Written for RHRealityCheck.org by Editor-in-Chief Jodi Jacobson. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.
Yesterday, Congresswoman Nita Lowey introduced the Global Democracy Promotion Act of 2011, a bill that would permanently repeal the Global Gag Rule (GGR), a policy that has been applied and revoked via executive order at each change in the White House, beginning with Ronald Reagan and leading most recently to repeal by President Obama in 2009.
The GGR prohibits international health care providers from receiving U.S. international assistance for family planning if those organizations use other (non-US) funding to provide abortion counseling, referrals, or services, or seek to change laws regarding abortion care in countries in which abortion is a leading cause of death among women ages 15 to 49. Access to contraception and to family planning counseling and information helps women and their partners to plan the number and spacing of children they want to have and to avoid unintended pregnancies that lead to abortion. As such, by denying U.S. international assistance to groups that also provide safe, legal abortion, the GGR actually increases the number of abortions, rather than reducing them.
These facts notwithstanding, as we reported last week, House Republicans are seeking to enshrine the gag rule into law.
Written by Martha Kempner for RHRealityCheck.org. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.
I wonder if Bill O’Reilly would be so worried about alcohol getting in the way of contraception if men were responsible for birth control. Currently, the only options for men other than “pulling out” are condoms or a vasectomy. The idea of a birth control pill for men has been floating around for many years with few results, but an article in the New York Times this weekend, suggests that “prompted by women’s organizations, global health groups and surveys indicating that men are receptive, federal agencies are financing research.”
Among the 1.2 million American citizens living in mountaintop removal mining counties in central Appalachia, an additional 60,000 cases of cancer are directly linked to the federally sanctioned strip-mining practice.
That is the damning conclusion in a breakthrough study, released last night in the peer-reviewed Journal of Community Health: The Publication for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention. Led by West Virginia University researcher Dr. Michael Hendryx, among others, the study entitled “Self-Reported Cancer Rates in Two Rural Areas of West Virginia with and Without Mountaintop Coal Mining” drew from a groundbreaking community-based participatory research survey conducted in Boone County, West Virginia in the spring of 2011, which gathered person-level health data from communities directly impacted by mountaintop mining, and compared to communities without mining.
“A door to door survey of 769 adults found that the cancer rate was twice as high in a community exposed to mountaintop removal mining compared to a non-mining control community,” said Hendryx, Associate Professor at the Department of Community Medicine and Director of West Virginia Rural Health Research Center at West Virginia University. “This significantly higher risk was found after control for age, sex, smoking, occupational exposure and family cancer history. The study adds to the growing evidence that mountaintop mining environments are harmful to human health.”
Bottom line: Far from simply being an environmental issue, mountaintop removal is killing American residents.
“This research in the Coal River Valley, along with the recent birth defects research in Appalachia and other peer reviewed science, is providing evidence of the long term effects of human exposure to mountaintop removal,” said Coal River Valley resident and coalfield leader Bo Webb, who participated in the study. “Again, I urgently call upon the United States government to intervene and address this health crisis, place an immediate moratorium on mountaintop removal and stop this needless killing of our citizens.”
As a tree-sit protest in the Coal River Valley enters a new week to stop the strip mining operations at a former Massey Energy and current Alpha Natural Resources site, the New York Times is reporting today that West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, a key supporter of absentee coal companies and lobbies, reported “operating income of $1,363,916″ from a coal brokerage firm.
Last month, delivering a new study on the link between birth defects and mountaintop removal mining, Appalachian leaders went to Washington, DC to call on President Obama, EPA administrator Lisa Jackson, Department of Health and Human Services chief Kathleen Sebelius and Attorney General Eric Holder to enact an immediate moratorium on all mountaintop removal mining operations in West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia until the Center for Disease Control and/or other federal regulatory agencies make a complete assessment of the spiraling health and human rights crisis related to mountaintop removal mining.
According to the new study: “The odds for reporting cancer were twice as high in the mountaintop mining environment compared to the non mining environment in ways not explained by age, sex,smoking, occupational exposure, or family cancer history.” The study found:
Surface water and ground water around MTM activity are characterized by elevated sulfates, iron, manganese, arsenic, selenium, hydrogen sulfide, lead, magnesium, calcium and aluminum; contaminates severely damage local aquatic stream life and can persist for decades after mining at a particular site ceases [18, 20]. In addition, elevated levels of airborne particulate matter around surface mining operations include ammonium nitrate, silica, sulfur compounds, metals, benzene, carbon monoxide, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and nitrogen dioxide [21, 22].
Citing extremely high levels of uterine and ovarian, skin, urinary, bone, brain, and others forms of cancers, the study additionally noted:
Arsenic, for example, is an impurity present in coal that is implicated in many forms of cancer including that of skin, bladder and kidney [31, 36]. Cadmium is linked to renal cancer [34]. Diesel engines are widely used at mining sites, and diesel fuel is used for surface mining explosives, coal transportation and coal processing; diesel exhaust has been identified as a major environmental contributor to cancer risk.
Despite the deadly consequences, mountaintop removal mining in central Appalachian only provides 5-8 percent of national coal production.
More information on the Appalachian leaders call for a MTR Moratorium Now can be found here.
Written with Leo Hindery Jr., chair of the Smart Globalization Initiative at the New America Foundation
America is facing a catastrophic jobs crisis. Not since the Great Depression has official unemployment hovered above nine percent – where it is today – for more than 20 months. Millions of American have given up looking for a job altogether. Even worse, real unemployment is more than 18%. Yet Washington overall has obviously yet to embrace a large-scale job creation agenda. Even if we reach consensus around the deficit – the only economic issue even getting any attention these days – it will do little to help the 29 million Americans who are unemployed in real terms. If we do not seriously tackle jobs, our country may never regain its competitive global edge.
We recently co-chaired a Task Force on Job Creation, seeking real solutions to the jobs crisis plaguing our country. This group of policy makers, economists, business and labor leaders developed a series of 15 immediate recommendations for reversing the crisis, outlined in a new report, “Vision for Economic Renewal: An American Jobs Agenda.” We found there are six vital policy areas that our government must address in order to create millions more jobs now: manufacturing, trade and globalization, U.S.-China trade, the infrastructure crisis, jobs in the green economy, and youth unemployment.
Washington is often a city of Chicken Littles, which makes ringing the alarm bell difficult. But once Washington wakes up from its deficit hangover, politicians will realize something that most Americans have known for months: The sky has already fallen.
Here’s what we can and need to do:
Manufacturing
America’s manufacturing sector must be a cornerstone of the nation’s economy and thus one of the essential drivers of the recovery we are still searching for. Yet manufacturing remains in a decades-long free fall, with, like most other sectors, stagnant wages for more than a decade. In just three years, our manufacturing sector has lost over 2.5 million jobs, and over the last decade, we’ve lost more than 6 million. The continuing decline of manufacturing will limit job growth and jeopardize our national standing. Industries that were once great contributors to our country – auto manufacturing, shipbuilding and machine tools fabrication – are barely shadows of what they once were. Meanwhile, jobs in other leading manufacturing sectors, like aerospace, are being offshored every day.
Why the decline? One of the fundamental reasons is simply that the U.S. lacks a national manufacturing strategy that integrates policies around tax and investment, R&D, domestic procurement and currency valuation. And we lack any plan for how to restore this sector. Our task force identified several ways to bring back this sector:
• Buy-Domestic Procurement requirements. No single measure would do more to help resuscitate U.S. employment, particularly in manufacturing, than an encompassing buy-domestic government procurement requirement. All infrastructure projects funded and guaranteed by the federal government and the proposed infrastructure bank should require purchases to be made in America rather than overseas, consistent with our international trade agreements. As well, to qualify as “Made in America,” at least 75 percent of the content should have to be manufactured within our borders. To make that happen, Congress should require domestic content calculations to be effective and transparent. Domestic sourcing requirements for all government procurement programs (e.g., Buy American, the Recovery Act) and programs that support U.S. exports (e.g., the U.S. Export-Impact Bank) should also be reviewed to ensure that contracting agencies are obeying and implementing the requirements. The Defense Authorization Bill passed in December that requires the Pentagon to buy solar panels from U.S. manufacturers is a good model. In addition, Congress needs to enact an all-of-government successor to the 1933 Buy American Act.
• Link an investment tax credit directly to jobs. A 10% investment tax credit for the rehabilitation and renovation of existing manufacturing facilities would pump billions of dollars into modernizing America’s plants. And with an additional investment tax credit for new equipment, businesses could retool their factories.
• Determine which government programs create and support U.S. jobs. We should require those bidding or applying for government contracts, assistance, grants or awards to provide detailed Employment Impact Statements in the application process. Results would factor into the outcome of the project or transaction.
Trade and Globalization
Our trade policies and unaddressed ills from globalization exacerbate America’s manufacturing industry woes. Just since 2001, the U.S. has had massive annual trade deficits totaling over $6 trillion. Yet the U.S. has no precise strategy to compete in a globalized economy.
In many parts of the developing world, workers toil for minimal pay under harsh conditions because organizing against unfair treatment is prohibited. This cheap labor seduces large multinational companies to move production overseas, where healthcare, pension and environmental costs are minimal. While human rights are plundered, U.S. workers are also losing their jobs. And many of the Asian countries where these jobs are going are manipulating their currencies to keep them undervalued against the dollar and are providing massive illegal subsidies and other unfair trade benefits.
We must mobilize to restore balance and mutual benefit to international trade. Let’s call on our leadership to:
• Restructure the tax code so American companies stay here. Right now, we provide tax incentives for companies to invest overseas, a sure sign that our economy works best for big business instead of for regular Americans. We must fix our tax code so corporations are not rewarded for closing plants and shipping jobs to China. In addition, Congress should offer partial tax rebates on exported goods and impose equivalent taxes on imports.
• Protect national security manufacturing. Today, the U.S. has an $80 billion annual trade deficit with China just for “Advanced Technology Products,” many of which are essential to our national defense. Congress should pass legislation requiring that certain critical items be subject to a national security impact statement before allowing their manufacturing overseas.
• Enact temporary tariffs. Congress should enact temporary tariffs to protect our high-value manufacturing. A temporary policy of import tariffs, coupled with encouragement of foreign direct investment, would provide the U.S. with all the benefits of free trade without promoting a low-wage workforce.
• Create a new Justice Dept. bureau to enforce trade. On the issue of enforcement, an independent office within the Department of Justice would be tougher and more effective at ensuring that our trade agreements are complied with.
• Initiate trade cases under the U.S. trade remedy laws. The U.S. should spearhead an Unfair Trade Strike Force to be deployed when nations violate trade laws.
U.S.-China Trade
It is impossible to overlook China when considering how to correct globalization’s unwanted fallout. The Chinese economy has been growing at ten percent a year for the last 30 years. Such unprecedented economic growth is at the root of China’s dramatic surge in military power, international political weight, and financial influence. These developments, with their economic and geo-political implications, are not simply the outgrowth of free market forces and fair trade. Rather, they stem from sophisticated industrial and mercantilist trade policies, often illegal, that China has instituted to establish its great power status.
The U.S. economy will continue its decline unless our leaders in Washington take immediate action to take on Chinese economic practices.
• Create a White House office to focus on American competitiveness. A transparent office dedicated to gathering independent intelligence on our trade competitiveness with China would improve our economic standing. It would help align trade and tax policy so that private sector incentives match the public interest.
• Pursue a hard line on Chinese economic policy. From intellectual property theft to restrictions on rare earth mineral exports to extortionist indigenous innovation purchasing policies, China is playing by a different set of rules and we’re doing little about it. Our government must be willing to challenge and mitigate the disastrous effects of Chinese economic policies on American manufacturing and trade. This should start with a clearer focus from the White House, guided by the independent body recommended above and directed at all federal agencies. Initiatives should include bringing cases in the W.T.O., imposing tariffs when necessary, and requiring rigorous reviews of China’s planned investments in American ports, markets, natural resources and transportation industry.
Infrastructure Crisis
Coincident with the loss of trade and manufacturing is the decline of our nation’s infrastructure. After years of under-investing in public infrastructure, America faces an infrastructure deficit of $3 trillion that is impeding economic growth and undermining our economy’s efficiency. We need to spend $2.2 trillion over just the next five years to meet America’s core infrastructure needs, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers. But actual spending plans fall far short.
• Create a levered National Infrastructure Bank. The administration and Congress should create a national infrastructure bank that would be an independent financial institution owned by the government. Able to fund a broad range of infrastructure projects beyond roads, rails and runways, it would make loans and loan guarantees and leverage private capital. It should be able to sell or issue general purpose bonds to raise funds for lending and investment, sell specific project bonds when necessary, and invite private investment, along with state and local government pension plan investments.
Green Economy
Employment opportunities in the “green economy” can provide some relief, although not as much as some project. According to Booz Allen, green projects will create eight million jobs by 2013; the Global Climate Network puts that number at 20 million world-wide by 2030. Bolstering this segment of our economy will put people to work in manufacturing jobs that have the greatest multiplier effect, and will stimulate more economic growth. Leaders in Washington must do more to encourage growth in this industry.
• Extend the Cash Grant Program for renewable energy production. This program converts non-refundable tax credits for renewable energy production into cash grants. Extending the program until the equity and debt markets recover will help create jobs and avoid further job loss in the industry.
• Lengthen the period of the Advanced Manufacturing Tax Credit. ARRA authorized up to $2.3 billion in tax credits for investments in qualified advanced energy projects at manufacturing facilities, such as energy storage, electricity transmission, energy conservation technologies, and others.
• Expand Title 17 Loan Guarantee Program. Title 17 of the Energy Policy Act of 2005 provides federal loan guarantees for the construction of energy-related facilities that use “new or significantly improved technologies” which are “non-commercial” and have high technological risk. These guarantees lower the cost of capital for these projects. Broadening Title 17 to include energy-efficiency investments would help spur this market and create new jobs.
Youth Employment
The hardest hit among the unemployed are young people. Almost 25 percent of teenagers from 16 to 19 are officially unemployed. For young adults aged 20 to 24, unemployment is nearly 16 percent – a number not seen since 1948. Many of these disconnected youth are at risk of becoming permanently disengaged from the labor market. Young people who do not have a successful work experience by age 25 are also at greater risk of lifelong poverty.
• Extend the Work Opportunity Tax Credit (W.O.T.C.) beyond August 2011. This law provides small businesses with tax incentives to hire people who might ordinarily struggle to find work – for example, those with lesser skills and veterans. Congress expanded the tax credit in 2009 to include the tax credits for hiring disconnected youth. Our ongoing national youth unemployment demands that this W.O.T.C. provision be extended well beyond August of this year.
Our national leadership is responsible for tackling the extreme real unemployment and stagnant wages crises. President Obama has already shown a strong willingness to reform health care and regulate the financial services industries. Today, however, our nation needs, from all of Washington, that same passion and commitment directed at job creation. It’s time our leaders show the moral courage that defines true leadership and resolve to restore what all good Americans want and need: the security, well-being and self-respect that come from fair employment and wages.
***
Leo Hindery Jr. is chair of the Smart Globalization Initiative at the New America Foundation and an investor in media companies. He is the former CEO of AT&T Broadband and its predecessors, Tele-Communications, Inc. and Liberty Media.
These economic trends bear potentially dire political consequences. Public opinion data collected by my colleagues and me over the past 20 years demonstrated that black disillusionment with the prospects for racial equality had grown from the early 1990s to the point that by 2005, four out of five blacks believed that racial equality would not be achieved in the foreseeable future. After two decades of growth, this percentage declined by 30 percentage points by October 2008 and the eve of the election of Barack Obama. For the first time since we started collecting data on this question, more than half of blacks believed that racial equality for blacks would be soon achieved or had already been achieved.
This relative level of euphoria was short-lived and plummeted with the onset of the economic crisis. Once again, half of all blacks believe that racial equality either will not be achieved in their lifetimes or not at all within the U.S.
The combination of blocked roads to social mobility, continuing economic crisis, the near unanimous belief among blacks that racism remains a major problem in the United States, and the consequent widespread and growing despair about the prospects for racial equality provide the grounds, if not the inevitability, for an ever more volatile and conflicted racial landscape.
It was great to see the always kind, brilliant, and gracious Professor Michael Dawson taking some heads Ghost Dog style in today’s NY Times as part of its series on the perils facing The Black Middle Class.
The Great Recession has brought questions about the extreme wealth inequality in the United States to the forefront of the national conversation on the economy. Once the stuff of old Lefties, it is a pleasant surprise–nevertheless tragic because of the macro level changes and destroyed lives and careers which have brought these issues front and center–that a basic threat to American democracy is finally getting the attention it deserves.
Or stated as a question: When one group has such a disproportionate percentage of resources, in a political system driven by interest group politics, how does their out-sized influence in a post-Citizens United era game the system against the Common Good and the “rest of us” in the service of an increasingly narrow political agenda?
Economists have long studied the increasing gap between the haves and “the have nots” in America. While their analysis was technical, and thus mired in the stuff of gini coefficients and income percentages by cohort as adjusted for inflation, the mainstream media is finally making their work more accessible for a general audience.
Sociologists and political scientists have long thought that the public didn’t “get” how extreme disparities in wealth and income were a social ill because our political culture does not have a language with which to discuss class. After all, Americans are not Europeans with all of their fancy third parties, and where “Socialism” and “nationalized health care” are not bad or evil words.
Even more vexing, it seems that a class based politics that speaks honestly about wealth inequality and the income gap remains hamstrung by a logic where voters, especially Conservatives, look at the rich (as opposed to their own families and communities) as proxies for their own immediate economic well-being and the general direction of the nation’s economy. In total, the poor and working classes often choose policies that work against their own immediate economic self-interest, and that of the country as a whole.
Given the latter, I am not hopeful that America will see a radical departure from its uncritical, corporate-consumerist model of citizenship. However, perhaps the Great Recession will force a little bit more critical reflection by an occasionally attentive public on these broader economic issues.
Moreover, returning to Dawson’s sharp commentary on the perils facing the black community in a time of debt ceiling hostage taking by the Tea Party GOP on the black middle class, I am pleased again that there is some public conversation about the relationship between race, wealth, and politics.
Unfortunately, this is a perennial chat among students of race and politics. Whites have on average at least 10 times the wealth of blacks and Latinos; single white women in their peak earning years are worth approximately 40,000 dollars, black and Latino women about 5 dollars; in the time of the Great Recession the black middle class has seen its average worth fall eighty-three percent to approximately 2,000 dollars. As the great Black Wealth/White Wealth pointed out, upper class blacks are just as likely to fall down the economic ladder as poor and working class whites are to move up it.
In total, the racial wealth gap has existed for decades and is the result of structural policy decisions made by white elites and the federal government. As coverage of the divide gains traction in the days leading up to the debt ceiling vote (MSNBC even had a feature on this “new” story today), how will the media’s frame on the story develop?
Some questions and possibilities:
1. Will the long racist history of the VA and FHA home lending programs, as well as redlining be discussed?
2. Will the chattering classes discuss how federal policy created the ghetto and thus systematically devalued the communities which black and brown folks were most likely to find themselves? Is there going to be a mention of “sundown towns” and the efforts of whites through pogroms and other acts of violence to destroy prosperous black communities in places such as Tulsa, Oklahoma?
3. Will there be a discussion of discrimination in mortgage and bank lending practices that continue to the present, and which put blacks, Latinos, and Asian-Americans into exotic mortgages, with higher interest rates, and thus at greater risk of default, than whites with comparable credit profiles?
4. Will there be a discussion of how when Social Security was established it explicitly excluded large segments of the labor force from benefits because African Americans were concentrated as domestics, farmers, and other laborers in the Jim and Jane Crow South, a class of laborers not included in that benefits program? And even more pointedly, that because of racialized disparities in health care outcomes, blacks effectively subsidize the Social Security payments of white folks because they die earlier and work for more years of their life, unable to retire at a reasonable age?
Historically, the media frame about blacks and the economy has been a racialized one. Poor black and brown folks are depicted by the media as the undeserving poor, as lazy, or welfare queens, irresponsible, and possessed of a questionable morality. The black middle class and their accomplishments are denigrated and always under question as they are the product of “affirmative action” and are “unqualified” for the positions which they have earned.
In the Age of Obama, where white racial resentment is naked and driving the Tea Party GOP, I shutter to think that there may be a segment of the public that sees the racial wealth gap as a non-issue, and perhaps even a good thing, as “blacks” and “minorities” shouldn’t be doing too well in a time when White America is struggling.
Alternatively, as Sean Hannity did on a recent radio show, the dishonest and insincere Right-wing will throw the racial wealth gap in President Obama’s face as more consternation creating fuel for their perennial question: What has President Obama and the Democratic Party done lately for blacks? Why do they even support him?
Of course, the Black Conservative banjo players will be brought out to back up this chorus.
In sum, race is the modality in which class is lived in America. More evidence then why a white unemployment rate of 8 percent is a crisis, and an under and unemployment rate for blacks of some 20 or more percent is accepted as “normal.” Thus, the job death hemorrhage that has afflicted blacks for several decades is not worthy of mainstream media coverage. It is the norm.
I come full circle in these reflections on wealth and race back to the late (and great) Dr. Manning Marable, a friend and colleague of Professor Michael Dawson. I was lucky to have broken bread with them together years back, just as my journey was first beginning. Trust, they made quite a positive and wonderful impression to say the least.
The late Dr. Marable powerfully suggested that the wealth and race gap in the United States was not an unlucky coincidence. It was the result of policy decisions where the racial state, what was America’s herrenvolk creed in practice, systematically underdeveloped Black America.
I know that the puzzle of the black/white wealth gap will not be framed in such a way–where it is accurately portrayed as a continuation of long and deep structural policies and State policy–by a mainstream media that is just learning how to have a reasonable discussion about class.
But a brother can hope just a little bit, can’t he?
What is the main lesson learned in the Murdoch scandal?
That corporate conglomerate power run unregulated causes great public harm and lacks the checks and balances required for there to be any accountability. Given this, what would be the best way to investigate the criminal wrongdoings of such a conglomerate?
News Corp would have you believe that the answer to that question is: have the guilty and obscuring conglomerate examine itself and then report to the rest of the world the level of information it chooses to publish.
Let me be blunt: this is the definition of insanity.
Former New York City school Chancellor Joel Klein, now News Corp’s executive vice president, has been tapped to lead the investigation of the company that pays him $4.5 million a year and gives him stock awards. What could potentially be a conflict of interest around that?
And who does Klein report to? Viet Dinh. Viet Dinh’s prior work experience? Authoring the USA Patriot Act, a law that greatly increased the government’s use of wiretapping and other forms of eavesdropping on citizens.
We also have already seen how such internal News Corps investigations turn out. There is the precedent of Les Hinton’s prior internal investigation, which revealed no phone hacking beyond the “bad apple” who had already gone to prison. Eventually, that failed investigation caught up with Hinton, who resigned from his post as chief executive of Dow Jones, publisher of the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal. But this example further highlights the point: there is no incentive for a senior executive to do anything other than minimize the issue they are investigating.
This act of News Corp supposedly investigating itself is a clear and raging sign of why consolidated power cannot be left in complete and unchecked control — particularly of their own investigation. As my 2004 documentary Outfoxed highlighted, in examining the unethical behavior of Fox News, the News Corp problem of distorting the truth has long existed. As a company, News Corp, with Fox often leading the way, has led an imaginary war in which it sees itself as “against the world.” Nothing from its corporate practices suggests that a self-investigation would reveal actual information.
This is not how things have to be. News Corp could follow the lead from dozens of prior companies and hire outside legal counsel to oversee the investigation. What News Corp is doing, once more, goes beyond standard practice and refuses to cede any control, presumably fearing that it might stop it from doing whatever it is it wants to do. Charles M. Elson, an expert on corporate governance at the University of Delaware, was recently quoted in The New York Times on this matter, saying clearly, “You cannot be seen as objective if you are inside.”
Let me summarize what has been learned by this whole parade of corruption. Corporate conglomerates run without regulation, do not work in the service of society, and run reckless and unchecked whenever possible. Self-investigation of such malfeasance is not the standard, and should not be the situation in this case. This whole phone-hacking story has been nothing but an absurd example of how power run unchecked responds by claiming more power when attempted to be reined in.
News Corp should not be allowed to continue this charade of a self-investigation. Meanwhile, the United States Senate and the department of justice should use all the power they have to push for a complete and thorough investigation into News Corp’s US dealings. We all deserve real answers to how much criminal activity occurred, and where the related responsibility and accountability failed.
Those answers will never come from News Corp itself.
Written by Martha Kempner for RHRealityCheck.org. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.
Representative John Wu (D-OR) announced today that he will resign from the U.S. House of Representatives as soon as the debt ceiling crisis is resolved amid allegations of non-consensual sex with a recent high school graduate.
According to the Portland Oregonian, a distraught young woman called Wu’s Portland office this spring, accusing him of an aggressive and unwanted sexual encounter. The young woman, who did not go to the police, has been identified only as the daughter of a longtime friend of the congressman. Though her age has not been verified, she reportedly graduated from high school in 2010.
by Be Scofield
Crossposted from Tikkun Daily
The vast majority of religious and spiritual people don’t really care about atheists and that’s why if I were an atheist I wouldn’t trust them as far as I could throw a Bible. At worst, many religious people and their associated institutions are responsible for a long history of dehumanizing atheists. A most recent example is that of the atheist senior high school student Damon Fowler. After objecting to the illegal publicly sponsored prayer scheduled for his graduation ceremony he was “hounded, pilloried, and ostracized by his community; publicly demeaned by one of his teachers; physically threatened; and thrown out by his parents, who cut off his financial support, kicked him out of the house, and threw his belongings onto the front porch.” At best, progressive religious organizations may include articles from authors that are atheist, advance viewpoints that are humanistic or attempt to engage atheists in interfaith work. This may be stepping in the right direction but it should be viewed for what it is; tokenism. Until the real-life social and political struggles that atheists face are taken up by religious and spiritual people in a serious manner I doubt any genuine progress will be made.
While there are some atheists who are willing to work under the rubric of an interfaith movement and other atheists who identify as religious such as Buddhists and Unitarian Universalists it seems that many atheists don’t want to integrate into religion. Can you blame them? Why would these atheists want to integrate into the very thing they feel is oppressing them? Yes, common goals of challenging religious fundamentalism and community service can be shared by both groups but why does it have to be done under the guise of religion as interfaith organizing?
Don’t get me wrong. I’d love for more anti-religious atheists to see the positive benefits religion can provide. I’ve critiqued militant atheists and will continue to do so in defense of religion. And of course it’d be great if this population of atheists understood how nice religious progressives and interfaith activists like myself are. But I don’t expect anti-religious atheists to buddy up to me anytime soon for no good reason.
Why should interfaith efforts to incorporate atheists have the moral high ground? What if it is the opposite? What if it’s not atheists who need to join the interfaith movement but rather religious people who need to give up religion in the name of combating religious fundamentalism or defending atheists? I’m asking that a bit rhetorically to illustrate my point. For many atheists being asked to join an interfaith movement is like asking a religious person to join an atheist movement. What if atheists organized a well-intentioned campaign designed to reach out to people of faith called “The Atheist Agenda?” How many believers would be willing to sign up for that? How many prominent spiritual or religious leaders would lend their name to that campaign? None. Atheism is still unfortunately a dirty word and that’s why efforts, while well intentioned are labeled as interfaith and not pro-atheist. I’m not saying that all atheists would engage in dialogue simply because religious people organized a pro-atheism rather than interfaith campaign. But if religious progressives and interfaith activists began a campaign called “Atheists are Beautiful,” that publicly challenged the dehumanization and stereotypes atheists face while simultaneously critiquing their own religious traditions which contribute to this religiously hegemonic culture then we may make progress.
What if atheists (understandably) don’t want to engage in an interfaith movement? What then? Will religious and spiritual progressives or secular humanist interfaith activists still be willing to take interest in atheists and their struggles? Or will they abandon them? Can atheist social and political issues be strongly supported independently of any interfaith work? Or is it only under the guise of the term interfaith that they are willing to reach out to atheists?
Atheists shouldn’t have to come in our territory under the rubric of religion to explain to us how they are marginalized or oppressed. Nor should religious progressives expect them to inform us how screwed up religion is. And they shouldn’t be expected to join in interfaith movements regardless of any positive outcome. There are some very brilliant, powerful and well connected progressive spiritual teachers, religious leaders and interfaith activists who could easily find the information they need about how atheists are marginalized via blogs, web sites, books, lectures and debates (good starting points are here and here.) They otherwise dedicate large amounts of time and resources to dealing with other groups which are marginalized. They spend many resources on social issues such as poverty, war, the prison industrial complex and immigration reform among many others. There is no reason why these leaders couldn’t have made challenging the dehumanization of atheists part of their agenda. But again, I don’t think the vast majority of them really care and that’s why if I were an atheist I wouldn’t trust them.
Can you name any progressive spiritual, interfaith or religious leader that has come out to support atheists when it really matters? I’m not talking about challenging religious extremism, which I think both non-religious atheists and progressives can agree is a good thing. Nor am I talking about Obama’s brief mention that non-believers are worthy of participating in community service alongside other faith traditions. Is what atheists really want? To be mentioned by the president in a condescending way? I don’t think so. I’m talking about the case of Damon Fowler for example. Or the numerous other instances in which atheists are discriminated against. I run a website with hundreds of videos from today’s leading spiritual and religious leaders, social activists and global reformers. I’m also a graduate student in an interfaith seminary and well read in these subjects. I know who’s who and who’s saying what. Yet, I can’t name any religious or spiritual leader famous or not that actually defends atheists because they are atheists. Not one. At best there is the tokenism that expects atheists to join them under a religious framework. Even on my campus which is likely the most progressive and radical religious education center in the world you won’t find any workshops, guest speakers or efforts that are pro-atheist.
I hope to change this. I’m not yet a prominent spiritual leader but I’d like to lead the way towards a pro-atheist movement rather than an interfaith movement. While I support the work of interfaith activists like Chris Stedman (an atheist), as a religious leader I’m not going to attempt to integrate atheists under the guise of religion. It simply feels inappropriate for me to do so. This is probably because I have a strong background in countering oppressions and I’m sensitive to power dynamics. If there are atheists who want to integrate under a religious framework more power to them. I’m sure interesting things will be shared and learned. But I don’t think this will be the panacea to solve religious/atheist dilemma. It won’t even address the core issues. If I’m going to organize and form relationships with atheists to end discrimination against them it’s going to be on their terms and not mine. I’ll gladly sign onto their campaign, using their language and embrace their agenda if they want. I will be an ally in the fight against atheist prejudice and dehumanization. The problem is most all religious and spiritual people won’t join me and that’s why if I were an atheist I wouldn’t trust them.
It’s important for me to mention here that I think the response of even the most virulent and militant atheist is just. As a progressive religious leader in training and critic of militant atheism my statement may seem odd. But there is nothing inconsistent about me believing that a response to a dominant and oppressive system is justifiable even if I personally find things to disagree about the response. When an anti-religious atheist misrepresents religion or makes broad generalizations I will gladly share my disagreements, but no real harm comes from their error. On the other hand when religious people get it wrong about atheists there is considerable harm done. The power balance clearly lies with the religious. I see atheists who are angry and frustrated with religion as defending themselves against a culture that is discriminatory and harmful. Thus given the religiously hegemonic culture and climate of the U.S. I think atheists are justified in defending themselves against religion however they choose.
So, which spiritual and religious leaders are willing to support a pro-atheist agenda? Who will stick their neck out and associate themselves with atheism? Who will support atheists because they are atheists and discriminated against with no strings attached? I’m not asking religious leaders to abandon religion if that’s what some atheists request. Nor am I saying that anti-religious atheists are right about everything. I’ve written extensively on how I think many misinterpret religion and I will continue to do so. Rather, I’m asking religious leaders, spiritual teachers and interfaith activists to support efforts to humanize atheists. In a previous article “We’re All Born Atheists: A Religious Person Defends Non-Belief” I laid out some ways we can do this. Religious and spiritual leaders should be less concerned about how many atheists will join an interfaith movement and more concerned about publicly speaking out against instances of prejudice and how religious language and cultural values posit atheists as inhuman, worthless and un-American.
For real change to occur it’s going to take more than holding inclusive religious services which incorporate atheists, offering space for humanistic voices in publications, religious people having atheist friends or integrating atheists into an interfaith movement. What is needed is the dismantling of a false religious system of morality, the consistent challenging in public of atheist discrimination, the stopping of the encroachment of religion into the public sphere and the tearing down of Christian hegemony that dominates our values and ideals. What is needed now are positive and pro-atheist efforts, not more tokenism. Progressive religious and spiritual leaders have a unique responsibility to meet these needs. Our silence kills the hope of a society that is built on all of those ideals we so cherish such as kindness, generosity, love, compassion, justice and community.
Who’s on board?
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Written by Andrea Grimes for RHRealityCheck.org. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.
The Texas Independent reports today on violations ranging from fire safety to client privacy in Texas’ many “alternatives to abortion” contractors. You know them as crisis pregnancy centers, and also as one of the few state-funded programs that saw their funding increase in this atrocious budget year–from $4 million to $4.15 million, despite the fact that they provide no medical care, no medical advice and are staffed by religious-motivated volunteers who undergo a minimum of training. Actual medical care that serves women and children in Texas been slashed, and Planned Parenthood has lost $47 million in funding.
The Texas Pregnancy Care Network conducted what amounts to an internal audit–with faith-based, religious-motivated inspectors looking into violations in clinics they have a vested interest in keeping afloat. There has not yet been an official third-party, or even Texas Department of Health and Human Services inspection into these CPC’s.
The Independent has the entire CPC inspection report available to read, but I’d just like to pluck out one totally not surprising finding: 15 percent of contractors did not, during supervised inspections, separate religious and educational material….
Originally published at Ecocentric.
They can ruin a perfectly nice beach day and are the very definition of spineless, and now jellyfish are drawing international attention with their power plant hijinks.
It’s been a strange few weeks in which five power plants around the world have had to scale back or shut down due to massive swarms of jellies getting sucked into the plants’ cooling water intakes. To be clear, this cooling water is used to chill steam, not fuel rods, so there’s no chance of radioactive super jellyfish bursting out of the plant and taking over the world.
Despite a lack of superpowers, regular old jellies are making their presence increasingly known. In late June, the Shimane nuclear plant in western Japan had to scale back its electricity production because jellies were clogging the plant’s cooling water system (a problem that’s been plaguing Japanese plants since 2006). Just a few days later, two nuclear reactors in Scotland shut down for a week due to yet another jellyfish bloom wreaking havoc in the plant’s cooling water intake system. Then just as the Scottish reactors were returning to service, swarms of jellies choked a coal power plant’s cooling system in Hadera, Israel, shutting down the plant. Not to be outdone by their brethren further up the coast, jellyfish then infested another coal plant in Ashkelon, Israel just a couple of days later.
It’s as if there’s bad blood between jellies and the power industry, but in this case power plants are the ones picking the fight. As one Israeli oceanographer explained, “The jellyfish are not ‘attracted’ to the water intakes – they are ‘sucked in’ – involuntarily.” So jellyfish aren’t being jerks any more than the adorable seal that got caught up in the cooling system at an English nuclear power plant, or the diver who was unwittingly sucked into a Los Angeles power plant, not to mention the sea turtles, manatees and billions of fish that have found themselves drawn into power plant intake pipes every year.
Still, the recent global booms in jellyfish population are a cause for concern. Some consider the increasing number of jellies as evidence of the “rise of slime“; the dumbing down of complex ocean food webs into simplistic ecosystems full of microbes, algal blooms and jellyfish. Scientists point to the trifecta of warming ocean temperatures, excess nutrients and overfishing as the main culprit for increasing the number of large jelly swarms. And we’re primarily to blame for that terrible threesome. Yes, some of these jelly outbreaks are local and cyclical, but humans are simply adding fuel to the invertebrate fire.
At the very least, we can stop this power plant vs. jellyfish feud by ending the power industry’s love affair with outdated, water-dependent cooling and switching to 21st century technology like dry cooling. But whether they’re clogging power plants, sinking fishing vessels, or stinging us at the beach, don’t get mad at jellies. Our use and abuse of air and water resources has been an open invitation for them to spread, thrive and drive us crazy.
