"A democracy can die of too many lies"

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/05/17/moyers/index.html
Television journalist Bill Moyers blasts flag-wearing phonies, reporters who parrot the government line, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's "dangerous" campaign to silence dissenting voices.

Editor's note: This is an address given by Bill Moyers at the National Conference for Media Reform in St. Louis, Mo., on Sunday.

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By Bill Moyers

May 17, 2005 | I can't imagine better company on this beautiful Sunday morning in St. Louis. You're church for me today, and there's no congregation in the country where I would be more likely to find more kindred souls than are gathered here.

There are so many different vocations and callings in this room -- so many different interests and aspirations of people who want to reform the media or produce for the media -- that only a presiding bishop like Bob McChesney with his great ecumenical heart could bring us together for a weekend like this.

What joins us all under Bob's embracing welcome is our commitment to public media. Pat Aufderheide got it right, I think, in the recent issue of In These Times when she wrote: "This is a moment when public media outlets can make a powerful case for themselves. Public radio, public TV, cable access, public DBS channels, media arts centers, youth media projects, nonprofit Internet news services ... low-power radio and webcasting are all part of a nearly-invisible feature of today's media map: the public media sector. They exist not to make a profit, not to push an ideology, not to serve customers, but to create a public -- a group of people who can talk productively with those who don't share their views, and defend the interests of the people who have to live with the consequences of corporate and governmental power."

She gives examples of the possibilities. "Look at what happened," she said, "when thousands of people who watched Stanley Nelson's 'The Murder of Emmett Till' on their public television channels joined a postcard campaign that re-opened the murder case after more than half a century. Look at NPR's courageous coverage of the Iraq war, an expensive endeavor that wins no points from this Administration. Look at Chicago Access Network's Community Forum, where nonprofits throughout the region can showcase their issues and find volunteers."

For all our flaws, Pat argues that the public media are a very important resource in a noisy and polluted information environment.

You can also take wings reading Jason Miller's May 4 article on Z Net about the mainstream media. While it is true that much of it is corrupted by the influence of government and corporate interests, Miller writes, there are still men and women in the mainstream who practice a high degree of journalistic integrity and who do challenge us with their stories and analysis. But the real hope 'lies within the internet with its two billion or more web sites providing a wealth of information drawn from almost unlimited resources that span the globe ... If knowledge is power, one's capacity to increase that power increases exponentially through navigation of the Internet for news and information."

Surely this is one issue that unites us as we leave here today. The fight to preserve the web from corporate gatekeepers joins media reformers, producers and educators -- and it's a fight that has only just begun.

I want to tell you about another fight we're in today. The story I've come to share with you goes to the core of our belief that the quality of democracy and the quality of journalism are deeply entwined. I can tell this story because I've been living it. It's been in the news this week, including reports of more attacks on a single journalist -- yours truly -- by the right-wing media and their allies at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

As some of you know, CPB was established almost 40 years ago to set broad policy for public broadcasting and to be a firewall between political influence and program content. What some on this board are now doing today, led by its chairman, Kenneth Tomlinson, is too important, too disturbing and, yes, even too dangerous for a gathering like this not to address.

We're seeing unfold a contemporary example of the age-old ambition of power and ideology to squelch and punish journalists who tell the stories that make princes and priests uncomfortable.

Let me assure you that I take in stride attacks by the radical right-wingers who have not given up demonizing me although I retired over six months ago. They've been after me for years now and I suspect they will be stomping on my grave to make sure I don't come back from the dead. I should remind them, however, that one of our boys pulled it off some 2,000 years ago -- after the Pharisees, Sadducees and Caesar's surrogates thought they had shut him up for good. Of course I won't be expecting that kind of miracle, but I should put my detractors on notice: They might just compel me out of the rocking chair and back into the anchor chair.

Who are they? I mean the people obsessed with control, using the government to threaten and intimidate. I mean the people who are hollowing out middle-class security even as they enlist the sons and daughters of the working class in a war to make sure Ahmed Chalabi winds up controlling Iraq's oil. I mean the people who turn faith-based initiatives into a slush fund and who encourage the pious to look heavenward and pray so as not to see the long arm of privilege and power picking their pockets. I mean the people who squelch free speech in an effort to obliterate dissent and consolidate their orthodoxy into the official view of reality from which any deviation becomes unpatriotic heresy.

That's who I mean. And if that's editorializing, so be it. A free press is one where it's OK to state the conclusion you're led to by the evidence.

One reason I'm in hot water is because my colleagues and I at "Now" didn't play by the conventional rules of Beltway journalism. Those rules divide the world into Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, and allow journalists to pretend they have done their job if, instead of reporting the truth behind the news, they merely give each side an opportunity to spin the news.

Jonathan Mermin writes about this in a recent essay in World Policy Journal. (You'll also want to read his book, "Debating War and Peace, Media Coverage of U.S. Intervention in the Post Vietnam Era.")

Mermin quotes David Ignatius of the Washington Post on why the deep interests of the American public are so poorly served by Beltway journalism. The "rules of our game," says Ignatius, "make it hard for us to tee up an issue ... without a news peg." He offers a case in point: the debacle of America's occupation of Iraq. "If Senator so and so hasn't criticized post-war planning for Iraq," says Ignatius, "then it's hard for a reporter to write a story about that."

Mermin also quotes public television's Jim Lehrer acknowledging that unless an official says something is so, it isn't news. Why were journalists not discussing the occupation of Iraq? Because, says Lehrer, "the word 'occupation' .. was never mentioned in the run-up to the war." Washington talked about the invasion as "a war of liberation, not a war of occupation, so as a consequence, "those of us in journalism never even looked at the issue of occupation."

"In other words," says Jonathan Mermin, "if the government isn't talking about it, we don't report it." He concludes, "[Lehrer's] somewhat jarring declaration, one of many recent admissions by journalists that their reporting failed to prepare the public for the calamitous occupation that has followed the 'liberation' of Iraq, reveals just how far the actual practice of American journalism has deviated from the First Amendment ideal of a press that is independent of the government."

Take the example (also cited by Mermin) of Charles J. Hanley. Hanley is a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter for the Associated Press, whose fall 2003 story on the torture of Iraqis in American prisons -- before a U.S. Army report and photographs documenting the abuse surfaced -- was ignored by major American newspapers. Hanley attributes this lack of interest to the fact that "It was not an officially sanctioned story that begins with a handout from an official source." Furthermore, Iraqis recounting their own personal experience of Abu Ghraib simply did not have the credibility with Beltway journalists of American officials denying that such things happened. Judith Miller of the New York Times, among others, relied on the credibility of official but unnamed sources when she served essentially as the government stenographer for claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.

These "rules of the game" permit Washington officials to set the agenda for journalism, leaving the press all too often simply to recount what officials say instead of subjecting their words and deeds to critical scrutiny. Instead of acting as filters for readers and viewers, sifting the truth from the propaganda, reporters and anchors attentively transcribe both sides of the spin invariably failing to provide context, background or any sense of which claims hold up and which are misleading.

I decided long ago that this wasn't healthy for democracy. I came to see that "news is what people want to keep hidden and everything else is publicity." In my documentaries -- whether on the Watergate scandals 30 years ago or the Iran Contra conspiracy 20 years ago or Bill Clinton's fundraising scandals 10 years ago or, five years ago, the chemical industry's long and despicable cover-up of its cynical and unspeakable withholding of critical data about its toxic products from its workers, I realized that investigative journalism could not be a collaboration between the journalist and the subject. Objectivity is not satisfied by two opposing people offering competing opinions, leaving the viewer to split the difference.

I came to believe that objective journalism means describing the object being reported on, including the little fibs and fantasies as well as the Big Lie of the people in power. In no way does this permit journalists to make accusations and allegations. It means, instead, making sure that your reporting and your conclusions can be nailed to the post with confirming evidence.

This is always hard to do, but it has never been harder than today. Without a trace of irony, the powers-that-be have appropriated the newspeak vernacular of George Orwell's "1984." They give us a program vowing "No Child Left Behind" while cutting funds for educating disadvantaged kids. They give us legislation cheerily calling for "Clear Skies" and "Healthy Forests" that give us neither. And that's just for starters.

In Orwell's "1984," the character Syme, one of the writers of that totalitarian society's dictionary, explains to the protagonist Winston, "Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?" "Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now? The whole climate of thought," he said, "will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking -- not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness."

An unconscious people, an indoctrinated people, a people fed only on partisan information and opinions that confirm their own bias, a people made morbidly obese in mind and spirit by the junk food of propaganda, is less inclined to put up a fight, to ask questions and be skeptical. That kind of orthodoxy can kill a democracy -- or worse.

I learned about this the hard way. I grew up in the South where the truth about slavery, race, and segregation had been driven from the pulpits, driven from the classrooms and driven from the newsrooms. It took a bloody Civil War to bring the truth home and then it took another hundred years for the truth to make us free.

Then I served in the Johnson administration. Imbued with cold war orthodoxy and confident that "might makes right," we circled the wagons, listened only to each other, and pursued policies the evidence couldn't carry. The results were devastating for Vietnamese and Americans.

I brought all of this to the task when PBS asked me after 9/11 to start a new weekly broadcast. They wanted us to make it different from anything else on the air --commercial or public broadcasting. They asked us to tell stories no one else was reporting and to offer a venue to people who might not otherwise be heard. That wasn't a hard sell. I had been deeply impressed by studies published in leading peer-reviewed scholarly journals by a team of researchers led by Vassar College sociologist William Hoynes. Extensive research on the content of public television over a decade found that political discussions on our public affairs programs generally included a limited set of voices that offer a narrow range of perspectives on current issues and events. Instead of far-ranging discussions and debates, the kind that might engage viewers as citizens, not simply as audiences, this research found that public affairs programs on PBS stations were populated by the standard set of elite news sources. Whether government officials and Washington journalists (talking about political strategy) or corporate sources (talking about stock prices or the economy from the investor's viewpoint), Public television, unfortunately, all too often was offering the same kind of discussions, and a similar brand of insider discourse, that is featured regularly on commercial television.

Who didn't appear was also revealing. Hoynes and his team found that in contrast to the conservative mantra that public television routinely featured the voices of anti-establishment critics, "alternative perspectives were rare on public television and were effectively drowned out by the stream of government and corporate views that represented the vast majority of sources on our broadcasts." The so-called experts who got most of the face time came primarily from mainstream news organizations and Washington think tanks rather than diverse interests. Economic news, for example, was almost entirely refracted through the views of business people, investors and business journalists. Voices outside the corporate/Wall Street universe -- nonprofessional workers, labor representatives, consumer advocates and the general public were rarely heard. In sum, these two studies concluded, the economic coverage was so narrow that the views and the activities of most citizens became irrelevant.

All this went against the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 that created the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. I know. I was there. As a young policy assistant to President Johnson, I attended my first meeting to discuss the future of public broadcasting in 1964 in the office of the Commissioner of Education. I know firsthand that the Public Broadcasting Act was meant to provide an alternative to commercial television and to reflect the diversity of the American people.

This, too, was on my mind when we assembled the team for "Now." It was just after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. We agreed on two priorities. First, we wanted to do our part to keep the conversation of democracy going. That meant talking to a wide range of people across the spectrum -- left, right and center. It meant poets, philosophers, politicians, scientists, sages and scribblers. It meant Isabel Allende, the novelist, and Amity Shlaes, the columnist for the Financial Times. It meant the former nun and best-selling author Karen Armstrong, and it meant the right-wing evangelical columnist Cal Thomas. It meant Arundhati Roy from India, Doris Lessing from London, David Suzuki from Canada, and Bernard Henry-Levi from Paris. It also meant two successive editors of the Wall Street Journal, Robert Bartley and Paul Gigot, the editor of the Economist, Bill Emmott, the Nation's Katrina vanden Heuvel and the Los Angeles Weekly's John Powers. It means liberals like Frank Wu, Ossie Davis and Gregory Nava, and conservatives like Frank Gaffney, Grover Norquist, and Richard Viguerie. It meant Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Bishop Wilton Gregory of the Catholic Bishops conference in this country. It meant the conservative Christian activist and lobbyist Ralph Reed, and the dissident Catholic Sister Joan Chittister. We threw the conversation of democracy open to all comers. Most of those who came responded the same way that Ron Paul, Republican and Libertarian congressman from Texas did when he wrote me after his appearance, "I have received hundreds of positive e-mails from your viewers. I appreciate the format of your program which allows time for a full discussion of ideas ... I'm tired of political shows featuring two guests shouting over each other and offering the same arguments ... NOW was truly refreshing."

Hold your applause because that's not the point of the story.

We had a second priority. We intended to do strong, honest and accurate reporting, telling stories we knew people in high places wouldn't like.

I told our producers and correspondents that in our field reporting our job was to get as close as possible to the verifiable truth. This was all the more imperative in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks. America could be entering a long war against an elusive and stateless enemy with no definable measure of victory and no limit to its duration, cost or foreboding fear. The rise of a homeland security state meant government could justify extraordinary measures in exchange for protecting citizens against unnamed, even unproven, threats.

Furthermore, increased spending during a national emergency can produce a spectacle of corruption behind a smokescreen of secrecy. I reminded our team of the words of the news photographer in Tom Stoppard's play who said, "People do terrible things to each other, but it's worse when everyone is kept in the dark."

I also reminded them of how the correspondent and historian Richard Reeves answered a student who asked him to define real news. "Real news," Reeves responded, "is the news you and I need to keep our freedoms."

For these reasons and in that spirit we went about reporting on Washington as no one else in broadcasting -- except occasionally "60 Minutes" -- was doing. We reported on the expansion of the Justice Department's power of surveillance. We reported on the escalating Pentagon budget and expensive weapons that didn't work. We reported on how campaign contributions influenced legislation and policy to skew resources to the comfortable and well-connected while our troops were fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq with inadequate training and armor. We reported on how the Bush administration was shredding the Freedom of Information Act. We went around the country to report on how closed-door, backroom deals in Washington were costing ordinary workers and taxpayers their livelihood and security. We reported on offshore tax havens that enable wealthy and powerful Americans to avoid their fair share of national security and the social contract.

And always -- because what people know depends on who owns the press -- we kept coming back to the media business itself -- to how mega media corporations were pushing journalism further and further down the hierarchy of values, how giant radio cartels were silencing critics while shutting communities off from essential information, and how the mega media companies were lobbying the FCC for the right to grow ever more powerful.

The broadcast caught on. Our ratings grew every year. There was even a spell when we were the only public affairs broadcast on PBS whose audience was going up instead of down.

Our journalistic peers took notice. The Los Angeles Times said, "NOW's team of reporters has regularly put the rest of the media to shame, pursuing stories few others bother to touch."

The Philadelphia Inquirer said our segments on the sciences, the arts, politics and the economy were "provocative public television at its best."

The Austin American Statesman called "Now" "the perfect antidote to today's high pitched decibel level -- a smart, calm, timely news program."

Frazier Moore of the Associated Press said we were "hard-edged when appropriate but never Hardball. Don't expect combat. Civility reigns."

And the Baton Rouge Advocate said "NOW invites viewers to consider the deeper implication of the daily headlines," drawing on "a wide range of viewpoints which transcend the typical labels of the political left or right."

Let me repeat that: "Now" draws on "a wide range of viewpoints which transcend the typical labels of the political left or right."

The Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 had been prophetic. Open public television to the American people -- offer diverse interests, ideas and voices .. be fearless in your belief in democracy -- and they will come.

Hold your applause -- that's not the point of the story.

The point of the story is something only a handful of our team, including my wife and partner, Judith Davidson Moyers, and I knew at the time -- that the success of "Now's" journalism was creating a backlash in Washington.

The more compelling our journalism, the angrier the radical right of the Republican Party became. That's because the one thing they loathe more than liberals is the truth. And the quickest way to be damned by them as liberal is to tell the truth.

This is the point of my story: Ideologues don't want you to go beyond the typical labels of left and right. They embrace a worldview that can't be proven wrong because they will admit no evidence to the contrary. They want your reporting to validate their belief system and when it doesn't, God forbid. Never mind that their own stars were getting a fair shake on "Now": Gigot, Viguerie, David Keene of the American Conservative Union, Stephen Moore of the Club for Growth, and others. No, our reporting was giving the radical right fits because it wasn't the party line. It wasn't that we were getting it wrong. Only three times in three years did we err factually, and in each case we corrected those errors as soon as we confirmed their inaccuracy. The problem was that we were getting it right, not right-wing -- telling stories that partisans in power didn't want told.

I've always thought the American eagle needed a left wing and a right wing. The right wing would see to it that economic interests had their legitimate concerns addressed. The left wing would see to it that ordinary people were included in the bargain. Both would keep the great bird on course. But with two right wings or two left wings, it's no longer an eagle and it's going to crash.

My occasional commentaries got to them as well. Although apparently he never watched the broadcast (I guess he couldn't take the diversity) Senator Trent Lott came out squealing like a stuck pig when after the midterm elections in 2002 I described what was likely to happen now that all three branches of government were about to be controlled by one party dominated by the religious, corporate and political right. Instead of congratulating the winners for their election victory as some network broadcasters had done -- or celebrating their victory as Fox, the Washington Times, the Weekly Standard, Talk Radio and other partisan Republican journalists had done -- I provided a little independent analysis of what the victory meant. And I did it the old-fashioned way: I looked at the record, took the winners at their word, and drew the logical conclusion that they would use power as they always said they would. And I set forth this conclusion in my usual modest Texas way.

Events since then have confirmed the accuracy of what I said, but, to repeat, being right is exactly what the right doesn't want journalists to be.

Strange things began to happen. Friends in Washington called to say that they had heard of muttered threats that the PBS reauthorization would be held off "unless Moyers is dealt with." The Chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Kenneth Tomlinson, was said to be quite agitated. Apparently there was apoplexy in the right-wing aerie when I closed the broadcast one Friday night by putting an American flag in my lapel and said -- well, here's exactly what I said.

"I wore my flag tonight. First time. Until now I haven't thought it necessary to display a little metallic icon of patriotism for everyone to see. It was enough to vote, pay my taxes, perform my civic duties, speak my mind, and do my best to raise our kids to be good Americans.

"Sometimes I would offer a small prayer of gratitude that I had been born in a country whose institutions sustained me, whose armed forces protected me, and whose ideals inspired me; I offered my heart's affections in return. It no more occurred to me to flaunt the flag on my chest than it did to pin my mother's picture on my lapel to prove her son's love. Mother knew where I stood; so does my country. I even tuck a valentine in my tax returns on April 15.

"So what's this doing here? Well, I put it on to take it back. The flag's been hijacked and turned into a logo -- the trademark of a monopoly on patriotism. On those Sunday morning talk shows, official chests appear adorned with the flag as if it is the good housekeeping seal of approval. During the State of the Union, did you notice Bush and Cheney wearing the flag? How come? No administration's patriotism is ever in doubt, only its policies. And the flag bestows no immunity from error. When I see flags sprouting on official lapels, I think of the time in China when I saw Mao's little red book on every official's desk, omnipresent and unread.

"But more galling than anything are all those moralistic ideologues in Washington sporting the flag in their lapels while writing books and running Web sites and publishing magazines attacking dissenters as un-American. They are people whose ardor for war grows disproportionately to their distance from the fighting. They're in the same league as those swarms of corporate lobbyists wearing flags and prowling Capitol Hill for tax breaks even as they call for more spending on war.

"So I put this on as a modest riposte to men with flags in their lapels who shoot missiles from the safety of Washington think tanks, or argue that sacrifice is good as long as they don't have to make it, or approve of bribing governments to join the coalition of the willing (after they first stash the cash.) I put it on to remind myself that not every patriot thinks we should do to the people of Baghdad what bin Laden did to us. The flag belongs to the country, not to the government. And it reminds me that it's not un-American to think that war -- except in self-defense -- is a failure of moral imagination, political nerve, and diplomacy. Come to think of it, standing up to your government can mean standing up for your country."

That did it. That -- and our continuing reporting on overpricing at Haliburton, chicanery on K Street, and the heavy, if divinely guided, hand of Tom DeLay.

When Senator Lott protested that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting "has not seemed willing to deal with Bill Moyers," a new member of the board, a Republican fundraiser named Cheryl Halperin, who had been appointed by President Bush, agreed that CPB needed more power to do just that sort of thing. She left no doubt about the kind of penalty she would like to see imposed on malefactors like Moyers.

As rumors circulated about all this, I asked to meet with the CPB board to hear for myself what was being said. I thought it would be helpful for someone like me, who had been present at the creation and part of the system for almost 40 years, to talk about how CPB had been intended to be a heat shield to protect public broadcasters from exactly this kind of intimidation. After all, I'd been there at the time of Richard Nixon's attempted coup. In those days, public television had been really feisty and independent, and often targeted for attacks. A Woody Allen special that poked fun at Henry Kissinger in the Nixon administration had actually been canceled. The White House had been so outraged over a documentary called "The Banks and the Poor" that PBS was driven to adopt new guidelines. That didn't satisfy Nixon, and when public television hired two NBC reporters -- Robert McNeil and Sander Vanocur -- to co-anchor some new broadcasts, it was, for Nixon, the last straw. According to White House memos at the time, he was determined to "get the left wing commentators who are cutting us up off public television at once -- indeed, yesterday if possible."

Sound familiar?

Nixon vetoed the authorization for CPB with a message written in part by his sidekick Pat Buchanan who in a private memo had castigated Vanocur, MacNeil, Washington Week in Review, Black Journal and Bill Moyers as "unbalanced against the administration."

It does sound familiar.

I always knew Nixon would be back. I just didn't know this time he would be the chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Buchanan and Nixon succeeded in cutting CPB funding for all public affairs programming except for Black Journal. They knocked out multiyear funding for the National Public Affairs Center for Television, otherwise known as NPACT. And they voted to take away from the PBS staff the ultimate responsibility for the production of programming.

But in those days -- and this is what I wanted to share with Kenneth Tomlinson and his colleagues on the CPB board -- there were still Republicans in America who did not march in ideological lockstep and who stood on principle against politicizing public television. The chairman of the public station in Dallas was an industrialist named Ralph Rogers, a Republican but no party hack, who saw the White House intimidation as an assault on freedom of the press and led a nationwide effort to stop it. The chairman of CPB was former Republican congressman Thomas Curtis, who was also a principled man. He resigned, claiming White House interference. Within a few months, the crisis was over. CPB maintained its independence, PBS grew in strength, and Richard Nixon would soon face impeachment and resign for violating the public trust, not just public broadcasting. Paradoxically, the very Public Affairs Center for Television that Nixon had tried to kill -- NPACT -- put PBS on the map by rebroadcasting in prime time each day's Watergate hearings, drawing huge ratings night after night and establishing PBS as an ally of democracy. We should still be doing that sort of thing.

That was 33 years ago. I thought the current CPB board would like to hear and talk about the importance of standing up to political interference. I was wrong. They wouldn't meet with me. I tried three times. And it was all downhill after that.

I was naive, I guess. I simply never imagined that any CPB chairman, Democrat or Republican, would cross the line from resisting White House pressure to carrying it out for the White House. But that's what Kenneth Tomlinson has done. On Fox News this week he denied that he's carrying out a White House mandate or that he's ever had any conversations with any Bush administration official about PBS. But the New York Times reported that he enlisted Karl Rove to help kill a proposal that would have put on the CPB board people with experience in local radio and television. The Times also reported that "on the recommendation of administration officials" Tomlinson hired a White House flack (I know the genre) named Mary Catherine Andrews as a senior CPB staff member. While she was still reporting to Karl Rove at the White House, Andrews set up CPB's new ombudsman's office and had a hand in hiring the two people who will fill it, one of whom once worked for -- you guessed it -- Kenneth Tomlinson.

I would like to give Mr. Tomlinson the benefit of the doubt, but I can't. According to a book written about the Reader's Digest when he was its Editor-in-Chief, he surrounded himself with other right-wingers -- a pattern he's now following at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. There is Ms. Andrews from the White House. For Acting President he hired Ken Ferree from the FCC, who was Michael Powell's enforcer when Powell was deciding how to go about allowing the big media companies to get even bigger. According to a forthcoming book, one of Ferree's jobs was to engage in tactics designed to dismiss any serious objection to media monopolies. And, according to Eric Alterman, Ferree was even more contemptuous than Michael Powell of public participation in the process of determining media ownership. Alterman identifies Ferree as the FCC staffer who decided to issue a "protective order" designed to keep secret the market research on which the Republican majority on the commission based their vote to permit greater media consolidation.

It's not likely that with guys like this running the CPB some public television producer is going to say, "Hey, let's do something on how big media is affecting democracy."

Call it preventive capitulation.

As everyone knows, Mr. Tomlinson also put up a considerable sum of money, reportedly over $5 million, for a new weekly broadcast featuring Paul Gigot and the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal. Gigot is a smart journalist, a sharp editor, and a fine fellow. I had him on "Now" several times and even proposed that he become a regular contributor. The conversation of democracy -- remember? All stripes.

But I confess to some puzzlement that the Wall Street Journal, which in the past editorialized to cut PBS off the public tap, is now being subsidized by American taxpayers although its parent company, Dow Jones, had revenues in just the first quarter of this year of $400 million.

I thought public television was supposed to be an alternative to commercial media, not a funder of it.

But in this weird deal, you get a glimpse of the kind of programming Mr. Tomlinson apparently seems to prefer. Alone of the big major newspapers, the Wall Street Journal has no Op-Ed page where different opinions can compete with its right-wing editorials. The Journal's PBS broadcast is just as homogenous -- right-wingers talking to each other. Why not $5 million to put the editors of the Nation on PBS? Or Amy Goodman's "Democracy Now!" You balance right-wing talk with left-wing talk.

There's more. Only two weeks ago did we learn that Mr. Tomlinson had spent $10,000 last year to hire a contractor who would watch my show and report on political bias. That's right. Kenneth Y. Tomlinson spent $10,000 of your money to hire a guy to watch "Now" to find out who my guests were and what my stories were.

Ten thousand dollars.

Gee, Ken, for $2.50 a week, you could pick up a copy of "TV Guide" on the newsstand. A subscription is even cheaper, and I would have sent you a coupon that can save you up to 62 percent.

For that matter, Ken, all you had to do was watch the show yourself. You could have made it easier with a double Jim Beam, your favorite. Or you could have gone online where the listings are posted. Hell, you could have called me -- collect -- and I would have told you what was on the broadcast that night.

Ten thousand dollars. That would have bought five tables at Thursday night's Conservative Salute for Tom DeLay. Better yet, that 10 grand would pay for the books in an elementary school classroom or an upgrade of its computer lab.

But having sent that cash, what did he find? Only Mr. Tomlinson knows. He apparently decided not to share the results with his staff or his board or leak it to Robert Novak. The public paid for it -- but Ken Tomlinson acts as if he owns it.

In a May 10 Op-Ed piece, in Reverend Moon's conservative "Washington Times," Mr. Tomlinson maintained he had not released the findings because public broadcasting is such a delicate institution he did not want to "damage public broadcasting's image with controversy." Where I come from in Texas, we shovel that kind of stuff every day.

As we learned only this week, that's not the only news Mr. Tomlinson tried to keep to himself. As reported by Jeff Chester's Center for Digital Democracy, of which I am a supporter, there were two public opinion surveys commissioned by CPB but not released to the media -- not even to PBS and NPR! According to a source who talked to Salon.com, "the first results were too good and [Tomlinson] didn't believe them. After the Iraq war, the board commissioned another round of polling and they thought they'd get worse results."

But they didn't.

The data revealed that, in reality, public broadcasting has an 80 percent favorable rating and that "the majority of the U.S. adult population does not believe that the news and information programming on public broadcasting is biased."

In fact, more than half believed PBS provided more in-depth and trustworthy news and information than the networks and 55 percent said PBS was "fair and balanced."

I repeat: I would like to have given Mr. Tomlinson the benefit of the doubt. But this is the man who was running the Voice of America back in 1984 when a partisan named Charlie Wick was politicizing the United States Information Agency of which Voice of America was a part. It turned out there was a blacklist of people who had been removed from the list of prominent Americans sent abroad to lecture on behalf of America and the USIA. What's more, it was discovered that evidence as to how those people were chosen to be on the blacklist -- more than 700 documents -- had been shredded. Among those on the lists of journalists, writers, scholars and politicians were dangerous left wing subversives like Walter Cronkite, James Baldwin, Gary Hart, Ralph Nader, Ben Bradlee, Coretta Scott King and David Brinkley.

The person who took the fall for the blacklist was another right-winger. He resigned. Shortly thereafter, so did Kenneth Tomlinson, who had been one of the people in the agency with the authority to see the lists of potential speakers and allowed to strike people's names.

Let me be clear about this: There is no record, apparently, of what Ken Tomlinson did. We don't know whether he supported or protested the blacklisting of so many American liberals. Or what he thinks of it now.

But I had hoped Bill O'Reilly would have asked him about it when he appeared on "The O'Reilly Factor" this week. He didn't. Instead, Tomlinson went on attacking me with O'Reilly egging him on, and he went on denying he was carrying out a partisan mandate despite published reports to the contrary. The only time you could be sure he was telling the truth was at the end of the broadcast when he said to O'Reilly, "We love your show."

We love your show.

I wrote Kenneth Tomlinson on Friday and asked him to sit down with me for one hour on PBS and talk about all this. I suggested that he choose the moderator and the guidelines.

There is one other thing in particular I would like to ask him about. In his Op-Ed essay this week in the Washington Times, Ken Tomlinson tells of a phone call from an old friend complaining about my bias. Wrote Mr. Tomlinson: "The friend explained that the foundation he heads made a six-figure contribution to his local television station for digital conversion. But he declared there would be no more contributions until something was done about the network's bias."

Apparently that's Kenneth Tomlinson's method of governance. Money talks and buys the influence it wants.

I would like to ask him to listen to a different voice.

This letter came to me last year from a woman in New York, five pages of handwriting. She said, among other things, that "After the worst sneak attack in our history, there's not been a moment to reflect, a moment to let the horror resonate, a moment to feel the pain and regroup as humans. No, since I lost my husband on 9/11, not only our family's world, but the whole world seems to have gotten even worse than that tragic day." She wanted me to know that on 9/11 her husband was not on duty. "He was home with me having coffee. My daughter and grandson, living only five blocks from the Towers, had to be evacuated with masks -- terror all around ... my other daughter, near the Brooklyn Bridge ... my son in high school. But my Charlie took off like a lightning bolt to be with his men from the Special Operations Command. 'Bring my gear to the plaza,' he told his aide immediately after the first plane struck the North Tower .. He took action based on the responsibility he felt for his job and his men and for those Towers that he loved."

In the FDNY, she continued, chain-of-command rules extend to every captain of every firehouse in the city. "If anything happens in the firehouse -- at any time -- even if the Captain isn't on duty or on vacation -- that Captain is responsible for everything that goes on there 24/7." So she asked: "Why is this Administration responsible for nothing? All that they do is pass the blame. This is not leadership ... Watch everyone pass the blame again in this recent torture case [Abu Ghraib] of Iraqi prisons ..."

She told me that she and her husband had watched my series on "Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth" together and that now she was a faithful fan of "Now." She wrote: "We need more programs like yours to wake America up .. Such programs must continue amidst the sea of false images and name calling that divide America now ... Such programs give us hope that search will continue to get this imperfect human condition on to a higher plane. So thank you and all of those who work with you. Without public broadcasting, all we would call news would be merely carefully controlled propaganda."

Enclosed with the letter was a check made out to "Channel 13 -- NOW" for $500.

I keep a copy of that check above my desk to remind me of what journalism is about.

Kenneth Tomlinson has his demanding donors.

I'll take the widow's mite any day.

Someone has said recently that the great raucous mob that is democracy is rarely heard and that it's not just the fault of the current residents of the White House and the capital. There's too great a chasm between those of us in this business and those who depend on TV and radio as their window to the world. We treat them too much as an audience and not enough as citizens. They're invited to look through the window but too infrequently to come through the door and to participate, to make public broadcasting truly public.

To that end, five public interests groups including Common Cause and Consumers Union will be holding informational sessions around the country to "take public broadcasting back" -- to take it back from threats, from interference, from those who would tell us we can only think what they command us to think.

It's a worthy goal.

We're big kids; we can handle controversy and diversity, whether it's political or religious points of view or two loving lesbian moms and their kids, visited by a cartoon rabbit. We are not too fragile or insecure to see America and the world entire for all their magnificent and sometimes violent confusion. "There used to be a thing or a commodity we put great store by," John Steinbeck wrote. "It was called the people."

Claudia D. Dikinis
AstroConsultants of Santa Monica
http://starcats.com
cddstarcats@yahoo.com

http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2005/05/19/newsweek/index.html

Wrong and right
Newsweek clearly erred in its sourcing, but the White House is committing a far greater sin in ignoring the overwhelming evidence of U.S. abuse of Muslim detainees.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Sidney Blumenthal

May 19, 2005 | Michael Isikoff has become the

While the administration faults Newsweek for relying on a flawed source, it has refused to respond specifically to the reports of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee and the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction that in constructing its case for going to war in Iraq it was reliant on disinformation from bogus Iraqi émigré sources, especially the agent dubbed Curveball, who was exposed as a duplicitous alcoholic. While demanding a retraction and an apology from Newsweek, nobody in the administration has ever bothered to respond to former Secretary of State Colin Powell's statement that he was " deceived="" in="" delivering="" his="" feb="" 5="" 2003="" speech="" before="" the="" united="" nations="" security="" council="" about="">WMD in Iraq, which had 26 major errors. By this standard, perhaps the president should reward Isikoff with the Medal of Freedom that he has bestowed on the architects of "catastrophic success."

In fact, the allegation published by Newsweek has been made by many former detainees at Guantánamo. The New York Times rightly reports that these have not been "authenticated." The reason they have not is that they cannot be. In the absence of the due process of law, denied to detainees in the floating netherworld of this gulag, absolutely nothing can be "authenticated."

The controversy about the desecrated Quran touches on merely one technique. Many other methods of torture have been "authenticated," including the persistent abuse of Islam. Newsweek's item appeared soon after a new book providing just such a firsthand account was published, "Inside the Wire" by Erik Saar, a former Army interpreter at Guantánamo, with Viveca Novak, a correspondent for Time magazine. He witnessed provocatively attired female interrogators rubbing their genitals in front of chained detainees and then smearing them with red liquid they were told was menstrual blood. Saar also documents how detainees were forced to view pornographic videos and magazines. "Had someone come to me before I left for Gitmo and told me we would use women to sexually torment detainees to try to sever their relationships with God, I probably would have thought that sounded fine," he writes. "But I hated myself when I walked out of that room ... We lost the high road ... There wasn't enough hot water in all of Cuba to make me feel clean."

Newsweek's story also follows the publication last month of a report by Human Rights Watch, "Getting Away With Torture? Command Responsibility for the U.S. Abuse of Detainees." The report discusses at length why "shocked" FBI agents have been ordered not to be present at torture sessions conducted by CIA agents and military interrogators:

"There is growing evidence that detainees at Guantánamo have suffered torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment. Reports by FBI agents who witnessed detainee abuse -- including the forcing of chained detainees to sit in their own excrement -- have recently emerged, adding to the statements of former detainees describing the use of painful stress positions, extended solitary confinement, use of military dogs to threaten them, threats of torture and death, and prolonged exposure to extremes of heat, cold and noise."

The Human Rights Watch report provides more irrefutable detail: "In particular, agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation express their shock at techniques used on detainees. In one e-mail, an FBI agent wrote: Here is a brief summary of what I observed at GTMO. On a couple of occassions [sic], I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food, or water. Most times they had urinated or defacated [sic] on themselves and had been left there for 18, 24 hours or more. On one occassion [sic], the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold. When I asked the [military police] what was going on, I was told that interrogators from the day prior had ordered this treatment, and the detainee was not to be moved. On another occassion [sic], the A/C had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room probably well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his own hair out throughout the night. On another occassion [sic], not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been since the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the tile floor. Another FBI agent reported seeing a detainee 'sitting on the floor of the interview room with an Israeli flag draped around him, loud music being played and a strobe light flashing.'"

The Newsweek item was published just days after the travesty that has been the trial of Spc. Lynddie England. The learning-disabled National Guardsman from rural Appalachia was tried for the various humiliations visited upon prisoners in Abu Ghraib in Iraq. She was depicted in infamous photographs gleefully posing next to piled bodies of naked Iraqis, leading a prisoner by a leash, and engaging in other cruelties. Her lawyer arranged a plea bargain for a reduced sentence in exchange for an admission of guilt. But the former lover of the pliable England, Spc. Charles Graner, convicted in January of nine counts of abuse at Abu Ghraib, a seductive and abusive character, testified that the photographs of the naked pyramid were intended to train other guards. The military judge promptly threw out England's plea bargain, entered a plea of not guilty, and ordered a new trial. "You can't have a one-person conspiracy," said the judge.

The Pentagon, however, has ruled that the torture policy as a criminal matter is confined to a conspiracy among the likes of England and Graner -- and one-star Gen. Janice Karpinski, who was in charge of Abu Ghraib and who was cited on May 5 (as Newsweek was going to press) for dereliction of duty and shoplifting (for good measure). "I believe I was a convenient scapegoat," she remarked. At the same time, everyone else up the chain of command was exonerated, including Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, whose decisions facilitated the torture policy. Nor was Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the former commandant at Guantánamo, held culpable, though it was he who, upon Pentagon orders, arranged the export of torture techniques from Guantánamo to prisons in Iraq.

Nor was anyone who devised the torture policy exempting the United States from the Geneva Conventions ever rebuked -- perhaps because President Bush signed the order. White House legal counsel Alberto Gonzales, who had called the Geneva Conventions "quaint" in a memo to the president, was rewarded by being named attorney general.

Nor was there any setback for Jay Bybee, assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel, who wrote the key torture memo, arguing that the president as commander in chief was not bound by existing law and that approved torture could be defined as "organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death." Bybee was awarded a judgeship on U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit.

Nor was Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who bears responsibility for his department, ever held to account. Rumsfeld, who has made hand notations on memos urging particular techniques of "stress and duress," makes a point of demonstrating his lack of accountability and even knowledge. When asked if he had read the report by Gen. Antonio Taguba on torture at Abu Ghraib, he answered, "Whether I have read every page, no. There is a lot of references and documentation to laws and conventions and procedures and requirements, but I have certainly read the conclusions and other aspects of it."

Nor was Lt. Gen. William Boykin, the officer sent from Guantánamo to Iraq to "Gitmo-ize" its prisons, removed from his position as assistant to the undersecretary of intelligence in the Pentagon. In 2003, Boykin, in uniform, gave a notorious PowerPoint presentation to a church group in which he explained that our enemy in the war on terrorism is "Satan"; that "they're after us because we're a Christian nation"; that compared to a Muslim believer, "my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God, and his was an idol"; and that Bush was divinely ordained as president: "Why is this man in the White House? The majority of Americans did not vote for him. Why is he there? And I tell you this morning that he's in the White House because God put him there for a time such as this." Boykin was very quietly chastised for his remarks, but he kept his post, where he remains to this day. The refusal to remove Boykin is widely seen in the Muslim world as proof that the United States is officially engaged in a religious crusade against Islam.

The Newsweek story is one of those journalistic incidents that are wrong in their sourcing but may well be right about the truth of the matter. The allegations of detainees (not "authenticated," as the Times reminds us) have been made to publicize torture besides the contempt shown the Islamic religion -- abuses that have in fact been widely "authenticated" by the Pentagon's own Fay/Jones report, the Church report, the Ryder report, the Taguba report, the Schlesinger report, the Schmidt report, and reports by nongovernmental organizations such as the Association of the Bar of the City of New York Committee on International Human Rights, Amnesty International, the American Bar Association, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and Human Rights Watch, among other credible groups.

Former detainees have given highly detailed accounts of their captivity and torture. Their motives may include revenge; they may indeed be Islamist terrorists. But these claims have also been recorded by their lawyers as part of the effort to create actual trials, to bring detainees like them to justice before the law, which the Bush administration is fighting tooth and nail.

One of the most graphic accounts of brutality is provided by those known as the Tipton Three, three men from the West Midlands of Britain who were captured in Afghanistan in 2001, held in Guantánamo, and released to Britain in March 2004 without being charged with any crimes. After their release, in June 2004, the Supreme Court ruled that the U.S. court system has the authority to decide whether foreign nationals held at Guantánamo are wrongfully imprisoned. The Tipton Three recounted their horrific travails to lawyers for the Center for Constitutional Rights, who represented them before the Supreme Court and produced a 115-page composite statement. In one of the many gruesome descriptions, a former detainee says: "The behavior of the guards towards our religious practices as well as the Koran was also, in my view, designed to cause us as much distress as possible. They would kick the Koran, throw it into the toilet and generally disrespect it."

Before the Newsweek mistake, there had been several such reports in the American press. The Washington Post, on March 26, 2003, reported several incidents of abuse of the Quran: "Merza Khan, who had been captured in northern Afghanistan while fighting for the Taliban, said Americans in Kandahar tied him up and alternately forced him to lie face down on the ground, then squat with his hands on his head for hours. He also said he saw American soldiers throw the Koran on the ground and sit on it while in Kandahar."

Knight Ridder Newspapers reported on March 6, 2005: "Captives at the Guantánamo Bay prison are alleging that guards kicked and stomped on Korans and cursed Allah, and that interrogators punished them by taking away their pants, knowing that would prevent them from praying. Guards also mocked captives at prayer and censored Islamic religious books, the captives allege. And in one incident, they say, a prison barber cut a cross-shaped patch of hair on an inmate's head. Most of the complaints come from the recently declassified notes of defense lawyers' interviews with prisoners, which Guantánamo officials initially stamped 'secret.' Under a federal court procedure for due-process appeals by about 100 inmates, portions are now being declassified."

The Los Angeles Times, on April 15, 2005, quoted a former detainee: "He said their Korans were taken and handled disrespectfully ... Al-Mutairi recalled three prisoner hunger strikes ... A third came after the Korans were mishandled."

The New York Times, on May 1, 2005, reported: "A former interrogator at Guantánamo, in an interview with The Times, confirmed the accounts of the hunger strikes, including the public expression of regret over the treatment of the Korans."

Overexcited and undersourced, Newsweek rushed into print with a story similar to those other major news organizations have published without a murmur of protest from the Bush administration. When Newsweek's story was used as a propaganda device by Islamists in Afghanistan, the Bush administration turned the tables on Newsweek, holding it responsible for the hostility of the Muslim world. The Bush administration has been successful in this single endeavor of journalistic criticism, detecting one unsound story among many unchallenged ones. But no amount of abject apologies by Newsweek's editors for shoddy practice can undo the damage done by Bush for his torture policy.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

About the writer Sidney Blumenthal, a former assistant and senior advisor to President Clinton and the author of "The Clinton Wars," is writing a column for Salon and the Guardian of London.

Claudia D. Dikinis
AstroConsultants of Santa Monica
http://starcats.com
cddstarcats@yahoo.com

No more Mr. Nice Guy: IRS swoops in for audits By Sandra Block, USA TODAY Determined to stop a troubling rise in tax fraud, the IRS is scrutinizing more returns, shutting down tax shelters and frog marching scofflaws into court. So as you hustle to file your 1040 before midnight Friday, should you worry about an audit? If you're a middle-income wage earner with a straightforward tax return, probably not. But if you're wealthy, self-employed or have had your returns prepared by an unorthodox tax adviser, keep good records. The IRS may want to chat with you. (Related story: IRS plans to close 105 walk-in assistance centers) For the past year, IRS Commissioner Mark Everson has been barnstorming the country, telling journalists, politicians and tax professionals that the nation's tax cops are back on the beat. The number of audits rose nearly 19% last year. Audits of high-income taxpayers rose 40%. In February, the Justice Department and the IRS indicted telecommunications entrepreneur Walter Anderson for allegedly failing to pay $200 million in federal and local taxes, the largest criminal tax case against an individual. At a time of rising federal budget deficits, there are powerful incentives to toughen tax enforcement. An IRS study released last month estimates that the "tax gap" — the difference between the amount taxpayers owe and the amount they actually pay, is $312 billion to $353 billion a year. But the study also found that workers who have taxes withheld from their paychecks are the least likely to cheat. Less than 1.5% of wages and salaries subject to third-party reporting or withholding are incorrectly reported, the study found. Kathleen Pedersen, 46, of Anchorage says her father was a tax attorney and "always made us aware of the possibility of an audit." She waited until the last minute to file, and her tax returns are more complicated than usual this year because she and her husband sold two homes in 2004. But Pedersen, who uses TurboTax software to prepare her family's taxes, isn't worried about being audited by the IRS. "I'm confident that if we were, we've got the information" to answer the IRS' questions, she says. Among the likely candidates for an IRS audit: •Wealthy taxpayers with big losses on their returns. The IRS has launched a major assault on tax shelters marketed to wealthy taxpayers. It has collected more than $3.2 billion from the so-called "Son of Boss" shelter, which used currency options and other financial products to create fictitious losses. Participants used the losses to avoid paying taxes on sales of stock options or business assets. Amounts collected from individual taxpayers who bought into the shelters ranged from $1 million to more than $100 million, the IRS said. The shelters were created because tax professionals thought they could get away with it, says Scott Michel, partner with Caplin & Drysdale and former chairman of the American Bar Association's committee on civil and criminal tax penalties. Now, tax professionals will be much less likely to recommend aggressive tax-avoidance strategies, he predicts. More tax-shelter cases are probably in the works, tax experts say. "The people who should be most concerned are those who entered into transactions that sounded too good to be true," says David Sands, chairman of the New York State Society of CPAs' IRS tax committee. •Unscrupulous tax preparers and their clients. The IRS and the Justice Department have aggressively pursued tax preparers who use fictitious deductions and other scams to inflate their clients' refunds. The IRS obtained 117 criminal convictions of tax preparers in fiscal 2004, up from 67 in 2003. In January, the agency issued a press release that included names of preparers who had been convicted of filing false tax returns. "I don't recall seeing them do that before," says Mel Schwarz, federal tax director for accounting firm Grant Thornton. A tax preparer's conviction can have far-reaching consequences. Typically, the IRS goes back and reviews all returns filed by the preparer's clients. Those individuals are liable for interest and penalties on unpaid taxes, sometimes going back years. And unlike with tax shelters, the clients aren't always wealthy. A frequent source of tax-preparer fraud is the earned income tax credit, designed to help the working poor. Unscrupulous preparers urge taxpayers to hide income or invent fictitious dependents to inflate the size of their credits. More than 70% of taxpayers who claim the earned income credit use tax preparers, yet they're still audited at a much higher rate than others, says Janet Spragens, a law professor at American University in Washington, D.C. Spragens, who directs a free tax clinic for low-income taxpayers, says many non-English-speaking taxpayers seek out preparers who speak their language, without checking their credentials or training. "The advice they get from these preparers can range from excellent to incompetent to totally fraudulent," Spragens testified at a recent IRS oversight board hearing. •The self-employed. Nearly 9.5 million workers were self-employed in 2004, up 22% from a decade earlier. The number of self-employed workers and independent contractors is expected to keep growing as companies seek to reduce benefit costs associated with full-time employees. But unlike wage-earners, the self-employed are responsible for reporting their income to the IRS. The IRS study found that underreported income accounted for 80% of the tax gap. Taxpayers who file a Schedule C, the form used to report profits and losses from a business, should expect more scrutiny from the IRS. In 2005, the IRS expects to audit 207,000 Schedule C returns, up 50% since 2002, says Kevin Brown, commissioner of the IRS' small business/self-employed division. That prospect unnerves Michelle Wicks, 35, owner of Michelle's of New York, a plus-size women's boutique in Islip Terrace, N.Y. Wicks started her business last April and is a sole proprietor, which means she's required to file Schedule C. Wicks has done her own taxes since she was 22, but she found Schedule C so confusing that she called the IRS several times with questions. Some IRS employees were helpful, others weren't, and one hung up on her, she says. Wicks has kept meticulous records in case her return triggers an audit. "I'm excited about my store, but this part of it is very scary," she says. The IRS is also paying more attention to the status of independent contractors, says Jeff Phelps, chief operating officer of ABE Services, a Sonoma, Calif.-based consulting firm. The IRS uses a complicated test to determine whether an individual is a contractor or employee, Phelps says. If it determines an individual is misclassified, the employer could face steep penalties and back taxes, and the worker could lose valuable self-employment deductions, he says. Enforcement obstacles For all its talk about chasing down the bad guys, the IRS enforcement initiative faces obstacles. Among them: •Money. President Bush's 2006 budget requests an additional $500 million to strengthen the IRS enforcement program. Sounds impressive, but it's not enough, says Charles Rossotti, head of the IRS from 1997 to 2002 and author of Many Unhappy Returns: One Man's Quest to Turn Around the Most Unpopular Organization in America. This proposed increase, like past budget hikes, probably will be eaten up by congressionally mandated pay raises for federal employees, Rossotti says. The IRS has 15,000 fewer workers than it had 10 years ago, Rossotti says. During the same period, the economy has grown significantly and is much more complex. "There just aren't enough resources to even tackle the most serious abusers," he says. •Perplexity. Beefing up enforcement efforts will require the IRS to enforce tax laws that are increasingly difficult for law-abiding taxpayers to obey. Eric Delore of Alameda, Calif., owes the IRS more than $400,000. He didn't participate in a tax shelter or invent illegal deductions for a home-based business. Delore, a technology professional, is in debt because he received incentive stock options from his former employer. Those options pushed him into the nightmare world of the alternative minimum tax. The AMT originally was created to prevent wealthy individuals from using loopholes to avoid paying taxes, but it's increasingly affecting middle-income taxpayers. Taxpayers who live in high-tax states or receive incentive stock options are particularly vulnerable. In 2000, Delore exercised stock options worth $1.1 million and held on to them so he could get a better tax rate when he sold. But his employer's stock price imploded when the tech bubble burst. By the time Delore sold his shares, they were worth $5,000. But because the AMT values stock options at the time of exercise, Delore was hit with a $420,000 tax bill. In 2001, Delore's employer filed for bankruptcy, and he lost his job. He's now working for a software company, but his struggles with the IRS continue. His bank accounts have been cleaned out and his paycheck intercepted. There's a lien on his house. He's tried twice to negotiate a lower tax bill with the IRS but was rejected both times. If the IRS rejects his latest offer, Delore, who is married and has two small children, says he'll be forced to file for bankruptcy protection. At a speech in February before the National Press Club, Everson said tax complexity "compromises both the service and enforcement missions of the IRS." Bush has named a bipartisan tax panel to study tax simplification. In the meantime, the number of taxpayers subject to the AMT continues to grow. More than 3 million will pay it this year. Delore now believes he took a big risk when he told the IRS that he exercised his options. He says horror stories like his encourage taxpayers to break the law. The government "should make compliance easier," he says. "Then you'll get more people paying their taxes."

Find this article at: http://www.usatoday.com/money/perfi/taxes/2005-04-13-irs-gets-tough_x.htm

Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com >^..^<
Political & Personal Astrology for a New Millennium

Madness takes its toll. Please have exact change.

"Collective Sollipsism" is what George Orwell called it: convincing the masses that 2 + 2 = 5 -- Gene Lyons

The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his deception, the one who lies with sincerity: André Gide

Integrity is telling myself the truth. And honesty is telling the truth to other people: Spencer Johnson

Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society: Ralph Waldo Emerson

"By words the mind is winged." - Aristophanes

"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty" -- Thomas Jefferson

A Succinct Summary of the 2004 Election

The Democrats' mistake was in thinking that a disastrous war,
national bankruptcy, erosion of civil liberties, corporate takeover
of government, environmental destruction, squandering our
economic and moral leadership in the world, and systematic
Administration lying would be of concern to the electorate.

The Republicans correctly saw that the chief concern of the
electorate was to keep gay couples from having an abortion.

Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com >^..^<>

Madness takes its toll. Please have exact change.

"Collective Sollipsism" is what George Orwell called it: convincing the masses that 2 + 2 = 5 -- Gene Lyons

The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his deception, the one who lies with sincerity: André Gide

Integrity is telling myself the truth. And honesty is telling the truth to other people: Spencer Johnson

Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society: Ralph Waldo Emerson

"By words the mind is winged." - Aristophanes

"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty" -- Thomas Jefferson

And on a different note Claudia write's this:

Dear Dr. Webster:

My, my. What our government will pay for while stumping on behalf of "the sanctity of all life" as Ms. Terri Schiavo lays dying in Pinellas, Florida.

Oh? Needless animal experiments such as the one you're conducting on tasing pigs is not a moral equivalent?

Then why not just come to a full stop and say to yourself: you know, tasing, whether done on a human or animal carries bad consequences.

Just how much do we need to know about how tasing will affect a pig?

Your conducting this project for our hypocritical Christian fascist government brings Sen. Bill Frist to mind. He's the "sanctity of life" heart transplant surgeon turned politico who used to adopt stray cats from animal shelters in Boston for dissection while in medical school. At least your experiment is out in the open. Frist lied to the animal shelters by passing himself off as this nice guy who just wanted an animal companion. Either way, it's another case of "the ends justifies the means. " In your case, the moral lapse is for a $500,000 grant.

Is this the America our founding fathers dreamed of?

Sincerely,

Claudia D. Dikinis,

_____________________________

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20050329/D894ME480.html

MADISON, Wis. (AP) - A professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison plans to study whether stun guns alone can kill pigs - or whether other medical factors must be at play - as part of an effort to understand why 70 people have died in North America since 2001 after being shocked by Tasers.

Led by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, outraged animal rights activists are calling for an end to the two-year study by John Webster, a professor emeritus of biomedical engineering.

Police hail stun guns as a nonlethal way to restrain unruly suspects. But critics blame the weapons for dozens of deaths, and police departments are reviewing how they use the devices, which shoot two small darts carrying about 50,000 volts of electricity to temporarily paralyze people.

Webster wants to test his hypothesis that Taser-related deaths were the result of heart failure fueled by drug use and other medical factors, not electrocution by the devices. To do so, researchers will begin in the next month studying how Taser electrical currents flow through 150-pound pigs.

Of three groups of pigs in the study, one will be given cocaine, one will be shocked with the devices, and one will be given both cocaine and electric blasts. Some will be subjected to Webster's "SuperTaser," up to 30 times as powerful as the model police use. All pigs will be on anesthesia so they won't feel pain.

"If the hypothesis is correct that Tasers do not electrocute the heart, then why are people dying in custody after they have been shot by Tasers? The people on our team have hypotheses why that's true and we intend to answer that question," Webster said. "Our goal is to save lives."

Animal rights activists say the study, funded by a $500,000 U.S. Department of Justice grant, is cruel and unnecessary. They plan protests on the UW-Madison campus starting this week.

"Shocking more pigs is only going to add their numbers to the Taser-related death statistics," Patti Gilman, whose brother died after being shot with a Taser in British Columbia in June 2004, wrote in a letter to the school. "Robert's death never should have happened. And neither should these experiments."

In a letter to PETA this month, UW-Madison Chancellor John Wiley said the study could have a significant impact on the use of stun guns. He said researchers have no other alternative than to use pigs, whose hearts are more like humans than any other species.

In Wisconsin, the state Department of Justice convened an advisory committee to create guidelines for police training and use of Tasers. On Tuesday, the committee is scheduled to hold its first public hearing in Stevens Point, where Webster will be among four presenters.

Webster said his research could lead to advice for how police should use the devices, standards for how powerful stun guns can be, and instructions for emergency room physicians on how to treat those who have been shocked.

Webster suggested some of the Taser-related deaths were from a rare condition known as malignant hyperthermia, in which bodies essentially overheat. He will test that theory on swine that have been specially bred to have the condition.

Other suspects may have died if potassium that is released into the blood stream after muscle contractions caused by a Taser shock reached the heart, Webster said. Cocaine use might be another factor, he said.

Webster's research is the first independent look at how Tasers affect pigs' hearts. Research published in January sponsored by Taser International, the Scottsdale, Ariz.-based maker of the devices, found that 15 times the charge from ordinary stun guns was needed to electrocute the heart of even the smallest pigs studied.

Taser said Webster is well-qualified to study the devices, which it says are safe. The company says Tasers are being used by more than 7,000 law enforcement, military and correctional agencies in the world.

"We welcome Professor Webster's research as it can provide continued independent research concerning the safety of our life-saving Taser technology," said company spokesman Steve Tuttle.

Taser research on animals dates to 1989, involving dogs, bulls and pigs, but Webster's study is the only known such research now under way, according to PETA.

While all the pigs will be filled with anesthesia, they will be euthanized after the experiments, said Webster, who predicted about 30 pigs would be used. The research could create a computer model that would eliminate the need for more animal testing, he said.

"I think this is an outstanding example of one of those questions that can only be answered using animals," said Eric Sandgren, a UW-Madison professor who heads a committee that oversees animal research. "Boy, there's been a lot of deaths from this. If the alternative is to go back to using bullets, let's find out how to make this safe."

That's a worthy goal, but researchers should instead study humans who have survived Taser shocks and autopsy reports of those who died, said Laura Yanne of PETA. She promised an "unprecedented" protest on Tuesday, but would not release details.

"Subjecting pigs to cruel experiments is not the way to go on this. It's so obvious," she said. "This is a half-million dollar boondoggle."

Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com >^..^<>

Madness takes its toll. Please have exact change.

"Collective Sollipsism" is what George Orwell called it: convincing the masses that 2 + 2 = 5 -- Gene Lyons

The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his deception, the one who lies with sincerity: André Gide

Integrity is telling myself the truth. And honesty is telling the truth to other people: Spencer Johnson

Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society: Ralph Waldo Emerson

"By words the mind is winged." - Aristophanes

"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty" -- Thomas Jefferson

March 24, 2005 http://wwwnytimes.com/2005/03/24/opinion/24dowd.html OP-ED COLUMNIST DeLay, Deny and Demagogue By MAUREEN DOWD h my God, we really are in a theocracy. Are the Republicans so obsessed with maintaining control over all branches of government, and are the Democrats so emasculated about not having any power, that they are willing to turn the nation into a wholly owned subsidiary of the church? The more dogma-driven activists, self-perpetuating pols and ratings-crazed broadcast media prattle about "faith," the less we honor the credo that a person's relationship with God should remain a private matter. As the Bush White House desperately maneuvers in Iraq to prevent the new government from being run according to the dictates of religious fundamentalists, it desperately maneuvers here to pander to religious fundamentalists who want to dictate how the government should be run. Maybe President Bush should spend less time preaching about spreading democracy around the world and more time worrying about our deteriorating democracy. Even some Republicans seemed appalled at this latest illustration of Nietzsche's observation that "morality is the best of all devices for leading mankind by the nose." As Christopher Shays, one of five House Republicans who voted against the bill to allow the Terri Schiavo case to be snatched from Florida state jurisdiction and moved to federal court, put it: "This Republican Party of Lincoln has become a party of theocracy. There are going to be repercussions from this vote." A CBS News poll yesterday found that 82 percent of the public was opposed to Congress and the president intervening in this case; 74 percent thought it was all about politics. The president, who couldn't be dragged outdoors to talk about the more than a hundred thousand people who died in the horrific tsunami, was willing to be dragged out of bed to sign a bill about one woman his base had fixated on. But with the new polls, the White House seemed to shrink back a bit. The scene on Capitol Hill this past week has been almost as absurdly macabre as the movie "Weekend at Bernie's," with Tom DeLay and Bill Frist propping up between them this poor woman in a vegetative state to indulge their own political agendas. Mr. DeLay, the poster child for ethical abuse, wanted to show that he is still a favorite of conservatives. Dr. Frist thinks he can ace out Jeb Bush to be 44, even though he has become a laughingstock by trying to rediagnose Ms. Schiavo's condition by video. As one disgusted Times reader suggested in an e-mail: "Americans ought to send Bill Frist their requests: 'Dear Dr. Frist: Please watch the enclosed video and tell us if that mole on my mother's cheek is cancer. Does she need surgery?' " Jeb, keeping up with the '08 competition, vainly tried to get Florida to declare Ms. Schiavo a ward of the state. Republicans easily abandon their cherished principles of individual privacy and states' rights when their personal ambitions come into play. The first time they snatched a case out of a Florida state court to give to a federal court, it was Bush v. Gore. This time, it's Bush v. Constitution. While Senate Democrats like Hillary Clinton, who are trying to curry favor with red staters, meekly allowed the shameful legislation to be enacted, at least some Floridian House members decided to put up a fight, though they knew they couldn't win. The president and his ideological partners don't believe in separation of powers. They just believe in their own power. First they tried to circumvent the Florida courts; now they're trying to pack the federal bench with trustworthy conservatives and even blow up the filibuster rule. But they may yet learn a lesson on checks and balances, as the federal courts rebuffed them in the Schiavo case. Mr. DeLay moved yesterday to file a friend of the court brief with the Supreme Court asking that Ms. Schiavo's feeding tube be restored while the federal court is deciding what to do. But as he exploits this one sad case, Mr. DeLay has voted to slash Medicaid by $15 billion, denying money to care for poor people in nursing homes, some on feeding tubes. Mr. DeLay made his personal stake clear at a conference last Friday organized by the Family Research Council, a conservative Christian group. He said that God had brought Terri Schiavo's struggle to the forefront "to help elevate the visibility of what is going on in America." He defined that as "attacks against the conservative movement, against me and against many others." So it's not about her crisis at all. It's about his crisis. E-mail: liberties@nytimes.com

Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com >^..^<
Political & Personal Astrology for a New Millennium

Madness takes its toll. Please have exact change.

"Collective Sollipsism" is what George Orwell called it: convincing the masses that 2 + 2 = 5 -- Gene Lyons

The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his deception, the one who lies with sincerity: André Gide

Integrity is telling myself the truth. And honesty is telling the truth to other people: Spencer Johnson

Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society: Ralph Waldo Emerson

"By words the mind is winged." - Aristophanes

"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty" -- Thomas Jefferson

I usually never post anything that sounds at all religious but this article is great!

Jammy


Welcome to Doomsday

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17852

By Bill Moyers

1.
There are times when what we journalists see and intend to write about dispassionately sends a shiver down the spine, shaking us from our neutrality. This has been happening to me frequently of late as one story after another drives home the fact that the delusional is no longer marginal but has come in from the fringe to influence the seats of power. We are witnessing today a coupling of ideology and theology that threatens our ability to meet the growing ecological crisis. Theology asserts propositions that need not be proven true, while ideologues hold stoutly to a world view despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality. The combination can make it impossible for a democracy to fashion real-world solutions to otherwise intractable challenges.

In the just-concluded election cycle, as Mark Silk writes in Religion in the News,

the assiduous cultivation of religious constituencies by the Bush apparat, and the undisguised intrusion of evangelical leaders and some conservative Catholic hierarchs into the presidential campaign, demonstrated that the old rule of maintaining a decent respect for the nonpartisanship of religion can now be broken with impunity.
The result is what the Italian scholar Emilio Gentile, quoted in Silk's newsletter, calls "political religion"—religion as an instrument of political combat. On gay marriage and abortion— the most conspicuous of the "non-negotiable" items in a widely distributed Catholic voter's guide—no one should be surprised what this political religion portends. The agenda has been foreshadowed for years, ever since Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and other right-wing Protestants set out to turn white evangelicals into a solid Republican voting bloc and reached out to make allies of their former antagonists, conservative Catholics.

What has been less apparent is the impact of the new political religion on environmental policy. Evangelical Christians have been divided. Some were indifferent. The majority of conservative evangelicals, on the other hand, have long hooked their view to the account in the first book of the Bible:

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them, and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth."
There are widely varying interpretations of this text, but it is safe to say that all presume human beings have inherited the earth to be used as they see fit. For many, God's gift to Adam and Eve of "dominion" over the earth and all its creatures has been taken as the right to unlimited exploitation. But as Blaine Harden reported recently in The Washington Post, some evangelicals are beginning to "go for the green." Last October the National Association of Evangelicals adopted an "Evangelical Call to Civic Responsibility," affirming that "God-given dominion is a sacred responsibility to steward the earth and not a license to abuse the creation of which we are a part." The declaration acknowledged that for the sake of clean air, clean water, and adequate resources, the government "has an obligation to protect its citizens from the effects of environmental degradation."

But even for green activists in evangelical circles, Harden wrote, "there are landmines."

Welcome to the Rapture!


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There are millions of Christians who believe the Bible is literally true, word for word. Some of them—we'll come back to the question of how many— subscribe to a fantastical theology concocted in the nineteenth century by two immigrant preachers who took disparate passages from the Bible and wove them with their own hallucinations into a narrative foretelling the return of Jesus and the end of the world. Google the "Rapture Index" and you will see just how the notion has seized the imagination of many a good and sincere believer (you will also see just where we stand right now in the ticking of the clock toward the culmination of history in the apocalypse). It is the inspiration for the best-selling books in America today—the twelve novels in the Left Behind series by Christian fundamentalist and religious- right warrior Tim LaHaye, a co- founder with Jerry Falwell of the Moral Majority.

The plot of the Rapture—the word never appears in the Bible although some fantasists insist it is the hidden code to the Book of Revelation—is rather simple, if bizarre. (The British writer George Monbiot recently did a brilliant dissection of it and I am indebted to him for refreshing my own insights.) Once Israel has occupied the rest of its "biblical lands," legions of the Antichrist will attack it, triggering a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon. As the Jews who have not been converted are burned the Messiah will return for the Rapture. True believers will be transported to heaven where, seated at the right hand of God, they will watch their political and religious opponents writhe in the misery of plagues—boils, sores, locusts, and frogs—during the several years of tribulation that follow.

I'm not making this up. Like Monbiot, I read the literature, including The Rapture Exposed, a recent book by Barbara Rossing, who teaches the New Testament at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, and America Right or Wrong, by Anatol Lieven, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. On my weekly broadcast for PBS, we reported on these true believers, following some of them from Texas to the West Bank. They are sincere, serious, and polite as they tell you they feel called to help bring the Rapture on as fulfillment of biblical prophecy. To this end they have declared solidarity with Israel and the Jewish settlements and backed up their support with money and volunteers.

For them the invasion of Iraq was a warm-up act, predicted in the Book of Revelation, where four angels "bound in the great river Euphrates" will be released "to slay the third part of man." A war with Islam in the Middle East is not something to be feared but welcomed—an essential conflagration on the road to redemption. The last time I Googled it, the Rapture Index stood at 144—approaching the critical threshold when the prophesy is fulfilled, the whole thing blows, the Son of God returns, and the righteous enter paradise while sinners will be condemned to eternal hellfire.

What does this mean for public policy and the environment? Listen to John Hagee, pastor of the 17,000- member Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, who is quoted in Rossing's book as saying: "Mark it down, take it to heart, and comfort one another with these words. Doomsday is coming for the earth, for the nations, and for individuals, but those who have trusted in Jesus will not be present on earth to witness the dire time of tribulation." Rossing sums up the message in five words that she says are basic Rapture credo: "The world cannot be saved." It leads to "appalling ethics," she reasons, because the faithful are relieved of concern for the environment, violence, and everything else except their personal salvation. The earth suffers the same fate as the unsaved. All are destroyed.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

How many true believers are there? It's impossible to pin down. But there is a constituency for the End Times. A Newsweek poll found that 36 percent of respondents held the Book of Revelation to be "true prophesy." (A Time/ CNN poll reported that one quarter think the Bible predicted the 9/11 attacks.) Drive across the country with your radio tuned to some of the 1,600 Christian radio stations or turn to some of the 250 Christian TV stations and you can hear the Gospel of the Apocalypse in sermon and song. Or go, as The Toronto Star's Tom Harpur did, to the Florida Panhandle where he came across an all-day conference "at one of the largest Protestant churches I have ever been in," the Village Baptist Church in Destin. The theme of the day was "Left Behind: A Conference on Biblical Prophecy about End Times" and among the speakers were none other than Tim LaHaye and two other leading voices in the religious right today, Gary Frazier and Ed Hindson. Here is what Harpur wrote for his newspaper:

I have never heard so much venom and dangerous ignorance spouted before an utterly unquestioning, otherwise normal-looking crowd in my life.... There were stunning statements about humans having been only 6,000 years on Earth and other denials of contemporary geology and biology. And we learned that the Rapture, which could happen any second now, but certainly within the next 40 years, will instantly sweep all the "saved" Americans (perhaps one-half the population) to heaven....
But these fantasies were harmless compared with the hatred against Islam that followed. Here are some direct quotes: "Islam is an intolerant religion—and it's clear whose side we should be on in the Middle East." Applause greeted these words: "Allah and Jehovah are not the same God.... Islam is a Satanic religion.... They're going to attack Israel for certain...." Gary Frazier shouted at the top of his lungs: "Wake Up! Wake Up!" And roughly eight hundred heads (at $25.00 per) nodded approval as he added that the left-wing, anti-Israel media—"for example, CNN"—will never tell the world the truth about Islam. According to these three, and the millions of Americans they lead, Muslims intend ultimately "to impose their religion on us all." It was clear, Harpur wrote: "A terrible, final war in the region is inevitable."


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

You can understand why people in the grip of such fantasies cannot be expected to worry about the environment. As Glenn Scherer writes in his report for the on-line environmental magazine Grist, why care about the earth when the droughts, floods, famine, and pestilence brought by ecological collapse are signs of the apocalypse foretold in the Bible? Why care about global climate change when you and yours will be rescued in the Rapture? Why bother to convert to alternative sources of energy and reduce dependence on oil from the volatile Middle East? Anyway, until Christ does return, the Lord will provide.

Scherer came upon a high school history book, America's Providential History, which is used in fundamentalist circles. Students are told that "the secular or socialist has a limited resource mentality and views the world as a pie…that needs to be cut up so everyone can get a piece." The Christian, however, "knows that the potential in God is unlimited and that there is no shortage of resources in God's Earth.... While many secularists view the world as overpopulated, Christians know that God has made the earth sufficiently large with plenty of resources to accommodate all of the people."

While it is impossible to know how many people hold these views, we do know that fundamentalists constitute a large and powerful proportion of the Republican base, and, as Anatol Lieven writes, "fundamentalist religiosity has become an integral part of the radicalization of the right in the US and of the tendency to demonize political opponents as traitors and enemies of God and America"—including, one must note, environmentalists, who are routinely castigated as villains and worse by the right. No wonder Karl Rove wandered the White House whistling "Onward Christian Soldiers" as he prepared for the 2004 elections.

2.
I am not suggesting that fundamentalists are running the government, but they constitute a significant force in the coalition that now holds a monopoly of power in Washington under a Republican Party that for a generation has been moved steadily to the right by its more extreme variants even as it has become more and more beholden to the corporations that finance it. One is foolish to think that their bizarre ideas do not matter. I have no idea what President Bush thinks of the fundamentalists' fantastical theology, but he would not be president without them. He suffuses his language with images and metaphors they appreciate, and they were bound to say amen when Bob Woodward reported that the President "was casting his vision, and that of the country, in the grand vision of God's master plan."

That will mean one thing to Dick Cheney and another to Tim LaHaye, but it will confirm their fraternity in a regime whose chief characteristics are ideological disdain for evidence and theological distrust of science. Many of the constituencies who make up this alliance don't see eye to eye on many things, but for President Bush's master plan for rolling back environmental protections they are united. A powerful current connects the administration's multinational corporate cronies who regard the environment as ripe for the picking and a hard-core constituency of fundamentalists who regard the environment as fuel for the fire that is coming. Once again, populist religion winds up serving the interests of economic elites.

The corporate, political, and religious right's hammerlock on environmental policy extends to the US Congress. Nearly half of its members before the election—231 legislators in all (more since the election)—are backed by the religious right, which includes several powerful fundamentalist leaders like LaHaye. Forty-five senators and 186 members of the 108th Congress earned 80 to 100 percent approval ratings from the most influential Christian Right advocacy groups. Not one includes the environment as one of their celebrated "moral values."


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

When I talk about this before a live audience I can see from the look on the faces before me just how hard it is for a journalist to report on such things with any credibility. So let me put on a personal level what sends the shiver down my spine.

I myself don't know how to be in this world without expecting a confident future and getting up every morning to do what I can to bring it about. I confess to having always been an optimist. Now, however, I remember my friend on Wall Street whom I once asked: "What do you think of the market?" "I'm optimistic," he answered. "Then why do you look so worried?" And he answered, "Because I am not sure my optimism is justified."

I'm not, either. Once upon a time I believed that people will protect the natural environment when they realize its importance to their health and to the health and lives of their children. Now I am not so sure. It's not that I don't want to believe this—it's just that as a journalist I have been trained to read the news and connect the dots.

I read that the administrator of the US Environmental Protection Agency has declared the election a mandate for President Bush on the environment. This for an administration:

• that wants to rewrite the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act protecting rare plant and animal species and their habitats, as well as the national Environmental Policy Act that requires the government to judge beforehand if actions might damage natural resources;
• that wants to relax pollution limits for ozone, eliminate vehicle tailpipe inspections, and ease pollution standards for cars, sport utility vehicles, and diesel-powered big trucks and heavy equipment;
• that wants a new international audit law to allow corporations to keep certain information about environmental problems secret from the public;
• that wants to drop all its New-Source Review suits against polluting coal-fired power plans and weaken consent decrees reached earlier with coal companies;
• that wants to open the Arctic Wildlife Refuge to drilling and increase drilling in Padre Island National Seashore, the longest stretch of undeveloped barrier island in the world and the last great coastal wild land in America;
• that is radically changing the management of our national forests to eliminate critical environmental reviews, open them to new roads, and give the timber companies a green light to slash and cut as they please.
I read the news and learned how the Environmental Protection Agency plotted to spend $9 million—$2 million of it from the President's friends at the American Chemistry Council—to pay poor families to continue the use of pesticides in their homes. These pesticides have been linked to neurological damage in children, but instead of ordering an end to their use, the government and the industry concocted a scheme to offer the families $970 each, as well as a camcorder and children's clothing, to serve as guinea pigs for the study.

I read that President Bush has more than one hundred high-level officials in his administration overseeing industries they once represented as lobbyists, lawyers, or corporate advocates—company insiders waved through the revolving door of government to assure that drug laws, food policies, land use, and the regulation of air pollu-tion are industry-friendly. Among the "advocates-turned-regulators" are a former meat industry lobbyist who helps decide how meat is labeled; a former drug company lobbyist who influences prescription drug policies; a former energy lobbyist who, while accepting payments for bringing clients into his old lobbying firm, helps to determine how much of our public lands those former clients can use for oil and gas drilling.

I read that civil penalties imposed by the Environmental Protection Agency against polluters in 2004 hit an fifteen-year low, in what amounts to an extended holiday for industry from effective compliance with environmental laws.

I read that the administration's allies at the International Policy Network, which is supported by Exxon-Mobil and others of like mind and interest, have issued a report describing global warming as "a myth" at practically the same time the President, who earlier rejected the international treaty outlining limits on greenhouse gases, wants to prevent any "written or oral report" from being issued by any international meetings on the issue.

I read not only the news but the fine print of a recent appropriations bill passed by Congress, with ob-scure amendments removing all endangered species protections from pesticides, prohibiting judicial review for a forest in Oregon, waiving environmental review for grazing permits on public lands, and weakening protection against development for crucial habitats in California.

I read all this and look up at the pictures on my desk, next to the computer —pictures of my grandchildren: Henry, age twelve; Thomas, ten; Nancy, eight; Jassie, three; SaraJane, one. I see the future looking back at me from those photographs and I say, "Father, forgive us, for we know not what we do." And then the shiver runs down my spine and I am seized by the realization: "That's not right. We do know what we are doing. We are stealing their future. Betraying their trust. Despoiling their world."

And I ask myself: Why? Is it because we don't care? Because we are greedy? Because we have lost our capacity for outrage, our ability to sustain indignation at injustice?

What has happened to our moral imagination?

On the heath Lear asks Gloucester: "How do you see the world?" And Gloucester, who is blind, answers: "I see it feelingly.'"

I see it feelingly.

Why don't we feel the world enough to save it—for our kin to come?

The news is not good these days. But as a journalist I know the news is never the end of the story. The news can be the truth that sets us free not only to feel but to fight for the future we want. The will to fight is the antidote to despair, the cure for cynicism, and the answer to those faces looking back at me from those photographs on my desk. We must match the science of human health to what the ancient Israelites called hochma—the science of the heart, the capacity to see and feel and then to act as if the future depended on us.

Believe me, it does.



Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com >^..^<
Political & Personal Astrology for a New Millennium

Madness takes its toll. Please have exact change.

"I have been thinking that I would make a proposition to my Republican friends... that if they will stop telling lies about the Democrats, we will stop telling the truth about them." -- Adlai Stevenson

The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his deception, the one who lies with sincerity: André Gide

Integrity is telling myself the truth. And honesty is telling the truth to other people: Spencer Johnson

Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society: Ralph Waldo Emerson

"By words the mind is winged." - Aristophanes

"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty" -- Thomas Jefferson

http://seetheforest.blogspot.com/2005_02_01_seetheforest_archive.html#110909138824507896

Checks and Balances and the "F-Word"

Is there enough going on to make you nervous yet? The Vice President of the United States was the keynote speaker at a conference where other speakers called for "a new McCarthyism" to bring "terror" to intellectuals, saying "let's oppress them [liberals]," and "the entire Harvard faculty" are "traitors." A Congressman said, "America's Operation Iraqi Freedom is still producing shock and awe, this time among the blame-America-first crowd," ? Then he said, "We continue to discover biological and chemical weapons and facilities to make them inside Iraq."

Meanwhile, right-wing commentators talk about killing American journalists, their premier blogs talk about former president Carter as being on the side of the enemy and leftists have "seamlessly taken up the cause of Islamic fascism". I have provided only a few examples.

When you hear threatening talk like this, in the company of the country's leadership, you know that whatever comes next isn't going to be pleasant. Things do not appear to be heading in a good direction at all. If you have been following this in the blogs, you know that more and more people are becoming concerned that the Right's rhetoric is growing ever more violent and totalitarian. Serious people have started referring to the "f-word." (See also here, here, here, here and many other places.)

Oliver Willis writes,

You cannot deal with that sort of ideology in any sort of accomodationist manner. Liberals need to understand this, from Democratic senators in Washington who still refuse to vote their conscience out of some sense of loyalty to a long-dead notion of civility in Washington, to progressive pundits who actually believe that their right-wing counterparts in the nation's media are actually there for a give-and-take rather than a chance to paint everyone to the left of Joe Lieberman as a terrorist sympathizer.

[. . .] Wake up, folks. We're in an ideological war with these folks and the sooner you realize that the better. The goal of the modern conservative movement, as embodied by George W. Bush, is not just a simple majority of conservative thought – rather, it is the elimination of everything but conservative thought.

I think we are entering a new phase of American history. These are not normal times, the pendulum is not swinging back, and historical trends of American politics no longer apply. American democracy was built on a system of checks and balances, and mechanisms of oversight and accountability. But the checks and balances and oversight and accountability are being removed. There is no Congressional oversight of this administration, the Justice Department does not investigate its crimes, the Federalist Society judges block all attempts to enforce the laws and the new media is no longer functional. The military acts as an arm of The Party and The Party is firmly in control of the State. The system of controls and protections that was carefully built over the last two centuries was put in place for reasons, by people who learned the lessons of history. I can not think of a time in history when a society left itself so wide open to tyranny from its leadership without it occurring.

Posted at 8:00 AM by Dave Johnson

__________

http://seetheforest.blogspot.com/2005_02_01_seetheforest_archive.html#110908992077997065

Dangerous

Another example of the dangerous direction the Right is taking us, from Heritage's Town Hall (Heritage is the hub of the modern Republican Party), Dennis Prager: Liberal feeling vs. Judeo-Christian values: Part VI. First, he goes after the enlightenment,

"Instead of being guided by God, the Bible and religion, great numbers -- in Western Europe, the great majority -- have looked elsewhere for moral and social guidelines. ... With the ascendancy of leftist values that has followed the decline of Judeo-Christian religion, personal feelings have supplanted universal standards. In fact, feelings are the major unifying characteristic among contemporary liberal positions."

Then he advocates war as the preferred solution to problems,

"Aside from reliance on feelings, how else can one explain a person who believes, let alone proudly announces on a bumper sticker, that "War is not the answer"? I know of no comparable conservative bumper sticker that is so demonstrably false and morally ignorant. Almost every great evil has been solved by war..."

Then vegetarians,

"The animals-and-humans-are-equivalent movement is based entirely on feelings. People see chickens killed and lobsters boiled, feel for the animals, and shortly thereafter abandon thought completely, and equate chicken and lobster suffering to that of a person under the same circumstances."

Then gays,

"The unprecedented support of liberals for radically redefining the basic institution of society, marriage and the family is another product of feelings -- sympathy for homosexuals. Thinking through the effects of such a radical redefinition on society and its children is not a liberal concern."

Then against self-esteem,

"The "self-esteem movement" -- now conceded to have been a great producer of mediocrity and narcissism -- was entirely a liberal invention based on feelings for kids."

Then against laws protecting women from sexual harassment,

"Sexual harassment laws have created a feelings-industrial complex. The entire concept of "hostile work environment" is feelings based. If one woman resents a swimsuit calendar on a co-worker's desk, laws have now been passed whose sole purpose is to protect her from having uncomfortable feelings."

Against non-Christians,

"Almost everything is affected by liberal feelings. For example, liberal opposition to calling a Christmas party by its rightful name is based on liberals' concern that non-Christians will feel bad. And for those liberals, nothing else matters -- not the legitimate desire of the vast majority of Americans to celebrate their holiday, let alone the narcissism of those non-Christians "offended" by a Christmas party."

And more of that kind of stuff. He concludes,

"And that, in a nutshell, is what our culture war is about -- Judeo-Christian values versus liberal/leftist feelings."

Remember, people like this are paid, and paid well to put out this kind of stuff. It is designed to reinforce a "narrative" - an overriding story in which specific things don't even have to be true, as long as they ride along with the larger script. Liberals hate God, aren't patriotic, etc.

Also at Town Hall today, Cal Thomas says it is time to close the mosques in the U.S.

Posted at 8:32 AM by Dave Johnson

Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com >^..^<
Political & Personal Astrology for a New Millennium

Madness takes its toll. Please have exact change.

The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his deception, the one who lies with sincerity: André Gide

Integrity is telling myself the truth. And honesty is telling the truth to other people: Spencer Johnson

Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society: Ralph Waldo Emerson

"By words the mind is winged." - Aristophanes

"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty" -- Thomas Jefferson