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progressive books 2/24/2010

The banks have had nine months to creatively increase the real cost of borrowing: Robert Manning on Credit Card Nation permalink

Just as we demand credit card users to act responsibly, we demand that credit card companies act responsibly too - President Obama's words on May 22, 2009 before signing the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure Act (CARD).

The CARD Act finally took effect on Monday, Feburary 22. It prohibits some of the worst industry practices including billing systems that generate finance charges on paid-off balances, some retroactive interest-rate increases and unrestricted marketing to consumers under the age of 21. But in the nine months since May, credit card companies have found new ways to increase their profits from consumer borrowing despite the CARD Act including annual fees, cutting credit limits, hiking interest rates and various hidden charges. On Tuesday, Robert Manning discussed the CARD act on DemocracyNow!. Robert Manning is the author of Credit Card Nation: The Consequences of America’s Addiction to Credit. and the founder of the Responsible Debt Relief Institute.

This would have been a great bill when it was first discussed about seven or eight years ago, but in the depths of this recession and the fact that there is no usury law and there are not any fee caps, and the fact that the banks had nine months to creatively increase the real cost of borrowing,... most Americans...are going to be shocked at how limited the help is, offered by the CARD Act...It’s one thing to be able to be told how long it’s going to take you to pay off your bill. It’s another thing to find out that your interest rate’s been doubled from 15 percent to 29.9 percent...[and] it’s happened already in the nine months preceding the implementation of the act...This is a fee-driven industry now. The effort to disconnect risk and lending and transfer that risk to investors means that banks make more and more of their money...in late and penalty over-limit fees. Banks are going to be charging annual fees....Any benefit that you get is going to come with a fee. - Robert Manning, speaking on DemocracyNow!.

Credit Card Nation: The Consequences of America's Addiction to Credit by Robert D. Manning Basic Books
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progressive books 2/9/2010

Robert McChesney and John Nichols the history and necessity of government subsides for US journalism permalink

Discussing their new book, The Death and Life of American Journalism, Robert McChesney and John Nichols relate how for the first hundred years of American history, it was understood that the duty of a democratic state was to see to the existence of an independent, uncensored journalism. Journalism was seen as a public good. The government helped American journalism by the granting of subsidies. There was no assumption that independent journalism would be provided for by market forces.

There are two great components of free press in the United States in our tradition. The first great component is the one we all know about, that government shouldn’t censor content, it shouldn’t regulate journalists, it shouldn’t prohibit anyone from entering doing media, like any of us. And that should never be compromised. But the second great tradition of the American free press tradition is that it’s the first duty of the state to make sure free press exists. And that part has been lost in the shuffle. One of the striking things we discovered, Amy and Juan, when we did our research is we reread all the First Amendment cases of the US Supreme Court in the last hundred years, all the freedom of the press cases. And what was striking in Hugo Black, in Potter Stewart, in all the great cases, was the assumption that it was the first duty of a democratic government to make sure a credible Fourth Estate exists. Otherwise the entire governance of the country will collapse. You cannot have a democracy and self-government and the rule of law.

Just start with the American tradition first, our own tradition in the first half of the nineteenth century. We wanted to compute, you know, this federal subsidy from the post office, which primarily was the distribution arm of newspapers—that’s 95 percent of its traffic—and the printing subsidies in the first half of the nineteenth century. How significant were they? And so, we actually went back and determined what percentage of GDP they were in the first half of the nineteenth century. If we had the same percentage of gross domestic product today, by the federal government as a subsidy to journalism, how much would the federal government pay? And it was $30 billion. I mean, it was such an enormous investment by the federal government to create a free press. It wasn’t just a piddly side thing; it was, after military, the largest expense of the federal government for the first seventy-five years of our history, into the Civil War period. And then we went to look at other—you know, generally, when people ask about government subsidies, they think of Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, Pol Pot. They think of all these terrible dictatorships. We said, well, that’s not really the relevant comparison for the United States. We should look at other democracies. What are they doing in Europe and in Asia, and even in third world countries that are democracies? And what we discovered is, all of them, or almost all them, have significantly large public media, community media and journalism subsidies. They vary from country to country, but they’re all enormous compared to the United States. And if you look at northern Europe, for example, this average country up there in Scandinavia or Holland or Germany, in US terms, if you put it to per capita basis and put it in the United States, we’d have to spend between $20 and $35 billion a year to subsidize public media and journalism to be equal to those countries.

- two selections from a DemocracyNow! interview with Robert McChesney and John Nichols.

The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution that Will Begin the World Again by Robert W. McChesney Nation Books
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progressive books 1/24/2010

Johann Hari on P. W. Singer's Wired For War permalink

If virtually no American forces had died in Vietnam, would the war have stopped when it did – or would the systematic slaughter of the Vietnamese people have continued for many more years? If "we" weren't losing anyone in Afghanistan or Iraq, would the call for an end to the killing be as loud? I'd like to think we are motivated primarily by compassion for civilians on the other side, but I doubt it. Take "us" safely out of the picture and we will be more willing to kill "them". - Johann Hari from The age of the killer robot is no longer a sci-fi fantasy.

The Nato forces now depend on a range of killer robots, largely designed by the British Ministry of Defence labs privatised by Tony Blair in 2001. Every time you hear about a "drone attack" against Afghanistan or Pakistan, that's an unmanned robot dropping bombs on human beings. Push a button and it flies away, kills, and comes home. Its robot-cousin on the battlefields below is called SWORDS: a human-sized robot that can see 360 degrees around it and fire its machine-guns at any target it "chooses". Fox News proudly calls it "the GI of the 21st century." And billions are being spent on the next generation of warbots, which will leave these models looking like the bulky box on which you used to play Pong. At the moment, most are controlled by a soldier – often 7,500 miles away – with a control panel. But insurgents are always inventing new ways to block the signal from the control centre, which causes the robot to shut down and "die". So the military is building "autonomy" into the robots: if they lose contact, they start to make their own decisions, in line with a pre-determined code.

This is "one of the most fundamental changes in the history of human warfare," according to PW Singer, a former analyst for the Pentagon and the CIA, in his must-read book, Wired For War: The Robotics Revolution and Defence in the Twenty-First Century. Humans have been developing weapons that enabled us to kill at ever-greater distances and in ever-greater numbers for millennia, from the longbow to the cannon to the machine-gun to the nuclear bomb. But these robots mark a different stage.

The earlier technologies made it possible for humans to decide to kill in more "sophisticated" ways – but once you programme and unleash an autonomous robot, the war isn't fought by you any more: it's fought by the machine. The subject of warfare shifts. - Johann Hari from The Independent, The age of the killer robot is no longer a sci-fi fantasy

Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century by P. W. Singer Penguin Press HC, The
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progressive books 1/23/2010

Jamin Raskin on the Supreme Court campaign finance ruling which removes limits on corporate campaign spending permalink

We’ve had some terrible Supreme Court interventions against political democracy: Shaw v. Reno, striking down majority African American and Hispanic congressional districts; Bush v. Gore, intervening to stop the counting of ballots in Florida. But I would have to say that all of them pale compared to what we just saw yesterday, where the Supreme Court has overturned decades of Supreme Court precedent to declare that private, for-profit corporations have First Amendment rights of political expression, meaning that they can spend up to the heavens in order to have their way in politics. And this will open floodgates of millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars in federal, state and local elections, as Halliburton and Enron and Blackwater and Bank of America and Goldman Sachs can take money directly out of corporate treasuries and put them into our politics. And I looked at just one corporation, Exxon Mobil, which is the biggest corporation in America. In 2008, they posted profits of $85 billion. And so, if they decided to spend, say, a modest ten percent of their profits in one year, $8.5 billion, that would be three times more than the Obama campaign, the McCain campaign and every candidate for House and Senate in the country spent in 2008. That’s one corporation. So think about the Fortune 500. They’re threatening a fundamental change in the character of American political democracy. - Jamin Raskin from a DemocracyNow! interview.

Overruling Democracy: The Supreme Court versus The American People by Jamin B. Raskin Routledge
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progressive books 12/12/2009

David Cortright on Obama's shallow understanding of the priciples of Just War Theory permalink

"I found the Nobel speech disappointing," David Cortright wrote to Chritopher Hayes, The Nation's Washington, DC editor. "To use the Nobel dais to justify the use of military force is unseemly. The president's characterization of the historic role of US military power was distorted, and his interpretation of just war theory was incomplete." David Cortright has had a long history of public advocacy for disarmament and the prevention of war begining with the time he served in Vietnam and organized his comrades against the war. Currently the Director of Policy Studies at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame, David Cortright has also been the executive director of The Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy and co-director of the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign. In 2002 he helped to found the Win Without War coalition in opposition to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. His full text to Chritopher Hayes:

The president asserted that US military policy has helped to "underwrite global security." More accurate would be an admission that many of our adventures have created global insecurity. Vietnam, the wars in Central America in the 1980s, the invasion of Iraq, countless interventions by the CIA--these and other actions have sown suffering and insecurity. The US has supported democracy in some settings but very often we have subverted democracy and overthrown legitimately elected democratic regimes, in Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Chile (1973), etc.

The president invoked just war principles but showed a shallow understanding of the criteria. The most important principle of just war theory is a presumption against the use of force, a belief that war is almost always unjust and can be justified only under the most dire circumstances and only if strict ethical criteria are satisfied. He mentioned a few of the criteria, without probing them in depth, but did mention the standard of 'probability of success.' Under that criterion, the war in Afghanistan cannot be judged just, since there is very little probability that the war can be pursued to achieve military victory, however that is defined.

The president's assertions about Afghanistan did not acknowledge the fact that war is an inappropriate means of combating terrorism. The Rand Corporation study of 2008 on how terrorist groups end found that military force was responsible for ending terrorist groups in only 7 per cent of the cases. Political bargaining (43 per cent) and effective law enforcement (40 per cent) were the primary factors accounting for the end of terrorist groups. The military's own counterinsurgency doctrine calls for a campaign that is 80 per cent nonmilitary. The US effort in Afghanistan is the reverse, more than 80 per cent military.

Peace demands responsibility and sacrifice, yes, but it is built primarily through nonmilitary means. The president mentioned some of these, but he failed to mention that US foreign policy systematically undervalues these approaches. In Afghanistan the US is spending far more on military approaches than on development and humanitarian assistance. -- David Cortright quoted by Christopher Hayes in A Practical Peace Advocate on Obama's Nobel Speech from The Nation magazine.

More on Just War Theory and Reassessing U.S. engagement in Afghanistan by David Cortright:

The initial United States military operation in Afghanistan after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was widely considered a just war, a classic case of self-defense. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a pastoral message in November 2001 acknowledging the “right and duty of a nation and the international community to use military force if necessary to defend the common good by protecting the innocent against mass terrorism.” Today’s mission is more complex and uncertain, however, and demands a new ethical assessment. Its fundamental goals are the same, defeating Al Qaeda and preventing global terrorist attacks, and are certainly just. The related objective is also just: helping to build capable governments in Afghanistan and Pakistan that can meet the needs of their people and protect against violent extremism. The question about both objectives is not whether they are just, but whether they can be achieved through the application of military force. It is a question of means rather than ends. U.S. military involvement in the region is based on three fundamental strategic assumptions: first, war is a necessary and appropriate means of defeating Al Qaeda and preventing global terrorist strikes; second, the Taliban is equivalent to Al Qaeda and thus a legitimate target of military attack; and third, NATO must fight and win a counterinsurgency war against the Taliban and related jihadist groups. The first two assumptions determined policy decisions in the weeks after 9/11, and they have remained at the heart of U.S./NATO strategy ever since. The third assumption evolved over time and drives the current long-term military commitment. In recent years a fourth strategic dimension has entered the equation—the extension of military operations to Pakistan. Each of these assumptions is highly questionable strategically and poses serious ethical dilemmas. -- from the opening paragraphs of No Easy Way Out Reassessing U.S. engagement in Afghanistan by David Cortright.

Peace: A History of Movements and Ideas by David Cortright Cambridge University Press
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progressive books 11/26/2009

Obama's rejection of Landmine Treaty lacks vision, compassion, and basic common sense permalink

"President Obama’s decision to cling to antipersonnel mines keeps the US on the wrong side of history and the wrong side of humanity. This decision lacks vision, compassion, and basic common sense, and it contradicts the Obama administration’s professed emphasis on multilateralism, disarmament, and humanitarian affairs." - Steve Goose, Arms Division director at Human Rights Watch

"We cannot understand this shameful decision. We cannot understand the Obama administration’s decision to not be transparent in this ‘review’ process of the landmine policy and we definitely cannot understand President Obama’s decision to continue with the Bush policy." "This decision is a slap in the face to landmine survivors, their families and affected communities everywhere – especially because in just a few short weeks, he will be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize." - Jody Williams, 1997 Nobel Laureate.

While there is no evidence that landmines are designed like toys to attract children, children are attracted to landmines because they are easily attracted by unknown objects. The results can be deadly. Children in heavily mined areas may become so familiar with mines that they forget they are lethal weapons, a reversal, as one mine expert noted, of "the common perception of the 'hidden mine'". In northern Iraq, "rural children commonly use mines as wheels for toy trucks and go-carts; in Cambodia they play boules with B40 anti-personnel mines." Even where children recognize the danger of mines, "there can not be an automatic assumption that such knowledge will deter them from tampering with mines. Especially among young boys, the risk element itself may prove a fatal attraction. In Afghanistan they compete in throwing stones at PFM-1 'Butterfly' mines, the winner being the child whose stone causes the mine to detonate; similar behavoir has been observed in other mined regions. - from After the Guns Fall Silent: The Enduring Legacy of Landmines.

Banning Landmines: Disarmament, Citizen Diplomacy, and Human Security by Jody Williams Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
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progressive books 11/15/2009

Robert Jensen: Of Turkeys and Holocausts permalink

Although it’s well known to anyone who wants to know, let me summarize the argument against Thanksgiving: European invaders exterminated nearly the entire indigenous population to create the United States. Without that holocaust, the United States as we know it would not exist. The United States celebrates a Thanksgiving Day holiday dominated not by atonement for that horrendous crime against humanity but by a falsified account of the “encounter” between Europeans and American Indians. When confronted with this, most people in the United States (outside of indigenous communities) ignore the history or attack those who make the argument. This is intellectually dishonest, politically irresponsible, and morally bankrupt.

In left/radical circles, even though that basic critique is widely accepted, a relatively small number of people argue that we should renounce the holiday and refuse to celebrate it in any fashion. Most leftists who celebrate Thanksgiving claim that they can individually redefine the holiday in a politically progressive fashion in private, which is an illusory dodge: We don’t define holidays individually or privately -- the idea of a holiday is rooted in its collective, shared meaning. When the dominant culture defines a holiday in a certain fashion, one can’t pretend to redefine it in private. To pretend we can do that also is intellectually dishonest, politically irresponsible, and morally bankrupt. - an excerpt from How I Stopped Hating Thanksgiving and Learned to be Afraid by Robert Jensen. Read the entire article at Counterpunch.

All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice by Robert Jensen Soft Skull Press
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progressive books 11/1/2009

If you think you'll to be rich someday, why resent million-dollar bonuses: Barbara Ehrenreich on Positive Thinking permalink

Barbara Ehrenreich on positive thinking as a system of social control:

When bad things happen to people you say, "Well, it's really your attitude that has to change."...You take people who have been really victimized, and I use that word advisedly, with cancer and with lay-offs from unaccountable corporations. And then you tell them, "Well, you just have to change the way you think." And that's very clever.

On the connection between positive thinking and the subprime-mortgage meltdown:

I have traced how positive thinking became the corporate culture in America. It was mandatory to be positive. So you had companies who would literally fire people for being negative, negative in the sense of maybe raising too many questions, maybe expressing a doubt. One example is the man who was the head of the real estate division of Lehman Bros. in 2006 and told his CEO that he thought the whole housing thing was a bubble and they should start getting out, and he was fired for that.

On positive thinking as an ideology that discourages indignation about extreme economic polarization:

If you think you're going to be rich someday, why would you be resentful of million-dollar bonuses or $10 million CEO salaries, you know? You're going to be there, so it would be against your own self-interest to stand up for your class interests.

On the alternative to positive thinking:

One of the major sources of misery in the world is poverty. We can do one of two things. We can tell poor people they need to change their attitudes, and there's a whole industry of that kind of thing -- motivational speakers that tell people to get over their bad attitudes towards wealth so it will just come to them. Or we can say, "What's the cause of this? How are we going to get together and do something about it?" And I come down on that side. - excerpts from an interview between Emily Wilson and Barbara Ehrenreich from AlterNet.

Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America by Barbara Ehrenreich Metropolitan Books
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progressive books 9/3/2009

Wallace Shawn on The Quest for Superiority permalink

Best known as co-author and player in My Dinner with Andre and his performance in several Woody Allen films, playwright and actor Wallace Shawn has just published his first book of nonfiction titled Essays. Catch him reading from “The Quest for Superiority” on DemocracyNow!:

“My feeling of superiority, and the sense of well-being that comes from that, increases with the number of poor people on the planet whose lives are dominated by me or my proxies and whom I nonetheless can completely ignore. I like to be reminded of those poor people, those unobtrusives, and then I like to be reminded of my lack of interest in them. For example, while I eat my breakfast each morning, I absolutely love to read my morning newspaper, because in the first few pages the newspaper tells me how my country treated all the unobtrusives on the day before—deaths, beatings, torture, what have you—and then, as I keep turning the pages, the newspaper reminds me how unimportant the unobtrusives are to me, and it tries to tempt me in its articles on shirts to consider different shirts that I might want to wear, and then it goes on, as I turn the pages, to try to coax me into sampling different forms of cooking, and then to experience different plays or films, different types of vacations…”

In other words, the stories in the newspaper about Afghanistan are partly true and partly false, but they’re presented in a context that basically makes me feel alright about treating the people there as non-equals, which obviously we do if we send an unmanned drone and we are thinking of killing some person who we think is an enemy and we kill fifteen members of his family. We wouldn’t do that to people who we thought were our equals. For example, friends. Even if there was someone that we despised or who wanted to kill us in the middle of their family, we wouldn’t kill the whole family. We just wouldn’t. And the New York Times helps me to take that as totally normal. - Wallace Shawn on DemocracyNow!

Essays by Wallace Shawn Haymarket Books
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progressive books 8/30/2009

Michael Parenti on Italian American Identity permalink

It would do well if we could bring more of a social content to our ethnic identity. The Italian-American Political Solidarity Club has just published a book whose title urges as much: Avanti Popolo: Italian-American Writers Sail Beyond Columbus. The book urges that on Columbus Day instead of celebrating conquest we should acknowledge those who fought for the rights of all immigrants and for social justice.

Indeed Italian Americans need to bring substance to the symbolic politics that have been fed to us. We do not need another statue to Columbus. Some such as Diane Di Prima, Tommi Avicolli-Mecca, and Juliet Ucelli have organized "Dumping Columbus" readings and other events that challenge the iconic image of the Great Navigator and instead commemorate the Native Americans he enslaved and murdered.

Philip Cannistraro and Gerald Meyer (of German Protestant lineage) edited a book, The Lost World of Italian-American Radicalism, that reclaims some of the history of radical Italian-American immigrants, labor leaders, union organizers, antiwar activists, and political protesters, a history long neglected or repressed.

To frame the Italian-American experience within a context of struggle for social justice and economic survival is to give it a dimension that goes beyond nostalgia and sentimentality, and flies in the face of the stereotypes that weigh down upon us Italians. Thus do we not only realize more of ourselves but we connect to more of the world, especially to the class realities that compose so much of life yet remain too often unmentioned and unnoticed. - a selection from Italian American Identity: To Be or Not To Be by Michael Parenti.

Avanti Popolo: Italian-American Writers Sail Beyond Columbus Manic D Press, Inc.
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