The Wrongologist – Page 215 – Geopolitics, Power and Political Economy

Monday Wake Up Call – May 18, 2015

The Amtrak accident in Philadelphia came hours before the House Appropriations Committee was due to meet to debate a transportation bill. Amtrak is a for-profit entity, but its board is appointed by the president, and it is entirely funded by the government, receiving roughly $1.4 billion a year in subsidies. It operates in the red, losing $227 million a year.

Congress has been considering tightening the purse-strings. The Senate has been slow to approve $7.8 billion in Amtrak funding that has been passed by the House. Much of the money would go to prop up sagging rails and refurbish rolling stock.

But John Boehner said discussing Amtrak funding in the wake of the crash was “stupid”. Boehner noted that the crash was caused by the train going too fast, not bad infrastructure. Republicans prefer to attack the national train system because only Democrats ride trains, not good truck driving folks. We should invest in modern high-speed trains to zip Americans around the country. We could also invest in a better safety infrastructure so that train wrecks don’t happen if they are the fault of the engineer or conductor. Instead, the rail industry and its Republican friends are pushing for the reduction of train crews on freight trains, which could cause more crashes.

Sadly, the Goldilocks Moment (when it’s “just right”) to discuss practical responses to a tragedy can be discerned only by Mr. Boehner. Yesterday was too early, and politicized the tragedy by pointing out how Republican policies and governance set the stage for eight people to be killed. At some point, John Boehner will tell us it’s now “too late” to get any legislation in the hopper.

Amtrak has received $45 billion in subsidies from the 1970’s to the present. That’s about one year’s taxpayer support for big oil. Democrats should absolutely push for greater Amtrak funding in the wake of the crash.

Don’t expect Boehner or any Republican to take any real heat for opposing this, but it makes their moral position on these issues completely clear.

Time to wake up America! Infrastructure upgrading is not anti-American. For your morning wake up call, here is the Veery Thrush, also called the Wilson’s Thrush:

For those who read the Wrongologist in email, you can view the video here.

Monday’s Hot Links:

The Antarctic’s Larsen “B” and “C” ice shelf’s are going away by 2020. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory says that the “B” shelf is now “approaching demise.” NASA adds that the ice shelf “is likely to disintegrate completely before the end of the decade.” But, global warming is a hoax…

A 10-year-old oil leak where an offshore platform toppled during a hurricane could continue spilling crude into the Gulf of Mexico for a century or more if left unchecked. No, it isn’t the BP leak. Taylor Energy Company owned the platform and has played down the extent and environmental impact of the leak. The Coast Guard provided a leak estimate that is about 20 times greater than one provided by the company. Quelle surprise! An American company tries to minimize its responsibilities.

A New Zealand company called Touchpoint Group is building a robot that will be angry all the time. The idea is to let angry customers speak to a machine instead of human call center agents. The robot will collect the data to better serve you with bullshit responses.

Inequality Watch: Scientists find alarming deterioration in DNA of the urban poor. Well, if you lived a life of constant worry over money and how you would pay your bills, raise your kids with enough food, clothing and self-respect, your DNA might deteriorate too!!!

Raul Castro says that Pope Francis may get him to return to religion. Mr. Castro said: “I will resume praying and turn to the Church again if the Pope continues in this vein.” This Pope may really be the Rightologist!

Here is an extra wake-up for you this spring morning. Unclear how this pose happened, but it is relaxing:

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – May 17, 2015

The “knowing what we know now” argument from the right wing talkers was all over the news this week. They are trying to help Jeb Bush walk back his brother’s decision to invade Iraq. It is a revisionist attempt to explain the past decisions of the Bush administration with the added benefit of indicting Hillary Clinton. After all, while a Senator from NY she voted to invade.

The reframe says that a decision based on “what we knew then” was righteous, that everyone who looked at the same information would have come to the same decision. These guys continue to defend the invasion, despite the fact that we know it was based on lies. Iraq was not a good faith mistake. Bush and Cheney didn’t sit down with the intelligence community, ask for their best assessment of the situation, and then reluctantly conclude that war was the only option.

They decided before the dust of 9/11 had settled to use it as an excuse to go after Saddam. As evil as he was, he had nothing to do with the attack. To make a case for the short little war they expected to fight, they deliberately misled the public, making an essentially fake case about Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) and insinuating that Saddam was behind 9/11. From Lambert Strether:

And we played whack-a-mole with one fake WMD story after another: The yellowcake. The drones. The white powder. Judy Miller. Curveball. Cheney at the CIA. As soon as we would whack one story, another would pop up. And then Colin Powell, bless his heart, went to the UN and regurgitated it all (to his subsequent regret). Only subsequently did we come to understand (from the Downing Street Memo) that “the facts and the intelligence were being fixed around the policy,” and that the reason it felt like we were playing whack-a-mole is that we were; Bush’s “White House Iraq Group” was systematically planting stories in our famously free press.

Yet the Neo-cons, including Jeb Bush, say they would still make the same decision.

Bush harkens back to a government that believed its own spin doctoring to the point where it wasn’t able to see the difference between a sales pitch and the hard evidence coming from the Intelligence community. Given the totality of the outcome of these decisions: America nearly bankrupted, hundreds of thousands dead, total conflagration in the Middle East, he spent the week dancing around, saying the intelligence was faulty, but everyone believed it. And saying while you wouldn’t do it now, you would have done it then, is moral depravity.

According to the neo-cons, Obama did it:

Jeb mansplains:

This week, Obama met with our ME “allies”:

Amtrak off the rails indicts America:

GOP’s new budget is springtime for the 1%:

Clay Bennett, Chattanooga Times Free Press

Trade Deal is still up in the air:

Exactly Who Does the FBI Work For?

The Keystone Pipeline has been off the radar for a few months, but The Guardian brought it back this week with an article describing the FBI’s bad behavior towards activists who are against Keystone:

The FBI breached its own internal rules when it spied on campaigners against the Keystone XL pipeline, failing to get approval before it cultivated informants and opened files on individuals protesting against the construction of the pipeline in Texas, documents reveal.

The documents connect the investigation of anti-Keystone activists to other “domestic terrorism issues” in the agency. The FBI files also suggest that the Houston part of the investigation was opened in early 2013, several months after a high-level strategy meeting between the agency and TransCanada, the company building the pipeline.

The Guardian hired Mike German, a former FBI agent, to help decipher the documentation. German said they indicated that the agency had opened a category of investigation that is known in agency parlance as an “assessment”. An “assessment” was an expansion of FBI powers after 9/11. Assessments allow agents to open intrusive investigations into individuals or groups, even if they have no reason to believe they are breaking the law. German, now a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, said:

It is clearly troubling that these documents suggest the FBI interprets its national security mandate as protecting private industry from political criticism

The Wrongologist wrote about this very issue in February 2015, making several points:

• The FBI was meeting with and surveilling anti-Keystone pipeline activists in the US.
• The FBI indicated publicly (and untruthfully) that they could only conduct investigations when they had reason to suspect criminal activity.
• The FBI failed to disclose that they had changed their mission statement. Instead of listing “law enforcement” as its primary function, as it had for years, the FBI fact sheet started listing “national security” as its chief mission.

At the time, we reported that the FBI was essentially doing pre-emptive security work for a Canadian corporation. From Charlie Pierce:

The FBI has no business dropping in on citizens who have not committed a crime, nor are they suspected of having committed one, and especially not at the behest of a private multinational concern.

That would be a foreign private concern. More from Pierce:

Names are going into a file…This never has worked out well in the area of political dissent in this country, and, given the fact that we now have a staggering network of covert domestic intelligence-gathering and a huge government law-enforcement apparatus, it’s unlikely to work out well in the future…

Finally, the new Guardian report states that the FBI said it was compelled to

take the initiative to secure and protect activities and entities which may be targeted for terrorism or espionage.

So, here we go. The FBI, never a friend of civil liberties, has once again violated the law by spying on activists in the absence of any reasonable suspicion that these pose a threat to life and/or property. They shouldn’t be in a position to conduct an unauthorized witch hunt and they shouldn’t be able to just say there is a threat of terrorism.

How convenient that the Houston FBI office didn’t seek approval in advance for their investigation. Plausible deniability for those up the chain of command preserves cushy government pensions.

Our security state says it requires all of this very intrusive information-gathering in order to protect us. Yet we read again and again that some terrorist or another was known to law enforcement prior to their criminal acts, just as the FBI missed clear opportunities to stop the Boston Bombers.

We could all learn from Al Swearengen in Deadwood:

I don’t like the Pinkertons. They’re muscle for the bosses, as if the bosses ain’t got enough edge.

There is a name for what happens when the government’s law-enforcement powers are put at the direct convenience of private corporations. Fascism.

See you on Sunday.

A Civil War Meditation

May 9th was the 150th anniversary of the end of the Civil War. It passed unnoticed in most national media. Despite Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, America’s black citizens were not truly free until MLK made us really see their problems during the Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s. In 1965, the 100th anniversary of the Civil War, the Voting Rights Act was passed.

The Voting Rights Act, along with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, were the largest step forward for equal rights in our nation’s history, certainly more important than the Emancipation Proclamation.

We are fascinated by the Civil War because it is an epic story. The American Republic was founded in 1789, and the nation only lives 72 years with slavery before it is torn apart by the argument over states’ rights, and the right to own slaves. We go on to fight a war that kills some 750,000 people, (equal to 7 million today). We then free 3.5 million people overnight, and then take years to try to put the country back together. Today, about 1 in 3 Americans can trace an ancestor to one side or the other in the Civil War. That adds up to about 100 million of our population who are remotely connected to the war.

What is sometimes lost in the story is that Lincoln, a Republican, introduced big government to America. At the start of the war, the country had a weak central government. Lincoln built the centralized state. Consider what Lincoln created:

• The first national income tax
• The first military draft
• The Quartermaster Corps, which became the 2nd largest employer in the country during the war, behind only the Union Army
• The largest confiscation of property in US history when he emancipated the slaves. Slave owners in the South lost $3.5 billion of net worth in the process
• A re-imagining of the US Constitution, passing the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, ending slavery, formalizing birthright citizenship, creating black male suffrage, and guaranteeing equal protection under the law. It can be said that these Amendments were a second American revolution.

Conservatives ask: “Where did big government come from?” It was invented by Lincoln, a Republican, to win the Civil War. If the Civil War ended with Constitutional Amendments that can be called a 2nd American Revolution, perhaps the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts of the mid-1960’s was yet a 3rd American Revolution. And there may be other “revolutions” to come.

Yale University Professor of Civil War History, David Blight wrote in The Atlantic that the nation has never truly gotten over that conflict. He says that the great issues of the war were not resolved at Appomattox, and in a sense, not only is the Civil War not over, it can still be lost.

When we think about the legacy of the Civil War, one of the issues that we have re-visited since the Reagan era is the revival of a debate about states’ rights and the place of federalism in our Republic. This is a persistent legacy of the Civil War, the issue of state power versus federal power: does America owe its first loyalty to the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution, that says the Constitution, federal statutes, and treaties are “the supreme law of the land?” Or does the 10th Amendment come first, which states that the federal government possesses only those powers delegated to it under the Constitution?

Professor Blight says that the question we have to ask the states’ rights supporters is: “states’ rights to do what?” Or, “for whom and against whom?”

During the Civil War, the states’ rights argument was used to preserve the racial order in the South. Today, the states’ rights debate is hidden in the term “limited government”, versus the right’s categorization of “big government”.

Lately, conservative partisans have brought back “nullification”, but couched in near-Orwellian terms, such as “right to work,” or, “religious freedom.” We have 36 state legislatures controlled by Republicans that are trying to eliminate abortions, remove environmental protections, enhance gun rights, and privatize education, all of which need a weaker federal government to succeed.

And every time a politician of the South says she/he is “standing on principle” and pledges “a return to our founding principles of limited government and local control,” our progress from the time of the Emancipation Proclamation, through the New Deal reforms, to the 1960’s Civil Rights acts are again threatened.

50 years after the Voting Rights Act, we are finally aware that there are millions of Americans who have never fully accepted the verdict of Appomattox.

As Professor Blight said this week in a BBC lecture, as long as we continue to debate states’ rights, and as long as we continue to leave the “problem” of racism unresolved, we will need to study our Civil War.

Drones: A Big Bad Nightmare

The unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), better known as the drone, is revolutionizing military power around the world. Despite the Pentagon’s Sequester, certain programs, like drone procurement have emerged unscathed, in part because the last two US administrations have embraced use of drones in combat theaters overseas. Meanwhile, a “drone caucus” has emerged in Congress that fiercely protects UAV funding and touts them as a way to help save money on defense, protect the lives of US soldiers, better patrol America’s borders, and assist domestic law enforcement agencies in surveillance.

In 2013, President Obama made a high-profile speech announcing plans to curb US use of drones. But events in the Middle East and North Africa, especially the rise of ISIS, have forced the US to shelve those plans. Yesterday, the Wrongologist reported that China was selling drones to Saudi Arabia. Consider this:

• More than 70 countries have acquired UAVs of different types. Of these countries, the US holds the largest share of UAVs
• 23 countries are reportedly developing armed UAVs
• The Teal Group forecasts an increase in global spending on UAVs from $6.6 billion in 2013 to $11.4 billion in 2022
• The Diplomat reports that China will be the largest UAV manufacturer over the next decade

Many countries want drones, and many will turn to China with its lower manufacturing costs, and similar drone technology. A report last year by the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission stated:

Chinese companies appear to be positioning themselves to become key suppliers of UAVs in the global market.

Chinese UAVs are especially attractive to countries in Africa and the Middle East given their low cost and China’s the lack of export restrictions compared with their Western competitors.

Even the new US drone export policy is not competitive with China, since it requires countries buying our armed drones to assure the US that they won’t use them to carry out illegal surveillance, that they will abide by international humanitarian laws, and that they use them for legal purposes. Just how will we enforce that? Will the US assign personnel to the control vans and centers to monitor each flight, or depend on self-reporting by foreign governments?

In the past year, drones have crashed onto the White House lawn, placed radioactive cesium on the roof of the Japanese prime minister’s office in Tokyo, and worked the battlefields in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Iraq.

It is a formidable weapon that we are only beginning to understand. The concern is that they can be used against a nation’s homeland, since they are hard to detect and difficult to bring down. With drone proliferation, what will the impact be if large public gatherings become indefensible targets? Will sporting events like the Super Bowl be “protectable” by the city and state that hosts the event? Probably not. So, will they have to be protected by the US military? Images of US military patrolling the streets around the Super Bowl would provide an Orwellian cast to the big game.

The small quad-copter commercial drones that anyone can purchase (for between a few hundred and a few thousand dollars) signal the biggest problem for the future. They are equipped with GPS technology and high-resolution cameras. They could carry (small) loads of plastic explosive, or even chemical weapons to a precise location and cause havoc. Jamming GPS signals could be an effective solution, provided we had some idea about a targeted area. Universal GPS jamming probably would be impractical, since GPS is so important to our everyday lives.

We don’t seem to have much of a clue as to what to do about this emerging threat.

How will we adapt when drones (commercial or military) become ubiquitous? What would be the societal impact? Fear is already a great driver of our domestic politics. It is difficult to imagine how much more of our 4th Amendment rights could be sacrificed to protecting us from terrorist drones. Armed drones deployed against a densely-populated Western country is a terrorist dream!

Drone design of the future is receiving huge amounts of venture capital. The current new idea is swarming drones. The US Navy is currently testing a weapon that can fire 30+ small armed drones at once. The Navy calls the program “Low-Cost UAV Swarming Technology”, or LOCUST. The Navy is also concerned about defending drone swarm attacks on its ships, since the vessels are relatively large targets.

Imagine if a terrorist could fire a “drone swarm” at Manhattan.

We won’t be putting this genie back in the bottle. Think of all the things that could possibly go (horribly) wrong by the US making drones the AK-47 of the future.

Monday Wake Up Call – May 11, 2015

Peter, a new reader to the Wrongologist asks: “Is there a Rightologist?” Wrongo has no idea. His first thought was maybe the Pope qualifies, because infallibility. Few people know that Pope Francis wrote a book in 1998 about Cuba called “Dialogues between John Paul II and Fidel Castro” that was a collection of observations between the two leaders on the occasion of Pope John Paul II’s visit to Cuba. Popes have been pushing to end Cuba’s isolation for decades. Among them were Pope Benedict, who visited Cuba in 2012, and John Paul II, who visited in 1998 along with then-Archbishop Bergoglio.

And today, we know that Pope Francis had a key role in the diplomatic thaw between the US and Cuba. It was the right move. So, the Pope can be the Rightologist.

For today’s Wake-up, here is the Tocororo, the national bird of Cuba. It is found only in Cuba, is rare, and few Cubans have seen it:

For those who read the Wrongologist in email, you can see the video here.

Monday’s Hot Links:

North Korea said Saturday that it had successfully test-fired a ballistic missile from a submarine. If true, this would be a game-changer in North Asia. It would pose a new challenge to the US and South Korea and Japan, since submarine-launched missiles are much harder to detect and intercept, and these countries are very close to each other.

We don’t know jack about Joe: Joe is General Joseph F. Dunford, Jr., Commandant of the Marine Corps and Obama’s nominee to be the next Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He’s only been the top officer of the Marines since October. Before that he was commander of US and allied forces in Afghanistan for 18 months, not a lot of time in grade, but Obama likes him.

China has signed a deal with Saudi Arabia to sell it Chinese drones. Saudi is buying the Wing Loong medium-altitude long-endurance unmanned aerial vehicle, called the Pterodactyl I. Chinese media have indicated that the drone has a wide variety of military applications, including “precision strikes and long-duration, long-distance reconnaissance.” Some say it is a knock-off of our Predator. Isn’t Saudi Arabia supposed to recycle petrodollars into US military hardware, or wouldn’t we sell our drones to them?

For the past 15 years, the Pentagon has used a $90 billion slush fund to keep certain defense spending “off budget”. It’s called the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) fund. Remarkably, the $90 billion in the OCO account for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1 exceeds the budget of every federal department and agency, except for the Defense Department. Last September, the Defense Department tried to use $2 billion of OCO funds to pay for eight F-35’s.

Skeletal evidence from the last 30k years suggests that our brains have become smaller. Scientific American says that that our brains have shrunk by an amount equivalent to a tennis ball, for two reasons. First we have smaller bodies, so the brain would naturally be smaller. Apparently, SA has never been in Indiana. Second, we now store and process information externally, like in the cloud. Your tennis ball is in a data storage facility somewhere in the NSA’s data center in Bluffdale, Utah. This explains why we can’t paint like the cavemen anymore.

Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-TX) reminded us that God “wrote the Constitution”. He told Matt Hagee:

I think we got off the track when we allowed our government to become a secular government…When we stopped realizing that God created this nation, that he wrote the Constitution…

Despite those like Mr. DeLay and Minister Hagee, who would have us believe that America is only a nation for Christians, we’ve somehow managed to keep religion out of our government. Perhaps it’s the recognition of what theocracy does to places like Pakistan, Iran, and Somalia.

Couldn’t be respect for the Constitution, written the way George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and James Madison intended.

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – May 10, 2015

The Republicans seem to have a bumper crop of presidential candidates. We can expect about 20 Republican candidates to announce before the running really starts. While it raises talk about the “Clown Car”, it also shows the strength of the Republican’s “bench.” Republicans have multiple governors and senators who could run a credible campaign in the presidential election. Contrast this with the Democratic Party. Who has what it takes to challenge Hillary Clinton’s position for the Democratic nominee?

It’s partly the strength of Hillary’s resume, but the Democrats have no viable alternatives. If Ms. Clinton stumbles, the Democrats would be stuck trying to win with Bernie Sanders, Martin O’Malley, or Jim Webb. This is indicative of a huge problem for Democrats: It has no bench. Consider this:

• Before the 2010 election, the Democrats controlled 61 of the 99 state legislative bodies in the US. By the end of the 2012 election cycle, they controlled 36; today, they control 30.
• The number of Democrats in the House dropped from 257 in mid-2010 to 201 after the 2012 election. Now, that number stands at 188.

And they are counting on older, war horse candidates for open Senate seats in 2016: Their nominee in Ohio will be Ted Strickland, who will be 75 by the 2016 election. In Pennsylvania, Democrats will likely go for former Governor Ed Rendell, or former Representative Joe Sestak. In Wisconsin, Democrats will probably look to former Senator Russ Feingold, and in New Hampshire, current Governor Maggie Hassan is the top choice.

Only in Florida and Illinois, where Reps. Patrick Murphy and Tammy Duckworth are slated for Senate nominations, are younger incumbents likely to move up.

A party with a strong, young bench in each state is like a basketball team with lots of young talent; they may not be all that good yet, but everyone knows they will be at some point. This void threatens to limit the Democrats in the not-too-distant future, and needs to be remedied quickly, or the party will be in a minority position for a very long time.

Contrast with Republicans:

Jade Helm brought out the best in Texas:

“Deflate Gate” came back to haunt the Patriots:

Tom Brady’s homoerotic moment:

In Great Britain’s election, the Scots declare independence from England, and England from Europe:

Britons vote after six weeks of campaigning. That’s only 42 days for the pundits to make their dough. The NY Times reports that in the UK, each party is limited to spending $29.5 million in the year before the election.

All TV channels are required by law to give the main parties and their leaders carefully measured free time at peak viewing hours to state their cases. Paid TV advertisements are forbidden. And on election day, television and radio shows are forbidden from discussing campaign issues, talking about polls or dissecting individual candidates until the polls close at 10 pm.

Let’s try it, America!

Truth or Spin?

Eye of the beholder: Baltimore in flames!

The only problem is the photo wasn’t taken in Baltimore. It was taken in Venezuela. But, Fox13 in Memphis, TN posted it as “Baltimore in Flames.” For those who saw Fox’s rendition of the story, the image is of urban devastation in Baltimore. A viewer recalled the actual event and called Fox out. Fox took the photo down after it racked up tens of thousands of views, saying: “Our team didn’t fact check the picture the way we should have.”

At the time, many commentators stressed the need for peaceful protests. It wasn’t long before some invoked MLK. You can always count on Wolf Blitzer:

I just want to hear you say there should be peaceful protests, not violent protests, in the tradition of Martin Luther King.

Sure, why not? Here is what a 38 year-old Martin Luther King Jr. already the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, said to the American Psychological Association’s convention in Washington, DC:

Urban riots must now be recognized as durable social phenomena. They may be deplored, but they are there and should be understood. Urban riots are a special form of violence. They are not insurrections. The rioters are not seeking to seize territory or to attain control of institutions. They are mainly intended to shock the white community. They are a distorted form of social protest.

MLK said more: (emphasis and brackets by the Wrongologist)

But most of all, alienated from society and knowing that this society cherishes property above people, he [the Negro] is shocking it by abusing property rights…This may explain why most cities in which riots have occurred have not had a repetition, even though the causative conditions remain. It is also noteworthy that the amount of physical harm done to white people other than police is infinitesimal and in Detroit whites and Negroes looted in unity.

He also said:

It is incontestable and deplorable that Negroes have committed crimes; but they are derivative crimes. They are born of the greater crimes of the white society. When we ask Negroes to abide by the law, let us also demand that the white man abide by law in the ghettos. Day-in and day-out he violates welfare laws to deprive the poor of their meager allotments; he flagrantly violates building codes and regulations; his police make a mockery of law; and he violates laws on equal employment and education and the provisions for civic services.

And Dr. King closed with this:

These are often difficult things to say but I have come to see more and more that it is necessary to utter the truth in order to deal with the great problems that we face in our society.

Speaking truth, or showing photos that distort the truth?

Take another “truth”, the Republican’s emerging 2016 campaign idea: What matters is economic opportunity, not inequality. A Wall Street Journal poll asks the question:

Which concerns you more: the income gap between the wealthiest Americans and the rest of the country or middle and working class Americans not being able to get ahead financially?

The answer?
• Income gap between the wealthy and the rest of the country: 28%
• Middle and working class not being able to get ahead: 68%

People tend to share values, and they lean more towards equal opportunities than equal outcomes. But, these are linked through causation. That means we can’t increase opportunity without reducing inequality. If we have narrowly distributed growth, those with asset-driven incomes hold disproportionate power relative to those whose incomes depend on paychecks. So, measures that attempt to reduce the 1%’s economic “rents”, things like collective bargaining, higher minimum wages, trade policy that protects workers’ rights and wages, robust safety nets, and progressive taxation, are attacked by Republicans as counterproductive to growth and jobs.

The political selling of “equal opportunity” is a house of cards. Why would anyone be happy with just equal opportunity, if it means an equal chance to live in in poverty? The R’s seem to be comparing equal economic opportunity to one roll of the dice: Roll a six sided die, get a 1, and earn less than $20,000, roll a 6, and you earn more than $115,000.

It’s high stakes, but relax, you’ve got equal opportunity.

Here is a Red-Winged Blackbird for your moment of Zen. Saw the first of the year today in a Crab Apple tree on the vast land holdings at the Mansion of Wrong:

For those who read the Wrongologist in email, you can see the video here.

See you on Sunday.

Thirty Years of Wrong

Everyone probably knows about Jade Helm 15. It is a two-month operation by the Pentagon in which Special Forces from four branches of the military will carry out simulated operations amid territory designated as “hostile” in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Colorado.

US Army Special Operations Command said that simulated exercises like this are routine. They also said that the public wouldn’t experience any disruption in their day-to-day lives, since the entire operation takes place in remote areas.

But, many Texans have expressed both suspicion and opposition to the project. Some claim it’s an attempt to institute martial law. Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz told Texans that he is on it: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

My office has reached out to the Pentagon to inquire about this exercise…We are assured it is a military training exercise. I have no reason to doubt those assurances, but I understand the reason for concern and uncertainty, because when the federal government has not demonstrated itself to be trustworthy in this administration, the natural consequence is that many citizens don’t trust what it is saying.

And Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R) called up the Texas Guard (one of three of Texas’ quasi-military groups), ordering them to “monitor” the Special Forces troops during their eight weeks of training.

Abbott seems to think his weekend warriors will accomplish…what? Then again, if you’re convinced that Jade Helm 15 is a false-flag operation designed to distract you while The Black Guy in the White House and his evil Muslim overlords plot a takeover of Texas, nothing will convince you otherwise.

It can be exceedingly difficult to discern where the parody ends and the serious conspiracy theories begin. Here is a claim from The Common Sense Show:

You see, there are these Wal-Marts in West Texas that supposedly closed for six months for ‘renovation’. That’s what they want you to believe. The truth is these Wal-Marts are going to be military guerrilla-warfare staging areas and FEMA processing camps for political prisoners.

How do you reason with people gripped with an ironclad conviction that all of the above is true, and that those who can’t see it, are dupes under the influence of Obama, Rachel Maddow, and George Soros?

Texas isn’t a barometer of much, except perhaps the price of oil pipe for fracking. Illegal immigration is going down. The number of Mexican-Americans in the voting population is going up. Rick Perry is still learning to count to three, and Ted Cruz, a graduate of Princeton and Harvard Law School, certainly knows which way is up. Apparently, he is more a deeply cynical man than a deranged one. Either way, he’s unfit for public office.

This false issue and the Republican response to it, is another example of Neo-Fascism in America. In this case, it is billionaires aligned with corrupt Republican politicians. They have an organization, ALEC, that drafts and shares model state-level legislation among state governments in the US. They have purchased state and federal legislators to do their bidding. Fascism doesn’t say, “We hate you!” It says, “Those guys over there hate you. They’re out to get you. Luckily, we’ve come to help you”.

This is the price we are paying for false equivalence by the media, which was popularized starting in 1982 with CNN’s Crossfire. It’s the same thing you get if you allow children to engage in anything their little heart desires: What do you get when there are no negative consequences for despicable actions, including bigotry, or in-your-face political ham-handedness?

You get a situation that is out of control, as it has been in the past 30 years.

Today’s conservatives/Republicans/libertarians are grown-up delinquents who have figured out that there is no bed time, no chores, no tests to take, and no need to eat their vegetables of responsibility.

The continuing assertion by the GOP that the President is behaving illegally, or that his orders should be ignored, is contributing to public distrust. Since our laws flow from the Constitution, it’s particularly annoying that those that claim to love it the most are directly attacking it with claims like this.

We are surfing down a very slippery slope. Right-wing politicians win elections by demonizing the government. They are now addicted to it. Like other addicts, they have to keep upping the dosage to get the same effect.

Unfortunately, they’re into serious overdose territory now.

RIP Guy Carawan

Unless you were around for the folk revival era in the late 1950’s − early 1960’s, you probably don’t know who Guy Carawan was. He co-wrote and popularized the protest song “We Shall Overcome” in the American Civil Rights Movement by teaching it to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1960. He just died at the age of 87.

Wrongo has written about the genealogy of this song:

The story behind the story of We shall Overcome is that the song is based on the early hymn “U Sanctissima.” Charles Albert Tindley, a minister in Philadelphia, added new words in 1901 and called his new hymn “I’ll Overcome Some Day.” In the ensuing decades, the song became a favorite at black churches throughout the American south, often sung as “I Will Overcome.” Eventually, the song was brought to a workshop at the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, TN. The school’s cultural director was Zilphia Horton. Pete Seeger visited the school and changed “We will overcome” to “We shall overcome.” Guy Carawan, a great folk artist who plays the hammer dulcimer, was then a music director at the Highlander School. He introduced it to civil rights activists during a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) meeting in 1960. Frank Hamilton was in Seeger’s band.

The song’s copyright includes Zilphia Horton, Frank Hamilton, Pete Seeger and Guy Carawan, but omits Charles A. Tindley.

Carawan lived in California at the beginning of the folk revival movement, but ended up at Highlander, a place famous for its role in left-wing southern organizing in the 20th century. Few know that Rosa Parks had already trained at Highlander on civil rights issues before refusing to move to the back of the bus which led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Martin Luther King had visited Highlander as well.

In 2013, NPR’s Noah Adams had a piece about Carawan and the song. Apparently, Carawan heard the song in the early 1950’s when he was finishing graduate work in sociology at UCLA and doing some singing on the side. He also learned about the Highlander Center, and eventually that’s where he spent most of the rest of his life. He told a history of the song:

I first heard this song from a friend of mine, Frank Hamilton. He taught me this song, and he also had put some chords to it [on guitar]…When I came to Highlander in 1959, Zilphia Horton had died, and I had some singing and musical skills and they needed somebody there. So by the time I came to Highlander, I was playing it with the guitar…

Today, few people sing at civil protests. Somehow, outside of concerts and church, we have lost an understanding of the power of shared singing, of unrestrained sincerity, and the strength it provides to the group.

But its power was important to Dr. King. Here is what he said about the song on March 31, 1968, just days before his death:

There’s a little song that we sing in our movement down in the South. I don’t know if you’ve heard it…You know, I’ve joined hands so often with students and others behind jail bars singing it: ‘We shall overcome.’ Sometimes we’ve had tears in our eyes when we joined together to sing it, but we still decided to sing it: ‘We shall overcome.’ Oh, before this victory’s won, some will have to get thrown in jail some more, but we shall overcome.

One difference between the civil rights movement, which resulted in political change, and the Vietnam demonstrations which did not, was the power of churches working together with students, singing a song that reflected the struggle. Regardless of whether it was sung by Mahalia Jackson, the earnest Carawan, Pete Seeger, or simply kids carrying signs, it had a power to inspire.

A successful movement also required a charismatic leader like Martin Luther King, Jr. who could tell a story, and take America on the journey with him.

Guy Carawan isn’t well known today, but he was really important to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, and he will be missed. Here is Guy Carawan singing “We Shall Overcome”:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tftdes9dp-A

For those who read the Wrongologist in email, you can view the video here.