It has been called the city that moved America; the city that spawned the sound of a generation. For decades, Detroit was the assembly line of the American Dream. Its auto factories produced the cars that made possible the suburban life that defined the American middle class and provided jobs and wages that lifted more families into the middle class.

Now, with its abandoned factories and vacant lots, Detroit symbolizes the deterioration of the American Dream it once fueled. So, it is only right that Detroit is one of the first stops on the road to rebuilding that dream. Today, the Congressional Progressive Caucus brings its Speak Out For Good Jobs tour to Detroit. Caucus members promise to “listen to what everyday Americans have to say and take that back to Washington with them as they continue to fight to reinvigorate the American Dream.”

If so, Detroit has a story to tell; one of a city and a dream in decline. READ FULL POST

As we all know, the National Organization for Marriage has pledged $2 million dollars to reverse the recent ruling which gives marriage equality to same-sex couple in New York and to punish the senators who voted for it.

Well as far as I’m concerned, NOM can stick its $2 million where the sun doesn’t shine.

You know why? Because of this:

Records of the Indiana Department of Child Services reveal that Christian Choate, a boy who authorities claim lived locked in a cage and died from savage abuse, wrote letters describing his situation and saying that he wanted to die.

According to the Chicago Tribune, DCS visited with the Choate family in Gary, Indiana more than a dozen times starting in 1999, investigating allegations of abuse and neglect. Authorities never discovered what prosecutors claim was the true depth of the misery in which young Christian lived.

Based on accounts from his sister and stepsister, Christian, who died in 2009 at age 13, spent much of the last year of his life locked in a three-foot-high dog cage, with little food and drink and few opportunities to leave. When he did get out of the cage, he endured savage beatings from his father Riley.

Part of me didn’t want to talk about this story.  I didn’t want to mention it for fear of being accused of exploiting the situation.

But my spirit won’t let me keep quiet.

Two million dollars to keep punish lawmakers for standing up for equality? And by a nasty extension, two million dollars to remind same-sex families like the Gill family in Florida (who took in two abused children and nurtured them , providing them with the love of a family) that no matter how much they love their children and each other, they will always be inferior because God says so?

No. Not God. God never said.

His so-called messengers who have volunteered to speak for him have said so – the National Organization for Marriage, Archbishop Timothy Dolan, Jason McGuire, Ruben Diaz, Brian Brown, Maggie Gallagher, and the rest of the assorted ecclesiastical odd balls.

Because people like the Gill family and same-sex couples in general dilute marriage? They take away from children “the chance” to be raised by their natural mother and father?

Meanwhile, a 13-year-old child was placed in a cage by his natural father and subjected to so much abuse that the poor thing actually wished he was dead. Pretty soon, he got his wish.

Why can’t $2 million be devoted to stopping travesties like this?

As God is my witness, I am so sick of phony traditional values groups with more money than shame or self-respect, who will use meaningless hypothetical terms  and scare tactics to divide and distract simply because they lose battles to legally force the rest of us to abide by their definition of “family.”

It’s starting to make me sick.

All of us need to send up a prayer for Christian Choate. We should be thankful that he is finally with SOMEONE who loves him.

And finally, we all need to pray that these self-appointed moral squads (i.e. NOM, etc) get a clue or at least get the hell out of the way of reality.

Herman Cain is poetry in motion and a life riot…again. I never thought I would see an upright walking human race card playing the race card as he complains about his detractors. Having witnessed the absurd, I can now say that I have lived a full life.

Herman Cain, Grand High Vizier of the black garbage pail kids black conservatives, gospel singer, and political coprophagist is upset that John Stewart mocked him. Apparently, when he gets called out for flubbing the Constitution, rank bigotry against Muslim Americans, or silly talk about a 3 page maximum limit on all Congressional bills, it is an act of racism. The critical self-reflection rule would seem not to apply, as Cain, in an act of self-delusion that is enabled by his white populist fan base, quite literally “has the complexion for the protection.”

Now, I generally loathe the phrase “playing the race card.” It is a flat and lazy term that disingenuous colorblind white Conservative racial reactionaries can use to deflect any substantive engagement with how race and racism remain operative in American political and social life. Ironically, just as Conservatives wield the race card as a crude cudgel to beat liberals, blacks, and others over the head with charges that they slavishly and dishonestly play the victim, in the Age of Obama it is Herman Cain and the Right who are masters of race puppetry and identity politics.

In much the same way that Tea Party GOP Conservatives do with affirmative action and their obsession with “unqualified minorities and women” who are “stealing” opportunities from deserving white men, Herman Cain’s race card gambit is a profound act of projection and hypocrisy. Why? The Right constantly and consistently puts unqualified black and brown faces in high places in a game of political tokenism.

Herman Cain, as a self-described “American Black Conservative”–God forbid someone call him an African-American–is race obsessed, all the while calling for a colorblind campaign. On the flip side, the race card is also used by the Right to transform pride by intelligent, link-fate aware, and historically grounded people of color into an act of prejudice.

To point: When black folks overwhelmingly supported Barack Obama for example, many of the bloviators on the Right called this reasoned choice an act of anti-white racism and a priori evidence of automaton-like group think.Thus, a basic question: Who gets to dictate how the “race card ” is played?

Here, Colin Powell’s explanation of his Age of Obama moment springs to the forefront of my memory as a great counterpoint to Herman Cain’s race card paraphilia. Both are black conservatives: the former is a black man who happens to be a Republican; the latter is a race mascot token for the Right.

Colin Powell seems to have a fully integrated personality where his racial self is not maladjusted and rooted in shame at being a black man, an African-American, in America. A victim of racial Stockholm syndrome and a proof of concept for Frantz Fanon’s theories, Herman Cain appears disjointed in this regard, where his appeals to being an “American Black Conservative” are plaintive musings for acceptance by his white Tea Party followers, for Cain (unlike “those blacks”) is one of “the good ones.”

Literary titan Carlos Fuentes called it “the illusory crystal divider, the glass membrane between Mexico and the U.S.”

Next week in Arizona and Sonora, Mexico, a ground-breaking festival featuring leading performance artists will attempt to shatter the stereotypes along that 1,950-mile crystal divide, and open a new dialogue among artists in the US and Mexico on the vexing cultural issues and political realities that often separate our neighboring countries.

Founded by borderland American artists in response to the fallout over Arizona’s infamous SB 1070 “papers please” legislation, Arizona Between Nosotros festival kicks off in Nogales, Sonora on June 30th, and then hopscotches the border to Tucson and Phoenix on July 1st and 8th, in a remarkable showcase of performance and video art, and follow-up panel discussions.

The festival couldn’t be more timely — and needed.

On the heels of Sen. John McCain’s latest rants about Mexican immigrants and the border, and the nightmare headlines of Mexico’s unrelenting drug war, Arizona Between Nosotros is one of those rare artistic initiatives that not only transcends the media-driven stereotypes from both sides of the border, but also allows a diverse group of artists from across Mexico to hold up the mirror and present artistic visions of their own country and the United States — on Arizona stages.

I spoke with festival co-organizer and Arizona poet and performance artist Logan Phillips about Arizona Between Nosotros, the role of artists and writers in bridging the divide between the US and Mexico, and the festival’s upcoming events.

Festival performance artist Gabriela Leon, photo courtesy of Arizona Between Nosotros

JB: Give us a little background on your own work in the US and Mexico.

LP: I was born and raised near the Arizona/Mexico border in Cochise County, after graduating from Northern Arizona University in 2005 I moved to Cuernavaca, Morelos and later Mexico City where I co-founded the multimedia performance art group Verbo•bala Spoken Video with video artists Moisés Regla and Adam Cooper-Terán. Both with Verbo•bala and solo, my work as a bilingual poet and performer has always touched on borders: social, political and personal.

JB: Describe how you see Arizona artists like yourself in overcoming outside perceptions of the border as the great divide, and Mexico as a threat.

LP: Touring and traveling throughout the US and Mexico, it is obvious that our commonalities far outnumber our differences. For governments, borders divide; but our communities extend across both sides. Borders are divisive, but borders also unite us — they are points of exchange, interaction and creativity.

Artists have the chance to communicate what statistics and politicians can’t, by touching on the variety of human senses beyond the intellect. Sure, in Washington or Mexico DF we can have hyperbolic debates for years about immigration, but it’s all theory unless those involved in the debating have met people from Mexico, have traveled in that country, have spent time on the border. Because of the fear-mongering, few are willing to do that. In the context of Arizona 2011, it is the responsibility of artists on both sides of the border to explore the lesser-recognized nuance, to expose visceral subtleties that are lost in the political debate. We must learn to tell our own stories — and listen to stories from the other side, person-to-person. Performance art and video art are two very effective ways to do that. Internalizing the stereotypes created by opportunistic and hateful state legislators serves absolutely no one except those politicians.

JB: As we discussed, I’m concerned American artists have ceded the cultural terrain in Arizona, allowing the media and outside portraits to focus more on the state’s rightwing xenophobia than the long-time movements in the Latino and progressive movements for social justice. Do you feel your work is attempting to shift this focus — or simply provide a different perspective?

LP: We believe that the first step of shifting the focus from xenophobic legislation to the more positive histories and current movements in Arizona is to showcase different perspectives. Our goal is to open spaces for artists living and working in Mexico to express themselves in Arizona, about Arizona. When combining an open space for expression with an open-minded audience, almost anything can happen — we hope the experience of Arizona Between Nosotros will stay with people, and make them less likely to be manipulated by petty politicians who trade in hate.

JB: How did Arizona Between Nosotros emerge and who all is involved?

LP: The genesis of Arizona Between Nosotros was a performance organized by Heather Wodrich and Laura Milkins in Mexico City last summer, where they together with Paco Velez gave performances relating to Arizona. SB1070 unexpectedly passed in the state legislature just before the show, and in Mexico suddenly the word Arizona had become shorthand for racism. The show received wide press attention in light of 1070, and the artists involved were forced to adapt to the new context. Late last fall after they had returned, the idea of inviting Mexican performance and video artists to Arizona emerged, as a way of continuing the artistic conversation that had started around the polemic legislation.

Arizona Between Nosotros is being organized by Arizonan artists, all of whom have a connection to Mexico — video artists Heather Wodrich and Adam Cooper-Terán, painter Paco Velez, performance artists Laura Milkins and Michéle Ceballos Michot, and myself. Our work is supported by numerous volunteers and over 100 individual financial donors who pledged in our online fundraising drive.

We’re also working with a wide variety of organizations in Nogales, Tucson and Phoenix, such as MOCA (Museum of Modern Art) and the YWCA Racial Justice program in Tucson, the City of Nogales, Sonora and ALAC (Arizona Latino Arts & Cultural Center). Some of our partner organizations have never before been involved in a collaborative project together — we hope that Arizona Between Nosotros will also break down the borders that exist in our own state, opening the door for further collaboration and cooperation.

Festival performance artist Niña Yhared, photo courtesy of Arizona Between Nosotros

JB: Last week, Mexican poet Javier Sicilia led the Caravan for Peace with Justice and Dignity to the US border — do you see your work as part of Silicia’s movement?

LP: Though we aren’t officially connected in any way, I feel that both Sicilia’s movement and Arizona Between Nosotros have grown out of the immense frustration that people in both countries feel with the status quo of border policy. The Caravan has focused on the militarization of the war on drugs in Mexico, and Arizona Between Nosotros is a form of response to the criminalization of migrants in the US — in both cases our countries are inescapably linked, and the solution will come from both sides of the border, not just one.

JB: And the festival’s mission?

LP: Arizona Between Nosotros will help us all to move beyond the stereotypes that define our culture’s view of Mexico; the performance and video art scene in Mexico is a young, dynamic and articulate. Many of the performers participating in ABN will be performing in the US for the first time, while others already have artistic roots in our state. Nothing like this festival has ever happened in Arizona — we hope as many people get to experience it as possible.

More information:

http://www.arizonabetweennosotros.org/en/events/2011-festival/
https://www.facebook.com/arizonabetweennosotros

Do you ever worry about ending up “a bag lady”?

If so, you are not alone. And if current trends don’t change, that fear is not entirely irrational.

Last week Merrill Lynch hosted an online presentation about the state of women & retirement. In our CrazyBusy 24/7 world it’s so easy to tune out when listening to any presentation – especially online. This webinar however, kept me glued to the screen for an hour… and I didn’t even multi-task. Alas, since then I’ve been struggling to find the right words to describe why I found it so gripping. (You can watch it too by clicking here).

Fast forward to today. As I write this, a friend’s husband has just been rushed to the hospital. He’s struggling with stage 4 cancer. They have a 5 year-old daughter. In the context of literal life and death, the point of this webinar suddenly became very clear to me. In a word: choice. What I took away from this talk was that in order to have flexibility and choices – especially during life’s inevitable speed bumps – it sure helps to have your finances squared away. Money can’t solve your problems, but it can be a very useful tool when navigating through them.

Yet in order to have money during the rough patches, you’ve got to make some trade-offs ahead of time when things are good. And that goes against natural human nature. So to get your wheels spinning about what trade-offs you might want to make, here were my top three take-aways from the Merrill Lynch “Women & Retirement” webinar:

• Women need to save more money than men. You’ve heard it before but it’s worth saying again and again. Women live longer than men. Just look at the male/female ratio in nursing care facilities. Therefore to support ourselves in old age we need to save more than men. Panel moderator and former ABC World News Tonight anchor Charlie Gibson highlighted healthcare estimates for retirees of $170,000 for men versus $240,000 for women. Alas, women today are retiring with 2/3rd the assets of men according to the President of Merrill Lynch Global Wealth & Investment Management, Sallie Krawcheck.

• Women have unique challenges to finding that money to save. Women are still doing two times the housework and three times the childcare of men – so simply finding the time to focus on finances is a challenge. As an added headwind, we’re not asking for raises at nearly the same rate as men (Krawcheck guesstimated that men ask her for raises at a rate of 50-to-1 more frequently than women. Fellow panelist and USA Network founder Kay Koplovitz concurred). “Asking For It,” financially speaking, is a topic I’ve discussed in the past and if reader emails are any measure – many, many of us women struggle with this (yep, me too). And when we step out of the workforce to care for kids or aging parents we see a nearly 15% drop in earnings after just 1 year. And that drop in earnings grows to nearly 50% if we stay out for 3 or more years. Ouch.

• Women respond differently to the marketing messages and tactics of the financial services industry. Research shows that when people hear financial jargon, both men and women get confused. Men, however, tend not to let that confusion bother them whereas for women it really turns them off the subject. Additionally both Koplovitz and former Morgan Stanley financial advisor and best selling personal finance author David Bach commented on how the dynamic of money discussions shifts dramatically when the group is all women versus the introduction of even a few men (as a graduate of a women’s college – I so get that). Alas, guess who is still doing most of the talking in financial services? Yep, men.

So what does this all mean for you?

This money stuff is stressful for both genders. As our nation’s economic foundation continues to shake, rattle, and roll – we all have to learn new skills. But listening to this webinar reminded me yet afresh how vital it is for women to master their money. If there is one piece of financial advice I’d highlight it would be Krawcheck’s observation that women need to save: “first, harder, and faster.” Or as I like to say, the three most powerful words in all of personal finance are “start saving now.”

What concerns or questions do you have about aging and retirement?

[This post originally appeared at ManishaThakor.com.] Want more financial love? You can follow personal finance expert & author, Manisha Thakor, on Twitter at @ManishaThakor, sign up to get her email updates delivered right to your inbox here, and enroll in her innovative online basic personal finance course called “Money Rules.”

Reverend Billy’s brilliantly bombastic, boldly brief Earthalujah sermons — now available as a podcast! Watch more episodes and subscribe at revbilly.com/podcast.

What if there is a switch in our brains that Bond-like villains can flip with impunity, sending us into spasms of shopping? Horribly, this is now an American fact of life. Yes – corporate researchers have discovered a circuit in our brains that actuates our shopping. Don’t scratch your head too hard, you might find yourself swooning for a $749 Barack Obama bust made of certified range-free Styrofoam.

Transcript:

There’s something called “The Switch.” It might sound like a folk story – but it isn’t. It’s something we’ve all heard of. There’s a company based in Chicago financed by the biggest corporations – the Coca-Colas, the Mcdonalds, Amen? Scientists are researching there in their white lab coats how to flip this nerve switch. The corporations will be able to flip a switch, something will happen to us, and we will be unable to resist. We will have no mental dissent. The corporations say “BUY!” and we say “I want that!” “I buy that!”

This company is not a folk story. It’s just that the corporations hesitate to admit that “The Switch” is something their researching. Maybe there’s something too Orwellian about the whole thing. Maybe it’s a future they don’t want us to know is waiting for us. Or maybe, children, that switch has already been flipped! Maybe it was flipped when so many of us believed that Saddam Hussein flew those jets into the Twin Towers, and we went right into Iraq and Afghanistan, sold to us like video games. Maybe they have already flipped that switch. Maybe that’s why we’re still buying things and using dirty coal and gas and oil even as the Earth revolts.

But children – we’ve got our own switch. Let’s the flip the switch that says the Earth is a place that we love. We want to live here. We exalt and service and make healthy the life around us. We use energy that doesn’t destroy. We stop the corporations and have local economies that are healthy for ourselves and for our children. Let’s flip our own switch. It’s about time. Amen! Earthalujah!

…There will be a lot of white working class voters showing up at the polls next November, and the degree to which they support (or abandon) President Obama could very well make or break his reelection.

In 2008, during his otherwise-solid election victory, Obama lost the white working class vote by 18 points. In 2010, however, things got much worse: Congressional Democrats’ experienced a catastrophic 30 point deficit among the same group. While the first number is a figure Obama could live with repeating, the second could very well prove fatal.

Indeed, if Republicans can replicate that 30 point deficit in 2012—a margin which seems increasingly possible given the recent bad news about the economy—Obama will have little to no room for error among his other constituencies.

The 2012 election is creeping closer. Like a ritual, a perennial in the political ecosphere, the hand-wringing has begun over how the Democrats and Barack Obama can win over the white working class vote.

For example, who can forget how Howard Dean brayed that the Bubba/Nascar/Walmart/Soccer Mom vote was critical for victory in 2004 or the infectious arguments put forth by authors such as Thomas Frank who painted a scary story of false consciousness in which white working class “values voters” support the Republicans against their own economic self-interest?

And as we saw in Ohio and Pennsylvania during the 2008 campaign, these worries are only amplified by the realities of race and how if a black man who happens to be President can win over the whitopian dreaming Middle America border states with all of their misplaced faith in “guns, God, and religion.”

In sum, the question of how President Barack Obama and the Democrats can win the white working class vote in 2012 is a veritable Riddle of the Sphinx standing in the shadow of The Bogeyman. It is also a canard and a distraction, one which is based on incorrect assumptions about just who constitutes “the white working class” and the role of class in voting decisions and partisan behavior.

Thus, there is a basic problem: For all of the allure of “the false consciousness stealing of the white working class vote as the secret of the GOP’s electoral gains” meme, the facts simply do not match up with all of the sensationalistic accounts. As recent works such as Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State; Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics; and (most compellingly) Unequal Democracy have demonstrated, a belief in the power of the white working class vote as the Achilles heel of the Democratic Party does not necessarily mean that it is true.

To that end, as I did in “They’re Poor, Scared, Less Educated, and Left Behind: New Polling Data from Gallup on Conservatives and Red State America,” let’s work through the basic premises and first principles of The New Republic’s article “The White Working Class: The Group That Will Decide Obama’s Fate” to get a more accurate sense of the political terrain.

Some questions:

1. Who is the white working class? While we may have images of construction workers and rough neck blue collar types interspersed with Roseanne Barr typecast in our collective consciousness, how do we actually define this group? Is “working class” primarily about income or is it about intangibles of taste and leisure…what Pierre Bourdieu famously described as “habitus?”

Moreover, is “working class” just as ambiguous a phrase as “middle class?” A series of words that refers to both everyone and no one? While The New Republic does a great job of painting a potentially dire picture for the Democrats among the white working classes (however defined), there is a complication that must be engaged.

2. In these conversations, who in fact comprises the “white working class” is vaguely and poorly explained. As a substitute for precision, there exists an assumption that this group consists of white Americans who have not earned a college degree. Despite a broadening in access to colleges and universities in the United States, this group constitutes a majority of Americans, with a broad range of incomes, resources, and social capital.

As Larry Bartels deftly argues, “working class whites” is a catch-all phrase that does not stand up to rigor as we try to predict their support (or not) for the Democratic Party. In fact, when one actually uses income as a definition for working class (looking at those families who make less than 35,000 dollars a year) the Democrats have an advantage in support among this group. Moreover, when defined this way white working class voters are more likely to vote Democratic than Republican.

3. Forget Joe the Plumber, what the Democrats should really be concerned about is the degree to which the GOP is actually peeling white voters away from the Democratic Party across all income levels. While there may be an image of a white working class guy or poor Christian Evangelical who is drunk on all of this Culture War talk looming in the heads of the Left-Progressive pundit classes (to the degree those appeals hold any real traction for voters), in fact it is among the middle and upper classes that the “values” narrative holds the most purchase.

4. Race wins again. There is a reason that the politics of white racial resentment, “real America” nativism, the mantle of a faux American “silent majority” exceptionalism, and the GOP’s Lee Atwater dog whistle politics are the bread and butter of the Tea Party Republican Party: the Southern Strategy works. The gains of the Republican Party over the last few decades among white voters can largely be explained by how it was able to use a backlash against The Civil Rights Movement and The Black Freedom Struggle to flip the Jim Crow South solidly red and Republican.

The myth of the ill-informed, false consciousness possessed, Right-wing Reagan Democrat white working class vote is compelling for a variety of reasons. Primarily, it stands up to the power of personal anecdote–who doesn’t know one of those “confused,” “angry,” “white working class” types who digests a steady diet of Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, believes that the AstroTurf, Koch Brothers funded Tea Party is a grassroots movement, and who hates unions and the evil “big government” all the while receiving Social Security, getting a pension, or working as a state employee?

The myth of the white working class vote is also validating to liberals and progressives: “Those white working class voters are just confused; If they could only be liberated from the Right-wing echo chamber their votes would make sense as the choices of reasonable and rational individuals.”

These narratives are also seductive…and easier to grapple with than hard questions such as this one: While the Right is plain out wrong on just about every public policy issue relating to the economy and job growth, how is it that they are able to consistently win elections and attract voters from the Democrats?

The puzzle of the white working class and their support for the Democratic Party in the Age of Obama is both fascinating and compelling because it nakedly plays on America’s national obsession with race. The struggle against white supremacy and to become a more inclusive and truly democratic society has been one of the central tensions in American society.

Consequently, the echoes of history are strong here: whiteness was created and has worked precisely to smooth over class differences by encouraging white people to ally with one another on the basis of perceived skin color and racial group membership. While the psychic and material wages of Whiteness were grand, they were not always in the service of the Common Good and/or the long-term material interests of the white poor and working classes.

Votes matter. Of course the Democrats should be working to expand their base across all income levels of the voting public. But an obsession with the white working class is a distraction, a political unicorn and Moby Dick sized fool’s errand that is energy misspent. In the time of the Great Recession, with an effective unemployment rate reaching at least 20 percent in many communities, the Democrats and Barack Obama need to be on the offensive.

The Republican Party is waging class warfare on behalf of the plutocrats and corporateocracy–and in the name of gangster capitalism–against the American middle, working classes, and the poor. The rape and destruction of the social safety net is the ultimate goal of the contemporary Ayn Rand infused Republican Party.

In the United States, when the top 1/100th of 1 percent of earners make an average of 31 million dollars a year, and the remaining 90 percent of Americans earn 31,000 dollars a year there is class warfare of the few against the many. When worker’s wages have been stagnant for 40 years while corporate CEO’s enjoy record salaries by outsourcing American jobs overseas there is class warfare of the few against the many.

The Democrats need to 1) forget their obsessive worries about the white working class vote; and 2) focus on the cruel realities of the new economy and how best to communicate their plans to correct it. Given the facts, those should be easy slogans to write and campaign commercials to program. In the time of The Great Recession, the Republican Party has blood on its hands from vivisecting the American Dream. The Democrats just need to show the body. This is a simple plan…and it is theirs to lose and bungle.

What do Kerry and McCain know about Libya that we don’t?

At WhoWhatWhy.com, we’ve been saying for some time that things just don’t add up when it comes to Libya. (For some of our past reporting, see for example this and this and this.) First the White House claimed that NATO needed to engage in a few days of bombing in order to protect Libyan civilians from Muammar Qaddafi’s troops. Those few days have turned into three months, and protecting civilians has morphed into a massive and unrelenting bombing campaign.

Now, Democrat John Kerry and Republican John McCain are proposing a bill to authorize US troops’ involvement in Libya for an entire year. And for what reason?  “To advance national security interests in Libya.”

But what national security interests? Those have never been spelled out. Kerry and McCain, according to McClatchy Newspapers, aren’t saying.

Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, does, however, warn that the US needs to support the Libyan rebels because failing to do so would “be ignorant, irresponsible and shortsighted and dangerous for our country.”

Shortsighted and dangerous for our country? How so? Kerry says just enough that it’s clear he knows something we don’t. Whatever it is, it has nothing to do with the principally humanitarian objectives originally cited for the bombing campaign.

The Kerry-McCain resolution does provide the sponsors with some political cover, by stipulating limitations on how US troops can be involved in Libya:

“Congress does not support deploying, establishing or maintaining the presence of units and members of the United States Armed Forces on the ground in Libya unless the purpose of the presence is limited to the immediate personal defense of United States Government officials…or to rescuing members of NATO forces from imminent danger.”

But that’s not what matters. What matters is that Kerry and McCain, 2004 and 2008 presidential nominees of opposing political parties, know something that makes them back Barack Obama in committing heavy resources to the job of removing Qaddafi. This is, among other things, ample grounds for concern about the range of permissible views within the elite policy circles of both parties.

Readers of this website and of my book, Family of Secrets, understand that the US government rarely levels with the American public on the real reasons for strategic policy decisions. In this case, the phrasing used by Kerry and McCain make clear that Libya has “national security” implications for the United States—implications that they so far will not lay out.

We’ve talked about what those implications are likely to be.

It is clear that, in light of the still-unfolding Arab Spring and the destabilization of cooperative regimes, strategically located and oil-rich Libya simply must be brought into the US camp. It is the ideal new anchor for long-term future US military operations in the region designed to secure continued access to oil supplies.

That sounds a lot like “national security.”

The administration cannot simply explain to Americans (and, hence, to the world) that it feels justified in military action to protect the vital flow of oil. So it has to be oblique.

Meanwhile, those apparently excluded from the inner sanctum take a position that, on the surface, seems more logical and responsible, given that the White House estimates the Libyan campaign will have cost a staggering $1.1 billion by Sept. 30.

Here’s Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va:

“Our members are frustrated over the president’s action, his lack of positing a clear vision and mission,” he said. Discussions were under way on possible House action, including denying funds for the operation as part of a defense-spending bill that’s expected to be considered beginning Thursday.

There’s plenty of evidence that a great deal is at stake. Besides blanketing Libya with bombs, the Administration is trying economic sanctions, and working to convince more of Qaddafi’s top brass to switch sides:

In another development Tuesday, the Treasury Department took new steps to isolate the Libyan regime and provide incentives for its members to pitch down.

… “Our sanctions are intended to prevent harm and change behavior,” Adam Szubin, the director of the Office of Foreign Assets Control, said in a statement announcing the actions. “To the extent that sanctioned individuals distance themselves from the Gadhafi regime, these measures can be lifted.”

Meanwhile, the White House is claiming it doesn’t need Congressional approval under the War Powers act to continue the bombardment of Libya, as long as American lives are not at risk. That’s a sly one, and Kerry is going along with it:

“The fact is that just because hostilities are taking place and we are supporting people engaged in those hostilities does not mean that we are ourselves, in fact, introducing troops into hostilities.”

So Kerry and McCain understand what is at stake and what is expected of them. Meanwhile, we continue to be amazed by how the news media is missing the whole story.

GRAPHIC:  http://www.adweek.com/files/imagecache/node-inline-wide/news_article/mccain-kerry-thinking-2011.jpg

WhoWhatWhy is a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative news site founded by Russ Baker. Follow it on Facebook and Twitter or visit WhoWhatWhy.com

Very few of us know how much we must change. We talk of climate change but not human change. We look through a window and envision a completely different vision of life on this Earth. And then that window actually is a door. We open it and we walk to our first task – and that might be gentle sustaining love, or a shout of horror.

Horror is being changed for us by the Earth – back to the kind that carries actual death; not the packaged horror that is good for jobs, that drives the economy. Not that long row of toys, games, media – the use of horror as a laughing guilty pleasure for children. The horror movie is now only a distraction, when just behind that screen is the real horror that will fling us into the sky if it wants to.

Climb through the jagged rip in the movie theater that a tornado has blown open. Talk about doorways. Look out at the Earth and first of all note that it is not media, is not a tourist brochure, is not a landscape made in America. The Earth is alive and our death might be a decision it has made, but must step through with a faith in the Earth – that fluid lively non-fundamentalistic faith – that we have a role in a collaboration with the thing that made us.

The force that trusted us with the intelligence that we now use to drill, gouge, dam, explode and drain this place it gave us… that Earth feels pain, knows who we are, and will change us because we are a part of it’s body. That Earth will know when we walk across it, held up on it’s plain of living soil. That Earth holds me up as I type this in Salt Lake City. That Earth spares me the horror a little longer but can’t make any promises, as I step through the door.

The United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) suffered a rough blow this past Friday when they lost a unionization vote at a Target store on New York’s Long Island. Had the union won, the store would have been the first of more than 1,700 Targets across the country to be organized. As it is, Target, like WalMart, will remain entirely union-free.

[Cross-posted from the "Arguing the World" blog at Dissent magazine.]

According to the New York Times coverage:

In a statement, the president of U.F.C.W. Local 1500, Bruce W. Both, said that the workers at the Valley Stream store had endured a “campaign of threats, intimidation and illegal acts by Target management.” As a result, he called on the National Labor Relations Board to direct a new election and order Target to cease its “illegal activity.”
….
“Target did everything they could to deny these workers a chance at the American dream,” said Mr. Both, of the union local.
….
The union filed a complaint with the labor board last month asserting that Target had unlawfully prohibited employees from wearing pro-union buttons and from discussing working conditions on online sites. It also said Target had unlawfully threatened employees with dismissal if they spoke about the union.

In meetings and fliers, Target officials told employees that a union could not guarantee better pay or benefits and that the organization only wanted their dues. In a move that worried numerous workers, the company said there were no guarantees that the store would remain open if the workers unionized.

Target, of course, denies that it did anything wrong. Its position is that this unionization drive—like all previous notions by employees of bringing a union to any of their stores—has failed because the company is one big, happy family. As spokesperson Molly Snyder put it in the Times article, “We believe in solving issues and concerns by working together with the help and input of all team members. Our team has embraced that philosophy by rejecting union representation.”

You can believe that. Or you can believe that the chain employs the same intimidation tactics as other big employers. Scholar Kate Bronfenbrenner has long been at the forefront of documenting the statistics. A report she authored in 2009 found:

It has become standard practice for workers to be subjected by corporations to threats, interrogation, harassment, surveillance, and retaliation for supporting a union. An analysis of the 1999-2003 data on NLRB election campaigns finds that:

– 63% of employers interrogate workers in mandatory one-on-one meetings with their supervisors about support for the union;
– 54% of employers threaten workers in such meetings;
– 57% of employers threaten to close the worksite;
– 47% of employers threaten to cut wages and benefits; and
– 34% of employers fire workers.

Plenty of their actions are illegal. But corporations learned long ago that it was less costly for them wantonly to violate labor law up front and suffer the slap on the wrist later than to allow employees freely to vote their will.

You can catch a glimpse of propaganda used by Target on workers in mandatory “captive audience” meetings thanks to the website Gawker. Although the site is generally known for celebrity gossip rather than hard-hitting labor coverage, editor Hamilton Nolan has done a commendable job of publicizing Target workers’ concerns. Prior to the vote, Gawker made public this video:

Salon subsequently reported that, ironically enough, the actors in the anti-union video are themselves union members, represented by the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA). Ric Reitz (who plays Target spokesman “Doug” in the video, and who is currently featured as the President of the United States in The Green Lantern) told Salon’s Justin Elliott that it was “very awkward” but that he went through with it anyway:

“If someone hires me to play a rapist, does it make me a rapist? You take the job, and you’re an actor,” says Reitz, a longtime member of AFTRA and the Screen Actors Guild. “Am I pro-union? Absolutely.”

I don’t know, Ric. I’m glad you’re pro-union, and I sympathize with you on the “an artist has got to work” front. But, as a friend of mine pointed out, playing a rapist is one thing; playing one in a video designed to promote sexual assault would be something else entirely. It looks like you botched the call on this one.

In any case, videos like the one screened by Target are a pretty standard part of corporate America’s ongoing and often-preemptive campaigns against unions, and they are the sort of thing that soul-sold-to-devil consulting firms like Jackson Lewis can help you to produce. I was hoping to compare the relative cinematic merits of the Target video with a similar film that was made by the Home Depot and leaked in April. Unfortunately, it appears that Home Depot got its copyright team into gear pretty swiftly; the video is now off-line.

To my mind, Gawker’s greatest contribution was not posting the Target video. It was gathering and publishing two consecutive days worth of testimonials from current and former Target workers. The type of stories they tell will be familiar to most who have worked in retail. But the stories nevertheless shed light on realities of working life in America rarely given any attention in the media:

A young man’s Target experience:

I worked at Target for about 5 years (16-21). I can corroborate a lot of the stories that have already been posted—I made about $.50 more when I left than when I was hired. I was hired at $.50 over minimum wage, although I was told for most starting wage is $.25 over minimum wage.

In the state I worked in, hourly limits on underage workers were limited to days that school was in session. So Sunday-Thursday during the school year, Target was required to let me out at 9:00pm. But on weekends and during school breaks (including Christmas, of course!) we worked as late as was deemed necessary (the week after I turned 18 the law was changed so that underage workers could not be kept past 9:00pm at any time. My store immediately stopped hiring underage workers.). I worked from 4:00pm – 2:00am on a regular basis, and often was scheduled to open the next day. My state also regulated that there had to be 8 hours between shifts, so any time we worked past midnight we were instructed to come in 8 hours later rather than the shift start time. Given a 30 minute drive to and from Target and time to bathe/dress, I did not actually get 8 hours rest. My record shift was 4:00pm – 4:00am, the night before public school started (I was a freshman in college at this point and worked a second job during the day).

The real kicker is that working all of these 10-12 hour shifts didn’t mean more money. As soon as you were in danger of receiving overtime, your remaining shifts for the week were cut. Occasionally the managers would try to call in people who were scheduled for the day off and under 40 hours, but generally people refused the offer and those left working the shift were stuck doing the extra work. This ALONE is a good argument for a union.

And:

From a young woman whose first job is at Target:

I would like to go to college, but I honestly cannot afford it because I need to work as much as possible to just make ends meet. I actually earn about 50 cents more than most of my coworkers, but there are still some months that I wonder how to pay rent. Sure, I could get a second job, and I try to, but there are simply no jobs open. I think a union would make sense, because at least then we have some hope of having a say. Currently, we honestly get shit hours, benefits are minimal and expensive, and reviews are a joke. We stay until all hours of the night to get things done, and we get acknowledged with just a great team card. I like the people at my job just fine, but the minimal hours, shitty pay, and the mindset that we should just deal grates on me. To reiterate, I am young—but I still need enough money to live, and this kind of job is the only one I can hold until I gain the skills I need to survive elsewhere. If a union can make Target into a place with an awesome environment AND at least passable pay and benefits, I am all for at least giving it a try, and maybe then I can actually afford college without spiraling into lifelong debt. Just because it’s a retail job does not give it a pass for being a shitty job. I also apologize if this email doesn’t make much sense—I’m not a very eloquent person.

Gawker also published some interesting letters from disgruntled managers. And, on the plus side for the company, Gawker received some letters from employees who didn’t think their Target jobs were all that bad. But it’s impossible to read through the postings and conclude that a corporate philosophy valuing the “help and input of all team members” is honestly what has kept unions out of the stores.