fashioned values, such as truth, fair play, factual accuracy, civility, the open exchange of ideas, the power of reasoned debate, and the honor of upholding the public trust.
Progressives Face a Predicament
In contrast to conservatives, progressives have done little to internally define "who we are," "what values we stand for" and "what we want." Lacking an agreed upon framework, progressives spread singular messages, resulting in a cacophony rather than an outline of a progressive agenda.
In early December, William Safire quoted James Carville's take on the matter in the New York Times Magazine: "They produce a narrative, we produce a litany. ... They say, 'I'm going to protect you from the terrorists in Tehran and the homos in Hollywood.' We say, 'We're for clean air, better schools, more health care.' And so there's a Republican narrative, a story, and there's a Democratic litany."
The challenge for progressives is to create narratives that express progressive values. Progressives must develop the strength of speaking with a unified voice, one that communicates our fundamental beliefs while still drawing on the diversity of perspectives integral to progressive principles.
Currently, the progressive media network is missing both a coordinated messaging system and a self-sustaining network that can funnel ideas from the grassroots, progressive think tanks and the independent media into the mainstream media where national conversations take place.
In a 2002 report on progressive think tanks for the Open Society Institute, David Dyssegaard Kallick wrote, "What is lacking is not sharp individuals with creative ideas. ... What is missing is an institutional infrastructure that brings these people together with each other and with people who understand practical politics, media and organizing."
For decades, liberal foundations and individual donors have failed to recognize the need for building long-term capacity in progressive media and affiliated organizations, and thereby create a progressive "echo chamber" that can begin to counter the right's media machine. Progressive foundations, with their roots in the reform movements of the early 20th century, have focused on funding social work and single-issue groups.
As a result, the progressive media network has evolved in an ad hoc, organic basis in contrast to the conservative media machine's coordinated infrastructure. Progressive media is built by unconnected individuals who have in common the belief that the progressive agenda needs a voice of its own. When liberal foundations do provide media grants, they shy away from overtly political media projects, and instead direct millions toward federally-supported public media, such as the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) and National Public Radio, or to individual documentary film projects that might be shown on PBS.
In their 2003 report "Funding for Social Change," Nan Rubin and Sharon Maeda write, "Progressive funders do not provide much support for infrastructures, distribution networks and membership organizations that provide the political and technical backbone for 'alternative media' to reach audiences."
They also note in a 2005 update to their survey that while foundations recognize the dangers of corporate media consolidation and the importance of organizing around media, they have little understanding of how to strategically fund media development or how to document its impact. "Few funders see media as an organizing tool or as a way to popularize messages or conduct public education campaigns," Rubin and Maeda write, "Primarily, though, they address the concept of the message and not the media themselves."
A media network emerges
Recently, new think tanks, such as the Center for American Progress and the Rockridge Institute, have started disseminating progressive messages, providing talking points and conducting fact-finding missions to discredit the misinformation coming from conservative think tanks and pundits. Online mobilizing groups such as MoveOn and progressive 527s like Americans Coming Together have re-energized a progressive voter base that is politically engaged and active.
Yet these Washington-centric efforts are still not connected to grassroots, single-issue organizations. Too often, they lack the involvement of women, people of color and those who are not upper-middle class.
Looking at "The Emerging Progressive Media Network," it's important to note the disconnect between the vast, well-funded "Issue-Based Nonprofits," the "Emerging Message Machine" of the think tanks, politicians and message creators and the struggling "Progressive Media." To participate in the mainstream dialogue, each of these spheres needs to be connected to each other and appropriately funded.
So what are the next steps?
* Progressive media makers should reach out to and educate foundations and individual donors about the strategic importance of providing significant funding to independent media outlets in order to build a sustainable progressive infrastructure that can effectively shape public dialogue.
* Progressive strategists should develop narrative frames and talking points that can successfully carry their values into the mainstream media. This will require an unprecedented level of cooperation among the disparate collection of independently run and funded organizations that currently make up the progressive movement.
* Progressive organizers should continue discussing ways to strengthen their media network without mimicking the top-down, undemocratic methods of the right's media machine. Supporting current infrastructure groups -- and building new ones -- is key to improving coordination between the different progressive media sectors. This will require financial resources and research.
* Progressives of all stripes should look for inspiration from innovative models of participatory information-sharing, such as the collective idea development pioneered in open-source networks, or the community-driven organizing of MoveOn's house parties and Democracy For America's meet-ups. New technological opportunities offered by advances like community WiFi also open up fresh media horizons.
These recommendations are only a start. Like the progressive media network itself, this analysis will continue to evolve. The prospects are exciting, but both financial support and dialogue are needed to reach the next level.
© 2005 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/21872/
Wednesday, April 27, 2005
Thursday, April 21, 2005
Fw: This Earth Day, Help Bring Congress Back to Earth to Reduce Oil Dependence
----- Original Message -----
From: "Kathy Guthrie"
To: "Miriam Vieni"
Sent: Thursday, April 21, 2005 4:43 PM
Subject: FCNL: This Earth Day, Help Bring Congress Back to Earth to Reduce
Oil Dependence
Act Now for Peace, Security, a Healthy Environment, and a Stable Climate.
Today, Thursday, April 21, the House is expected to complete work on
its omnibus energy bill (H.R. 6), a bill that would set priorities for
national energy policy for the next several years. While the bill has
many positive elements, overall, the bill does not offer a good
blueprint for our future. It emphasizes boosting environmentally
harmful domestic oil, gas, coal, and nuclear energy supplies over
reducing energy demand. It proposes too little, too late to reduce the
United States' dangerous and environmentally damaging dependence on
oil.
Congress needs to get real about reducing U.S. oil dependence. The
Senate must do better. Soon, your senators will begin drafting their
own version of the bill. Now is the time to let them know how urgent
and important it is for the U.S. to reduce its oil dependence now.
ACT NOW!
Please contact your senators. Urge them to promote a national
mobilization to rapidly reduce U.S. oil consumption, improve the
efficiency of our transportation system and vehicles, and accelerate
development and use of renewable fuels and energy sources. Urge them to
oppose giving subsidies or tax credits to the oil industry, oppose
opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil exploration, and
oppose reducing environmental protection in the permitting and
production of oil and gas on public lands and the outer continental
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FCNL's letter to the House opposing H.R. 6,
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The Normalization of War
A Call To Action
AlterNet
By Andrew J. Bacevich, Tomdispatch.com
Posted on April 21, 2005, Printed on April 21, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/21827/
Andrew J. Bacevich has written a book on militarism, American-style, of surpassing interest. Just published, "The New American Militarism, How Americans Are Seduced by War" would be critical reading no matter who wrote it. But coming from Bacevich, a West Point graduate, Vietnam veteran, former contributor to such magazines as the Weekly Standard and the National Review, and former Bush Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, it has special resonance.
Bacevich, a self-professed conservative, has clearly been a man on a journey. He writes that he still situates himself "culturally on the right. And I continue to view the remedies proffered by mainstream liberalism with skepticism. But my disenchantment with what passes for mainstream conservatism, embodied in the present Bush administration and its groupies, is just about absolute. Fiscal irresponsibility, a buccaneering foreign policy, a disregard for the Constitution, the barest lip service as a response to profound moral controversies: these do not qualify as authentically conservative values. On this score my views have come to coincide with the critique long offered by the radical left: it is the mainstream itself, the professional liberals as well as the professional conservatives who define the problem."
At the end of the Cold War, Americans said yes to military power. The skepticism about arms and armies that pervaded the American experiment from its founding, vanished. Political leaders, liberals and conservatives alike, became enamored with military might.
The ensuing affair had and continues to have a heedless, Gatsby-like aspect, a passion pursued in utter disregard of any consequences that might ensue. Few in power have openly considered whether valuing military power for its own sake or cultivating permanent global military superiority might be at odds with American principles. Indeed, one striking aspect of America's drift toward militarism has been the absence of dissent offered by any political figure of genuine stature.
For example, when Sen. John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, ran for the presidency in 2004, he framed his differences with George W. Bush's national security policies in terms of tactics rather than first principles. Kerry did not question the wisdom of styling the U.S. response to the events of 9/11 as a generations-long "global war on terror." It was not the prospect of open-ended war that drew Kerry's ire. It was rather the fact that the war had been "extraordinarily mismanaged and ineptly prosecuted." Kerry faulted Bush because, in his view, U.S. troops in Iraq lacked "the preparation and hardware they needed to fight as effectively as they could." Bush was expecting too few soldiers to do too much with too little. Declaring that "keeping our military strong and keeping our troops as safe as they can be should be our highest priority," Kerry promised if elected to fix these deficiencies. Americans could count on a President Kerry to expand the armed forces and to improve their ability to fight.
Yet on this score Kerry's circumspection was entirely predictable. It was the candidate's way of signaling that he was sound on defense and had no intention of departing from the prevailing national security consensus.
Under the terms of that consensus, mainstream politicians today take as a given that American military supremacy is an unqualified good, evidence of a larger American superiority. They see this armed might as the key to creating an international order that accommodates American values. One result of that consensus over the past quarter century has been to militarize U.S. policy and to encourage tendencies suggesting that American society itself is increasingly enamored with its self-image as the military power nonpareil.
How Much Is Enough?
This new American militarism manifests itself in several different ways. It does so, first of all, in the scope, cost, and configuration of America's present-day military establishment.
Through the first two centuries of U.S. history, political leaders in Washington gauged the size and capabilities of America's armed services according to the security tasks immediately at hand. A grave and proximate threat to the nation's well-being might require a large and powerful military establishment. In the absence of such a threat, policymakers scaled down that establishment accordingly. With the passing of crisis, the army raised up for the crisis went immediately out of existence. This had been the case in 1865, in 1918, and in 1945.
Since the end of the Cold War, having come to value military power for its own sake, the United States has abandoned this principle and is committed as a matter of policy to maintaining military capabilities far in excess of those of any would-be adversary or combination of adversaries. This commitment finds both a qualitative and quantitative expression, with the U.S. military establishment dwarfing that of even America's closest ally. Thus, whereas the U.S. Navy maintains and operates a total of twelve large attack aircraft carriers, the once-vaunted [British] Royal Navy has none -- indeed, in all the battle fleets of the world there is no ship even remotely comparable to a Nimitz-class carrier, weighing in at some ninety-seven thousand tons fully loaded, longer than three football fields, cruising at a speed above 30 knots, and powered by nuclear reactors that give it an essentially infinite radius of action. Today, the U.S. Marine Corps possesses more attack aircraft than does the entire Royal Air Force -- and the United States has two other even larger "air forces," one an integral part of the Navy and the other officially designated as the U.S. Air Force. Indeed, in terms of numbers of men and women in uniform, the U.S. Marine Corps is half again as large as the entire British Army--and the Pentagon has a second, even larger "army" actually called the U.S. Army -- which in turn also operates its own "air force" of some 5,000 aircraft.
All of these massive and redundant capabilities cost money. Notably, the present-day Pentagon budget, adjusted for inflation, is 12 percent larger than the average defense budget of the Cold War era. In 2002, American defense spending exceeded by a factor of 25 the combined defense budgets of the seven "rogue states" then comprising the roster of U.S. enemies. Indeed, by some calculations, the United States spends more on defense than all other nations in the world together. This is a circumstance without historical precedent.
Furthermore, in all likelihood, the gap in military spending between the United States and all other nations will expand further still in the years to come. Projected increases in the defense budget will boost Pentagon spending in real terms to a level higher than it was during the Reagan era. According to the Pentagon's announced long-range plans, by 2009 its budget will exceed the Cold War average by 23 percent -- despite the absence of anything remotely resembling a so-called peer competitor. However astonishing this fact might seem, it elicits little comment, either from political leaders or the press. It is simply taken for granted. The truth is that there no longer exists any meaningful context within which Americans might consider the question "How much is enough?"
On a day-to-day basis, what do these expensive forces exist to do? Simply put, for the Department of Defense and all of its constituent parts, defense per se figures as little more than an afterthought. The primary mission of America's far-flung military establishment is global power projection, a reality tacitly understood in all quarters of American society. To suggest that the U.S. military has become the world's police force may slightly overstate the case, but only slightly.
That well over a decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union the United States continues to maintain bases and military forces in several dozens of countries -- by some counts well over a hundred in all -- rouses minimal controversy, despite the fact that many of these countries are perfectly capable of providing for their own security needs. That even apart from fighting wars and pursuing terrorists, U.S. forces are constantly prowling around the globe -- training, exercising, planning, and posturing -- elicits no more notice (and in some cases less) from the average American than the presence of a cop on a city street corner. Even before the Pentagon officially assigned itself the mission of "shaping" the international environment, members of the political elite, liberals and conservatives alike, had reached a common understanding that scattering U.S. troops around the globe to restrain, inspire, influence, persuade, or cajole paid dividends. Whether any correlation exists between this vast panoply of forward-deployed forces on the one hand and antipathy to the United States abroad on the other has remained for the most part a taboo subject.
The Quest for Military Dominion
The indisputable fact of global U.S. military preeminence also affects the collective mindset of the officer corps. For the armed services, dominance constitutes a baseline or a point of departure from which to scale the heights of ever greater military capabilities. Indeed, the services have come to view outright supremacy as merely adequate and any hesitation in efforts to increase the margin of supremacy as evidence of falling behind.
Thus, according to one typical study of the U.S. Navy's future, "sea supremacy beginning at our shore lines and extending outward to distant theaters is a necessary condition for the defense of the U.S." Of course, the U.S. Navy already possesses unquestioned global preeminence; the real point of the study is to argue for the urgency of radical enhancements to that preeminence. The officer-authors of this study express confidence that given sufficient money the Navy can achieve ever greater supremacy, enabling the Navy of the future to enjoy "overwhelming precision firepower," "pervasive surveillance," and "dominant control of a maneuvering area, whether sea, undersea, land, air, space or cyberspace." In this study and in virtually all others, political and strategic questions implicit in the proposition that supremacy in distant theaters forms a prerequisite of "defense" are left begging -- indeed, are probably unrecognized. At times, this quest for military dominion takes on galactic proportions. Acknowledging that the United States enjoys "superiority in many aspects of space capability," a senior defense official nonetheless complains that "we don't have space dominance and we don't have space supremacy." Since outer space is "the ultimate high ground," which the United States must control, he urges immediate action to correct this deficiency. When it comes to military power, mere superiority will not suffice.
The new American militarism also manifests itself through an increased propensity to use force, leading, in effect, to the normalization of war. There was a time in recent memory, most notably while the so-called Vietnam Syndrome infected the American body politic, when Republican and Democratic administrations alike viewed with real trepidation the prospect of sending U.S. troops into action abroad. Since the advent of the new Wilsonianism, however, self-restraint regarding the use of force has all but disappeared. During the entire Cold War era, from 1945 through 1988, large-scale U.S. military actions abroad totaled a scant six. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, however, they have become almost annual events. The brief period extending from 1989's Operation Just Cause (the overthrow of Manuel Noriega) to 2003's Operation Iraqi Freedom (the overthrow of Saddam Hussein) featured nine major military interventions. And that count does not include innumerable lesser actions such as Bill Clinton's signature cruise missile attacks against obscure targets in obscure places, the almost daily bombing of Iraq throughout the late 1990s, or the quasi-combat missions that have seen GIs dispatched to Rwanda, Colombia, East Timor, and the Philippines. Altogether, the tempo of U.S. military interventionism has become nothing short of frenetic.
As this roster of incidents lengthened, Americans grew accustomed to -- perhaps even comfortable with -- reading in their morning newspapers the latest reports of U.S. soldiers responding to some crisis somewhere on the other side of the globe. As crisis became a seemingly permanent condition so too did war. The Bush administration has tacitly acknowledged as much in describing the global campaign against terror as a conflict likely to last decades and in promulgating -- and in Iraq implementing -- a doctrine of preventive war.
In former times American policymakers treated (or at least pretended to treat) the use of force as evidence that diplomacy had failed. In our own time they have concluded (in the words of Vice President Dick Cheney) that force "makes your diplomacy more effective going forward, dealing with other problems." Policymakers have increasingly come to see coercion as a sort of all-purpose tool. Among American war planners, the assumption has now taken root that whenever and wherever U.S. forces next engage in hostilities, it will be the result of the United States consciously choosing to launch a war. As President Bush has remarked, the big lesson of 9/11 was that "this country must go on the offense and stay on the offense." The American public's ready acceptance of the prospect of war without foreseeable end and of a policy that abandons even the pretense of the United States fighting defensively or viewing war as a last resort shows clearly how far the process of militarization has advanced.
The New Aesthetic of War
Reinforcing this heightened predilection for arms has been the appearance in recent years of a new aesthetic of war. This is the third indication of advancing militarism.
The old 20th-century aesthetic of armed conflict as barbarism, brutality, ugliness, and sheer waste grew out of World War I, as depicted by writers such as Ernest Hemingway, Erich Maria Remarque, and Robert Graves. World War II, Korea, and Vietnam reaffirmed that aesthetic, in the latter case with films like Apocalypse Now, Platoon, and Full Metal Jacket.
The intersection of art and war gave birth to two large truths. The first was that the modern battlefield was a slaughterhouse, and modern war an orgy of destruction that devoured guilty and innocent alike. The second, stemming from the first, was that military service was an inherently degrading experience and military institutions by their very nature repressive and inhumane. After 1914, only fascists dared to challenge these truths. Only fascists celebrated war and depicted armies as forward-looking -- expressions of national unity and collective purpose that paved the way for utopia. To be a genuine progressive, liberal in instinct, enlightened in sensibility, was to reject such notions as preposterous.
But by the turn of the 21st century, a new image of war had emerged, if not fully displacing the old one at least serving as a counterweight. To many observers, events of the 1990s suggested that war's very nature was undergoing a profound change. The era of mass armies, going back to the time of Napoleon, and of mechanized warfare, an offshoot of industrialization, was coming to an end. A new era of high-tech warfare, waged by highly skilled professionals equipped with "smart" weapons, had commenced. Describing the result inspired the creation of a new lexicon of military terms: war was becoming surgical, frictionless, postmodern, even abstract or virtual. It was "coercive diplomacy" -- the object of the exercise no longer to kill but to persuade. By the end of the 20th century, Michael Ignatieff of Harvard University concluded, war had become "a spectacle." It had transformed itself into a kind of "spectator sport," one offering "the added thrill that it is real for someone, but not, happily, for the spectator." Even for the participants, fighting no longer implied the prospect of dying for some abstract cause, since the very notion of "sacrifice in battle had become implausible or ironic."
Combat in the information age promised to overturn all of "the hoary dictums about the fog and friction" that had traditionally made warfare such a chancy proposition. American commanders, affirmed Gen. Tommy Franks, could expect to enjoy "the kind of Olympian perspective that Homer had given his gods."
In short, by the dawn of the 21st century the reigning postulates of technology-as-panacea had knocked away much of the accumulated blood-rust sullying war's reputation. Thus reimagined -- and amidst widespread assurances that the United States could be expected to retain a monopoly on this new way of war -- armed conflict regained an aesthetic respectability, even palatability, that the literary and artistic interpreters of twentieth-century military cataclysms were thought to have demolished once and for all. In the right circumstances, for the right cause, it now turned out, war could actually offer an attractive option--cost-effective, humane, even thrilling. Indeed, as the Anglo-American race to Baghdad conclusively demonstrated in the spring of 2003, in the eyes of many, war has once again become a grand pageant, performance art, or a perhaps temporary diversion from the ennui and boring routine of everyday life. As one observer noted with approval, "public enthusiasm for the whiz-bang technology of the U.S. military" had become "almost boyish." Reinforcing this enthusiasm was the expectation that the great majority of Americans could count on being able to enjoy this new type of war from a safe distance.
The Moral Superiority of the Soldier
This new aesthetic has contributed, in turn, to an appreciable boost in the status of military institutions and soldiers themselves, a fourth manifestation of the new American militarism.
Since the end of the Cold War, opinion polls surveying public attitudes toward national institutions have regularly ranked the armed services first. While confidence in the executive branch, the Congress, the media, and even organized religion is diminishing, confidence in the military continues to climb. Otherwise acutely wary of having their pockets picked, Americans count on men and women in uniform to do the right thing in the right way for the right reasons. Americans fearful that the rest of society may be teetering on the brink of moral collapse console themselves with the thought that the armed services remain a repository of traditional values and old-fashioned virtue.
Confidence in the military has found further expression in a tendency to elevate the soldier to the status of national icon, the apotheosis of all that is great and good about contemporary America. The men and women of the armed services, gushed Newsweek in the aftermath of Operation Desert Storm, "looked like a Norman Rockwell painting come to life. They were young, confident, and hardworking, and they went about their business with poise and élan." A writer for Rolling Stone reported after a more recent and extended immersion in military life that "the Army was not the awful thing that my [anti-military] father had imagined"; it was instead "the sort of America he always pictured when he explained ... his best hopes for the country."
According to the old post-Vietnam-era political correctness, the armed services had been a refuge for louts and mediocrities who probably couldn't make it in the real world. By the turn of the 21st century a different view had taken hold. Now the United States military was "a place where everyone tried their hardest. A place where everybody ... looked out for each other. A place where people -- intelligent, talented people -- said honestly that money wasn't what drove them. A place where people spoke openly about their feelings." Soldiers, it turned out, were not only more virtuous than the rest of us, but also more sensitive and even happier. Contemplating the GIs advancing on Baghdad in March 2003, the classicist and military historian Victor Davis Hanson saw something more than soldiers in battle. He ascertained "transcendence at work." According to Hanson, the armed services had "somehow distilled from the rest of us an elite cohort" in which virtues cherished by earlier generations of Americans continued to flourish.
Soldiers have tended to concur with this evaluation of their own moral superiority. In a 2003 survey of military personnel, "two-thirds [of those polled] said they think military members have higher moral standards than the nation they serve. ... Once in the military, many said, members are wrapped in a culture that values honor and morality." Such attitudes leave even some senior officers more than a little uncomfortable. Noting with regret that "the armed forces are no longer representative of the people they serve," retired Adm. Stanley Arthur has expressed concern that "more and more, enlisted as well as officers are beginning to feel that they are special, better than the society they serve." Such tendencies, concluded Arthur, are "not healthy in an armed force serving a democracy."
In public life today, paying homage to those in uniform has become obligatory and the one unforgivable sin is to be found guilty of failing to "support the troops." In the realm of partisan politics, the political right has shown considerable skill in exploiting this dynamic, shamelessly pandering to the military itself and by extension to those members of the public laboring under the misconception, a residue from Vietnam, that the armed services are under siege from a rabidly anti-military left.
In fact, the Democratic mainstream -- if only to save itself from extinction -- has long since purged itself of any dovish inclinations. "What's the point of having this superb military that you're always talking about," Madeleine Albright demanded of Gen. Colin Powell, "if we can't use it?" As Albright's question famously attests, when it comes to advocating the use of force, Democrats can be positively gung ho. Moreover, in comparison to their Republican counterparts, they are at least as deferential to military leaders and probably more reluctant to question claims of military expertise.
Even among left-liberal activists, the reflexive anti-militarism of the 1960s has given way to a more nuanced view. Although hard-pressed to match self-aggrandizing conservative claims of being one with the troops, progressives have come to appreciate the potential for using the armed services to advance their own agenda. Do-gooders want to harness military power to their efforts to do good. Thus, the most persistent calls for U.S. intervention abroad to relieve the plight of the abused and persecuted come from the militant left. In the present moment, writes Michael Ignatieff, "empire has become a precondition for democracy." Ignatieff, a prominent human rights advocate, summons the United States to "use imperial power to strengthen respect for self-determination [and] to give states back to abused, oppressed people who deserve to rule them for themselves."
The President as Warlord
Occasionally, albeit infrequently, the prospect of an upcoming military adventure still elicits opposition, even from a public grown accustomed to war. For example, during the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003, large-scale demonstrations against President Bush's planned intervention filled the streets of many American cities. The prospect of the United States launching a preventive war without the sanction of the U.N. Security Council produced the largest outpouring of public protest that the country had seen since the Vietnam War. Yet the response of the political classes to this phenomenon was essentially to ignore it. No politician of national stature offered himself or herself as the movement's champion. No would-be statesman nursing even the slightest prospects of winning high national office was willing to risk being tagged with not supporting those whom President Bush was ordering into harm's way. When the Congress took up the matter, Democrats who denounced George W. Bush's policies in every other respect dutifully authorized him to invade Iraq. For up-and-coming politicians, opposition to war had become something of a third rail: only the very brave or the very foolhardy dared to venture anywhere near it.
More recently still, this has culminated in George W. Bush styling himself as the nation's first full-fledged warrior-president. The staging of Bush's victory lap shortly after the conquest of Baghdad in the spring of 2003 -- the dramatic landing on the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, with the president decked out in the full regalia of a naval aviator emerging from the cockpit to bask in the adulation of the crew -- was lifted directly from the triumphant final scenes of the movie Top Gun, with the boyish George Bush standing in for the boyish Tom Cruise. For this nationally televised moment, Bush was not simply mingling with the troops; he had merged his identity with their own and made himself one of them -- the president as warlord. In short order, the marketplace ratified this effort; a toy manufacturer offered for $39.99 a Bush look-alike military action figure advertised as "Elite Force Aviator: George W. Bush -- U.S. President and Naval Aviator."
Thus has the condition that worried C. Wright Mills in 1956 come to pass in our own day. "For the first time in the nation's history," Mills wrote, "men in authority are talking about an 'emergency' without a foreseeable end." While in earlier times Americans had viewed history as "a peaceful continuum interrupted by war," today planning, preparing, and waging war has become "the normal state and seemingly permanent condition of the United States." And "the only accepted 'plan' for peace is the loaded pistol."
© 2005 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/21827/
AlterNet
By Andrew J. Bacevich, Tomdispatch.com
Posted on April 21, 2005, Printed on April 21, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/21827/
Andrew J. Bacevich has written a book on militarism, American-style, of surpassing interest. Just published, "The New American Militarism, How Americans Are Seduced by War" would be critical reading no matter who wrote it. But coming from Bacevich, a West Point graduate, Vietnam veteran, former contributor to such magazines as the Weekly Standard and the National Review, and former Bush Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, it has special resonance.
Bacevich, a self-professed conservative, has clearly been a man on a journey. He writes that he still situates himself "culturally on the right. And I continue to view the remedies proffered by mainstream liberalism with skepticism. But my disenchantment with what passes for mainstream conservatism, embodied in the present Bush administration and its groupies, is just about absolute. Fiscal irresponsibility, a buccaneering foreign policy, a disregard for the Constitution, the barest lip service as a response to profound moral controversies: these do not qualify as authentically conservative values. On this score my views have come to coincide with the critique long offered by the radical left: it is the mainstream itself, the professional liberals as well as the professional conservatives who define the problem."
At the end of the Cold War, Americans said yes to military power. The skepticism about arms and armies that pervaded the American experiment from its founding, vanished. Political leaders, liberals and conservatives alike, became enamored with military might.
The ensuing affair had and continues to have a heedless, Gatsby-like aspect, a passion pursued in utter disregard of any consequences that might ensue. Few in power have openly considered whether valuing military power for its own sake or cultivating permanent global military superiority might be at odds with American principles. Indeed, one striking aspect of America's drift toward militarism has been the absence of dissent offered by any political figure of genuine stature.
For example, when Sen. John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, ran for the presidency in 2004, he framed his differences with George W. Bush's national security policies in terms of tactics rather than first principles. Kerry did not question the wisdom of styling the U.S. response to the events of 9/11 as a generations-long "global war on terror." It was not the prospect of open-ended war that drew Kerry's ire. It was rather the fact that the war had been "extraordinarily mismanaged and ineptly prosecuted." Kerry faulted Bush because, in his view, U.S. troops in Iraq lacked "the preparation and hardware they needed to fight as effectively as they could." Bush was expecting too few soldiers to do too much with too little. Declaring that "keeping our military strong and keeping our troops as safe as they can be should be our highest priority," Kerry promised if elected to fix these deficiencies. Americans could count on a President Kerry to expand the armed forces and to improve their ability to fight.
Yet on this score Kerry's circumspection was entirely predictable. It was the candidate's way of signaling that he was sound on defense and had no intention of departing from the prevailing national security consensus.
Under the terms of that consensus, mainstream politicians today take as a given that American military supremacy is an unqualified good, evidence of a larger American superiority. They see this armed might as the key to creating an international order that accommodates American values. One result of that consensus over the past quarter century has been to militarize U.S. policy and to encourage tendencies suggesting that American society itself is increasingly enamored with its self-image as the military power nonpareil.
How Much Is Enough?
This new American militarism manifests itself in several different ways. It does so, first of all, in the scope, cost, and configuration of America's present-day military establishment.
Through the first two centuries of U.S. history, political leaders in Washington gauged the size and capabilities of America's armed services according to the security tasks immediately at hand. A grave and proximate threat to the nation's well-being might require a large and powerful military establishment. In the absence of such a threat, policymakers scaled down that establishment accordingly. With the passing of crisis, the army raised up for the crisis went immediately out of existence. This had been the case in 1865, in 1918, and in 1945.
Since the end of the Cold War, having come to value military power for its own sake, the United States has abandoned this principle and is committed as a matter of policy to maintaining military capabilities far in excess of those of any would-be adversary or combination of adversaries. This commitment finds both a qualitative and quantitative expression, with the U.S. military establishment dwarfing that of even America's closest ally. Thus, whereas the U.S. Navy maintains and operates a total of twelve large attack aircraft carriers, the once-vaunted [British] Royal Navy has none -- indeed, in all the battle fleets of the world there is no ship even remotely comparable to a Nimitz-class carrier, weighing in at some ninety-seven thousand tons fully loaded, longer than three football fields, cruising at a speed above 30 knots, and powered by nuclear reactors that give it an essentially infinite radius of action. Today, the U.S. Marine Corps possesses more attack aircraft than does the entire Royal Air Force -- and the United States has two other even larger "air forces," one an integral part of the Navy and the other officially designated as the U.S. Air Force. Indeed, in terms of numbers of men and women in uniform, the U.S. Marine Corps is half again as large as the entire British Army--and the Pentagon has a second, even larger "army" actually called the U.S. Army -- which in turn also operates its own "air force" of some 5,000 aircraft.
All of these massive and redundant capabilities cost money. Notably, the present-day Pentagon budget, adjusted for inflation, is 12 percent larger than the average defense budget of the Cold War era. In 2002, American defense spending exceeded by a factor of 25 the combined defense budgets of the seven "rogue states" then comprising the roster of U.S. enemies. Indeed, by some calculations, the United States spends more on defense than all other nations in the world together. This is a circumstance without historical precedent.
Furthermore, in all likelihood, the gap in military spending between the United States and all other nations will expand further still in the years to come. Projected increases in the defense budget will boost Pentagon spending in real terms to a level higher than it was during the Reagan era. According to the Pentagon's announced long-range plans, by 2009 its budget will exceed the Cold War average by 23 percent -- despite the absence of anything remotely resembling a so-called peer competitor. However astonishing this fact might seem, it elicits little comment, either from political leaders or the press. It is simply taken for granted. The truth is that there no longer exists any meaningful context within which Americans might consider the question "How much is enough?"
On a day-to-day basis, what do these expensive forces exist to do? Simply put, for the Department of Defense and all of its constituent parts, defense per se figures as little more than an afterthought. The primary mission of America's far-flung military establishment is global power projection, a reality tacitly understood in all quarters of American society. To suggest that the U.S. military has become the world's police force may slightly overstate the case, but only slightly.
That well over a decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union the United States continues to maintain bases and military forces in several dozens of countries -- by some counts well over a hundred in all -- rouses minimal controversy, despite the fact that many of these countries are perfectly capable of providing for their own security needs. That even apart from fighting wars and pursuing terrorists, U.S. forces are constantly prowling around the globe -- training, exercising, planning, and posturing -- elicits no more notice (and in some cases less) from the average American than the presence of a cop on a city street corner. Even before the Pentagon officially assigned itself the mission of "shaping" the international environment, members of the political elite, liberals and conservatives alike, had reached a common understanding that scattering U.S. troops around the globe to restrain, inspire, influence, persuade, or cajole paid dividends. Whether any correlation exists between this vast panoply of forward-deployed forces on the one hand and antipathy to the United States abroad on the other has remained for the most part a taboo subject.
The Quest for Military Dominion
The indisputable fact of global U.S. military preeminence also affects the collective mindset of the officer corps. For the armed services, dominance constitutes a baseline or a point of departure from which to scale the heights of ever greater military capabilities. Indeed, the services have come to view outright supremacy as merely adequate and any hesitation in efforts to increase the margin of supremacy as evidence of falling behind.
Thus, according to one typical study of the U.S. Navy's future, "sea supremacy beginning at our shore lines and extending outward to distant theaters is a necessary condition for the defense of the U.S." Of course, the U.S. Navy already possesses unquestioned global preeminence; the real point of the study is to argue for the urgency of radical enhancements to that preeminence. The officer-authors of this study express confidence that given sufficient money the Navy can achieve ever greater supremacy, enabling the Navy of the future to enjoy "overwhelming precision firepower," "pervasive surveillance," and "dominant control of a maneuvering area, whether sea, undersea, land, air, space or cyberspace." In this study and in virtually all others, political and strategic questions implicit in the proposition that supremacy in distant theaters forms a prerequisite of "defense" are left begging -- indeed, are probably unrecognized. At times, this quest for military dominion takes on galactic proportions. Acknowledging that the United States enjoys "superiority in many aspects of space capability," a senior defense official nonetheless complains that "we don't have space dominance and we don't have space supremacy." Since outer space is "the ultimate high ground," which the United States must control, he urges immediate action to correct this deficiency. When it comes to military power, mere superiority will not suffice.
The new American militarism also manifests itself through an increased propensity to use force, leading, in effect, to the normalization of war. There was a time in recent memory, most notably while the so-called Vietnam Syndrome infected the American body politic, when Republican and Democratic administrations alike viewed with real trepidation the prospect of sending U.S. troops into action abroad. Since the advent of the new Wilsonianism, however, self-restraint regarding the use of force has all but disappeared. During the entire Cold War era, from 1945 through 1988, large-scale U.S. military actions abroad totaled a scant six. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, however, they have become almost annual events. The brief period extending from 1989's Operation Just Cause (the overthrow of Manuel Noriega) to 2003's Operation Iraqi Freedom (the overthrow of Saddam Hussein) featured nine major military interventions. And that count does not include innumerable lesser actions such as Bill Clinton's signature cruise missile attacks against obscure targets in obscure places, the almost daily bombing of Iraq throughout the late 1990s, or the quasi-combat missions that have seen GIs dispatched to Rwanda, Colombia, East Timor, and the Philippines. Altogether, the tempo of U.S. military interventionism has become nothing short of frenetic.
As this roster of incidents lengthened, Americans grew accustomed to -- perhaps even comfortable with -- reading in their morning newspapers the latest reports of U.S. soldiers responding to some crisis somewhere on the other side of the globe. As crisis became a seemingly permanent condition so too did war. The Bush administration has tacitly acknowledged as much in describing the global campaign against terror as a conflict likely to last decades and in promulgating -- and in Iraq implementing -- a doctrine of preventive war.
In former times American policymakers treated (or at least pretended to treat) the use of force as evidence that diplomacy had failed. In our own time they have concluded (in the words of Vice President Dick Cheney) that force "makes your diplomacy more effective going forward, dealing with other problems." Policymakers have increasingly come to see coercion as a sort of all-purpose tool. Among American war planners, the assumption has now taken root that whenever and wherever U.S. forces next engage in hostilities, it will be the result of the United States consciously choosing to launch a war. As President Bush has remarked, the big lesson of 9/11 was that "this country must go on the offense and stay on the offense." The American public's ready acceptance of the prospect of war without foreseeable end and of a policy that abandons even the pretense of the United States fighting defensively or viewing war as a last resort shows clearly how far the process of militarization has advanced.
The New Aesthetic of War
Reinforcing this heightened predilection for arms has been the appearance in recent years of a new aesthetic of war. This is the third indication of advancing militarism.
The old 20th-century aesthetic of armed conflict as barbarism, brutality, ugliness, and sheer waste grew out of World War I, as depicted by writers such as Ernest Hemingway, Erich Maria Remarque, and Robert Graves. World War II, Korea, and Vietnam reaffirmed that aesthetic, in the latter case with films like Apocalypse Now, Platoon, and Full Metal Jacket.
The intersection of art and war gave birth to two large truths. The first was that the modern battlefield was a slaughterhouse, and modern war an orgy of destruction that devoured guilty and innocent alike. The second, stemming from the first, was that military service was an inherently degrading experience and military institutions by their very nature repressive and inhumane. After 1914, only fascists dared to challenge these truths. Only fascists celebrated war and depicted armies as forward-looking -- expressions of national unity and collective purpose that paved the way for utopia. To be a genuine progressive, liberal in instinct, enlightened in sensibility, was to reject such notions as preposterous.
But by the turn of the 21st century, a new image of war had emerged, if not fully displacing the old one at least serving as a counterweight. To many observers, events of the 1990s suggested that war's very nature was undergoing a profound change. The era of mass armies, going back to the time of Napoleon, and of mechanized warfare, an offshoot of industrialization, was coming to an end. A new era of high-tech warfare, waged by highly skilled professionals equipped with "smart" weapons, had commenced. Describing the result inspired the creation of a new lexicon of military terms: war was becoming surgical, frictionless, postmodern, even abstract or virtual. It was "coercive diplomacy" -- the object of the exercise no longer to kill but to persuade. By the end of the 20th century, Michael Ignatieff of Harvard University concluded, war had become "a spectacle." It had transformed itself into a kind of "spectator sport," one offering "the added thrill that it is real for someone, but not, happily, for the spectator." Even for the participants, fighting no longer implied the prospect of dying for some abstract cause, since the very notion of "sacrifice in battle had become implausible or ironic."
Combat in the information age promised to overturn all of "the hoary dictums about the fog and friction" that had traditionally made warfare such a chancy proposition. American commanders, affirmed Gen. Tommy Franks, could expect to enjoy "the kind of Olympian perspective that Homer had given his gods."
In short, by the dawn of the 21st century the reigning postulates of technology-as-panacea had knocked away much of the accumulated blood-rust sullying war's reputation. Thus reimagined -- and amidst widespread assurances that the United States could be expected to retain a monopoly on this new way of war -- armed conflict regained an aesthetic respectability, even palatability, that the literary and artistic interpreters of twentieth-century military cataclysms were thought to have demolished once and for all. In the right circumstances, for the right cause, it now turned out, war could actually offer an attractive option--cost-effective, humane, even thrilling. Indeed, as the Anglo-American race to Baghdad conclusively demonstrated in the spring of 2003, in the eyes of many, war has once again become a grand pageant, performance art, or a perhaps temporary diversion from the ennui and boring routine of everyday life. As one observer noted with approval, "public enthusiasm for the whiz-bang technology of the U.S. military" had become "almost boyish." Reinforcing this enthusiasm was the expectation that the great majority of Americans could count on being able to enjoy this new type of war from a safe distance.
The Moral Superiority of the Soldier
This new aesthetic has contributed, in turn, to an appreciable boost in the status of military institutions and soldiers themselves, a fourth manifestation of the new American militarism.
Since the end of the Cold War, opinion polls surveying public attitudes toward national institutions have regularly ranked the armed services first. While confidence in the executive branch, the Congress, the media, and even organized religion is diminishing, confidence in the military continues to climb. Otherwise acutely wary of having their pockets picked, Americans count on men and women in uniform to do the right thing in the right way for the right reasons. Americans fearful that the rest of society may be teetering on the brink of moral collapse console themselves with the thought that the armed services remain a repository of traditional values and old-fashioned virtue.
Confidence in the military has found further expression in a tendency to elevate the soldier to the status of national icon, the apotheosis of all that is great and good about contemporary America. The men and women of the armed services, gushed Newsweek in the aftermath of Operation Desert Storm, "looked like a Norman Rockwell painting come to life. They were young, confident, and hardworking, and they went about their business with poise and élan." A writer for Rolling Stone reported after a more recent and extended immersion in military life that "the Army was not the awful thing that my [anti-military] father had imagined"; it was instead "the sort of America he always pictured when he explained ... his best hopes for the country."
According to the old post-Vietnam-era political correctness, the armed services had been a refuge for louts and mediocrities who probably couldn't make it in the real world. By the turn of the 21st century a different view had taken hold. Now the United States military was "a place where everyone tried their hardest. A place where everybody ... looked out for each other. A place where people -- intelligent, talented people -- said honestly that money wasn't what drove them. A place where people spoke openly about their feelings." Soldiers, it turned out, were not only more virtuous than the rest of us, but also more sensitive and even happier. Contemplating the GIs advancing on Baghdad in March 2003, the classicist and military historian Victor Davis Hanson saw something more than soldiers in battle. He ascertained "transcendence at work." According to Hanson, the armed services had "somehow distilled from the rest of us an elite cohort" in which virtues cherished by earlier generations of Americans continued to flourish.
Soldiers have tended to concur with this evaluation of their own moral superiority. In a 2003 survey of military personnel, "two-thirds [of those polled] said they think military members have higher moral standards than the nation they serve. ... Once in the military, many said, members are wrapped in a culture that values honor and morality." Such attitudes leave even some senior officers more than a little uncomfortable. Noting with regret that "the armed forces are no longer representative of the people they serve," retired Adm. Stanley Arthur has expressed concern that "more and more, enlisted as well as officers are beginning to feel that they are special, better than the society they serve." Such tendencies, concluded Arthur, are "not healthy in an armed force serving a democracy."
In public life today, paying homage to those in uniform has become obligatory and the one unforgivable sin is to be found guilty of failing to "support the troops." In the realm of partisan politics, the political right has shown considerable skill in exploiting this dynamic, shamelessly pandering to the military itself and by extension to those members of the public laboring under the misconception, a residue from Vietnam, that the armed services are under siege from a rabidly anti-military left.
In fact, the Democratic mainstream -- if only to save itself from extinction -- has long since purged itself of any dovish inclinations. "What's the point of having this superb military that you're always talking about," Madeleine Albright demanded of Gen. Colin Powell, "if we can't use it?" As Albright's question famously attests, when it comes to advocating the use of force, Democrats can be positively gung ho. Moreover, in comparison to their Republican counterparts, they are at least as deferential to military leaders and probably more reluctant to question claims of military expertise.
Even among left-liberal activists, the reflexive anti-militarism of the 1960s has given way to a more nuanced view. Although hard-pressed to match self-aggrandizing conservative claims of being one with the troops, progressives have come to appreciate the potential for using the armed services to advance their own agenda. Do-gooders want to harness military power to their efforts to do good. Thus, the most persistent calls for U.S. intervention abroad to relieve the plight of the abused and persecuted come from the militant left. In the present moment, writes Michael Ignatieff, "empire has become a precondition for democracy." Ignatieff, a prominent human rights advocate, summons the United States to "use imperial power to strengthen respect for self-determination [and] to give states back to abused, oppressed people who deserve to rule them for themselves."
The President as Warlord
Occasionally, albeit infrequently, the prospect of an upcoming military adventure still elicits opposition, even from a public grown accustomed to war. For example, during the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003, large-scale demonstrations against President Bush's planned intervention filled the streets of many American cities. The prospect of the United States launching a preventive war without the sanction of the U.N. Security Council produced the largest outpouring of public protest that the country had seen since the Vietnam War. Yet the response of the political classes to this phenomenon was essentially to ignore it. No politician of national stature offered himself or herself as the movement's champion. No would-be statesman nursing even the slightest prospects of winning high national office was willing to risk being tagged with not supporting those whom President Bush was ordering into harm's way. When the Congress took up the matter, Democrats who denounced George W. Bush's policies in every other respect dutifully authorized him to invade Iraq. For up-and-coming politicians, opposition to war had become something of a third rail: only the very brave or the very foolhardy dared to venture anywhere near it.
More recently still, this has culminated in George W. Bush styling himself as the nation's first full-fledged warrior-president. The staging of Bush's victory lap shortly after the conquest of Baghdad in the spring of 2003 -- the dramatic landing on the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, with the president decked out in the full regalia of a naval aviator emerging from the cockpit to bask in the adulation of the crew -- was lifted directly from the triumphant final scenes of the movie Top Gun, with the boyish George Bush standing in for the boyish Tom Cruise. For this nationally televised moment, Bush was not simply mingling with the troops; he had merged his identity with their own and made himself one of them -- the president as warlord. In short order, the marketplace ratified this effort; a toy manufacturer offered for $39.99 a Bush look-alike military action figure advertised as "Elite Force Aviator: George W. Bush -- U.S. President and Naval Aviator."
Thus has the condition that worried C. Wright Mills in 1956 come to pass in our own day. "For the first time in the nation's history," Mills wrote, "men in authority are talking about an 'emergency' without a foreseeable end." While in earlier times Americans had viewed history as "a peaceful continuum interrupted by war," today planning, preparing, and waging war has become "the normal state and seemingly permanent condition of the United States." And "the only accepted 'plan' for peace is the loaded pistol."
© 2005 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/21827/
Wednesday, April 20, 2005
A Radical in the White House
A Call To Action
The New York Times
April 18, 2005
OP-ED COLUMNIST
By BOB HERBERT
Last week - April 12, to be exact - was the 60th anniversary of the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. "I have a terrific headache," he said, before collapsing at the Little White House in Warm Springs, Ga. He died of a massive cerebral hemorrhage on the 83rd day of his fourth term as president. His hold on the nation was such that most Americans, stunned by the announcement of his death that spring afternoon, reacted as though they had lost a close relative.
That more wasn't made of this anniversary is not just a matter of time; it's a measure of the distance the U.S. has traveled from the egalitarian ideals championed by F.D.R. His goal was "to make a country in which no one is left out." That kind of thinking has long since been consigned to the political dumpster. We're now in the age of Bush, Cheney and DeLay, small men committed to the concentration of big bucks in the hands of the fortunate few.
To get a sense of just how radical Roosevelt was (compared with the politics of today), consider the State of the Union address he delivered from the White House on Jan. 11, 1944. He was already in declining health and, suffering from a cold, he gave the speech over the radio in the form of a fireside chat.
After talking about the war, which was still being fought on two fronts, the president offered what should have been recognized immediately for what it was, nothing less than a blueprint for the future of the United States. It was the clearest statement I've ever seen of the kind of nation the U.S. could have become in the years between the end of World War II and now. Roosevelt referred to his proposals in that speech as "a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all regardless of station, race or creed."
Among these rights, he said, are:
"The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation.
"The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation.
"The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living.
"The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad.
"The right of every family to a decent home.
"The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health.
"The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident and unemployment.
"The right to a good education."
I mentioned this a few days ago to an acquaintance who is 30 years old. She said, "Wow, I can't believe a president would say that."
Roosevelt's vision gave conservatives in both parties apoplexy in 1944 and it would still drive them crazy today. But the truth is that during the 1950's and 60's the nation made substantial progress toward his wonderfully admirable goals, before the momentum of liberal politics slowed with the war in Vietnam and the election in 1968 of Richard Nixon.
It wouldn't be long before Ronald Reagan was, as the historian Robert Dallek put it, attacking Medicare as "the advance wave of socialism" and Dick Cheney, from a seat in Congress, was giving the thumbs down to Head Start. Mr. Cheney says he has since seen the light on Head Start. But his real idea of a head start is to throw government money at people who already have more cash than they know what to do with. He's one of the leaders of the G.O.P. gang (the members should all wear masks) that has executed a wholesale transfer of wealth via tax cuts from working people to the very rich.
Roosevelt was far from a perfect president, but he gave hope and a sense of the possible to a nation in dire need. And he famously warned against giving in to fear.
The nation is now in the hands of leaders who are experts at exploiting fear, and indifferent to the needs and hopes, even the suffering, of ordinary people.
"The test of our progress," said Roosevelt, "is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little."
Sixty years after his death we should be raising a toast to F.D.R. and his progressive ideas. And we should take that opportunity to ask: How in the world did we allow ourselves to get from there to here?
E-mail: bobherb@nytimes.com
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
The New York Times
April 18, 2005
OP-ED COLUMNIST
By BOB HERBERT
Last week - April 12, to be exact - was the 60th anniversary of the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. "I have a terrific headache," he said, before collapsing at the Little White House in Warm Springs, Ga. He died of a massive cerebral hemorrhage on the 83rd day of his fourth term as president. His hold on the nation was such that most Americans, stunned by the announcement of his death that spring afternoon, reacted as though they had lost a close relative.
That more wasn't made of this anniversary is not just a matter of time; it's a measure of the distance the U.S. has traveled from the egalitarian ideals championed by F.D.R. His goal was "to make a country in which no one is left out." That kind of thinking has long since been consigned to the political dumpster. We're now in the age of Bush, Cheney and DeLay, small men committed to the concentration of big bucks in the hands of the fortunate few.
To get a sense of just how radical Roosevelt was (compared with the politics of today), consider the State of the Union address he delivered from the White House on Jan. 11, 1944. He was already in declining health and, suffering from a cold, he gave the speech over the radio in the form of a fireside chat.
After talking about the war, which was still being fought on two fronts, the president offered what should have been recognized immediately for what it was, nothing less than a blueprint for the future of the United States. It was the clearest statement I've ever seen of the kind of nation the U.S. could have become in the years between the end of World War II and now. Roosevelt referred to his proposals in that speech as "a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all regardless of station, race or creed."
Among these rights, he said, are:
"The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation.
"The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation.
"The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living.
"The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad.
"The right of every family to a decent home.
"The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health.
"The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident and unemployment.
"The right to a good education."
I mentioned this a few days ago to an acquaintance who is 30 years old. She said, "Wow, I can't believe a president would say that."
Roosevelt's vision gave conservatives in both parties apoplexy in 1944 and it would still drive them crazy today. But the truth is that during the 1950's and 60's the nation made substantial progress toward his wonderfully admirable goals, before the momentum of liberal politics slowed with the war in Vietnam and the election in 1968 of Richard Nixon.
It wouldn't be long before Ronald Reagan was, as the historian Robert Dallek put it, attacking Medicare as "the advance wave of socialism" and Dick Cheney, from a seat in Congress, was giving the thumbs down to Head Start. Mr. Cheney says he has since seen the light on Head Start. But his real idea of a head start is to throw government money at people who already have more cash than they know what to do with. He's one of the leaders of the G.O.P. gang (the members should all wear masks) that has executed a wholesale transfer of wealth via tax cuts from working people to the very rich.
Roosevelt was far from a perfect president, but he gave hope and a sense of the possible to a nation in dire need. And he famously warned against giving in to fear.
The nation is now in the hands of leaders who are experts at exploiting fear, and indifferent to the needs and hopes, even the suffering, of ordinary people.
"The test of our progress," said Roosevelt, "is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little."
Sixty years after his death we should be raising a toast to F.D.R. and his progressive ideas. And we should take that opportunity to ask: How in the world did we allow ourselves to get from there to here?
E-mail: bobherb@nytimes.com
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
Tuesday, April 19, 2005
Fw: Iraq -- Humanitarian Workers' Deaths Remind FCNL of Costs of U.S. War and Occupation
----- Original Message -----
From: "Joe Volk"
To: "Miriam Vieni"
Sent: Tuesday, April 19, 2005 10:19 AM
Subject: Iraq -- Humanitarian Workers' Deaths Remind FCNL of Costs of U.S.
War and Occupation
The violent death of humanitarian aid workers Marla Ruzicka and Faiz
Ali Salim in a suicide bombing in Iraq this past weekend struck many of
us with grief because she has been a regular visitor to the FCNL office
in Washington. The organization she founded, the Campaign for Innocent
Victims of Conflict (CIVIC), plays an important role in working to
obtain U.S. government recognition of and financial support for the
survivors of civilians killed or injured in armed conflict. We saw
first-hand her commitment to the Iraqi people because FCNL played a
small role in supporting Marla's work as she began her project by
serving as the fiscal agent for some of those donating to her projects.
Her death, and the death of her Iraqi colleague, Faiz Ali Salim (the
father of a 2-month-old child), remind all of us of the violence that
is continuing unabated in Iraq. Press reports suggest that at least 17
other Iraqis and 3 U.S. troops were killed on the same day as Marla and
Faiz. Some reports suggest that most Iraqi deaths are simply uncounted.
The U.S. military has refused since the start of the war to count Iraqi
casualties.
Marla wouldn't stand for it. She fearlessly stood with the Iraqi's who
had not voice, no power, no prospect of justice. She told me,
"Joe, when I looked into their eyes, I just couldn't walk away and
do nothing." Marla did something. She went straight to the U.S.
authorities in Iraq and grabbed them by their epaulets and said,
"You have a responsibility, and I'm not going to let go until you
do something." She just wouldn't let the survivors of violent
conflict go unnoticed, and she wouldn't allow the authorities to claim
they didn't know what happened to individual people. She informed them
face to face. And her Iraqi colleague Faiz exercised extraordinary
courage in taking her where she needed to go, despite the terrible
risks.
The headlines in the United States focus on the political dynamics and
the negotiations to form the new government. Deaths are usually
mentioned only if they are the deaths of U.S. nationals. But the
reality for many Iraqis is that the situation on the ground is getting
worse, not better, day by day (the FCNL Washington Newsletter that
should be arriving in your mailboxes this week includes a personal
account of what conditions on-the-ground in Iraq are like today).
The story of on-the-ground conditions in Iraq, however, is still not
getting through to your elected leaders in Washington. This week,
probably either late Tuesday or Wednesday, the U.S. Senate will almost
certainly vote to approve tens of billions of dollars in additional
funding for the war and occupation of Iraq. More and more senators are
telling us that they believe the FCNL proposal that the Congress
declare that the U.S. has no imperial intentions in Iraq is an
important way to advance the debate on U.S. policy for Iraq. But we are
still a long way from winning passage of an amendment affirming that it
is the U.S. intention to withdraw all military troops and bases from
Iraq.
I'm including at the bottom of this email links to the web site for
Marla's group, CIVIC, and to a very good statement released by Senator
Patrick Leahy, who was a strong supporter of Marla's work. Here at
FCNL we will continue to honor the work of Marla and the tens of
thousands of others who have died in the Iraq war and occupation by
continuing to press Congress to declare that the U.S. has no imperial
ambitions in Iraq. As I go into congressional offices, I'll stop
outside the door to silently remind myself - Marla, presente - before
I go inside to engage congressional staff and members of Congress.
Joe Volk
Executive Secretary
FCNL
For more information about the FCNL Iraq campaign go to www.fcnl.org/iraq
For more information about Marla's group Civic, go to
www.civicworldwide.org/
To read Senator Leahy's statement on Marla's death go to
http://capwiz.com/fconl/utr/1/OVSKEPGUWX/HRRNEPGVCT/
________________________________________
Contact Congress and the Administration:
http://capwiz.com/fconl/utr/1/OVSKEPGUWX/AIWKEPGVCU/
Order FCNL publications and "War is Not the Answer" campaign
bumper stickers and yard signs:
http://capwiz.com/fconl/utr/1/OVSKEPGUWX/HVTSEPGVCV/
http://capwiz.com/fconl/utr/1/OVSKEPGUWX/IRVMEPGVCW/
Contribute to FCNL:
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________________________________________
Friends Committee on National Legislation
245 Second St. NE, Washington, DC 20002-5795
fcnl@fcnl.org * www.fcnl.org
phone: (202)547-6000 * toll-free: (800)630-1330
We seek a world free of war and the threat of war
We seek a society with equity and justice for all
We seek a community where every person's potential may be fulfilled
We seek an earth restored.
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Friday, April 15, 2005
Latest Assault on Judges Threatens Rule of Law
A Call To Action
latimes.com
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-sunstein15apr15,0,6145804.story
COMMENTARY
By Cass R. Sunstein
Cass R. Sunstein teaches law at the University of Chicago.
April 15, 2005
In the last half-century, conservative politicians have mounted three dramatically different attacks on the federal judiciary. The first attack, in which they emphasized the need for judicial restraint, was principled and coherent. The second, which called on judges to consider the original meaning of the Constitution, was more radical but still had honorable goals: to promote stability, neutrality and the rule of law. The third attack, however, is the most worrisome: a large-scale challenge to judicial independence, and we are now in the midst of it.
During the first of the three waves, beginning around 1955, conservatives attacked liberal activist judges for seizing on ambiguous constitutional provisions to strike down decisions of elected officials. The conservatives were concerned about Supreme Court rulings protecting accused criminals, above all Miranda vs. Arizona, which required police to inform suspects of their rights. The principals were Justices William O. Douglas, William J. Brennan Jr. and Earl Warren — the liberal leaders of the Warren court. The attack on the Warren court helped fuel Gerald Ford's failed effort to impeach Douglas in 1970.
In this period, conservatives promoted judicial "restraint," calling on judges to hesitate before interpreting the Constitution to strike down reasonable judgments of the people's representatives. President Nixon, for instance, sought to end the era of judicial "activism" by appointing judges who scaled back protection of criminal defendants and who rejected efforts to use the Constitution to protect the poor.
The second attack on the judiciary, which began in the early 1980s, no longer emphasized restraint. Instead it built on the approach to constitutional interpretation known as "originalism" — the view that the Constitution means exactly what it meant when it was ratified. Some of these conservatives called for restoration of what they called "the lost Constitution."
Of course, defenders of the lost Constitution oppose new protections of criminal defendants. They have no sympathy for the right of privacy enunciated in Griswold vs. Connecticut and Roe vs. Wade. But many originalists are far more ambitious; they also believe, for instance, that Congress should not have more power over interstate commerce than it had in 1787. Unlike those who called for judicial restraint in the 1970s, these originalists are perfectly willing to use the Constitution to strike down decisions of elected officials — if those decisions are inconsistent with the original meaning of the ratifiers.
On important occasions, this argument has found a receptive audience within the Rehnquist court, whose members have referred to the original understanding of the ratifiers in striking down the Violence Against Women Act and a key provision of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, among many other laws.
Originalism is a radical program, but it has one admirable feature: It is designed to promote both judicial independence from the political process and the rule of law, by ensuring what Justice Antonin Scalia, the most prominent originalist, calls a "rock-solid, unchanging Constitution." Scalia has deplored the fact that the "American people have been converted to belief in The Living Constitution, a 'morphing' document that means, from age to age, what it ought to mean."
But now we are witnessing a third wave of attack, in which originalism is receding, and in which many conservative politicians want judges to read the Constitution, and the law in general, as if it fits with the Republican Party platform. After all, Republican presidents have succeeded in reconstructing the federal judiciary so that it is dominated by handpicked GOP appointees. Liberal activism is dying if not dead. Why shouldn't Republicans take advantage of their dominance of the judiciary to ensure that their preferred policies are implemented by courts?
The problem, as the legal battle over Terri Schiavo demonstrated, is that whatever their politics, judges are unlikely to ignore the law. In that case, the law clearly did not authorize federal judges to order Schiavo's feeding tube reinserted — but some Republicans are outraged that the judges did not have it reinserted anyway. On Wednesday, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay instructed the Judiciary Committee to investigate federal court decisions in the Schiavo case.
The attack on the judges who refused to order the feeding tube reinserted may be trivial by itself. But it is of a piece with something much more important. In recent years, some conservative politicians have been insisting that federal judges should strike down affirmative action programs, protect commercial advertising, invalidate environmental regulations, allow the president to do whatever he likes in the war on terrorism, use the Constitution to produce tort reform, invalidate gun control regulation, invalidate campaign finance laws and much more — regardless of whether they can find solid justification for these steps in our founding document.
Now, the battle over the confirmation process has become enmeshed with this third and most extreme stage of conservative thinking. What we are seeing, for the first time, is a fundamental challenge to the rule of law itself.
If you want other stories on this topic, search the Archives at latimes.com/archives.
TMS Reprints
Article licensing and reprint options
Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times
latimes.com
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-sunstein15apr15,0,6145804.story
COMMENTARY
By Cass R. Sunstein
Cass R. Sunstein teaches law at the University of Chicago.
April 15, 2005
In the last half-century, conservative politicians have mounted three dramatically different attacks on the federal judiciary. The first attack, in which they emphasized the need for judicial restraint, was principled and coherent. The second, which called on judges to consider the original meaning of the Constitution, was more radical but still had honorable goals: to promote stability, neutrality and the rule of law. The third attack, however, is the most worrisome: a large-scale challenge to judicial independence, and we are now in the midst of it.
During the first of the three waves, beginning around 1955, conservatives attacked liberal activist judges for seizing on ambiguous constitutional provisions to strike down decisions of elected officials. The conservatives were concerned about Supreme Court rulings protecting accused criminals, above all Miranda vs. Arizona, which required police to inform suspects of their rights. The principals were Justices William O. Douglas, William J. Brennan Jr. and Earl Warren — the liberal leaders of the Warren court. The attack on the Warren court helped fuel Gerald Ford's failed effort to impeach Douglas in 1970.
In this period, conservatives promoted judicial "restraint," calling on judges to hesitate before interpreting the Constitution to strike down reasonable judgments of the people's representatives. President Nixon, for instance, sought to end the era of judicial "activism" by appointing judges who scaled back protection of criminal defendants and who rejected efforts to use the Constitution to protect the poor.
The second attack on the judiciary, which began in the early 1980s, no longer emphasized restraint. Instead it built on the approach to constitutional interpretation known as "originalism" — the view that the Constitution means exactly what it meant when it was ratified. Some of these conservatives called for restoration of what they called "the lost Constitution."
Of course, defenders of the lost Constitution oppose new protections of criminal defendants. They have no sympathy for the right of privacy enunciated in Griswold vs. Connecticut and Roe vs. Wade. But many originalists are far more ambitious; they also believe, for instance, that Congress should not have more power over interstate commerce than it had in 1787. Unlike those who called for judicial restraint in the 1970s, these originalists are perfectly willing to use the Constitution to strike down decisions of elected officials — if those decisions are inconsistent with the original meaning of the ratifiers.
On important occasions, this argument has found a receptive audience within the Rehnquist court, whose members have referred to the original understanding of the ratifiers in striking down the Violence Against Women Act and a key provision of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, among many other laws.
Originalism is a radical program, but it has one admirable feature: It is designed to promote both judicial independence from the political process and the rule of law, by ensuring what Justice Antonin Scalia, the most prominent originalist, calls a "rock-solid, unchanging Constitution." Scalia has deplored the fact that the "American people have been converted to belief in The Living Constitution, a 'morphing' document that means, from age to age, what it ought to mean."
But now we are witnessing a third wave of attack, in which originalism is receding, and in which many conservative politicians want judges to read the Constitution, and the law in general, as if it fits with the Republican Party platform. After all, Republican presidents have succeeded in reconstructing the federal judiciary so that it is dominated by handpicked GOP appointees. Liberal activism is dying if not dead. Why shouldn't Republicans take advantage of their dominance of the judiciary to ensure that their preferred policies are implemented by courts?
The problem, as the legal battle over Terri Schiavo demonstrated, is that whatever their politics, judges are unlikely to ignore the law. In that case, the law clearly did not authorize federal judges to order Schiavo's feeding tube reinserted — but some Republicans are outraged that the judges did not have it reinserted anyway. On Wednesday, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay instructed the Judiciary Committee to investigate federal court decisions in the Schiavo case.
The attack on the judges who refused to order the feeding tube reinserted may be trivial by itself. But it is of a piece with something much more important. In recent years, some conservative politicians have been insisting that federal judges should strike down affirmative action programs, protect commercial advertising, invalidate environmental regulations, allow the president to do whatever he likes in the war on terrorism, use the Constitution to produce tort reform, invalidate gun control regulation, invalidate campaign finance laws and much more — regardless of whether they can find solid justification for these steps in our founding document.
Now, the battle over the confirmation process has become enmeshed with this third and most extreme stage of conservative thinking. What we are seeing, for the first time, is a fundamental challenge to the rule of law itself.
If you want other stories on this topic, search the Archives at latimes.com/archives.
TMS Reprints
Article licensing and reprint options
Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times
Wednesday, April 13, 2005
Fw: Where Do Your Federal Tax Dollars Go?
----- Original Message -----
From: "Kathy Guthrie"
To: "Miriam Vieni"
Sent: Wednesday, April 13, 2005 11:35 AM
Subject: FCNL: Where Do Your Federal Tax Dollars Go?
An article this week in Parade Magazine, which is distributed to more
than 15 million people nationwide in Sunday newspapers, offers an
opportunity to engage Friends, neighbors, and local opinion leaders in
a discussion about federal tax policy as tax day approaches.
"Where Does Your Tax Money Go?," asks David Wallechinsky, in
an article that highlights the fact that the U.S. spends as much money
on its military as all other nations combined. The article goes on to
state that 21 percent of your income taxes are spent on the military.
In fact, the percentage of your federal income taxes devoted to the
military is much higher. FCNL calculates that about 42 cents of every
income tax dollar last year was spent on current and past wars and
preparations for future wars. At the same time, the U.S. spends less
than a penny of each tax dollar to promote diplomacy, international
cooperation, humanitarian and development aid, and efforts to
peacefully prevent deadly conflicts. You can find information on how we
arrive at these figures here:
http://capwiz.com/fconl/utr/1/EFVLEOHZYR/MYCWEOIHKI/
Taxes and paying taxes will be on the minds of millions of people this
week. The IRS estimates that at least 10 million people will be paying
their taxes in the next few days. The Parade Magazine article has also
focused attention on how our federal tax dollars are spent. This is a
perfect time to bring your neighbors and friends together in common
concern and let your community and legislators know how you feel about
these unbalanced budget priorities.
FCNL's new tax day flier "Where do our income tax dollars
go?" can help you share your concern about misplaced federal
budget priorities with your community, local news media, and members of
Congress. Take a look here:
http://capwiz.com/fconl/utr/1/EFVLEOHZYR/EYNHEOIHKJ/ (If you have
trouble accessing this file, see the note about PDF files at the end of
this message).
Some suggested uses for this flier:
Print copies to distribute at local tax day demonstrations or at your
local meeting or church.
Send copies to local news outlets with the name and number of a local
contact for interviews.
Send a copy to your legislators, along with a letter about the budget
(see below).
In April, the House and Senate will be debating the budget resolution
for fiscal year 2006.
Let your legislators know your concern that Congress is wasting too
much on the military and is not investing enough to promote peace and
human security at home and abroad.
Act Now!
FCNL makes it easy to contact your members of Congress: You can see a
sample letter on FCNL's web site:
http://capwiz.com/fconl/utr/1/EFVLEOHZYR/OPHDEOIHKK/ Then write your
own email in your own words. Send your legislators a copy of the tax
day flier.
Additional Resources:
Read more from FCNL about federal budget priorities:
http://capwiz.com/fconl/utr/1/EFVLEOHZYR/ANSREOIHKL/
Read FCNL's statement on conscientious objection to participation in
war:http://capwiz.com/fconl/utr/1/EFVLEOHZYR/GLGSEOIHKM/
Express your conscientious objection to paying taxes for war and
support the "Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund" bill:
http://capwiz.com/fconl/utr/1/EFVLEOHZYR/JGJGEOIHKN/
Note about PDF files: To access PDF files you will need to have Adobe
Acrobat Reader on your computer. If you do not have this free program
you can download it from Adobe's web site:
http://capwiz.com/fconl/utr/1/EFVLEOHZYR/ANYVEOIHKO/
_______________________________________
Stop New Nuclear Weapons! Find out how,
http://capwiz.com/fconl/utr/1/EFVLEOHZYR/DFLEEOIHKP/
The Next Step for Iraq: Join FCNL's Iraq Campaign,
http://capwiz.com/fconl/utr/1/EFVLEOHZYR/KHENEOIHKQ/
Contact Congress and the Administration:
http://capwiz.com/fconl/utr/1/EFVLEOHZYR/BDEXEOIHKR/
Order FCNL publications and "War is Not the Answer" campaign
bumper stickers and yard signs:
http://capwiz.com/fconl/utr/1/EFVLEOHZYR/CVFXEOIHKS/
http://capwiz.com/fconl/utr/1/EFVLEOHZYR/HNMXEOIHKT/
Contribute to FCNL:
http://capwiz.com/fconl/utr/1/EFVLEOHZYR/IXJYEOIHKU/
Subscribe or update your information to this list:
http://capwiz.com/fconl/utr/1/EFVLEOHZYR/GGGVEOIHKV/ To unsubscribe
from this list, please see the end of this message.
Subscribe to other FCNL legislative, policy, and action alert lists:
http://capwiz.com/fconl/utr/1/EFVLEOHZYR/GXAIEOIHKW/
________________________________________
Friends Committee on National Legislation
245 Second St. NE, Washington, DC 20002-5795
fcnl@fcnl.org * www.fcnl.org
phone: (202)547-6000 * toll-free: (800)630-1330
We seek a world free of war and the threat of war
We seek a society with equity and justice for all
We seek a community where every person's potential may be fulfilled
We seek an earth restored.
---
You may unsubscribe from our mailing list at any time by visiting
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Thursday, April 07, 2005
In the Name of Politics
A Call To Action
The New York Times
March 30, 2005
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
By JOHN C. DANFORTH
St. Louis — BY a series of recent initiatives, Republicans have transformed our party into the political arm of conservative Christians. The elements of this transformation have included advocacy of a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, opposition to stem cell research involving both frozen embryos and human cells in petri dishes, and the extraordinary effort to keep Terri Schiavo hooked up to a feeding tube.
Standing alone, each of these initiatives has its advocates, within the Republican Party and beyond. But the distinct elements do not stand alone. Rather they are parts of a larger package, an agenda of positions common to conservative Christians and the dominant wing of the Republican Party.
Christian activists, eager to take credit for recent electoral successes, would not be likely to concede that Republican adoption of their political agenda is merely the natural convergence of conservative religious and political values. Correctly, they would see a causal relationship between the activism of the churches and the responsiveness of Republican politicians. In turn, pragmatic Republicans would agree that motivating Christian conservatives has contributed to their successes.
High-profile Republican efforts to prolong the life of Ms. Schiavo, including departures from Republican principles like approving Congressional involvement in private decisions and empowering a federal court to overrule a state court, can rightfully be interpreted as yielding to the pressure of religious power blocs.
In my state, Missouri, Republicans in the General Assembly have advanced legislation to criminalize even stem cell research in which the cells are artificially produced in petri dishes and will never be transplanted into the human uterus. They argue that such cells are human life that must be protected, by threat of criminal prosecution, from promising research on diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and juvenile diabetes.
It is not evident to many of us that cells in a petri dish are equivalent to identifiable people suffering from terrible diseases. I am and have always been pro-life. But the only explanation for legislators comparing cells in a petri dish to babies in the womb is the extension of religious doctrine into statutory law.
I do not fault religious people for political action. Since Moses confronted the pharaoh, faithful people have heard God's call to political involvement. Nor has political action been unique to conservative Christians. Religious liberals have been politically active in support of gay rights and against nuclear weapons and the death penalty. In America, everyone has the right to try to influence political issues, regardless of his religious motivations.
The problem is not with people or churches that are politically active. It is with a party that has gone so far in adopting a sectarian agenda that it has become the political extension of a religious movement.
When government becomes the means of carrying out a religious program, it raises obvious questions under the First Amendment. But even in the absence of constitutional issues, a political party should resist identification with a religious movement. While religions are free to advocate for their own sectarian causes, the work of government and those who engage in it is to hold together as one people a very diverse country. At its best, religion can be a uniting influence, but in practice, nothing is more divisive. For politicians to advance the cause of one religious group is often to oppose the cause of another.
Take stem cell research. Criminalizing the work of scientists doing such research would give strong support to one religious doctrine, and it would punish people who believe it is their religious duty to use science to heal the sick.
During the 18 years I served in the Senate, Republicans often disagreed with each other. But there was much that held us together. We believed in limited government, in keeping light the burden of taxation and regulation. We encouraged the private sector, so that a free economy might thrive. We believed that judges should interpret the law, not legislate. We were internationalists who supported an engaged foreign policy, a strong national defense and free trade. These were principles shared by virtually all Republicans.
But in recent times, we Republicans have allowed this shared agenda to become secondary to the agenda of Christian conservatives. As a senator, I worried every day about the size of the federal deficit. I did not spend a single minute worrying about the effect of gays on the institution of marriage. Today it seems to be the other way around.
The historic principles of the Republican Party offer America its best hope for a prosperous and secure future. Our current fixation on a religious agenda has turned us in the wrong direction. It is time for Republicans to rediscover our roots.
John C. Danforth, a former United States senator from Missouri, resigned in January as United States ambassador to the United Nations. He is an Episcopal minister.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
The New York Times
March 30, 2005
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
By JOHN C. DANFORTH
St. Louis — BY a series of recent initiatives, Republicans have transformed our party into the political arm of conservative Christians. The elements of this transformation have included advocacy of a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, opposition to stem cell research involving both frozen embryos and human cells in petri dishes, and the extraordinary effort to keep Terri Schiavo hooked up to a feeding tube.
Standing alone, each of these initiatives has its advocates, within the Republican Party and beyond. But the distinct elements do not stand alone. Rather they are parts of a larger package, an agenda of positions common to conservative Christians and the dominant wing of the Republican Party.
Christian activists, eager to take credit for recent electoral successes, would not be likely to concede that Republican adoption of their political agenda is merely the natural convergence of conservative religious and political values. Correctly, they would see a causal relationship between the activism of the churches and the responsiveness of Republican politicians. In turn, pragmatic Republicans would agree that motivating Christian conservatives has contributed to their successes.
High-profile Republican efforts to prolong the life of Ms. Schiavo, including departures from Republican principles like approving Congressional involvement in private decisions and empowering a federal court to overrule a state court, can rightfully be interpreted as yielding to the pressure of religious power blocs.
In my state, Missouri, Republicans in the General Assembly have advanced legislation to criminalize even stem cell research in which the cells are artificially produced in petri dishes and will never be transplanted into the human uterus. They argue that such cells are human life that must be protected, by threat of criminal prosecution, from promising research on diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and juvenile diabetes.
It is not evident to many of us that cells in a petri dish are equivalent to identifiable people suffering from terrible diseases. I am and have always been pro-life. But the only explanation for legislators comparing cells in a petri dish to babies in the womb is the extension of religious doctrine into statutory law.
I do not fault religious people for political action. Since Moses confronted the pharaoh, faithful people have heard God's call to political involvement. Nor has political action been unique to conservative Christians. Religious liberals have been politically active in support of gay rights and against nuclear weapons and the death penalty. In America, everyone has the right to try to influence political issues, regardless of his religious motivations.
The problem is not with people or churches that are politically active. It is with a party that has gone so far in adopting a sectarian agenda that it has become the political extension of a religious movement.
When government becomes the means of carrying out a religious program, it raises obvious questions under the First Amendment. But even in the absence of constitutional issues, a political party should resist identification with a religious movement. While religions are free to advocate for their own sectarian causes, the work of government and those who engage in it is to hold together as one people a very diverse country. At its best, religion can be a uniting influence, but in practice, nothing is more divisive. For politicians to advance the cause of one religious group is often to oppose the cause of another.
Take stem cell research. Criminalizing the work of scientists doing such research would give strong support to one religious doctrine, and it would punish people who believe it is their religious duty to use science to heal the sick.
During the 18 years I served in the Senate, Republicans often disagreed with each other. But there was much that held us together. We believed in limited government, in keeping light the burden of taxation and regulation. We encouraged the private sector, so that a free economy might thrive. We believed that judges should interpret the law, not legislate. We were internationalists who supported an engaged foreign policy, a strong national defense and free trade. These were principles shared by virtually all Republicans.
But in recent times, we Republicans have allowed this shared agenda to become secondary to the agenda of Christian conservatives. As a senator, I worried every day about the size of the federal deficit. I did not spend a single minute worrying about the effect of gays on the institution of marriage. Today it seems to be the other way around.
The historic principles of the Republican Party offer America its best hope for a prosperous and secure future. Our current fixation on a religious agenda has turned us in the wrong direction. It is time for Republicans to rediscover our roots.
John C. Danforth, a former United States senator from Missouri, resigned in January as United States ambassador to the United Nations. He is an Episcopal minister.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
Wednesday, April 06, 2005
The Judges Made Them Do It
A Call To Action
The New York Times
April 6, 2005
EDITORIAL
It was appalling when the House majority leader threatened political retribution against judges who did not toe his extremist political line. But when a second important Republican stands up and excuses murderous violence against judges as an understandable reaction to their decisions, then it is time to get really scared.
It happened on Monday, in a moment that was horrifying even by the rock-bottom standards of the campaign that Republican zealots are conducting against the nation's judiciary. Senator John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, rose in the chamber and dared to argue that recent courthouse violence might be explained by distress about judges who "are making political decisions yet are unaccountable to the public." The frustration "builds up and builds up to the point where some people engage in" violence, said Mr. Cornyn, a former member of the Texas Supreme Court who is on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which supposedly protects the Constitution and its guarantee of an independent judiciary.
Listeners could only cringe at the events behind Mr. Cornyn's fulminating: an Atlanta judge was murdered in his courtroom by a career criminal who wanted only to shoot his way out of a trial, and a Chicago judge's mother and husband were executed by a deranged man who was furious that she had dismissed a wild lawsuit. It was sickening that an elected official would publicly offer these sociopaths as examples of any democratic value, let alone as holders of legitimate concerns about the judiciary.
The need to shield judges from outside threats - including those from elected officials like Senator Cornyn - is a priceless principle of our democracy. Senator Cornyn offered a smarmy proclamation of "great distress" at courthouse thuggery. Then he rationalized it with broadside accusations that judges "make raw political or ideological decisions." He thumbed his nose at the separation of powers, suggesting that the Supreme Court be "an enforcer of political decisions made by elected representatives of the people." Avoiding that nightmare is precisely why the founders made federal judgeships lifetime jobs and created a nomination process that requires presidents to seek bipartisan support.
Echoes of the political hijacking of the Terri Schiavo case hung in the air as Mr. Cornyn spoke, just days after the House majority leader, Tom DeLay, vengefully vowed that "the time will come" to make the judges who resisted the Congressional Republicans' gruesome deathbed intrusion "answer for their behavior." Trying to intimidate judges used to be a crime, not a bombastic cudgel for cynical politicians.
The public's hope must be that Senator Cornyn's shameful outburst gives further pause to Senate moderates about the threats of the majority leader, Senator Bill Frist, to scrap the filibuster to ensure the confirmation of President Bush's most extremist judicial nominees. Dr. Frist tried to distance himself yesterday from Mr. DeLay's attack on the judiciary. But Dr. Frist must carry the militants' baggage if he is ever to run for president, and he complained yesterday of "a real fire lighted by Democrats around judges over the last few days."
By Democrats? The senator should listen to what's being said on his side of the aisle, if he can bear it.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
The New York Times
April 6, 2005
EDITORIAL
It was appalling when the House majority leader threatened political retribution against judges who did not toe his extremist political line. But when a second important Republican stands up and excuses murderous violence against judges as an understandable reaction to their decisions, then it is time to get really scared.
It happened on Monday, in a moment that was horrifying even by the rock-bottom standards of the campaign that Republican zealots are conducting against the nation's judiciary. Senator John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, rose in the chamber and dared to argue that recent courthouse violence might be explained by distress about judges who "are making political decisions yet are unaccountable to the public." The frustration "builds up and builds up to the point where some people engage in" violence, said Mr. Cornyn, a former member of the Texas Supreme Court who is on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which supposedly protects the Constitution and its guarantee of an independent judiciary.
Listeners could only cringe at the events behind Mr. Cornyn's fulminating: an Atlanta judge was murdered in his courtroom by a career criminal who wanted only to shoot his way out of a trial, and a Chicago judge's mother and husband were executed by a deranged man who was furious that she had dismissed a wild lawsuit. It was sickening that an elected official would publicly offer these sociopaths as examples of any democratic value, let alone as holders of legitimate concerns about the judiciary.
The need to shield judges from outside threats - including those from elected officials like Senator Cornyn - is a priceless principle of our democracy. Senator Cornyn offered a smarmy proclamation of "great distress" at courthouse thuggery. Then he rationalized it with broadside accusations that judges "make raw political or ideological decisions." He thumbed his nose at the separation of powers, suggesting that the Supreme Court be "an enforcer of political decisions made by elected representatives of the people." Avoiding that nightmare is precisely why the founders made federal judgeships lifetime jobs and created a nomination process that requires presidents to seek bipartisan support.
Echoes of the political hijacking of the Terri Schiavo case hung in the air as Mr. Cornyn spoke, just days after the House majority leader, Tom DeLay, vengefully vowed that "the time will come" to make the judges who resisted the Congressional Republicans' gruesome deathbed intrusion "answer for their behavior." Trying to intimidate judges used to be a crime, not a bombastic cudgel for cynical politicians.
The public's hope must be that Senator Cornyn's shameful outburst gives further pause to Senate moderates about the threats of the majority leader, Senator Bill Frist, to scrap the filibuster to ensure the confirmation of President Bush's most extremist judicial nominees. Dr. Frist tried to distance himself yesterday from Mr. DeLay's attack on the judiciary. But Dr. Frist must carry the militants' baggage if he is ever to run for president, and he complained yesterday of "a real fire lighted by Democrats around judges over the last few days."
By Democrats? The senator should listen to what's being said on his side of the aisle, if he can bear it.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
Tuesday, April 05, 2005
An Academic Question
A Call To Action
The New York Times
April 5, 2005
OP-ED COLUMNIST
By PAUL KRUGMAN
It's a fact, documented by two recent studies, that registered Republicans and self-proclaimed conservatives make up only a small minority of professors at elite universities. But what should we conclude from that?
Conservatives see it as compelling evidence of liberal bias in university hiring and promotion. And they say that new "academic freedom" laws will simply mitigate the effects of that bias, promoting a diversity of views. But a closer look both at the universities and at the motives of those who would police them suggests a quite different story.
Claims that liberal bias keeps conservatives off college faculties almost always focus on the humanities and social sciences, where judgments about what constitutes good scholarship can seem subjective to an outsider. But studies that find registered Republicans in the minority at elite universities show that Republicans are almost as rare in hard sciences like physics and in engineering departments as in softer fields. Why?
One answer is self-selection - the same sort of self-selection that leads Republicans to outnumber Democrats four to one in the military. The sort of person who prefers an academic career to the private sector is likely to be somewhat more liberal than average, even in engineering.
But there's also, crucially, a values issue. In the 1970's, even Democrats like Daniel Patrick Moynihan conceded that the Republican Party was the "party of ideas." Today, even Republicans like Representative Chris Shays concede that it has become the "party of theocracy."
Consider the statements of Dennis Baxley, a Florida legislator who has sponsored a bill that - like similar bills introduced in almost a dozen states - would give students who think that their conservative views aren't respected the right to sue their professors. Mr. Baxley says that he is taking on "leftists" struggling against "mainstream society," professors who act as "dictators" and turn the classroom into a "totalitarian niche." His prime example of academic totalitarianism? When professors say that evolution is a fact.
In its April Fools' Day issue, Scientific American published a spoof editorial in which it apologized for endorsing the theory of evolution just because it's "the unifying concept for all of biology and one of the greatest scientific ideas of all time," saying that "as editors, we had no business being persuaded by mountains of evidence." And it conceded that it had succumbed "to the easy mistake of thinking that scientists understand their fields better than, say, U.S. senators or best-selling novelists do."
The editorial was titled "O.K., We Give Up." But it could just as well have been called "Why So Few Scientists Are Republicans These Days." Thirty years ago, attacks on science came mostly from the left; these days, they come overwhelmingly from the right, and have the backing of leading Republicans.
Scientific American may think that evolution is supported by mountains of evidence, but President Bush declares that "the jury is still out." Senator James Inhofe dismisses the vast body of research supporting the scientific consensus on climate change as a "gigantic hoax." And conservative pundits like George Will write approvingly about Michael Crichton's anti-environmentalist fantasies.
Think of the message this sends: today's Republican Party - increasingly dominated by people who believe truth should be determined by revelation, not research - doesn't respect science, or scholarship in general. It shouldn't be surprising that scholars have returned the favor by losing respect for the Republican Party.
Conservatives should be worried by the alienation of the universities; they should at least wonder if some of the fault lies not in the professors, but in themselves. Instead, they're seeking a Lysenkoist solution that would have politics determine courses' content.
And it wouldn't just be a matter of demanding that historians play down the role of slavery in early America, or that economists give the macroeconomic theories of Friedrich Hayek as much respect as those of John Maynard Keynes. Soon, biology professors who don't give creationism equal time with evolution and geology professors who dismiss the view that the Earth is only 6,000 years old might face lawsuits.
If it got that far, universities would probably find ways to cope - by, say, requiring that all entering students sign waivers. But political pressure will nonetheless have a chilling effect on scholarship. And that, of course, is its purpose.
E-mail: krugman@nytimes.com
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
The New York Times
April 5, 2005
OP-ED COLUMNIST
By PAUL KRUGMAN
It's a fact, documented by two recent studies, that registered Republicans and self-proclaimed conservatives make up only a small minority of professors at elite universities. But what should we conclude from that?
Conservatives see it as compelling evidence of liberal bias in university hiring and promotion. And they say that new "academic freedom" laws will simply mitigate the effects of that bias, promoting a diversity of views. But a closer look both at the universities and at the motives of those who would police them suggests a quite different story.
Claims that liberal bias keeps conservatives off college faculties almost always focus on the humanities and social sciences, where judgments about what constitutes good scholarship can seem subjective to an outsider. But studies that find registered Republicans in the minority at elite universities show that Republicans are almost as rare in hard sciences like physics and in engineering departments as in softer fields. Why?
One answer is self-selection - the same sort of self-selection that leads Republicans to outnumber Democrats four to one in the military. The sort of person who prefers an academic career to the private sector is likely to be somewhat more liberal than average, even in engineering.
But there's also, crucially, a values issue. In the 1970's, even Democrats like Daniel Patrick Moynihan conceded that the Republican Party was the "party of ideas." Today, even Republicans like Representative Chris Shays concede that it has become the "party of theocracy."
Consider the statements of Dennis Baxley, a Florida legislator who has sponsored a bill that - like similar bills introduced in almost a dozen states - would give students who think that their conservative views aren't respected the right to sue their professors. Mr. Baxley says that he is taking on "leftists" struggling against "mainstream society," professors who act as "dictators" and turn the classroom into a "totalitarian niche." His prime example of academic totalitarianism? When professors say that evolution is a fact.
In its April Fools' Day issue, Scientific American published a spoof editorial in which it apologized for endorsing the theory of evolution just because it's "the unifying concept for all of biology and one of the greatest scientific ideas of all time," saying that "as editors, we had no business being persuaded by mountains of evidence." And it conceded that it had succumbed "to the easy mistake of thinking that scientists understand their fields better than, say, U.S. senators or best-selling novelists do."
The editorial was titled "O.K., We Give Up." But it could just as well have been called "Why So Few Scientists Are Republicans These Days." Thirty years ago, attacks on science came mostly from the left; these days, they come overwhelmingly from the right, and have the backing of leading Republicans.
Scientific American may think that evolution is supported by mountains of evidence, but President Bush declares that "the jury is still out." Senator James Inhofe dismisses the vast body of research supporting the scientific consensus on climate change as a "gigantic hoax." And conservative pundits like George Will write approvingly about Michael Crichton's anti-environmentalist fantasies.
Think of the message this sends: today's Republican Party - increasingly dominated by people who believe truth should be determined by revelation, not research - doesn't respect science, or scholarship in general. It shouldn't be surprising that scholars have returned the favor by losing respect for the Republican Party.
Conservatives should be worried by the alienation of the universities; they should at least wonder if some of the fault lies not in the professors, but in themselves. Instead, they're seeking a Lysenkoist solution that would have politics determine courses' content.
And it wouldn't just be a matter of demanding that historians play down the role of slavery in early America, or that economists give the macroeconomic theories of Friedrich Hayek as much respect as those of John Maynard Keynes. Soon, biology professors who don't give creationism equal time with evolution and geology professors who dismiss the view that the Earth is only 6,000 years old might face lawsuits.
If it got that far, universities would probably find ways to cope - by, say, requiring that all entering students sign waivers. But political pressure will nonetheless have a chilling effect on scholarship. And that, of course, is its purpose.
E-mail: krugman@nytimes.com
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
Monday, April 04, 2005
The Bush-Cheney Media Enterprises
A Call To Action
AlterNet
By Norman Solomon, AlterNet
Posted on April 1, 2005, Printed on April 4, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/21656/
Stakeholders received windfalls as mainstream news outlets deferred to consolidation of power from the November election.
A rollout of new "democracy" branding -- kicked off by the State of the Union product relaunch -- yielded at least temporary gains in psychological market share. For instance, repackaging of images in the Middle East implemented makeovers for several client governments. Actual democratic threats, inimical to Bush-Cheney LLC interests, remain low.
Our major domestic financial goal, the privatization of Social Security, is out of reach for the next several quarters. However, in view of the magnitude of potential profits, this massive effort will continue.
More problematic, in retrospect, was the March expenditure of political capital in the Schiavo gambit. Returns on media investment, as gauged by opinion poll data, have been disappointing. However, base earnings are likely to accrue to beneficial levels due to high volume from fundamentalist buy-ins.
Some media damage is inevitable, like the March 30 New York Times op-ed by John Danforth claiming that the Republican Party "has gone so far in adopting a sectarian agenda that it has become the political extension of a religious movement." But such refined GOP sensibilities are not a big part of our base. In fact, the further melding of religious and patriotic symbolism augurs well for investors. With the Cross in one hand and the Dollar Bill in the other, this limited liability corporation is moving forward to advance the interests of its various constituencies.
Unfortunately, the first quarter closed with a looming personnel problem on Capitol Hill. On balance, as indicated by a recent Wall Street Journal editorial, the House majority leader's baggage has approached the tipping point. Tom DeLay may need to be dumped before the fourth quarter.
On cable television, satisfactory trends continue. At MSNBC the process of imitating Fox News Channel is apparently secure. Other good news: The benign junk quotient on prime-time CNN continues to rise, with a welcome boost from the Michael Jackson trial. Overall, the ambient TV trajectory is edging toward our target, "No journalism is good journalism."
Negative impacts of the Armstrong Williams "payola" scandal continue to dissipate. Our in-house audit of the cost/benefit ratio indicates that such payments to media pundits amount to a short-term plus but long-term minus. In general, crass payoffs are inappropriate and unnecessary to curry favor with sycophant columnists.
Less problematic are the "video news releases" skewered by The New York Times. Taxpayer funding for some of our PR operations is a significant enhancement of perception management, and little ground need be given in this area. (If the Times were as scrupulous in avoiding stories we plant as it urges TV news departments to be with our videos, many of the paper's articles wouldn't exist.) Blow-over anticipated by end of third quarter.
Regarding the Iraq war: Despite occasional barbs from "the liberal media," they are largely taking cues from weak-kneed Democrats in Congress who ignore the significant opposition to the war that exists at grassroots as measured by opinion polling. With many stakeholders in Bush-Cheney LLC still receiving major financial benefits from war-related contracts, the status quo remains lucrative while the political hazards appear to be manageable over the next few quarters.
As in the past eight quarters, the spectacle of U.S. servicemen and servicewomen in harm's way must be utilized to deflect criticism of the policies that put them in harm's way. CEO Bush will continue his Jimmy Stewart imitations during appearances with soldiers and their families, while CFO Cheney will further develop his persona of stern and slightly avuncular paternalism.
On the talk-radio front, the emergence of Air America as a liberal network, while troubling, does not currently threaten the airwave dominance of B-C LLC clients. Our proprietary echo chambers -- with such booming amplifiers as Rush Limbaugh, the Weekly Standard, the Washington Times, the New York Post, Fox News Channel and the Wall Street Journal's editorial page -- provide a steady barrage of media blasts unmatched by anything the left-of-center can possibly offer.
Cautionary note: The interests of the Bush-Cheney limited liability corporation remain vulnerable to realization by a majority of the population that their financial interests and long-term security are being undermined by our policies.
© 2005 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/21656/
AlterNet
By Norman Solomon, AlterNet
Posted on April 1, 2005, Printed on April 4, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/21656/
Stakeholders received windfalls as mainstream news outlets deferred to consolidation of power from the November election.
A rollout of new "democracy" branding -- kicked off by the State of the Union product relaunch -- yielded at least temporary gains in psychological market share. For instance, repackaging of images in the Middle East implemented makeovers for several client governments. Actual democratic threats, inimical to Bush-Cheney LLC interests, remain low.
Our major domestic financial goal, the privatization of Social Security, is out of reach for the next several quarters. However, in view of the magnitude of potential profits, this massive effort will continue.
More problematic, in retrospect, was the March expenditure of political capital in the Schiavo gambit. Returns on media investment, as gauged by opinion poll data, have been disappointing. However, base earnings are likely to accrue to beneficial levels due to high volume from fundamentalist buy-ins.
Some media damage is inevitable, like the March 30 New York Times op-ed by John Danforth claiming that the Republican Party "has gone so far in adopting a sectarian agenda that it has become the political extension of a religious movement." But such refined GOP sensibilities are not a big part of our base. In fact, the further melding of religious and patriotic symbolism augurs well for investors. With the Cross in one hand and the Dollar Bill in the other, this limited liability corporation is moving forward to advance the interests of its various constituencies.
Unfortunately, the first quarter closed with a looming personnel problem on Capitol Hill. On balance, as indicated by a recent Wall Street Journal editorial, the House majority leader's baggage has approached the tipping point. Tom DeLay may need to be dumped before the fourth quarter.
On cable television, satisfactory trends continue. At MSNBC the process of imitating Fox News Channel is apparently secure. Other good news: The benign junk quotient on prime-time CNN continues to rise, with a welcome boost from the Michael Jackson trial. Overall, the ambient TV trajectory is edging toward our target, "No journalism is good journalism."
Negative impacts of the Armstrong Williams "payola" scandal continue to dissipate. Our in-house audit of the cost/benefit ratio indicates that such payments to media pundits amount to a short-term plus but long-term minus. In general, crass payoffs are inappropriate and unnecessary to curry favor with sycophant columnists.
Less problematic are the "video news releases" skewered by The New York Times. Taxpayer funding for some of our PR operations is a significant enhancement of perception management, and little ground need be given in this area. (If the Times were as scrupulous in avoiding stories we plant as it urges TV news departments to be with our videos, many of the paper's articles wouldn't exist.) Blow-over anticipated by end of third quarter.
Regarding the Iraq war: Despite occasional barbs from "the liberal media," they are largely taking cues from weak-kneed Democrats in Congress who ignore the significant opposition to the war that exists at grassroots as measured by opinion polling. With many stakeholders in Bush-Cheney LLC still receiving major financial benefits from war-related contracts, the status quo remains lucrative while the political hazards appear to be manageable over the next few quarters.
As in the past eight quarters, the spectacle of U.S. servicemen and servicewomen in harm's way must be utilized to deflect criticism of the policies that put them in harm's way. CEO Bush will continue his Jimmy Stewart imitations during appearances with soldiers and their families, while CFO Cheney will further develop his persona of stern and slightly avuncular paternalism.
On the talk-radio front, the emergence of Air America as a liberal network, while troubling, does not currently threaten the airwave dominance of B-C LLC clients. Our proprietary echo chambers -- with such booming amplifiers as Rush Limbaugh, the Weekly Standard, the Washington Times, the New York Post, Fox News Channel and the Wall Street Journal's editorial page -- provide a steady barrage of media blasts unmatched by anything the left-of-center can possibly offer.
Cautionary note: The interests of the Bush-Cheney limited liability corporation remain vulnerable to realization by a majority of the population that their financial interests and long-term security are being undermined by our policies.
© 2005 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/21656/
Friday, April 01, 2005
The End of Reason
A Call To Action
AlterNet
By David Morris, AlterNet
Posted on March 31, 2005, Printed on April 1, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/21641/
For Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, until 2003 the deputy head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican's most powerful office, seeing The DaVinci Code in a Vatican bookstore was the last straw. In early March he lashed out at Catholic bookstores for carrying the book, and directed Catholics not to read it. Why? "There is a very real risk that many people who read it will believe that the fables it contains are true."
Fables?
Dan Brown's phenomenal bestseller suggests that Jesus was an immensely popular and prophetic leader who married one of his closest associates and had a family. Archbishop Bertone and the Church maintain that Jesus was at the same time a man, the son of God, and God himself, that a virgin woman gave birth to him and remained a virgin, that a few days after he was killed he came back to life and shortly thereafter was taken up to heaven to spend an eternity directing the destinies of billions of people.
In a rational world the burden of proof as to which is fable would fall on the Church. But there's the rub. For when it comes to organized religion, no burden of proof is required. On the contrary, by definition, religion requires faith and faith renounces evidence. Taking a proposition "on faith" means to consciously and willfully refuse to examine the facts.
There is a word for this type of thinking: Superstition. Many dictionaries define superstition as "belief which is not based on human reason or scientific knowledge." The American Heritage Dictionary defines superstition as "a belief, practice or rite irrationally maintained by ignorance of the laws of nature" and "a fearful or abject state resulting from such ignorance or irrationality."
Of course, we all have our superstitions. I may refrain from walking under a ladder, or throw salt over my shoulder after a salt spill to avoid bad things from happening to me. But organized religion elevates superstition to an entirely new level. It demands that we govern our lives with superstition, promises us eternal salvation and bliss if we do, and threatens us with eternal damnation and pain if we do not.
It is long past time we stopped giving a free pass to organizations that refuse to be guided by reason and would force their unreason on the entire society. A first step would be to stop calling these "faith-based institutions" and start calling them by the synonymous and much more instructive term, "superstition-based institutions."
No Other Superstition But This One
Organized superstitions might be more socially supportable if their creed included a provision accepting the organized superstitions of others. Unfortunately, modern religions do not practice tolerance. For example Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore gained widespread fame and even adulation when he refused to obey court orders to remove from the Alabama Courthouse a huge stone tablet on which was inscribed the Ten Commandments. When he was asked how he would react to the suggestion that a monument to the Koran or the Torah also be placed in the Courthouse he brusquely declared he would prohibit such an installation.
A few months later, Lt. Gen. William G. "Jerry" Boykin, the new deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence explained why he knew he would win his battle against Muslims in Somalia. "I knew my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol."
The creationism vs. evolution debate also illuminates this intolerance. Christians insist that their creation myth represent the creationist side. But there are many creationist myths, many of which predated both Christianity and Judaism. If evidence is not needed, why exclude any superstitions? As Sam Harris notes in The End of Faith, "there is no more evidence to justify a belief in the literal existence of Yahweh and Satan than there was to keep Zeus perched upon his mountain throne or Poseidon churning the seas."
The impact of moving towards "superstition-based institutions" would be highly controversial, quite educational, and on the whole exceedingly salutary. Consider the impact on the audience if we switched the interchangeable terms in President George W. Bush's following statement, posted on a federal web site:
I believe in the power of superstition in people's lives. Our government should not fear programs that exist because a church or a synagogue or a mosque has decided to start one. We should not discriminate against programs based upon superstition in America. We should enable them to access federal money, because superstition-based programs can change people's lives, and America will be better off for it.
Fanatics and Zealots Destroying the Liberty of Thought
In her magnificent book, Freethinkers, Susan Jacoby describes the 230-year-old battle in the United States between reason and superstition. She discusses the post-Civil War period in which the battle may have been most evenly matched.
Robert Green Ingersoll, possibly the best known American in the post Civil War era and the nation's foremost orator, traveled around the country arguing about the harm that comes from self-congratulatory, aggressive and assertive organized religions.
He explained why the word God does not appear in the U.S. Constitution. The founding fathers "knew that the recognition of a Deity would be seized upon by fanatics and zealots as a pretext for destroying the liberty of thought. They knew the terrible history of the church too well to place in her keeping, or in the keeping of her God, the sacred rights of man."
Ingersoll believed that reason, not faith, could and should be the basis for modern morality. "Our civilization is not Christian. It does not come from the skies. It is not a result of 'inspiration,'" he insisted. "It is the child of invention, of discovery, of applied knowledge -- that is to say, of science. When man becomes great and grand enough to admit that all have equal rights; when thought is untrammeled; when worship shall consist in doing useful things; when religion means the discharge of obligations to our fellow-men, then, and not until then, will the world be civilized."
In 1885, Elizabeth Cady Stanton explained how organized and assertive religions around the world have restricted women's rights. "You may go over the world and you will find that every form of religion which has breathed upon this earth has degraded woman ... I have been traveling over the old world during the last few years and have found new food for thought. What power is it that makes the Hindoo woman burn herself upon a funeral pyre of her husband? Her religion. What holds the Turkish woman in the harem? Her religion. By what power do the Mormons perpetuate their system of polygamy? By their religion. Man, of himself, could not do this; but when he declares, 'Thus saith the Lord', of course he can do it."
Stanton's enduring motto was, "Seek Truth for Authority, not Authority for Truth."
During the era when Ingersoll and Stanton spread their own form of the gospel, the Church was making ever-more explicit its own hostility to reason as a guide to human behavior. In 1869, Pope Pius IX convinced the First Vatican Council to proclaim, "let him be anathema ... (w)ho shall say that human sciences ought to be pursued in such a spirit of freedom that one may be allowed to hold as true their assertions, even when opposed to revealed doctrine."
His successor, Pope Leo XIII, in one of his best known encyclicals maintained, it "has even been contended that public authority with its dignity and power of ruling, originates not from God but from the mass of the people, which considering itself unfettered by all divine sanctions, refuses to submit to any laws that it has not passed of its own free will."
Other churches agreed. In 1878, geologist Alexander Winchell was dismissed from the faculty of Vanderbilt University in Nashville for publishing his opinion that human life had existed on earth long before the biblical time frame for the creation of Adam. Most Methodists supported the dismissal, arguing that Vanderbilt was founded by Methodists and dedicated to the goals of the church.
Some 45 years later, the famous Scopes trial opened. Most of us know that William Jennings Bryan was the lawyer for the prosecution of Scopes, a biology teacher who in his classroom violated Tennessee law forbidding the mention of evolution. What we may not know is that William Jennings Bryan was a three-time democratic presidential candidate and Woodrow Wilson's secretary of state. After the Wilson administration Bryan devoted himself to campaigning around the nation on behalf of state laws banning the teaching of evolution. For Bryan faith always trumped science. "(I)t is better to trust in the Rock of Ages than to know the ages of rocks; it is better for one to know that he is close to the Heavenly Father than to know how far the stars in the heaven are apart."
That was then. This is now. A few months ago, a dozen science centers, mostly in the South, refused to show Volcanoes, a science film funded in part by the National Science Foundation. The film was turned down because it very briefly raises the possibility that life on Earth may have originated at undersea steam vents.
Carol Murray, director of marketing for the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History, said that many people said the film was "blasphemous." Lisa Buzzelli, director of the Charleston Imax Theater in South Carolina, told The New York Times, "We have definitely a lot more creation public than evolution public."
Buzzelli's probably right. And that cannot bode well for America's future economic and technological leadership. A 1988 survey by researchers from the University of Texas found that one of four public school biology teachers thought that humans and dinosaurs might have inhabited the earth simultaneously. A recent survey by Gallup found that 35 percent of Americans believe the Bible is the literal and inerrant word of the Creator of the universe. Another 48 percent believe it is the "inspired" word of the same. Some 46 percent of Americans take a literalist view of creation; another 40 percent believe God has guided creation over the course of millions of years.
The Politicizing of Religion
I know most people who are reading this are asking, "Would you ban organized religion?" Of course not. Religion is an integral part of human existence. For tens of thousands of years humans have sought to explain the unknowable and have found comfort in believing that the death of a loved one may simply be the transition of that loved one to another, more sublime state.
But today organized religion has declared its intention to use its influence far beyond its congregation. The politicization of religion and the rise of a superstition-driven state may be the most important development in this country in many, many decades.
Tom DeLay, House Majority Leader and arguably the third most powerful person in Washington told an audience just a few weeks ago that the problems in America began when "they stopped churches from getting into politics ... Lyndon Johnson ... passed a law that said you couldn't get in politics or you're going to lose your tax-exempt status ... It forces Christians back into the church. That's what's going on in America ... That's not what Christ asked us to do."
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, a leading candidate to become chief justice, has declared in oral hearings "the fact that government derives its authority from God." In January 2002, in a major speech revealingly titled "God's Justice and Ours," delivered to the University of Chicago Divinity School, Scalia favorably cited Paul's announcement, "For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God." And Scalia declared that the death penalty is God's will. "The more Christian a country is the less likely it is to regard the death penalty as immoral," he observed. "I attribute that to the fact that, for the believing Christian, death is no big deal."
One of President Bush's first acts in office was to create an Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. Today 10 federal agencies have a Center for the Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. The White House web site gives churches Do's and Don'ts for applying for federal assistance. It has funded 30 organizations to provide training and technical assistance for religious organizations desiring federal grants. And it guarantees that any religious organization in need of help will find a ready and willing person on the other end of the phone.
After failing to persuade Congress to change the law, President Bush, by Executive Order, rewrote the rules to allow federal agencies to directly fund churches and other religious groups. In 2003 such groups received an astonishing $1.17 billion in grants from federal agencies.
"That's not enough," H. James Towey, director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives recently told the Associated Press. He notes that another $40 billion in federal money is given out by state governments and "many states do not realize that federal rules now allow them to fund these organizations."
In 2003, an independent study found little activity or interest by states in contracting with religious groups. But federal intervention has persuaded them that future funding depended on their having these groups provide services. By Towey's count, 21 governors have established their own faith-based offices.
The Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives maintains, "There is no general federal law that prohibits faith-based organizations that receive federal funds from hiring on a religious basis." It further explains that "for a religious organization to define or carry out its mission, it is important that it be able to take religion into account in hiring staff. Just as a college or university can take the academic credentials of an applicant for a professorship into consideration in order to maintain high standards, or an environmental organization can consider the views of potential employees on conservation, so too should a faith-based organization be able to take into account an applicant's religious belief when making a hiring decision."
One major program funded by the White House is Charles Colson's Prison Fellowship Ministries. It runs the InnerChange Freedom Initiative in prisons in Minnesota, Kansas, Iowa and Texas. The Christ-centered program offers prisoners privileges that include access to a big TV, computers, and private bathrooms in return for a hefty dose of Bible study and Christian counseling. As a condition of being hired, the program's employees are required to sign a statement affirming their belief in a literal interpretation of the Bible.
Superstition as a Lethal Force
Organized superstition in this country has begun to drive and guide social policy. The clearest example of this is the recent enactment by several states of laws that allow pharmacists and doctors and hospitals to refuse to treat patients whose behavior conflicts with the their superstitions.
The central problem with organized, assertive religion, of course, is that it endows superstition with a moral and messianic fervor. God-directed superstition can be a lethal force. Indeed, one might argue that this type of force is behind much of the violence around the world. The conflicts in Palestine (Jews v. Muslims), the Balkans (Orthodox Serbians v. Muslims), Northern Ireland (Protestants v. Catholics), Kashmir (Muslims v. Hindus), Indonesia (Muslims v. Timorese Christians) and the Caucasus (Orthodox Russians v. Chechen Muslims) constitute only a few of the places where religion has been the explicit cause of million of deaths in the last ten years.
Sam Harris discusses "the burden of paradise." Why are there suicide bombers? "Because they actually believe what they say they believe. They believe in the literal truth of the Koran ...Why did 19 well-educated, middle class men trade their lives in this world for the privilege of killing thousands of our neighbors? Because they believed that they would go straight to paradise for doing so."
To Harris, condoning the use of superstition as an important social force enables and encourages extremism. "The concessions we have made to religious faith," he maintains, "to the idea that belief can be sanctified by something other than evidence -- have rendered us unable to name, much less address, one of the most pervasive causes of conflict in our world."
In 1784, Patrick Henry introduced a bill in the Virginia General Assembly that would have assessed taxes on all citizens for the support of "teachers of the Christian religion." The bill's passage seemed certain. But then James Madison issued his Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments, eventually signed by some 2,000 Virginians.
"What influence in fact have ecclesiastical establishments had on Civil Society?" Madison asked. "In some instances they have been seen to erect a spiritual tyranny on the ruins of Civil authority; in many instances they have seen the upholding of the thrones of political tyranny; in no instance have they been seen the guardians of the liberty of the people."
The two-year debate over the assessment bill ended in its overwhelming defeat. Instead the Virginia legislature in 1786 passed an Act for Establishing Religious Freedom. The preamble to the original bill, written by Thomas Jefferson, declared, "Well aware that the opinions and belief of men depend not on their own will, but follow involuntarily the evidence proposed to their mind; that Almighty God hath created the mind free... ."
The final law contained only the last few words of Jefferson's preamble, "Whereas, Almighty God hath created the mind free ... ."
After the passage of the legislation, Jefferson wrote Madison to express his pride in Virginia's leadership on this crucial issue. "(I)t is comfortable to see the standard of reason at length erected, after so many ages, during which the human mind has been held in vassalage by kings, priests and nobles, and it is honorable for us, to have produced the first legislature who had the courage to declare, that the reason of man may be trusted with the formation of his own opinions."
In early February 2005, the Virginia House of Delegates easily approved (69-27) an amendment to the state's constitution that would allow the practice of religion in public schools and other public buildings. A few weeks later the amendment was killed in a Senate committee (10-5).
It was a lonely victory for reason in this increasingly unreasonable time. The battle between rationality and superstition continues.
© 2005 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/21641/
AlterNet
By David Morris, AlterNet
Posted on March 31, 2005, Printed on April 1, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/21641/
For Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, until 2003 the deputy head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican's most powerful office, seeing The DaVinci Code in a Vatican bookstore was the last straw. In early March he lashed out at Catholic bookstores for carrying the book, and directed Catholics not to read it. Why? "There is a very real risk that many people who read it will believe that the fables it contains are true."
Fables?
Dan Brown's phenomenal bestseller suggests that Jesus was an immensely popular and prophetic leader who married one of his closest associates and had a family. Archbishop Bertone and the Church maintain that Jesus was at the same time a man, the son of God, and God himself, that a virgin woman gave birth to him and remained a virgin, that a few days after he was killed he came back to life and shortly thereafter was taken up to heaven to spend an eternity directing the destinies of billions of people.
In a rational world the burden of proof as to which is fable would fall on the Church. But there's the rub. For when it comes to organized religion, no burden of proof is required. On the contrary, by definition, religion requires faith and faith renounces evidence. Taking a proposition "on faith" means to consciously and willfully refuse to examine the facts.
There is a word for this type of thinking: Superstition. Many dictionaries define superstition as "belief which is not based on human reason or scientific knowledge." The American Heritage Dictionary defines superstition as "a belief, practice or rite irrationally maintained by ignorance of the laws of nature" and "a fearful or abject state resulting from such ignorance or irrationality."
Of course, we all have our superstitions. I may refrain from walking under a ladder, or throw salt over my shoulder after a salt spill to avoid bad things from happening to me. But organized religion elevates superstition to an entirely new level. It demands that we govern our lives with superstition, promises us eternal salvation and bliss if we do, and threatens us with eternal damnation and pain if we do not.
It is long past time we stopped giving a free pass to organizations that refuse to be guided by reason and would force their unreason on the entire society. A first step would be to stop calling these "faith-based institutions" and start calling them by the synonymous and much more instructive term, "superstition-based institutions."
No Other Superstition But This One
Organized superstitions might be more socially supportable if their creed included a provision accepting the organized superstitions of others. Unfortunately, modern religions do not practice tolerance. For example Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore gained widespread fame and even adulation when he refused to obey court orders to remove from the Alabama Courthouse a huge stone tablet on which was inscribed the Ten Commandments. When he was asked how he would react to the suggestion that a monument to the Koran or the Torah also be placed in the Courthouse he brusquely declared he would prohibit such an installation.
A few months later, Lt. Gen. William G. "Jerry" Boykin, the new deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence explained why he knew he would win his battle against Muslims in Somalia. "I knew my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol."
The creationism vs. evolution debate also illuminates this intolerance. Christians insist that their creation myth represent the creationist side. But there are many creationist myths, many of which predated both Christianity and Judaism. If evidence is not needed, why exclude any superstitions? As Sam Harris notes in The End of Faith, "there is no more evidence to justify a belief in the literal existence of Yahweh and Satan than there was to keep Zeus perched upon his mountain throne or Poseidon churning the seas."
The impact of moving towards "superstition-based institutions" would be highly controversial, quite educational, and on the whole exceedingly salutary. Consider the impact on the audience if we switched the interchangeable terms in President George W. Bush's following statement, posted on a federal web site:
I believe in the power of superstition in people's lives. Our government should not fear programs that exist because a church or a synagogue or a mosque has decided to start one. We should not discriminate against programs based upon superstition in America. We should enable them to access federal money, because superstition-based programs can change people's lives, and America will be better off for it.
Fanatics and Zealots Destroying the Liberty of Thought
In her magnificent book, Freethinkers, Susan Jacoby describes the 230-year-old battle in the United States between reason and superstition. She discusses the post-Civil War period in which the battle may have been most evenly matched.
Robert Green Ingersoll, possibly the best known American in the post Civil War era and the nation's foremost orator, traveled around the country arguing about the harm that comes from self-congratulatory, aggressive and assertive organized religions.
He explained why the word God does not appear in the U.S. Constitution. The founding fathers "knew that the recognition of a Deity would be seized upon by fanatics and zealots as a pretext for destroying the liberty of thought. They knew the terrible history of the church too well to place in her keeping, or in the keeping of her God, the sacred rights of man."
Ingersoll believed that reason, not faith, could and should be the basis for modern morality. "Our civilization is not Christian. It does not come from the skies. It is not a result of 'inspiration,'" he insisted. "It is the child of invention, of discovery, of applied knowledge -- that is to say, of science. When man becomes great and grand enough to admit that all have equal rights; when thought is untrammeled; when worship shall consist in doing useful things; when religion means the discharge of obligations to our fellow-men, then, and not until then, will the world be civilized."
In 1885, Elizabeth Cady Stanton explained how organized and assertive religions around the world have restricted women's rights. "You may go over the world and you will find that every form of religion which has breathed upon this earth has degraded woman ... I have been traveling over the old world during the last few years and have found new food for thought. What power is it that makes the Hindoo woman burn herself upon a funeral pyre of her husband? Her religion. What holds the Turkish woman in the harem? Her religion. By what power do the Mormons perpetuate their system of polygamy? By their religion. Man, of himself, could not do this; but when he declares, 'Thus saith the Lord', of course he can do it."
Stanton's enduring motto was, "Seek Truth for Authority, not Authority for Truth."
During the era when Ingersoll and Stanton spread their own form of the gospel, the Church was making ever-more explicit its own hostility to reason as a guide to human behavior. In 1869, Pope Pius IX convinced the First Vatican Council to proclaim, "let him be anathema ... (w)ho shall say that human sciences ought to be pursued in such a spirit of freedom that one may be allowed to hold as true their assertions, even when opposed to revealed doctrine."
His successor, Pope Leo XIII, in one of his best known encyclicals maintained, it "has even been contended that public authority with its dignity and power of ruling, originates not from God but from the mass of the people, which considering itself unfettered by all divine sanctions, refuses to submit to any laws that it has not passed of its own free will."
Other churches agreed. In 1878, geologist Alexander Winchell was dismissed from the faculty of Vanderbilt University in Nashville for publishing his opinion that human life had existed on earth long before the biblical time frame for the creation of Adam. Most Methodists supported the dismissal, arguing that Vanderbilt was founded by Methodists and dedicated to the goals of the church.
Some 45 years later, the famous Scopes trial opened. Most of us know that William Jennings Bryan was the lawyer for the prosecution of Scopes, a biology teacher who in his classroom violated Tennessee law forbidding the mention of evolution. What we may not know is that William Jennings Bryan was a three-time democratic presidential candidate and Woodrow Wilson's secretary of state. After the Wilson administration Bryan devoted himself to campaigning around the nation on behalf of state laws banning the teaching of evolution. For Bryan faith always trumped science. "(I)t is better to trust in the Rock of Ages than to know the ages of rocks; it is better for one to know that he is close to the Heavenly Father than to know how far the stars in the heaven are apart."
That was then. This is now. A few months ago, a dozen science centers, mostly in the South, refused to show Volcanoes, a science film funded in part by the National Science Foundation. The film was turned down because it very briefly raises the possibility that life on Earth may have originated at undersea steam vents.
Carol Murray, director of marketing for the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History, said that many people said the film was "blasphemous." Lisa Buzzelli, director of the Charleston Imax Theater in South Carolina, told The New York Times, "We have definitely a lot more creation public than evolution public."
Buzzelli's probably right. And that cannot bode well for America's future economic and technological leadership. A 1988 survey by researchers from the University of Texas found that one of four public school biology teachers thought that humans and dinosaurs might have inhabited the earth simultaneously. A recent survey by Gallup found that 35 percent of Americans believe the Bible is the literal and inerrant word of the Creator of the universe. Another 48 percent believe it is the "inspired" word of the same. Some 46 percent of Americans take a literalist view of creation; another 40 percent believe God has guided creation over the course of millions of years.
The Politicizing of Religion
I know most people who are reading this are asking, "Would you ban organized religion?" Of course not. Religion is an integral part of human existence. For tens of thousands of years humans have sought to explain the unknowable and have found comfort in believing that the death of a loved one may simply be the transition of that loved one to another, more sublime state.
But today organized religion has declared its intention to use its influence far beyond its congregation. The politicization of religion and the rise of a superstition-driven state may be the most important development in this country in many, many decades.
Tom DeLay, House Majority Leader and arguably the third most powerful person in Washington told an audience just a few weeks ago that the problems in America began when "they stopped churches from getting into politics ... Lyndon Johnson ... passed a law that said you couldn't get in politics or you're going to lose your tax-exempt status ... It forces Christians back into the church. That's what's going on in America ... That's not what Christ asked us to do."
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, a leading candidate to become chief justice, has declared in oral hearings "the fact that government derives its authority from God." In January 2002, in a major speech revealingly titled "God's Justice and Ours," delivered to the University of Chicago Divinity School, Scalia favorably cited Paul's announcement, "For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God." And Scalia declared that the death penalty is God's will. "The more Christian a country is the less likely it is to regard the death penalty as immoral," he observed. "I attribute that to the fact that, for the believing Christian, death is no big deal."
One of President Bush's first acts in office was to create an Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. Today 10 federal agencies have a Center for the Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. The White House web site gives churches Do's and Don'ts for applying for federal assistance. It has funded 30 organizations to provide training and technical assistance for religious organizations desiring federal grants. And it guarantees that any religious organization in need of help will find a ready and willing person on the other end of the phone.
After failing to persuade Congress to change the law, President Bush, by Executive Order, rewrote the rules to allow federal agencies to directly fund churches and other religious groups. In 2003 such groups received an astonishing $1.17 billion in grants from federal agencies.
"That's not enough," H. James Towey, director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives recently told the Associated Press. He notes that another $40 billion in federal money is given out by state governments and "many states do not realize that federal rules now allow them to fund these organizations."
In 2003, an independent study found little activity or interest by states in contracting with religious groups. But federal intervention has persuaded them that future funding depended on their having these groups provide services. By Towey's count, 21 governors have established their own faith-based offices.
The Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives maintains, "There is no general federal law that prohibits faith-based organizations that receive federal funds from hiring on a religious basis." It further explains that "for a religious organization to define or carry out its mission, it is important that it be able to take religion into account in hiring staff. Just as a college or university can take the academic credentials of an applicant for a professorship into consideration in order to maintain high standards, or an environmental organization can consider the views of potential employees on conservation, so too should a faith-based organization be able to take into account an applicant's religious belief when making a hiring decision."
One major program funded by the White House is Charles Colson's Prison Fellowship Ministries. It runs the InnerChange Freedom Initiative in prisons in Minnesota, Kansas, Iowa and Texas. The Christ-centered program offers prisoners privileges that include access to a big TV, computers, and private bathrooms in return for a hefty dose of Bible study and Christian counseling. As a condition of being hired, the program's employees are required to sign a statement affirming their belief in a literal interpretation of the Bible.
Superstition as a Lethal Force
Organized superstition in this country has begun to drive and guide social policy. The clearest example of this is the recent enactment by several states of laws that allow pharmacists and doctors and hospitals to refuse to treat patients whose behavior conflicts with the their superstitions.
The central problem with organized, assertive religion, of course, is that it endows superstition with a moral and messianic fervor. God-directed superstition can be a lethal force. Indeed, one might argue that this type of force is behind much of the violence around the world. The conflicts in Palestine (Jews v. Muslims), the Balkans (Orthodox Serbians v. Muslims), Northern Ireland (Protestants v. Catholics), Kashmir (Muslims v. Hindus), Indonesia (Muslims v. Timorese Christians) and the Caucasus (Orthodox Russians v. Chechen Muslims) constitute only a few of the places where religion has been the explicit cause of million of deaths in the last ten years.
Sam Harris discusses "the burden of paradise." Why are there suicide bombers? "Because they actually believe what they say they believe. They believe in the literal truth of the Koran ...Why did 19 well-educated, middle class men trade their lives in this world for the privilege of killing thousands of our neighbors? Because they believed that they would go straight to paradise for doing so."
To Harris, condoning the use of superstition as an important social force enables and encourages extremism. "The concessions we have made to religious faith," he maintains, "to the idea that belief can be sanctified by something other than evidence -- have rendered us unable to name, much less address, one of the most pervasive causes of conflict in our world."
In 1784, Patrick Henry introduced a bill in the Virginia General Assembly that would have assessed taxes on all citizens for the support of "teachers of the Christian religion." The bill's passage seemed certain. But then James Madison issued his Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments, eventually signed by some 2,000 Virginians.
"What influence in fact have ecclesiastical establishments had on Civil Society?" Madison asked. "In some instances they have been seen to erect a spiritual tyranny on the ruins of Civil authority; in many instances they have seen the upholding of the thrones of political tyranny; in no instance have they been seen the guardians of the liberty of the people."
The two-year debate over the assessment bill ended in its overwhelming defeat. Instead the Virginia legislature in 1786 passed an Act for Establishing Religious Freedom. The preamble to the original bill, written by Thomas Jefferson, declared, "Well aware that the opinions and belief of men depend not on their own will, but follow involuntarily the evidence proposed to their mind; that Almighty God hath created the mind free... ."
The final law contained only the last few words of Jefferson's preamble, "Whereas, Almighty God hath created the mind free ... ."
After the passage of the legislation, Jefferson wrote Madison to express his pride in Virginia's leadership on this crucial issue. "(I)t is comfortable to see the standard of reason at length erected, after so many ages, during which the human mind has been held in vassalage by kings, priests and nobles, and it is honorable for us, to have produced the first legislature who had the courage to declare, that the reason of man may be trusted with the formation of his own opinions."
In early February 2005, the Virginia House of Delegates easily approved (69-27) an amendment to the state's constitution that would allow the practice of religion in public schools and other public buildings. A few weeks later the amendment was killed in a Senate committee (10-5).
It was a lonely victory for reason in this increasingly unreasonable time. The battle between rationality and superstition continues.
© 2005 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/21641/
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