How Music Changes Our Brains

Reproduced from Salon Magazine, Sunday October 23,2011

SUNDAY, OCT 23, 2011 8:00 PM UTC2011-10-23T20:00:00ZL, M J, Y G:I A T

How music changes our brains

Science is becoming increasingly interested in the relationship between sound and the brain. An expert

explains

BY THOMAS ROGERS

Music has never been more accessible.

Just a decade ago, we were lugging

around clunky portable CD players

that weighed as much as a hardcover

book and would skip whenever we

made any sudden movement. Now our

entire record collection (and thanks to

new companies like Spotify, almost

any other song on the planet) can fit

into our phones. We can listen to

music nonstop — on our commute, at

work, at the gym and everywhere else

we might want to. But what is this

explosion of sound doing to our

brains?

In their new book, “Healing at the

Speed of Sound,” Don Campbell, an

author who has written extensively

about music and health, and Alex Doman, a specialist in technology in brain function, take an extensive survey about

what the latest neuroscientific findings tell us about music and the brain. Although excessive noise has be harmful in a

number of ways, music has been shown to improve children with learning disabilities, help elders feel more connected to

the world, and even get people into better shape. It provides children with a “hook” for the brain’s memory centers,

allowing them to retain more information, and it can play huge roles in modifying our moods.

Salon spoke to Campbell over the phone about the dangers of excessive noise, the importance of exercise music and why

more children should learn how to play instruments.

As you write about in the book, there’s been a growing consensus in the last few years that sound can have

some very strong effects on our overall health.

Science is beginning to ask very different questions than it was 20 or 30 years ago. Just 3 months ago, the World Health

Organization published a 108-page study that absolutely shook me up. It argued that noise is the second greatest pollutant

in the world today. Environmental noise affects cardiovascular disease, cognitive impairment in kids, sleep disturbance,

tinnitus, not to mention just plain annoyance. If it’s too loud, whether it’s classical music, rock, whatever, it’s not good for

us. And the numbers are just beyond me. The study said noise cost up 45,000 DALY [disability-adjusted-life years,

meaning 45,000 years of "healthy" life worldwide are taken away by noise] per year.

I just returned from a week in New York City, and I have a little decibel app on my iPhone. On the subways it registered

way over 100 decibels. When I was outside, I found myself covering my ears and needing to use my noise reduction

headphones.

But as you point out in the book, the scientific community is increasingly interested in looking at the

ways music can affect our brains.

Our home, our work, everywhere around us is overloaded with sound. By selecting certain kinds of music, we can improve

our lives and decrease our stress. Music triggers responses: If I speak in rhythm and rhyme, for example, another part of

your brain will be [activated than the one that simply responds to speech]. Music can relate to emotions. It creates

autonomic automatic responses.

What was surprising to me was, as you point out in the book, fast-paced music actually has real effects on

your ability to work out. In one 2009 study you cite in the book, college students biked faster or slower

depending on what kind of music they were listening to — and it made it easier for them to push

themselves.

If you put a rhythm behind your exercise, you don’t become as tired as quickly because of our natural tendency to fall into a

pattern. If you want to do 100 pushups, you will start counting because you need that rhythmicity. The building of the

railroads, for example, would never have happened as quickly without the use of repetitive work songs. One professor at

the university of Northern Colorado has done extensive research into what they call rhythmicity and rehabilitation,

showing that, for people who’ve had injuries, the use of rhythmic patterns, whether from a metronome or music sustains

the ability to prolong exercise in rehabilitative therapy. It’s a technique called entrainment. The body creates the rhythm,

and then the therapist uses the rhythm in a rehabilitative context.

From a neurological perspective, why is it important to listen to and play music from an early age?

The more participation there is with music early on — through singing and movement — the more it simultaneously

activates multiple levels of the brain. If you look at the corpus callosum [of someone who plays music] there are more

connections made between right and left sides. A child who is moving, dancing and singing learns coordination between

their eye, ear and sound early on. And [the experience of participating in music education] helps integrate the social, the

emotional and the real context of what we’re learning. There are studies that show children who play music have higher

SAT scores, that learning to control rhythm and tempo not only help them get along with others but plants seeds for

similar advantages when we get much older.

What about learning disabilities?

In many cases, a background rhythm will help and assist somebody with dyslexia or autism to speak and read in rhythm.

Exposure to different kinds of patterns — high range, mid-range, low range, slow tempo, medium, high tempo — can help

bring order to their thinking. In a 2001 study, one researcher found that brain activity changes when there is soothing

music, and there is biological evidence that we can actually remove a great deal of the tension in frustrated children by

exposing them to more soothing sounds. In the Journal of Complementary Medicine in 2007, there was a study that found

that these children can channel more resources when they speak in rhythm and rhyme and when they play and listen to

music.

What about the elderly?

Our hearing decreases radically after the age of 60, and often by the time we are in our 80s we don’t hear high frequencies

and some sounds become more annoying and more confusing. Under different kinds of medication, tinnitus becomes

more frequent. It’s a symptom, not a disease. By learning to tap a rhythm as one speaks with an elder, to use a drum, a

simple hand drum, the size of a tambourine, to be able to translate and transfer the organization of speech and thought

becomes much more effective. There’s a company called Oval Window that produces floors that vibrate, so elders they can

literally hear better through the vibrations.

There are interesting studies on socialization. The more we lose our hearing, the more isolated we become. Music and

rhythm help keep people wildly engaged in life. Gordon Shaw [a professor at University of California Irvine] has been a

great leader in this field. My mother had dementia for 10 years, and once I spoke to her in rhythm or played songs on the

piano that my dad used to play for her when they were young, it woke her up.

Our lives are also much more deeply enmeshed in music these days. Now that music players are so

portable, it feels weird to leave the house without listening to something on my headphones.

If we live in a world where there is no silence or integration, we’re not as healthy as we could be. 125 years ago, all music

was real and alive. We didn’t have radio and iPods, and now it’s just the opposite.

Right, and conversely we don’t have as much access to silence.

Silence is part of the brain’s pattern. It helps it reintegrate, like sleep, but we can’t shut our ears like we shut our eyes.

I also find that, now that listening to vast quantities of music is so easy, I get impatient 30 seconds into a

song and skip forward to the next one for no real reason.

I love exploring iTunes, but you only get 20 seconds of something to see if you like it. It’s like an all-you-can-eat food bar,

but you need to understand the nutrition of it. If you’re changing music every 30 seconds, then be sure to have 2 minutes of

real silence in there. It goes back to chew your food so to speak before you swallow it.

In the book, you describe something called a “listening disability,” or “auditory processing disorder,” in

which children process sound incorrectly. As you point out, 2 to 3 percent of children suffer from it, but

it’s often misdiagnosed as ADHD or hyperactivity.

Listening disabilities were discovered by ear-nose-and-throat specialists early this century. They manifest themselves

when students are not able to discriminate between sounds or they’re overwhelmed by sound. They may suddenly realize

they misunderstand instructions, they have poor auditory memory, and are easily distracted, have reading difficulties and

have language problems. Symptoms in auditory processing can affect our whole learning and communication system. The

ear can cause difficulties within the other pairs of cranial nerves, like the vagus nerve that affects not only the diaphragm

but also the heart and the larynx. If something is not right in our hearing, we may not be able to speak and talk about it in

the correct way. I know of a doctoral student at the University of Edinburgh who is doing fine research looking at the

auditory relationship on this point — we often don’t look at the ear as a source of reading and learning difficulties.

Clearly a lot of places are very noisy and there has been some argument that having a TV or radio on in

the background when you’re trying to do work is very distracting to people. Does the science back that

up?

Different ages need different sounds. The brains of high school and college students are still developing and myelinating

in such a way that sometimes sound allows them to focus better. Some of the newer studies have found that if someone is

just having music in the background studying, very structured music like Mozart and Vivaldi and Haydn is better than pop

music or nonstructured music. But we’re all different. For someone who lives in a home where there is a television, a

microwave, the heater, as well as traffic outside, their mind can do nothing but work at filtering out sounds. For that

person, silence can be quite frightening. And that’s where music can be used as a bridge. I’ve worked in classrooms of

third-graders that have very little attention span, but if you give them noise cancellation headphones, they can suddenly

hear themselves think.

Thomas Rogers is Salon's Deputy Arts Editor.

Copyright © 2011 Salon.com. All rights reserved.

Wisdom from Fannin County, Texas

Every month a missive from Joyce and Gene Marshall of Bonham, Texas arrives in my inbox. I always read it for the insights from this county of some 17,000 residents on the Texas Oklahoma border.

Here's some profound and (for me) helpful insights and information about our remarkable governor, for the good he has done for Texas, and his hopes to be President of these United States. Enjoy.

Citizens’ Call September 2011
an e-mag on citizen information


Slogan for the Month:
“Let us GROAN that Texas has once again offered a nincompoop
to be the Chief Executive of the most Powerful Institution on Earth.”
Any economy success we have here in Texas is in spite of, rather than because of Rick Perry. Ironically, this irrational hater of the Federal Government is Governor of a State whose economic success is largely dependent upon the Federal Government – its huge military base inputs, its massive perks to the oil industry, and more. Also, the economic success of Texas is highly overrated. See The Texas Unmiracle article below.
Gene Marshall

Rick Perry Says Social Security And Medicare
Are Unconstitutional
By Ian Millhiser
August 12, 2011

Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) has, to say the least, a very odd understanding of the Constitution. He thinks Texas should be able to opt out of Social Security, and he believes that everything from federal public school programs to clean air laws are unconstitutional. Yet in an interview with the Daily Beast’s Andrew Romano, Perry makes his most outlandish claim to date — Social Security and Medicare are unconstitutional:

The Constitution says that “the Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes… to provide for the… general Welfare of the United States.” But I noticed that when you quoted this section on page 116, you left “general welfare” out and put an ellipsis in its place. Progressives would say that “general welfare” includes things like Social Security or Medicare—that it gives the government the flexibility to tackle more than just the basic responsibilities laid out explicitly in our founding document. What does “general welfare” mean to you?

[PERRY:] I don’t think our founding fathers when they were putting the term “general welfare” in there were thinking about a federally operated program of pensions nor a federally operated program of health care. What they clearly said was that those were issues that the states need to address. Not the federal government. I stand very clear on that. From my perspective, the states could substantially better operate those programs if that’s what those states decided to do.

So in your view those things fall outside of general welfare. But what falls inside of it? What did the Founders mean by “general welfare”?

[PERRY:] I don’t know if I’m going to sit here and parse down to what the Founding Fathers thought general welfare meant.

But you just said what you thought they didn’t mean by general welfare. So isn’t it fair to ask what they did mean? It’s in the Constitution.

[Silence.]

Perry’s reading of the Constitution raises very serious questions about whether he understands the English language. The Constitution gives Congress the power to “to lay and collect taxes” and to “provide for the…general welfare of the United States .” No plausible interpretation of the words “general welfare” does not include programs that ensure that all Americans can live their entire lives secure in the understanding that retirement will not force them into poverty and untreated sickness.

Moreover, Perry’s belief that Social Security and Medicare must cease to exist not only puts him well to the right of his fellow Republicans in Congress — who recently voted to gradually phase out Medicare — it also puts him at the rightward fringe of the GOP presidential field. Not even Michele Bachmann has gone on record claiming that America’s two most cherished programs for seniors violate the Constitution, although she did invite a Fox News analyst who shares Perry’s beliefs to lecture her fellow lawmakers on what the Constitution requires .

When House Budget Chair Paul Ryan (R-WI) released the GOP’s plan to slowly eliminate Medicare, it was the most conservative budget proposal anyone had seriously considered in generations. Perry’s agenda, however, makes Paul Ryan look like Ted Kennedy.


Rick Perry’s Unanswered Prayers
By Timothy Egan

A few months ago, with Texas aflame from more than 8,000 wildfires brought on by extreme drought, a man who hopes to be the next president took pen in hand and went to work:

“Now, therefore, I, Rick Perry, Governor of Texas, under the authority vested in me by the Constitution and Statutes of the State of Texas, do hereby proclaim the three-day period from Friday, April 22, 2011, to Sunday, April 24, 2011, as Days of Prayer for Rain in the State of Texas.”

In the four months since Rick Perry’s request for divine intervention, his state has taken a dramatic turn for the worse.

Then the governor prayed, publicly and often. Alas, a rainless spring was followed by a rainless summer. July was the hottest month in recorded Texas history. Day after pitiless day, from Amarillo to Laredo, from Toadsuck to Twitty, folks were greeted by a hot, white bowl overhead, triple-digit temperatures, and a slow death on the land.

In the four months since Perry’s request for divine intervention, his state has taken a dramatic turn for the worse. Nearly all of Texas is now in “extreme or exceptional” drought, as classified by federal meteorologists, the worst in Texas history.

Lakes have disappeared. Creeks are phantoms, the caked bottoms littered with rotting, dead fish. Farmers cannot coax a kernel of grain from ground that looks like the skin of an aging elephant.

Is this Rick Perry’s fault, a slap to a man who doesn’t believe that humans can alter the earth’s climate — God messin’ with Texas? No, of course not. God is too busy with the upcoming Cowboys football season and solving the problems that Tony Romo has reading a blitz.

But Perry’s tendency to use prayer as public policy demonstrates, in the midst of a truly painful, wide-ranging and potentially catastrophic crisis in the nation’s second most-populous state, how he would govern if he became president.

“I think it’s time for us to just hand it over to God, and say, ‘God: You’re going to have to fix this,’” he said in a speech in May, explaining how some of the nation’s most serious problems could be solved.

Pat Sullivan/Associated PressTexas Gov. Rick Perry spoke at a day long prayer and fast rally on Saturday, Aug. 6, 2011, at Reliant Stadium in Houston. That was a warm-up of sorts for his prayer-fest, 30,000 evangelicals in Houston’s Reliant Stadium on Saturday. From this gathering came a very specific prayer for economic recovery. On the following Monday, the first day God could do anything about it, Wall Street suffered its worst one-day collapse since the 2008 crisis. The Dow sunk by 635 points.

Prayer can be meditative, healing, and humbling. It can also be magical thinking. Given how Perry has said he would govern by outsourcing to the supernatural, it’s worth asking if God is ignoring him.

Though Perry will not officially announce his candidacy until Saturday, he loomed large over the Republican debate Thursday night. With their denial of climate change, basic budget math, and the indisputable fact that most of the nation’s gains have gone overwhelmingly to a wealthy few in the last decade, the candidates form a Crazy Eight caucus. You could power a hay ride on their nutty ideas.

After the worst week of his presidency (and the weakest Oval Office speech since Gerald Ford unveiled buttons to whip inflation), the best thing Barack Obama has going for him is this Republican field. He still beats all of them in most polling match-ups.

Perry is supposed to be the savior. When he joins the campaign in the next few days, expect him to show off his boots; they are emblazoned with the slogan dating to the 1835 Texas Revolution: “Come and Take It.” He once explained the logo this way: “Come and take it — that’s what it’s all about.” This is not a man one would expect to show humility in prayer.

Perry revels in a muscular brand of ignorance (Rush Limbaugh is a personal hero), one that extends to the ever-fascinating history of the Lone Star State. Twice in the last two years he’s broached the subject of Texas seceding from the union.

“When we came into the nation in 1845 we were a republic, we were a stand-alone nation,” says Perry in a 2009 video that has just surfaced. “And one of the deals was, we can leave any time we want. So we’re kind of thinking about that again.”

He can dream all he wants about the good old days when Texas left the nation to fight for the slave-holding states of the breakaway confederacy. But the law will not get him there. There is no such language in the Texas or United States’ constitutions allowing Texas to unilaterally “leave any time we want.”

But Texas is special. By many measures, it is the nation’s most polluted state. Dirty air and water do not seem to bother Perry. He is, however, extremely perturbed by the Environmental Protection Agency’s enforcement of laws designed to clean the world around him. In a recent interview, he wished for the president to pray away the E.P.A.

To Jews, Muslims, non-believers and even many Christians, the Biblical bully that is Rick Perry must sound downright menacing, particularly when he gets into religious absolutism. “As a nation, we must call upon Jesus to guide us through unprecedented struggles,” he said last week.

As a lone citizen, he’s free to advocate Jesus-driven public policy imperatives. But coming from someone who wants to govern this great mess of a country with all its beliefs, Perry’s language is an insult to the founding principles of the republic. Substitute Allah or a Hindu God for Jesus and see how that polls.

Perry is from Paint Creek, an unincorporated hamlet in the infinity of the northwest Texas plains. I’ve been there. In wet years, it’s pretty, the birds clacking on Lake Stamford, the cotton high. This year, it’s another sad moonscape in the Lone Star State.

Over the last 15 years, taxpayers have shelled out $232 million in farm subsidies to Haskell County, which includes Paint Creek — a handout to more than 2,500 recipients, better than one out every three residents. God may not always be reliable, but in Perry’s home county, the federal government certainly is.
The Texas Unmiracle

By PAUL KRUGMAN
August 14, 2011

Some of these miracles will involve things that you’re liable to read in the Bible. But if he wins the Republican nomination, his campaign will probably center on a more secular theme: the alleged economic miracle in Texas, which, it’s often asserted, sailed through the Great Recession almost unscathed thanks to conservative economic policies. And Mr. Perry will claim that he can restore prosperity to America by applying the same policies at a national level.

So what you need to know is that the Texas miracle is a myth, and more broadly that Texan experience offers no useful lessons on how to restore national full employment.

It’s true that Texas entered recession a bit later than the rest of America, mainly because the state’s still energy-heavy economy was buoyed by high oil prices through the first half of 2008. Also, Texas was spared the worst of the housing crisis, partly because it turns out to have surprisingly strict regulation of mortgage lending.

Despite all that, however, from mid-2008 onward unemployment soared in Texas, just as it did almost everywhere else.

In June 2011, the Texas unemployment rate was 8.2 percent. That was less than unemployment in collapsed-bubble states like California and Florida, but it was slightly higher than the unemployment rate in New York, and significantly higher than the rate in Massachusetts. By the way, one in four Texans lacks health insurance, the highest proportion in the nation, thanks largely to the state’s small-government approach. Meanwhile, Massachusetts has near-universal coverage thanks to health reform very similar to the “job-killing” Affordable Care Act.

So where does the notion of a Texas miracle come from? Mainly from widespread misunderstanding of the economic effects of population growth.

For this much is true about Texas: It has, for many decades, had much faster population growth than the rest of America — about twice as fast since 1990. Several factors underlie this rapid population growth: a high birth rate, immigration from Mexico, and inward migration of Americans from other states, who are attracted to Texas by its warm weather and low cost of living, low housing costs in particular.

And just to be clear, there’s nothing wrong with a low cost of living. In particular, there’s a good case to be made that zoning policies in many states unnecessarily restrict the supply of housing, and that this is one area where Texas does in fact do something right.

But what does population growth have to do with job growth? Well, the high rate of population growth translates into above-average job growth through a couple of channels. Many of the people moving to Texas — retirees in search of warm winters, middle-class Mexicans in search of a safer life — bring purchasing power that leads to greater local employment. At the same time, the rapid growth in the Texas work force keeps wages low — almost 10 percent of Texan workers earn the minimum wage or less, well above the national average — and these low wages give corporations an incentive to move production to the Lone Star State.

So Texas tends, in good years and bad, to have higher job growth than the rest of America. But it needs lots of new jobs just to keep up with its rising population — and as those unemployment comparisons show, recent employment growth has fallen well short of what’s needed.

If this picture doesn’t look very much like the glowing portrait Texas boosters like to paint, there’s a reason: the glowing portrait is false.

Still, does Texas job growth point the way to faster job growth in the nation as a whole? No.

What Texas shows is that a state offering cheap labor and, less important, weak regulation can attract jobs from other states. I believe that the appropriate response to this insight is “Well, duh.” The point is that arguing from this experience that depressing wages and dismantling regulation in America as a whole would create more jobs — which is, whatever Mr. Perry may say, what Perrynomics amounts to in practice — involves a fallacy of composition: every state can’t lure jobs away from every other state.

In fact, at a national level lower wages would almost certainly lead to fewer jobs — because they would leave working Americans even less able to cope with the overhang of debt left behind by the housing bubble, an overhang that is at the heart of our economic problem.

So when Mr. Perry presents himself as the candidate who knows how to create jobs, don’t believe him. His prescriptions for job creation would work about as well in practice as his prayer-based attempt to end Texas’s crippling drought.

If Rick Perry is the Best the Republican Party can offer,
we have a Clear Choice
Gene Marshall
Bonham Citizen

The choice is Barack Obama. It is understandable that in these troubled times almost everyone has a complaint against Obama. He has not been the Superman Messiah that some of us hoped for. He has not ranted against the insanity of his opposition as strenuously as others of us would have liked. He is stuck to the task of consensus-building governing, which may be been one of his strong points. In doing so, Obama has had a few amazing achievements in healthcare, in gay rights, and more. Granted, these victories have been small in relation to the huge challenges that we face.

Nevertheless, would anyone in his position would have been able to do significantly better? Even if the answer to that question is “Yes,” we must not overlook the huge wall of opposition Obama has had to work against. First of all, notice the recalcitrant Tea Party radicals who reject the very idea of an effective national government — indeed, these radicals have been non-governing ranters who have been willing to have this nation drop off a cliff rather than compromise their ideological beliefs. Obama has also had to face an enormous wall of money from the richest and greediest part of this nation. Obama would have signed a much stronger national healthcare bill, but health insurance company greedheads would not have it. Even the weak bill he and others finally snaked through the Congress is still rabidly opposed by these greedy forces. The same story has been played over and over in almost every area. If this nation takes out our disappointments with Obama by voting for Rich Perry, an extremest far to the right of Herbert Hoover, then we deserve the still deeper hell into which such an outcome would surely descend us.

Obama is our choice. Superman is not on the ballot. We can choose a flexible, intelligent, hard-working statesman or we can have what Republicans are going to offer us: UGH.
Let us Remember

Beginning with Newt Gingerich ... The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons, hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks, Lamborghini libertarians, people who believe Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New Mexico, little honkers out to diminish the rest of us, Newt’s evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of information and of secular institutions, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk.
Republicans: The No.1 reason the rest of the world thinks we’re deaf, dumb and dangerous.
Garrison Keillor
Culture » August 26, 2004

BY GLENN GREENWALD
Wikipedia
GLENN
GREENWALD
MONDAY, AUG 29, 2011 10:30 ET
The decade's biggest scam
The Los Angeles Times examines the staggering sums of money
expended on patently absurd domestic "homeland security"
projects: $75 billion per year for things such as a Zodiac boat with
side-scan sonar to respond to a potential attack on a lake in tiny
Keith County, Nebraska, and hundreds of "9-ton BearCat armored
vehicles, complete with turret" to guard against things like an attack
on DreamWorks in Los Angeles. All of that -- which is independent of
the exponentially greater sums spent on foreign wars, occupations,
bombings, and the vast array of weaponry and private contractors to
support it all -- is in response to this mammoth, existential, the-singlegreatest-
challenge-of-our-generation threat:
"The number of people worldwide who are killed by Muslim-type
terrorists, Al Qaeda wannabes, is maybe a few hundred outside of war zones. It's basically the same number of
people who die drowning in the bathtub each year," said John Mueller, an Ohio State University professor who
has written extensively about the balance between threat and expenditures in fighting terrorism.
Last year, McClatchy characterized this threat in similar terms: "undoubtedly more American citizens died overseas
from traffic accidents or intestinal illnesses than from terrorism." The March, 2011, Harper's Index expressed
the point this way: "Number of American civilians who died worldwide in terrorist attacks last year: 8 -- Minimum number
who died after being struck by lightning: 29." That's the threat in the name of which a vast domestic Security State is
constructed, wars and other attacks are and continue to be launched, and trillions of dollars are transferred to the private
security and defense contracting industry at exactly the time that Americans -- even as they face massive wealth inequality --
are told that they must sacrifice basic economic security because of budgetary constraints.
Despite these increasing economic insecurities -- actually, precisely because of them -- the sprawling domestic Security State
continues unabated. The industry journal National Defense Magazine today trumpets: "Homeland Security Market
‘Vibrant’ Despite Budget Concerns." It details how budget cuts mean "homeland security" growth may not be as robust
as once predicted, but "Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Boeing and Northrop Grumman . . . have been winning more
contracts from DHS"; as a Boeing spokesman put it: "You’ll still continue to see domestically significant investment on the
part of the government and leveraging advances in technology to stand up and meet those emerging threats and needs.”
Of course, the key to sustaining this Security State bonanza -- profit for private industry and power for Security State officials
-- is keeping fear levels among the citizenry as high as possible, as National Defense expressly notes, and that is
accomplished by fixating even on minor and failed attacks, each one of which is immediately seized upon to justify greater
expenditures, expansion of security measures, and a further erosion of rights:
Polls still show that there is increasing public concern about another terrorist attack. It is this fear and an
unrealistic American perception of risk that will continue to propel some aspects of the market,
analysts say. . . .
Small-scale attacks, whether successful or not, will continue to prompt additional spending, the market
analysts at Homeland Security Research Corp. say. They point to the failed 2009 Christmas plot of a man trying to blow
up a flight to Detroit with explosives sewn into his underwear and the attempted car-bombing in Times Square early the
next year. Though unsuccessful, these events led to immediate White House intervention, congressional hearings and
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2011/08/29/terrorism
an airport screening upgrade costing more than $1.6 billion.
The LA Times, while skillfully highlighting these wasteful programs, depicts them as some sort of unintended inefficiencies.
That is exactly what they are not. None of this is unintended or inefficient but is achieving exactly the purposes for which it is
designed. That's true for two reasons.
First, this wastefulness is seen as inefficient only if one falsely assumes that its real objective is to combat Terrorist
threats. That is not the purpose of what the U.S. Government does. As Daniel Weeks explains today, the Congress --
contrary to popular opinion -- is not "broken"; it is working perfectly for its actual owners. Or, as he puts it, "Washington
isn't broken -- it’s fixed":
Our problem today is not a broken government but a beholden one: government is more beholden to special-interest
shareholders who fund campaigns than it is to ordinary voters. Like any sound investor, the funders seek nothing more
and nothing less than a handsome return -- deficits be darned -- in the form of tax breaks, subsidies and government
contracts.
The LA Times, and most people who denounce these spending "inefficiencies," have the causation backwards: fighting
Terrorism isn't the goal that security spending is supposed to fulfill; the security spending (and power vested by
surveillance) is the goal itself, and Terrorism is the pretext for it. For that reason, whether the spending efficiently addresses
a Terrorism threat is totally irrelevant.
Second, while the Security State has little to do with addressing ostensible Terrorist threats, it has much to do with targeting
perceived domestic and political threats, especially threats brought about by social unrest from austerity and the growing
wealth gap. This Alternet article by Sarah Jafee, entitled "How the Surveillance State Protects the Interests Of the Ultra-
Rich," compiles much evidence -- including what I offered two weeks ago -- demonstrating that the prime aim of the
growing Surveillance State is to impose domestic order, preserve prevailing economic prerogatives and stifle dissent and
anticipated unrest.
Pointing out disparities between surveillance programs and the Terrorist threat is futile because they're not aimed at that
threat. The British Government, for instance, is continuing its efforts to restrict social media in the wake of the povertyfueled
riots that plagued that country; as The New York Times reports today, it is secretly meeting with representatives
of Twitter, Facebook, and the company that owns Blackberry "to discuss voluntary ways to limit or restrict the use of social
media to combat crime and periods of civil unrest." That revelation prompted taunting condemnations of British tyranny
from China and Iran, both of which have been routinely excoriated for surveillance abuses and Internet suppression of the
type increasingly common in the West.
Meanwhile, much of the anti-Terrorism weaponry in the U.S. ends up being deployed for purposes of purely domestic
policing. As the LA Times notes: those aforementioned BearCats are "are now deployed by police across the country; the
arrests of methamphetamine dealers and bank robbers these days often look much like a tactical assault on
insurgents in Baghdad." Drones are used both in the Drug War and to patrol the border. Surveillance measures
originally justified as necessary to fight foreign Terrorists are routinely turned far more often inward, and the NSA --
created with a taboo against domestic spying -- now does that regularly.
Exaggerating, manipulating and exploiting the Terrorist threat for profit and power has been the biggest scam of the decade;
only Wall Street's ability to make the Government prop it up and profit from the crisis it created at the expense of everyone
else can compete for that title. Nothing has altered the mindset of the American citizenry more than a decade's worth of fearmongering
So compelling is fear-based propaganda, so beholden are our government institutions to these private Security
State factions, and so unaccountable is the power bestowed by these programs, that even a full decade after the only Terrorist
attacks on U.S. soil, its growth continues more or less unabated.
-- Glenn Greenwald

Wisdom from Fannin County, Texas

Citizens’ Call June 2011

an e-mag on citizen information

Republican Economics

Gene Marshall

Bonham Citizen

The only people who should be excited about Republican economics are some dead economists who can’t vote.

Republicans ran up the national debt with tax cuts for the wealthiest citizens, a needless war in Iraq, and support for an almost unregulated banking establishments that squandered trillions of dollars of wealth. Now they are proposing debt solutions that take it out on Medicare patients and that slash health, education, social services, alternative energy, and every other remotely useful program.

Even wealthy CEO’s and high-paid investment speculators need to notice that Republican economics will lead to the destruction of the economy that has so unfairly rewarded them. Taking money from struggling citizens who have to spend it and giving it to those who don’t need to spend it does not stimulate the economy. Trickle-down economics is an illusion. Republicans actually favor trickle-up economics. Theirs is an economics of downright thieving from middle and lower classes.

Of course money isn’t everything. Republicans also promise to pamper your racism and religious bigotry. If you don’t like a brown-faced president and want to believe Obama was born in Kenya, some Republican people-pleasers have pretended to agree with you on that weird story. Or if you think that your religious beliefs have to be forced into the bedrooms and doctor’s offices of people who dare to believe differently than you, some Republicans have made a career of pretending to agree with you on that bit of old-world theocracy.

Or how about this one? Some Republicans pretend to support you in the illusion that this country of immigrants should shut its doors to Central American workers and potential immigrants in order to preserve an American culture that has never existed.

Even if you don’t believe that money is everything, most of your Republican politicians do. All the questionable social issues that may or may not interest you actually mean nothing to most Republican office holders. They are only interested in money for their wealthy supporters. Money is indeed everything for them. All else is subterfuge and downright lying to get your votes.

How can can we ordinary voters put up with Republican lying about Medicare in order to enrich some health insurance companies, lying about global warming in order to enrich some oil and coal companies, lying about banking practices in order to protect greedy bankers and speculators, lying about Democratic candidates in order to give their mostly incompetent money-pushers a chance at the polls?

So is there any reason for an ordinary Fannin county voter to vote Republican? None at all.

Shall we believe the fiction that Democrats are just a bad as Republicans? Democrats are not perfect, that is certainly true. From my perspective their deepest flaws have to do with going along too much with Republican nonsense. But in general, Democratic office holders (minus some bad apples) are concerned for the well-being of ordinary citizens, the rescue of the U.S. Economy from its worst warpings, the forging of an honorable foreign policy, and an openness to hear from you and me on how they can serve us better. I for one have a lot to say about that. Some Democrats at least listen.

If I am exaggerating about how badly Republicans are lying to us, it is only because there are a few libertarian Republicans who actually believe that government should let the corporate money handlers do whatever they want unimpeded by big government regulations. They honestly claim, it seems, that everything will work out gloriously if we just let the free-market solve everything with its supply and demand magic. But this magic is not as wondrous as claimed, and besides that we do not have free markets. We have markets controlled by the biggest money pools. So we might as well laugh the honest libertarians out of the conversation and get down to business on how to regulate businesses so that businesses serve the pubic good rather than the biggest pocketbooks.

Basically, I am calling upon all citizens to throw out every Republican office holder and never vote for another until Republicans clean up their act. We can deal with the cowardly and half-hearted Democrats after that. This is a democracy. Citizens count. It is way past time for we ordinary citizens to actually be counted.

How Can We Solve the Jobs Crisis?

by Sarah van Gelder

Excerpts from

Yes Magazine

May 11, 2011

At a time when millions of Americans are without work, the political debate has taken a bizarre turn. Instead of discussing how to make the public investments necessary to get Americans back to work, the political right has used the deficit “crisis” to push for cuts in workers’ rights and pay, without explaining how the economy can recover if potential consumers are too poor to buy anything.

What we need is livelihoods, fairness, and ecological sustainability, which together is our best bet for an economy that can support American families.

There are millions of people with talents, skills, and the desire to work. There is a backlog of work that needs doing: people who need food, homes, and education; communities that need bike lanes, rapid transit, renewable and reliable sources of energy, and rebuilt bridges and water systems. There are empty factories and offices, natural resources, and skilled workers ready to pitch in.

The problem is not that we’re broke. It’s that transnational corporations and the extremely wealthy have captured federal government decision-making, skewing policies to allow the exhaustion of the Earth and the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of billionaires, while undermining job security for everyone else. Government money floods into unstable big banks and financial institutions, while small businesses, homeowners, state and local governments are left to sink or swim on their own.

Creating sustainable jobs will require restructuring our economy to more equitably share the work and wealth of this country, without destroying the foundation of all economies—the natural world.

So What Can We Do Right Here in Fannin County?

By Gene Marshall

Bonham Citizen

We need to vote Democratic, but more. We need to challenge the lies being told in our local newspapers, churches, public meetings, and casual conversations. Politics is a matter of understanding some basic things about our common life and talking about them. We do not need to adapt to the foolishness around us into order to elect somebody. We need to change the foolishness so that the population can elect and support the leadership we need. Let us keep thinking about how this can be done. This is the CALL to Fannin CITIZENS.

Is Horrific Weather Related to Global Warming?

By Gene Marshall

Bonham Citizen

No particular hurricane, tornado, drought, or flood can be directly tied to your car driving or your electric power plant, but it remains true that the rising average temperature of the planet is caused by fossil-fuel burning and that a higher average temperature on Earth makes weather events more extreme and more frequent. Global warming results are already happening. What we are experiencing was set in motions decades ago. And our current fossil-fuel use will produce even more unwelcome results for our grandchildren.

For a more detailed discussion of this important matter here are a few paragraphs from Bill McKibben:

A link between climate change and Joplin tornadoes? Never!

By Bill McKibben

Caution: It is vitally important not to make connections. When you see pictures of rubble like this week’s shots from Joplin, Mo., you should not wonder: Is this somehow related to the tornado outbreak three weeks ago in Tuscaloosa, Ala., or the enormous outbreak a couple of weeks before that (which, together, comprised the most active April for tornadoes in U.S. history). No, that doesn’t mean a thing.

It is far better to think of these as isolated, unpredictable, discrete events. It is not advisable to try to connect them in your mind with, say, the fires burning across Texas — fires that have burned more of America at this point this year than any wildfires have in previous years. Texas, and adjoining parts of Oklahoma and New Mexico, are drier than they’ve ever been — the drought is worse than that of the Dust Bowl. But do not wonder if they’re somehow connected.

If you did wonder, you see, you would also have to wonder about whether this year’s record snowfalls and rainfalls across the Midwest — resulting in record flooding along the Mississippi — could somehow be related. And then you might find your thoughts wandering to, oh, global warming, and to the fact that climatologists have been predicting for years that as we flood the atmosphere with carbon we will also start both drying and flooding the planet, since warm air holds more water vapor than cold air.

It’s far smarter to repeat to yourself the comforting mantra that no single weather event can ever be directly tied to climate change. There have been tornadoes before, and floods — that’s the important thing. Just be careful to make sure you don’t let yourself wonder why all these record-breaking events are happening in such proximity — that is, why there have been unprecedented megafloods in Australia, New Zealand and Pakistan in the past year. Why it’s just now that the Arctic has melted for the first time in thousands of years. No, better to focus on the immediate casualties, watch the videotape from the store cameras as the shelves are blown over. Look at the news anchorman standing in his waders in the rising river as the water approaches his chest.

Because if you asked yourself what it meant that the Amazon has just come through its second hundred-year drought in the past five years, or that the pine forests across the western part of this continent have been obliterated by a beetle in the past decade — well, you might have to ask other questions. Such as: Should President Obama really just have opened a huge swath of Wyoming to new coal mining? Should Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sign a permit this summer allowing a huge new pipeline to carry oil from the tar sands of Alberta? You might also have to ask yourself: Do we have a bigger problem than $4-a-gallon gasoline?

Better to join with the U.S. House of Representatives, which voted 240 to 184 this spring to defeat a resolution saying simply that “climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for public health and welfare.” Propose your own physics; ignore physics altogether. Just don’t start asking yourself whether there might be some relation among last year’s failed grain harvest from the Russian heat wave, and Queensland’s failed grain harvest from its record flood, and France’s and Germany’s current drought-related crop failures, and the death of the winter wheat crop in Texas, and the inability of Midwestern farmers to get corn planted in their sodden fields. Surely the record food prices are just freak outliers, not signs of anything systemic.

It’s very important to stay calm. If you got upset about any of this, you might forget how important it is not to disrupt the record profits of our fossil fuel companies. If worst ever did come to worst, it’s reassuring to remember what the U.S. Chamber of Commerce told the Environmental Protection Agency in a recent filing: that there’s no need to worry because “populations can acclimatize to warmer climates via a range of behavioral, physiological, and technological adaptations.” I’m pretty sure that’s what residents are telling themselves in Joplin today.

Bill McKibben is founder of the global climate campaign 350.org and a distinguished scholar at Middlebury College in Vermont.

Wonderful year for candidate watching.

I'm cross posting this so that I can link to it without showing the title (which might get it kicked off Facebook.

Tea With Frankenstein: Please, No Masturbation

by David Michael Green

Just when you thought you’d reached the ground floor in the well of American self-destruction, you find out once again that that pit is absolutely bottomless.

Now that primary season is almost over, the far-right tea party movement has scored impressive victories over the far-right establishment in a slew of Republican primaries. I’ve always said that the regressive movement would end up eating its young, and now it is.

The new batch of Republican monsters includes a candidate – now the official Republican nominee for the United States Senate from Delaware, mind you – who has staked out a tough position against – no, I’m not kidding here – masturbation.

Christine O’Donnell once averred that “The Bible says that lust in your heart is committing adultery. So you can't masturbate without lust.”

And why the hell not? Surely the reason that our country has so rapidly fallen into decline is that god is punishing America because so many of us are jerking off all the time.

You know who you are.

Oh, and did you hear that she was once a witch? That she believes that scientists have bred mice-men with human brains? That she has no job? And that – despite running on a platform of cleaning up Washington’s fiscal disaster – she has a train wreck for a record of her personal finances?

I’m not kidding. Remember way back when – like, you know, yesterday – when you would have accused me of bad comedy writing for making such things up? Guess what? None of these are.

America, this is you, 2010. Kinda makes you pine for the good ol’ days of the thirteenth century, doesn’t it?

Here in New York the nominee is a bazillionaire who sends out racist and pornographic email to people. Hah-hah. Love that kind of real working man’s humor, don’t you? After being rejected by the Republican party initially, Carl Paladino hired Richard Nixon’s political hit man to run his campaign, injected millions of his own money to fund it, and trounced the hapless establishment candidate, Rick Lazio, who just couldn’t get extreme enough to win, whore himself as he might, and as he readily did.

The Christian Science Monitor notes that, “Paladino, who espouses family values, has a daughter with a former employee who is not his wife”. It is also noted of this great and incendiary paragon of small government that, “As a landlord, he made a lot of money renting space to the state in Albany and using state tax incentives for his real estate empire”.

Similarly, Paladino has compared labor unions to pigs, and, according to the Huffington Post, “said he would transform some New York prisons into dormitories for welfare recipients, where they could work in state-sponsored jobs, get employment training and take lessons in ‘personal hygiene’”.

Did I mention that his father was employed by the Civilian Conservation Corps during the Great Depression? Perhaps if Franklin Roosevelt had incarcerated père Paladino and instructed him in better hygiene – instead of wasting taxpayer money to create a monstrously big government in remote Washington, DC that continually oppressed the people with stupid wasteful programs that like, oh, you know, kept starving Americans alive – we in New York wouldn’t be stuck with the fruit of his loins assaulting our senses today.

Whatever. I mean, what’s the point of having Republicans if it’s not gonna be all about hypocrisy and twisted sexual obsession, anyhow?

Meanwhile, America’s thirty year March to the Sea goes on unabated. It is the most astonishing thing, if you think about it. Of course ‘thinking’ and ‘America’ are increasingly becoming words that can no longer be smashed into the same sentence anymore, even with the use of advanced new weaponry the Pentagon is producing. But indulge me for the moment.

What has happened to this country is that the United States – which was holding a pretty goddam good winning hand, thank you very much, by the middle of the twentieth century – started following (what were inaccurately labeled) conservative politicians and policies in the 1980s, and things got a lot worse. Then we followed even more regressive idiots this last decade, and things got a whole lot worse yet.

So what are we up to now, in reaction to these twin debacles of precambrian policymaking? Following even crazier still über-extremist right-wing monster freakazoid criminals dressed up as ordinary angry citizens, of course. Natch, babe. In for a penny, in for a pound. In for a pound, in for a planet.

It is the stuff of fiction, really – almost unimaginable to remotely sentient beings operating in the real world. Something that requires a master novelist to do it proper justice. But Orwell’s long dead, so even that possibility is off the table.

Not everybody quite gets how perilous is the moment, however. Democratic pundits who are rejoicing over the tea party primary victories, thinking that they are good for the Democratic Party, are stupid slugs who ought to have the living shit kicked out of them, just for brainlessly taking up space on the planet. First of all, who could possibly care in the slightest about the fate of the Democratic Party? Am I really supposed to be so filled with motivating joy about the prospects of electing slightly less regressive agents of the American oligarchy to Congress that I will run down to party headquarters and start phone banking for my local Democrat? Are we really supposed get electrified and rally around our president and the inspirational likes of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, simply because they are marginally less obnoxious than the alternative? Golly, I just don’t think so.

But more importantly, Democrats are the very reason for the tea party, this latest episode of American idiocy. Had the party done something with the grand historic opportunity handed to them two years ago, none of this would be happening. Had they not booted so badly a rare alignment of the stars that gave them crises allowing real, serious solutions, along with a despised opposition allowing the final crushing of the conservative disease for a generation or more, we wouldn’t be sitting here today laughing at serious candidates for the United States Senate who have staked out firm positions on the societal perils of onanism.

If Barack Obama had channeled Harry Truman instead of Neville Chamberlain, this show would have been over a long time ago. But the president instead decided to make nice with vicious thugs, even though he never needed to, and even though they were publicly excoriating him in the ugliest and most deceitful terms, just as he was negotiating with them. And negotiating. And negotiating some more. The Fool Down The Hill spent a year cutting deals with Republicans in Congress on his health care debacle, giving in to them at every turn, and stiff-arming the progressives who had made him president, only to achieve exactly what anyone who has been remotely conscious since Joe McCarthy’s day knew would be the outcome: no Republican votes for a bill they themselves had helped water down to near insignificance. Add to that Republican obstruction on every other issue, the almost complete absence of GOP votes on anything – even legislation they had previously sponsored – the Democrats favored, along with the right’s continuous assault on every real or (mostly) imagined personal characteristic of the president, and now you see a huge part of the explanation for the tragicomedy that is American politics at this moment.

What’s worse, Obama’s stupidity is a gift that will keep on giving for a long time. By means of his actions in the White House so far, he has nearly guaranteed that he cannot recover in the coming years, no matter what. He has done one of the few things that more or less assures his presidency of being finished. The right will never let up on him, even if he were to adopt their agenda wholesale. And let’s be clear about this – he more or less already has. If you lay out the positions of the Obama administration on everything from civil liberties to gay rights to economic policy to national ‘defense’ and more, there’s hardly a damn shred of difference between his positions and George W. Bush’s. It’s a ludicrous lie to call this milquetoast regressive in a Democratic suit a liberal, let alone a socialist. And we’ve only just begun with Bad Barry, folks. After he gets his ass royally kicked in November, Obama will lurch even further to the right. But that will engender even greater scorn from the sickos living over there under their slime-infested rocks, as well as endless congressional investigations of bogus administration scandals, likely including an impeachment. Or did you miss the 1990s entirely, Barack?

But that’s only the start of it. Because Obama was too dumb to recognize that everything hinged on reviving the economy (did you miss the last century, too, Bro?), and because he was too cowardly to move boldly on anything whatsoever that he did, he has also lost ordinary, centrist, independent voters who think both parties are generally worthless but will vote for anyone who can actually produce solutions. It’s possible that you can bring those people back, but it ain’t likely. The first rule of politics is that people vote their pocketbooks. Thus, any prayer at winning again would require an economic recovery. But that isn’t gonna happen, in part because Half O’Bama half-assed the stimulus bill, partly because he was seeking bipartisan support which – wait for it now – never came, despite the compromises which reduced the size of the stimulus and turned one-third of it into ineffective tax cuts that the one-tune-jukebox Neanderthals demanded. It’s also not gonna happen because this downturn is less a one-off event than it is the culmination (we grimly hope – it could get worse yet) of a thirty year grand national downsizing project, and because it is less an economic recession than it is a wholesale and permanent restructuring. No economist I’ve heard of sees any shred of economic recovery anywhere on the horizon throughout all of 2011, and neither do I. In fact, there are good reasons to think it gets worse from here. And that means Obama and his party are toast, not just in this election cycle, but the next one as well.

Having thus irrevocably alienated aliens on the right in addition to the just-gimme-some-results voters in the middle, Obama is producing some of the same effect on progressives as well. It was a very bad idea to speak in bold, Lincolnesque strokes as a candidate if you intended to govern like a small town city manager, and a feeble one at that. Lots of young folks, especially, who flocked to the banner of hope and change are now feeling burned, and well they should. For many others – including the dude I see in my bathroom mirror every morning – this is more like the last straw, the final frontier. Having spent decades holding our noses and voting for Democrats just because the Republicans were so goddam destructive, many of us are now done, possibly forever. Not only is it unimaginable to me that I would vote for Obama in 2012 – no matter who is his Republican opponent – I refuse, with rare possible exception, to vote for any Democrat ever again, until the party can at least get back in the ballpark of progressive politics.

And so it is Obama and his co-conspirators in Congress have lost the right and the center, and at least the enthusiasm if not the votes of the left. But, more importantly, they have done so in ways that are mostly permanent, ways that mostly preclude any possible recovery of these voters’ support. This is precisely the reason that Democratic pundits and functionaries are even more self-destructively stupid now than they have been for thirty years, rejoicing in tea party primary victories, thinking that those represent good news for their party.

Consider the appropriately-named Bob Shrum as one example, he whose great wisdom has produced an astonishing zero-for-eight record as a top presidential campaign staffer over the decades (in a hissy fit after nine days on board, he actually quit the Jimmy Carter campaign, the only successful one he was ever involved with). Looking ahead to the presidential prospects of 2012 given the surge of the tea party, he surveys the Republican field, noting that, “The GOP’s 1964 tragedy of Goldwater, who was at least a serious figure, could be repeated in the farce of Palin. ... Newt Gingrich is positioning himself as Palin with a brain. Gingrich has now become a font of smears and off-the-rail ideas – from privatizing Social Security to the transparently racist charge that Obama channels the Kenyan anti-colonialism of the father he barely knew. With his pandering to both prejudice and extremism, Gingrich could be the 2012 nominee. He would be unelectable. ... So would Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor who’s proposed scrapping the progressive income tax, the sinister idea championed by that great socialist Republican Theodore Roosevelt. ... In desperation, Republican strategists are thinking of Mississippi Republican Gov. Haley Barbour, who would also compete with an appeal to the birthers, the resentful, and the backlash base. But Barbour was a legendary D.C. lobbyist for the most powerful vested interests, from tobacco to oil. Perhaps he could run on the slogan: ‘Remove the Middleman.’ For Republicans, payback could come as early as November, with Democrats keeping the Senate – maybe even the House. But 2012, I believe, will provide the ultimate irony: The people who most revile President Obama – and the Republican leaders who enlisted them only to see their party hijacked by them – may assure an Obama re-election.”

To say that this analysis displays astonishing naivete would be an unfair and unkind cut on simpletons the world over. This is pure lunacy, and it shows both the self-interested narrowness and the analytical imbecility of Democratic strategists (to abuse a term) and pundits. Maybe these folks haven’t noticed lately, but in American politics “pandering to both prejudice and extremism” is not exactly a losing strategy. Maybe these people (and there’s a lot more of them than just Shrum) aren’t paying real close attention, but most American voters don’t even have a clue who Teddy Roosevelt was or what he did. And they don’t exactly shrink from the idea of slashing taxes just because some dude had a different approach a hundred years ago. Or was it a thousand?

Most importantly, Shrum’s assumption of rationality amongst voters leads him to conclude that the nomination of Palin in 2012 would result in the “ironic” “farce” of her Goldwater-like crushing defeat at the polls. It is no surprise this guy keeps booting presidential campaigns. The twin wonders are why anyone continues to hire him, and why anyone publishes his analysis of politics. For all I know, he could be a world-class expert at philately or the intricacies nineteenth century cricket, but, meanwhile, opinion journal publishers might want to take note of the increasingly inconvenient fact that the guy clearly knows nothing about politics.

Here’s the deal, Bob (et al.), and feel free to take notes: This is not 1964. The country is not flush. The middle class is not robust, thriving and expanding. The incumbent party is not riding a wave of peace and prosperity, nor is it benefitting from public sympathy for the young, handsome, witty and beloved leader just recently tragically cut down in his prime. Okay? Which means that, unlike Lyndon Johnson and crew, Democrats are not gonna get a lot of votes from people happy with the magic of our moment, and therefore especially uninterested in a taking a gamble on a self-described extremist like Barry Goldwater. Indeed, precisely the opposite logic applies here, which will produce precisely the opposite outcome. Democrats should be familiar with this – it’s exactly the reverse of what transpired not even two years ago: Very unhappy voters in 2012 will choose the candidate of the party not in the White House, because those voters will desperately crave change. You remember “change”, don’t you, Bob? Thus, the real race will be for the Republican nomination – decided exclusively by Republican primary voters, who are merely certifiably insane on a good day – not the general election, which will be a sure thing for the GOP. And thus the next president of the United States will be Sarah Palin.

It would be nice if that were the bad part. But, sadly, as ugly as that prospect is, it’s only the warm-up act for the real fun. Republicans – tea party variant or not (and, ideologically, there ain’t much difference between the two) – have absolutely zero solutions for the crises the country faces (not to mention the irony of them being responsible for creating those crises, of course). Their only plan for economic recovery is more tax cuts for the rich. That will do nothing for the economy, of course, other than plunging the country deeper into debt and exacerbating already dramatic disparities in the country’s distribution of wealth. Their plan for health care is to repeal Obama’s. Their plan for global warming is to pretend it doesn’t exist and support fossil fuel related industries such that the problem gets worse. Their foreign policy is war. Their plan for Middle East peace is to support Israel no matter what it does, thus guaranteeing no peace agreement. Their plan for the financial crisis is to slash any restrictions that might meaningfully control the behavior of Wall Street predators. And so on. They have no solutions, and can only succeed in making the bad situation they created worse.

And now here is where it starts to get really scary. Imagine us in 2014, the same distance into a Republican government (on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue) that we are today into a Democratic one. Except that there are two big differences. The first is that the public has had four more years – four years! – of decline, demoralization and economic terrorism under their belts by this time, with no solutions remotely in sight. What is their likely disposition? They will be turning on Republicans and showing their canines in a way that makes 2010 look like a friendly game of Scrabble by comparison.

The second difference will be in the nature of those inhabiting a government which at that point will be firmly backed up against the wall. About the only positive thing I can say regarding Democrats is that they have some limitations on what they are willing to do out of self-interest. Not much, but some. Not so the animals of the GOP, least of all the tea party sociopathic freaks. These people are not going to go down lightly. These people will be faced with a choice between humiliation and destruction on the one hand, and generating a diversionary, and probably jingoistic feel-good, catastrophe on the other. They would not be the first failing government in history to choose the annihilation of others in order to sustain a bit longer the unsustainable. They would not even be the first to take out tens of millions in such a quest. Scary only begins to describe where this is all going.

People often scoff at me when I tell them that I think Sarah Palin is likely to be the next American president. Or they think I wax a bit apocalyptic when I start talking about outcomes that smell all too much like Germany in the 1930s. So let me review the bidding in summary form to explain why we should be very afraid. Jump in anywhere you see a chink in the chain of logic.

The first question is, Will Barack Obama preside over economic recovery substantial and early enough to be reelected in 2012? Perhaps, of course. But not likely as things look now. Second, will voters conform with nearly universal past practice and choose to go with the alternative to the status quo under conditions of economic (and other) duress? Highly likely. Third, will they be willing to elect somebody whose ideas are extreme and who quite recently was widely portrayed in the media as a dummy and a clown, if that is their only realistic alternative to the failed sitting president and his party? I dunno – can you say “Ronald Reagan in 1980”? Fourth, given the composition of Republican primary voters who are already choosing candidates so extreme that even Karl Rove is describing them as “nutty”, and given what we saw from these people in 2008, who is most likely to be the 2012 GOP nominee, and therefore shoe-in winner of the general election in November of that year? You know her name. Fifth, will a Republican program of tax cuts for the rich, reduced standard of living for everyone else, increased economic insecurity, more war, environmental wreckage, a Wall Street bacchanal and unfettered corporate pillage give Americans in 2013 and 2014 the solutions they were looking for when they desperately voted out the incumbent in 2012? Of course not. And, finally, and most grimly of all, Would a Sarah Palin administration or its equivalent stand by and watch itself go down in flames of complete destruction – sorta like what Barack Obama is now doing – when it had at its disposal a way to instead change the channel of public dissatisfaction?

I think we all know the answer to that one too. Each of these questions has more than one possible answer, and I am far from claiming any outcome as inevitable. However, I will say that I think the sequence of events I’ve outlined above – not just individually, but the more daunting probability of all these things happening – is more likely than not. I have a hard time seeing this country recover in two years time. I have a hard time seeing Obama winning reelection. I not only cannot imagine a non-radical GOP nominee in 2012, I can’t even name one such person in the party considering a presidential bid. I know for sure that their ‘solutions’ don’t work – indeed, I, like you, am living the consequences of those very policies as we speak. And, finally, I also know that the people who did Iraq and debt hemorrhaging tax cuts and Katrina and torture and the rest are capable of anything. Anything. And these weren’t even the tea partiers, who are even sicker than the Bushes and Roves out there.

People like Bob Shrum or perhaps Barack Obama and the strategists around him would merely be insane to applaud tea party successes this year, if all that was at stake was their own worthless careers. (And it is, of course, a measure of their utter failure as politicians that the best thing they have going in this election cycle is the hope that their opponents will choose lunatics as candidates.) Yes, yes, Bob and Barack and Rahm and David and David, this may be good news six weeks from now for a Democratic Party that is so pathetic it depends on the GOP to implode in order to only get partially devastated in the coming election. But even that won’t stop scads of tea baggers from winning seats in the United States Congress this year. And – far more importantly – it won’t stop the rise of this movement that is so disastrous for the country going forward.

Far, far more is at stake here than one failed president’s second term, or the careers of a bunch of party hacks and media retreads.

The truth is, we stand now on the edge of a precipice. And it is a very long way down to the bottom.

David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York. He is delighted to receive readers' reactions to his articles (mailto:dmg@regressiveantidote.net), but regrets that time constraints do not always allow him to respond. More of his work can be found at his website,www.regressiveantidote.net.

Wisdom from Fannin County, Texas

I used to live in Fannin County, pop. 17,000. It's an agricultural area and the biggest town is around 9000. I still keep up with some of what goes on there even though I live in the big city (pop 26,000) of Greenville. Gene Marshall of Bonham publishes a monthly newsletter and I unashamedly reproduce part of his latest here. Read on.

Drilling for Crude in Your Pantry

Gene Marshall
Bonham Citizen

Messing with black gunk where you store your supper is a gross idea, but this is what we are doing in the Gulf of Mexico. This is one of our pantries, a huge source of food. Even New England tuna fishing is effected by any damage to tuna spawning in the Gulf. We have been risking the destruction of this food pantry with poorly regulated oil companies drilling in deep water without safety nets for their exceedingly complex and risky ventures.

Why can’t we just say “NO” to such practices? Because we are oil addicts, and oil addicts share similar qualities with drug addicts. U.S. drug addicts have turned Mexico in to a war zone financed by U.S. drug purchases.

Our oil addiction is also creating horrific tragedies. Oil spills are only one, but a big one. All the oil so far spewed into the Gulf of Mexico is, I hear, close to the amount that the U.S. burns in one day (maybe we are up to two days now, since we are unsure how much oil is spewing.) Our oil addiction is so vast we have nothing to compare it with. We might compare it to smoking three cigarettes at a time, ten hours a day. If such a lung pollution is unthinkable, let us also notice how unthinkable is the extent of our carbon dioxide pollution of the atmosphere. Whole islands are being drowned. Hurricanes are becoming more intense. Ecosystems are being destroyed. Fresh water is being reduced. People keep saying that when the situation gets bad enough, we will do something. THE SITUATION IS BAD ENOUGH!

Some oil companies are trying to sound responsible by saying that they want to invest in alternative energy, that we need to increase ALL energy sources. But that is not so. We need to decrease SOME energy sources, namely oil and coal as well as natural gas. But try asking an oil company how much they are going to reduce their oil sales this year. You would surely receive a blank look to such a question. “We can’t quit oil production right away,” they might say. Then you might say, “True, but when do you intend to start reducing oil production and where do you intend to start reducing it?” When no answer comes back, you might continue, “What about reducing drilling for oil in our Gulf of Mexico Food Pantry?”

Such conversations would quickly teach you that the narrow, perpetual-growth thinking of these “Drill Baby Drill” companies does not deal with the real solutions to our energy crisis, but only with market share, profits, and benefits for arrogant and deluded oil company executives. In spite of what these false optimists tell us, we do not know for sure if we will ever be able to shut down this wound in the bottom of the Gulf. We may have a permanent leak. We have wounded our planet and it is bleeding. Perhaps we will get by with it this time. But next time? Whatever they say, there will be a next time. We not only need a moratorium on deep-water drilling until we figure this out, we need a permanent moratorium on all types off-shore drilling. Sooner of later, Gulf oil workers will need to look for other work. Perhaps we need a jobs program to help them with this, but “change” means CHANGE! We can’t get sentimental about it.

Oil companies, like all corporations, are dangerous organizations -- only because they are doing what they were invented to do -- making returns for their investors. How can these dangerous organizations be disciplined to actually serve the public in a manner that the public needs to be served? Your democratic government is the only force in existence with clout enough to force this to happen.

But as we all know, our governments (national, state, and local) are not truly democratic organizations . They have become house pets of the corporations. Governments no longer sternly restrain corporations; governments coddle them, deregulate them, and collude with them for accruing short-term economic benefits and political power. The long-term solutions to our onrushing crises are neglected.

So what is the answer? Citizen responsibility! It is not enough to write letters and complain. We need clout. When Fannin County citizens vote for Republicans they are voting for oil companies, for the oil addiction, and for go-slow changes in our energy patterns. Democrats are considerably better on this issue. So, let’s get out a big Democratic Party vote in Fannin County this November. Let’s begin now putting together the organization that can do that. Yes, it is true that some Democrats, even the best of them, can also be slow footed. But Republican Congress members are going backwards; they cannot be counted on at all on this topic and many other topics.

Do you want to do more? Talk to your friends and acquaintances, Republican and Democratic, in language that makes sense to them. Take a few risks at becoming a controversial person. Along with Jesus, Buddha, and Superman say what is true, do what is needed, and smile at the scorn of those who don’t want to face reality. This might be fun. Do you want to avoid scorn? Get over it.

P.S. Please listen to this speech that Rachel Maddow wishes that Obama had made on this topic.
http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/news/center/articles/2010/washington-post-06-17-2010.html

Defenders of the Constitution, ARISE!

Here's the latest from the Independent Republic of Arizona, which should curdle the blood of all defenders of the Constitution of the United States of America

This from Time.com

Buoyed by recent public opinion polls suggesting they're on the right track with illegal immigration, Arizona Republicans will likely introduce legislation this fall that would deny birth certificates to children born in Arizona - and thus American citizens according to the U.S. Constitution - to parents who are not legal U.S. citizens.

The question is whether that would violate the U.S. Constitution. The 14th Amendment states that "all persons, born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States." It was intended to provide citizenship for freed slaves and served as a final answer to the Dred Scott case, cementing the federal government's control over citizenship.