Tag: TMC Politics

KEITH OLBERMANN: As I noted, we have had – and we will continue to have – as much fun at possible with the on-camera meltdown of Andrew Breitbart in front of a group of Occupy protesters at CPAC last weekend.

But, in our number one-story on the “Countdown” – the subject of rape is no laughing matter. The allegation that a political or cultural group condones or encourages rape and sexual assault, against anyone, is virtually as serious a charge as can be leveled. Yet nearly just as bad is to fabricate, twist, and alter facts, to make it seem like such a charge against such a group has any credence at all.

Mr. Breitbart and his websites have now promulgated a list of what his people boast are 17 rapes at Occupy protests between October 16th and November 19th of last year. Seventeen stories and links, listed “Rapes and Various Sexual Crimes,” and all of them attributed to Occupy.

It turns out Breitbart and his people have padded this list. They have listed some stories twice. In nearly every case, Breitbart’s crew has twisted nearly every one of the allegations in the stories. The idea seems to have been to make as long a list as possible, and assume that your supporters will never bother to link through to the actual stories, let alone follow up to find their true outcomes. Those who do will find Mr. Breitbart and his colleagues are lying.

Story number one – Madison, Wisconsin. Turns out this is the story of Occupy Madison losing its permit for a couple of days, in part because of a charge that somebody was masturbating in public. No charges, no names, no evidence, and even the head of the local business association which brought the complaint, one Mary Carbine, was emphatic that the behavior was, “not necessarily by the protesters themselves.”

Number two – Cleveland. Refers to an alleged assault of a member of Occupy Cleveland. No arrests and the police offer no indication the alleged assailant was a member of Occupy.

Number three – Seattle. Turns out to be the arrest of a man for indecent exposure in schoolyards and other parks, not at Occupy Seattle. Detectives say they were told the suspect had been seen at Occupy and, again, they make no claim he was associated with Occupy.

Number four – Cleveland. This is the same story as number two. Listed twice. This time, a Fox News video is linked as well.

Number five – Dallas. An alleged assault victim told police the sex in question was consensual. She would not press charges nor cooperate with authorities. The claim that there was an assault in the first place originated with one local TV station’s anonymous source in the Dallas police department.

Number six – Portland, Oregon. The registered address a sex offender gave authorities turned out to be the same address as the Occupy Portland camp. The police have no evidence he was ever there, nor do any witnesses place him there.

Number seven – Lawrence, Kansas. A local police captain named Jim Martin is quoted, in the Breitbart-linked story, as saying “someone who had been at the Occupy Lawrence camp reported on Monday morning a possible sexual assault. Martin said he did not believe the victim or any possible suspects were members of the group.”

Number eight – Glasgow. Breitbart assigns responsibility for an assault on an Occupy protester in Scotland to the American Occupy movement. He also does not note that the morning after the incident, Occupy organizers voluntarily began to disbanded the camp after police refused to provide security.

Number nine – Manchester, New Hampshire. A woman operating out of her own home is arrested in her own home there after she tries to turn an Occupy protester into a prostitute.

Number 10 – New York City. An Occupy protester is assaulted in her tent.

Number 11 – New York City. It’s the same story as number ten. They again listed it twice.

Number 12 – Chula Vista, California. On November 6th, a woman posts on the Occupy Los Angeles Facebook page, asking Occupy to help locate her daughter, a 16-year-old named Ashley Springer. The last the woman knew, Ashley Springer was at OccupyLA and then she disappeared. Breitbart does not note that by December 9th, Ashley Springer was home – safe, sound, and unharmed.

Number 13 – Philadelphia. The Breitbart list blares “Occupier Arrest for Rape.” The actual newspaper headline at the other end of the link says “Man arrested in Occupy Philly Sexual Assault.” The alleged victim was a member of Occupy, not the assailant, even though Breitbart implies it was the other way around.

Number 14 – Austin, Texas. A man in a sleeping bag near the Occupy encampment in a public square is arrested for allegedly masturbating in front of a 16-year-old. Again, despite the Breitbart headline, “Occupier Accused of Masturbating In Front of 16-Year-Old Girl,” in the actual story that Breitbart links to, police do not conclude that either the victim or perpetrator was involved with Occupy.

Number 15 – Chicago. A 21-year-old man named Robert Reitz, whom Occupy Chicago confirmed had attended some of its events, is arrested at his home, on child-porn charges. Breitbart does not bother to note that, in the second half of the very story he linked to, Occupy Chicago responded to the arrest by immediately banning this Reitz from its encampment.

Number 16 – St. Louis. Again, the victim in an assault is identified as a member of Occupy, not the alleged perpetrator.

Number 17 – New York City. Again, the victim in a fondling case is a member of Occupy, police identify the assailant as a neighborhood homeless person.

So, seventeen stories Breitbart claims are cases of rape by Occupy. Just reading the stories, just Googling the names of those identified, following up on these stories, that took me only about 70 minutes. The final result? Two cases of the stories on the list were duplicates, one story turns out to have been about consensual sex. One case, in Scotland, led the Occupy group to disband for the sake of safety. One case of an arrest for child porn, with Occupy immediately banning the alleged perpetrator. One case of a girl disappearing, ignoring the fact that she was home and unharmed a month later. Four cases in which police said neither the victim nor the assailant were apparently even associated with Occupy.

That leaves seven stories, all of which show police identifying Occupy participants as the victims, six of which show police identifying the alleged assailants as not being Occupy participants. That is the evidence that Andrew Breitbart has submitted to rationalize his irrational attempt to smear the Occupy movement, and Occupy members, as rapists, and to brand anybody who points out his dishonesty, his twisting of the facts – and who bothers to actually read the stories that disprove his own contention – to paint then as a rape denier or rape apologist.

What Mr. Breitbart and his fellow propagandists have done, in fact, is to take at least eight women – eight members of Occupy, who were raped or otherwise assaulted – and blamed them for being raped. He is not just perpetrating the classic fabrication con of the dishonest man, for whom facts are malleable and can be ignored when they are inconvenient.

More importantly, Breitbart is exploiting rape victims, blaming rape victims. And no woman, no man – conservative, liberal, or indifferent – can abide this despicable attempt to take individual human suffering and, by lying at the top of his voice, try to score cheap political points with it.

Fourteen months ago, Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement members and our allies from National People’s Action and the New Bottom Line campaign met with Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller in Des Moines to discuss the national foreclosure investigation that he was leading.

Miller vowed to pursue a fundamental transformation of the mortgage servicing industry. He spoke like a people’s champion, like someone who would “knock it out of the ballpark” and bring the banks to justice.

But after he announced the details of his settlement with the banks last week, we felt Miller had struck out. [..]

Bold action in the face of grave injustice is not counterproductive – it is required.

If Obama and Schneiderman take these “people first” actions to deliver justice for millions of homeowners and everyday people, then maybe we’ll have something to celebrate.

John Nichols: A Politics That Says: The People Shall Rule

After she organized Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 Democratic primary challenge to Lyndon Johnson, around the time she joined Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug and Shirley Chisholm in forming the National Women’s Political Caucus, Midge Miller got herself elected to the Wisconsin Assembly. [..]

The point of progressive public service, argued Midge Miller, was not to be a cog in the machine run by corporate and political elites. It was to make the machine work for the people.

So when Midge Miller’s stepson, Wisconsin Senate minority leader Mark Miller, found himself leading a legislative caucus that was being asked to rubber-stamp Governor Scott Walker’s attacks on collective-bargaining rights, civil-service protections and local democracy, he thought of Midge. “She believed that it was the first responsibility of legislators to protect the rights of the people,” said Miller. “She would never have been a part of anything that rammed changes like these down the throats of the people.”

George Zornick: Obama’s Plan to Save the Military From Cuts-at the Expense of Domestic Programs

As budget wonks comb over President Obama’s outline for fiscal year 2013, a startling White House plan has become clear: the administration is seeking to undo some mandatory cuts to the Pentagon at the expense of critical domestic programs. It does so by basically undoing the defense sequester that kicked in as a result of the Congressional supercommittee on debt. This wasn’t a featured part of the White House budget rollout, and for good reason-it undercuts the administration’s carefully crafted message of benevolent government action and economic fairness.

The process for this shift is complicated, and has been flagged by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Essentially, Obama wants to eliminate individual spending caps for both military and non-military spending, and institute one single discretionary spending cap instead. Here’s the basic rundown.

Ari Berman: Howard Dean Predicts Obama Re-Election, Democrats Retake House

No incumbent president since FDR has been re-elected with an unemployment rate above 8 percent. Despite that daunting precedent, an increasing number of political analysts and prominent Democratic Party figures are now bullish about President Obama’s re-election prospects. “Obama’s chances have definitely improved,” former Democratic Party chairman Howard Dean recently told me. “If Mitt Romney’s the Republican nominee, I would say it’s a one- or two-point win for Obama.”

Dean also likes his party’s chances at the Congressional level. “I’m predicting flat-out that if Obama wins, Democrats take back the House,” he says. Other analysts have recently raised that possibility, even though GOP domination of the redistricting process gives Republicans a major edge in 2012.

At the Conservative Political Action Conference last week, Ann Coulter mocked the Obama administration for requiring health insurance to cover birth control by saying “birth control costs $20 a month; an abortion is $400 or $500 at the most, you don’t get insurance for that.” First of all, Coulter is wrong, or lying. Perhaps she’s never been without insurance herself and she doesn’t understand the difference between a co-payment and what something costs without birth control. Twenty dollars per month might be what one pays for the pill with insurance. Without it, you can pay over $100. This is, in other words, precisely what you have insurance for.

Lois Utley: Employees Need Birth Control Coverage Mandate

For the women employed by the former Hackley Hospital in Muskegon, Michigan, last week’s news couldn’t have been better. President Obama’s announcement that Catholic hospitals and educational institutions must provide contraceptive coverage to employees should mean those women will finally be getting back the insurance coverage for birth control they lost in 2007, when their hospital merged with a nearby Catholic hospital. That is, unless the Catholic Bishops and their allies in Congress succeed in unraveling the birth control coverage mandate for the hospital’s employees and millions of other American women.

Just as the Bishops had demanded, Obama announced that Catholic hospitals, colleges and social services agencies would not have to pay for contraceptive coverage for their employees. Instead, under what Obama characterized as an “accommodation,” the hospitals’ insurance companies would be required to offer the coverage at no extra charge to employees and their dependents. Insurers are expected to be willing to pay the birth control cost, since they save money by avoiding more costly pregnancy care.

Eugene Robinson: Pay Close Attention to China

China, for better or worse, is a serious country. The United States had better start acting like one.

I got a glimpse of the future Wednesday in the vast ballroom of a Washington hotel where hundreds of august dignitaries-and some journalists as well-gathered at a luncheon in honor of Vice President Xi Jinping, who is widely expected to become China’s top leader after a year-long transition.

Xi’s status is such that he was introduced by no less than Henry Kissinger, who spoke, not for the first time, of the Nixon-to-China breakthrough four decades ago. It is useful to remember that the country we now think of as a trillion-dollar creditor and the manufacturer of iPads was once a Maoist bastion, hermetically sealed against the capitalist influences of the Western world.

Richard Reeves: Comes the Revolution

LOS ANGELES-Andrew Breitbart, the publisher of Breitbart.com and a couple of other popular websites, set the tone for a program at the University of Southern California last Wednesday by calling George Stephanopoulus of ABC News a little rat with a runny nose.

He continued by equating mainstream newspapers and television news, National Public Radio, Hollywood and American universities with totalitarians around the world, citing Joseph Stalin, Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro, cultural Marxism and storm troopers.

He was joined by Jon Fleischman, founder of FlashReport.org, a popular website out here that aggregates and reports on California politics, government and cultural life. He offered the opinion that “President Obama represents the abyss. He is taking us over the socialist cliff.”

Eight youths, tending their flock of sheep in the snowy fields of Afghanistan, were exterminated last week by a NATO airstrike. They were in the Najrab district of Kapisa province in eastern Afghanistan. Most were reportedly between the ages of 6 and 14. They had sought shelter near a large boulder, and had built a fire to stay warm. At first, NATO officials claimed they were armed men. The Afghan government condemned the bombing and released photos of some of the victims. By Wednesday, NATO offered, in a press release, “deep regret to the families and loved ones of several Afghan youths who died during an air engagement in Kapisa province Feb. 8.” Those eight killed were not that different in age from Lance Cpl. Osbrany Montes De Oca, 20, of North Arlington, N.J. He was killed two days later, Feb. 10, while on duty in Afghanistan’s Helmand province. These nine young, wasted lives will be the latest footnote in the longest war in United States history, a war that is being perpetuated, according to one brave, whistle-blowing U.S. Army officer, through a “pattern of overt and substantive deception” by “many of America’s most senior military leaders in Afghanistan.”

Those are the words written by Lt. Col. Danny Davis in his 84-page report, “Dereliction of Duty II: Senior Military Leaders’ Loss of Integrity Wounds Afghan War Effort.” A draft of that report, dated Jan. 27, 2012, was obtained by Rolling Stone magazine. It has not been approved by the U.S. Army Public Affairs office for release, even though Davis writes that its contents are not classified. He has submitted a classified version to members of Congress. Davis, a 17-year Army veteran with four combat tours behind him, spent a year in Afghanistan with the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force, traveling more than 9,000 miles to most operational sectors of the U.S. occupation and learning firsthand what the troops said they needed most.

Eugene Robinson: Drumming up a phony war on religion

At ease, Christian soldiers. There is no “war on religion,” no assault on the Catholic Church. A faith that has endured for thousands of years will survive even Nicki Minaj.

It never occurred to me to evaluate the Grammy Awards show on theological rectitude, but apparently we’re supposed to be outraged at the over-the-top “exorcism” Minaj performed Sunday night. The hip-hop diva, who writhed and cavorted amid a riot of religious iconography, is accused of anti-Catholic bigotry – and seen as an enemy combatant in an escalating “war on religion” being waged by “secular elites,” which seems to be used as a synonym for Democrats.

Seriously? Are we really going to pretend that Christianity is somehow under siege? That the Almighty would have been any more offended Sunday than he was, say, in 2006, when Madonna – who could sue Minaj for theft of intellectual property – performed a song during her touring act while being mock-crucified on a mirrored cross? While wearing a crown of thorns? Even at her show in Rome?

The “war on religion” alarmists are just like Minaj and Madonna in one key respect: Lacking a coherent point to make, they go for shock value.

Robert Sheer: Apple’s China Comes Home to Haunt Us

Four decades ago Richard Nixon, a once famously hawkish Republican president, cut a deal with the Communist overlords of China to reshape the world. The result was a transformation of the global economy in ways that we are only now, with the sharp critiques of Apple’s China operation, beginning to fully comprehend.

At the heart of the deal was a rejection of the basic moral claim of both egalitarian socialism and free market capitalism, the rival ideologies of the Cold War, to empower the individual as the center of decision-making. Instead, the fate of the citizen would come to be determined by an alliance between huge multinational corporations and government elites with scant reference to the needs of ordinary working folk.

Joe Conason: Will Catholic Bishops and the Religious Right Save Obama?

What is most striking about the showdown over contraceptive freedom is not the political victory that President Obama earned by standing up for women’s reproductive rights, although his Republican adversaries are certainly helping him to make the most of it. Those adversaries don’t seem to realize they have fallen into a trap, whether the White House set them up intentionally or not.

While the Catholic bishops and their allies on the religious right insist that this is an argument over the First Amendment, their true, longstanding purpose now stands revealed to the public. They would begin by imposing their dogma on every woman unlucky enough to work for an employer who shares it-an agenda that is deeply unpopular even among the Catholic faithful, let alone the rest of the American electorate. Then they would impose it on everyone, as the theorists of the religious right suggest every time they deny the separation of church and state.

New York Times Editorial: A Rare Deal

There’s nothing like a deadline – and the prospect of acute political embarrassment – to concentrate the mind. With Congress about to go on recess, and with Republicans fearing a voter backlash, negotiators on Wednesday were putting the finishing touches on a deal to extend the payroll tax cut and federal jobless benefits through 2012.

The agreement is imperfect but sound. It will help struggling Americans and the struggling economy. It is also a political win for Democrats and President Obama, who had made extending the payroll tax cut and the jobless benefits a centerpiece of his jobs agenda. We hope that it gives them the courage to stick to that agenda if they face another round of Republican obstructionism.

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I’m Paul Jay in Washington.

In Greece, the financial elites of Europe have gotten agreement from the Greek government to another round of what some people are calling savage austerity measures, for example, lowering the minimum wage by 22 percent, a new round of privatizations, and cuts to pensions and many other social programs. This is, I guess, an example of banks and a banking technocrat that now leads the Greek government directly intervening, calling government policy. So what does this tell us here in the U.S., Canada, and other countries that are watching this?

Now joining us to discuss all of this: Michael Hudson is a former Wall Street financial analyst, a distinguished research professor of economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and he writes at Michael-Hudson.com. Thanks for joining us, Michael.

MICHAEL HUDSON, RESEARCH PROF., UMKC: Thank you very much.

JAY: So, Michael, what should we be learning from what’s going on in Greece?

HUDSON: Well, we should be learning what the European bankers are learning, and that is what is the result of a great experiment that’s going on. For the last five years in Latvia, they’ve-the neoliberals have lowered wages by about 30 percent. The basic premise of today’s model builders are: you don’t know how far you can lower wages and pensions until people begin to press back. Well, in Latvia they still haven’t begun to press back when they’ve lowered for 30 percent. Now they’re moving towards Greece on the way to Spain and Portugal and Italy, and they’re trying to figure out how much can we lower wages, how much can we drain an economy until there is pressure to come back.

And the right wing, who’ve essentially appointed, as you pointed out, a bank lobbyist, which is called a technocrat, in charge of Greece, is: let’s try the experiment to just see how much we can squeeze out-because they’ve realized that the left in Europe is completely fragmented. They don’t have a defense available, they don’t have a body of concepts available to say, wait a minute, this is crazy. When you’re lowering wages, you’re actually shrinking an economy. When you’re cutting the budget deficit, you’re reducing the amount of money that comes into the economy to promote demand. So in effect what Europe is doing is bleeding economies, very much like a medieval doctor would bleed blood on the ground, since this is going to make economies more productive.

Well, the only response that the Greek people have, not simply the left, but the right and the Greek people, is, look, if you think you’re going to increase the surplus, increase taxes by lowering our wages and cutting our pensions and cutting our health care, we’re going to do what the Egyptians are doing and what the Arab Spring is doing. We’re going to tear the economy apart, and there won’t be anything for you. And the PASOK, the socialist party that inaugurated this whole austerity program, now has an 8 percent approval rating in Greece. That’s even lower than Mr. Obama has for cutting wages here.

So what the Greeks are saying: look, when the premier said that they were going to have a referendum for whether we want to cut back the wages to pay the bankers, the first thing Angela Merkel said was, you can’t have a referendum. We’re going to suspend democracy, we’re going to impose a dictator on you, and we’re going to tell you what to do.

Well, under modern international law, if there’s no democratic commitment to pay, then the debt taken on is null and void. Well, the European common market, the European Union, has had its lawyers say, okay, we’re going to get the agreement of congress. Well, the Greek people can say, look, you can come down with bags of money and you can buy all the parliament members that you want to approve the deal, but as soon as there is an election, we’re going to throw them out, and they’re not acting on our behalf, and-.

JAY: Yeah, but it’s not clear by polling that the next election would actually elect a government that wouldn’t go along with this. Most of the parties that seem capable of winning elections in Greece have signed on to this deal. But can I go back to something earlier you said? Is not one of the big objectives here-’cause it’s hard to understand the logic of driving Greece into a decade of depression if you actually want any revenue that’s going to pay some of these debts back, which means, is not the real objective here not more about privatization, that if you can create so much chaos and dependency on the Greek government, on the European financial elites, they’re going to sell everything off? And apparently they’re talking now about selling airports and shipping-seaports, like, a whole ‘nother level of privatizations.

HUDSON: Not only that, but also the water systems, the sewer systems, real estate, the islands. You’re right. They think that if they can create a crisis, it becomes a grab bag area. And bankers and people who have a plan usually do much better in a crisis or a grab bag than people who don’t have a plan. So this indeed seems to be it. Finance today achieves what military invasion used to do in times past. So the new mode of warfare is financial, not military. It’s much cheaper and it’s much safer for the country doing the attack.

So you’re quite right: privatization is a big role. And that’s why yesterday the European Union said, wait a minute, we’re not even going to give you the money to pay us, namely, for us to pay our own banks that have bought your bonds, unless you spell out exactly what you’re going to privatize and commit to it now. And this is a sticking point. In the past, the Greeks have made promises, and thank heavens they haven’t privatized, because once they begin to sell things off, then there’s going to be a real squeeze and even more of an opposition. So you’re right. This is a property grab.

JAY: Yeah. We were joking off-camera. I was saying it’s amazing how the Europeans make Obama’s budget look good. And as critical as you and I and many people we’ve interviewed on The Real News have been critical of Obama, there actually does seem to be some kind of different approach between Wall Street (and, certainly, the sections of Wall Street that helped elect President Obama) and the Europeans. You can hear interviews with Wall Street representatives who actually say, no, you do have to have short-term stimulus before you have these kinds of austerity measures; you can’t force the world into a global depression. You hear that kind of language out of New York and out of President Obama, where the Europeans seem so committed to this severe austerity.

HUDSON: There are two reasons for that. Number one, from the very beginning, from the last century, America has already had in the private sector what was in the public domain in Europe. Europe had its power companies, electric and gas systems in the public domain. America privatized them, but as regulated public utilities. The public utilities were allowed-were regulated as to how much bond and equity they could get, what their rate of return would be. Europe has no body of law to regulate the prices or rent extraction the public utilities can charge, because they’d always had these in the public domain, just like Russia had no and the Soviet Union had no system like this. So the objective of privatizing in Europe, first of all, there’s much more property and public assets to grab in Europe than there were in the United States, and secondly, there is no regulatory body in Europe, because of the fact that in the past, power and sewer and water and public utilities were supplied either at cost or at subsidized rates to make the economy more competitive.

So the idea in Europe is not only that you cut wages by 30 percent, but you’re now going to raise the price of what you just mentioned, the access to water, sewers, transportation, everything else. You’re going to raise the price to put the real squeeze on wages. And the result in Greece will probably be the same as it was in Iceland, Latvia, and other countries. There’s going to be a large emigration of working-age labor. And the result will, of course, be to make the economy much less competitive.

And in this morning’s newspaper, when it turned out that Greece’s GDP fell at 7 percent annual rate, not the 5 percent expected, as usual the newspaper said, to everyone’s surprise, the situation is worse than projected. Well, of course it wasn’t really to our surprise, because we know that when you’re strangling an economy, of course it can’t cope very well. And they’re strangling the Greeks economy. And they’re using it, I think, as a laboratory experiment to say, what’s going to happen when we really just squeeze labor and squeeze labor? It’s like trying to feed a horse less and less and see whether it’s really going to be more efficient until it keels over dead.

JAY: And I guess it’s always-the way large-scale unemployment is always a good threat against the employed within a country, the more you can beat up Greece and Spain, Portugal, the more you can threaten the working class of France and Germany, where I guess the big targets eventually will be.

HUDSON: Well, if that happens, there’s going to be a renewed nationalism that’s going to cut the common market apart, and you’re going to have, all of a sudden, a realization that when Europe united, the whole idea of it’s united was so that it would never go to war again, military war. But now that it’s united under neoliberal bank rules, they think, wait a minute, we’re uniting and we are going to war. But it’s a class war. It’s an economic war. And this isn’t what we wanted. If the idea of uniting in Europe is for a class war under rules where we’re guaranteed to lose, then we’re saying no to Europe, just as the Icelanders have voted not to join Europe, just as other countries that had planned to join Europe, all the way to Turkey at the other end, are saying, wait a minute, if that’s the Europe that’s coming, an oligarchic Europe whose program is austerity and shrinkage, why on earth would we want to join?

JAY: Thanks for joining us, Michael.

HUDSON: Thank you very much.

JAY: And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.

End

When it comes to natural gas extraction via “fracking,” TV journalism has some serious competition: energy industry commercials.

Like ads for political candidates that run concurrently with broadcast news coverage of the presidential race, ads promoting natural gas (and other fossil fuels) have long been running in concert with news segments about the topic, most recently touting the prospect of a “boom” made possible by the controversial extraction method known as hydraulic fracturing of the shale sprawling beneath more than 30 U.S. states.

During the past three years, Extra! found, there has been exponentially more propaganda for the wonders of natural gas on our screens each night than theoretically objective news segments about natural-gas extraction.

Marian Wright Edelman: Still Hungry in America

“There were some times where, you know, we wouldn’t have that much food, and I would tell my mom, ‘I’m not hungry, don’t worry about it,’ and I lost a lot of weight. I remember I used to be a size five, and I went from a size five to a size zero,” a New York high school senior said in December.

In 1967, as a young civil rights lawyer in Mississippi, I was asked to testify before the Senate Subcommittee on Employment, Manpower, and Poverty in Washington about how the anti-poverty program in Mississippi was working. The Head Start program was under attack by the powerful Mississippi segregationist delegation because it was operated by church, civil rights, and Black community groups after the state turned it down. After defending the Head Start program, I told the committee I had become increasingly concerned about the growing hunger in the Mississippi Delta. The convergence of efforts to register Black citizens to vote, Black parents’ challenges to segregated schools, the development of chemical weed killers and farm mechanization, and recent passage of a minimum wage law covering agriculture workers on large farms had resulted in many Black sharecroppers being pushed off their near feudal plantations which no longer needed their cheap labor. Many displaced sharecroppers were illiterate and had no skills. Free federal food commodities like cheese, powdered milk, flour, and peanut butter were all that stood between them and starvation. I invited the Senators to come to Mississippi and hear directly from local people about the positive impact the anti-poverty program was making. They did.

Kathy Kelly: Cold, Cold Heart

It’s Valentine’s Day, and opening the little cartoon on the Google page brings up a sentimental animation with Tony Bennett singing “why can’t I free your doubtful mind and melt your cold, cold heart.”

Here in Dubai, where I’m awaiting a visa to visit Afghanistan, the weather is already warm and humid. But my bags are packed with sweaters because Kabul is still reeling from the coldest winter on record. Two weeks ago, eight children under age five froze to death there in one of the sprawling refugee camps inhabited by so many who have fled from the battles in other provinces. Since January 15, at least 23 children under 5 have frozen to death in the camps.And just over a week ago, eight young shepherds, all but one under 14 years of age, lit a fire for warmth on the snowy Afghan mountainside in Kapisa Province where they were helping support their families by grazing sheep. French troops saw the fire, and acted on faulty information, and the boys were all killed in two successive NATO airstrikes. The usual denunciations from local authorities, and Western apologies, followed. (Trend News, February 10, 2012).

So I’m thinking about warmth, and who we share it with and who we don’t.

Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez: An Unlikely Environmental Evangelist

I was not raised in any religion, nor do I follow any religious practices now.  I don’t believe in God as a benevolent white man in the sky, nor do I believe that one needs to sit in a particular building, listening to a particular preacher, to reach out to the divine.

But I have always felt a deep spiritual connection to the natural world.  When I was 8 or 9, I used to go out into the woods and sit alone in my “spot,” which was a circle of mossy stones at the top of a big stone ridge, ringed by maples and centered around a grassy glade.  It was a small circle, no bigger than 10 feet in diameter.  I would just sit there and look and listen to the birds in the trees above me, the small insects on patrol in the grass, feeling the wind ruffling against my face and a kind of inner exultation and delight that I can only describe as religious ecstasy.

No one taught me to do this, and it wasn’t until much later, reading personal narratives by indigenous elders, that I was able to put this early spiritual connection with nature into a broader polytheistic cultural framework.

I believe that everything in our world is tinged with spiritual significance.  And I believe that human beings, because we are unique among animals in being able to see the effects of our actions on the larger landscape of the planet, and to both predict and alter the future, have a special moral imperative to do what we can to be the responsible stewards of the natural world of which we are a part.