9 Santorum Speeches That Make Me Want to Throw Up.

Photo Credit: AFP

  

AlterNet / ByAdele M. Stan

 

The thought of living under a neo-theocracy makes me kind of queasy.

 

The topic was a speech that Rick Santorum, really, really didn't like -- the speech John F. Kennedy gave during the 1960 presidential campaign, in which Kennedy declared his belief in an "absolute" wall of separation between church and state.

"That makes me throw up," Santorum, the former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania told George Stephanopolous on the ABC News program, "This Week."

That got me to thinking about speeches that might make me throw up, and, funny thing, an awful lot of them were delivered by Rick Santorum. I mean, this guy is the oratorical equivalent of a bottle of ipecac.

The thought of living under a neo-theocracy makes me kind of queasy, and Santorum's oratory often displays judgments on the theology of others, not to mention the supremacy of his own, which he seems keen to institutionalize.

Then there's the anti-intellectualism, and the demonization of educators as "indoctrinators." Ew, that's a nasty taste in my mouth.

Another thing that gives me a case of agita: demeaning the memory of the Holocaust and its victims, as Santorum does when he uses what he calls "World War II metaphors" to compare President Barack Obama to Adolf Hitler, or Democratic procedural moves in the Senate to the Nazi invasion of France.


And racism -- damn, that stuff just gives me a major fit of chalushes, as in when the very pious senator repeatedly characterizes food-stamp recipients as black or members of "minority communities."


This list of nauseating pronouncements by the current frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination consists of remarks derived only from speeches (hence, none of his trademark anti-gay comments). There are many more invitations to cookie-tossing in the senator's numerous television appearances and written statements. These are presented in no particular order, and this is, by no means, a comprehensive list. But with such an embarrassment of vomitorious riches, one has to stop somewhere.

1. Hailing the Crusades; Spartansburg, SC (Feb. 22, 2011). While yet undecided on whether he had heard the call to run for the presidency, Santorum traveled to South Carolina to deliver a speech to the students of Oakbrook Preparatory School, a private Christian academy. There he educated the young men in attendance, explaining the glory of the Roman Catholic Church's crusades against the Muslims of the Holy Land. From GoUpstate, a South Carolina Web site:

"The idea that the Crusades and the fight of Christendom against Islam is somehow an aggression on our part is absolutely anti-historical," Santorum said. "And that is what the perception is by the American left who hates Christendom. They hate Christendom. They hate Western civilization at the core. That's the problem."

But Santorum, 52, disagreed with the "Christian Soldier" assessment.
"I don't see it that way at all," he said. "What I'm talking about is onward American soldiers. What we're talking about are core American values. 'All men are created equal' -- that's a Christian value, but it's an American value. It's become part of our national religion, if you will. The point I was trying to make was that the national faith, the national ideal, is rooted in the Christian ideal -- in the Judeo-Christian concept of the person."

During the same campaign trip, Santorum lashed out at African American women during a visit to a right-wing "crisis pregnancy center." As reported by GoUpstate:

He talked in part about what he said was the high rate of abortion among black women: "The most dangerous place for an African-American in this country is in the womb." He likened abortion to slavery, saying that Roe v. Wade treated unborn children as property, without rights -- just as black people had been defined years before under slavery.

2. Black People Take Your Money; Sioux City, IA (Jan. 1, 2012). At a campaign stop two days before the Iowa caucuses, Santorum stood before a nearly all-white crowd, telling them:

I don't want to make black people's lives better by giving them somebody else's money. I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money, and provide for themselves and their families. And the best way to do that is to get the manufacturing sector of the economy rolling again.

Three days later, Santorum denied that he said "black people," but had instead stumbled in his speech, using the syllable "blah" before the word "people." You can view the video here.

3. Education = Snobbery, Food Stamps = 'Minorities'; Troy, MI (Feb. 25, 2012). Addressing a crowd of activists for Americans for Prosperity, the Tea Party-allied organization founded by David Koch, Santorum derided the notion of making college available to all by calling Obama "a snob" -- a remark that drew cheers from the audience. College, after all, was basically a left-wing plot, Santorum seemed to say. (Earlier in the weekend, Koch, in a radio interview, suggested that Santorum was too "nuts" to be the GOP nominee because of the candidate's statements decrying birth control as "harmful to women.")

In the same speech, the former senator reprised his suggestion that recipients of food stamps and other safety-net aid are non-whites. CBS News has the video; the following transcript is mine:

...and I know what it means to have those manufacturing jobs at that entry level that get you in there. It gives you the opportunity to accumulate more skills over time and rise, so you can provide a better standard of living for your family. Those opportunities for working men and women. Not all folks are gifted in the same way. Some folks have incredible gifts with their hands. Some people have incredible gifts [unintelligible ] use it and want to work out there making things.

President Obama once said he wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob! There are good, decent men and women who go out and work hard every day and put their skills to tests that aren't taught by some liberal college professor to try to indoctrinate them. Oh, I understand why he wants you to go to college: to remake you in his image. I want to create jobs so that people can remake their children into their image, not his.

Then this, from the CBS News report:

Santorum said he planned to "talk to minority communities, not about giving them food stamps and government dependency, but about creating jobs that they can participate in and rise in society."

You can view the whole speech here, but you may want to have a pail at the ready.

4. The Would-Be Theologian-in-Chief; Columbus, OH (Feb. 18, 2012). Talking to supporters at a rally in Ohio, Santorum suggested that the whole of the Obama agenda is based on "a phony theology." As reported in the New York Times:

"It's about some phony ideal, some phony theology. Oh, not a theology based on the Bible, a different theology," he said. "But no less a theology."

In later comments to reporters, Mr. Santorum said while there are "a lot of different stripes" of Christianity, he believes that "if the president says he's a Christian, he's a Christian."

"I'm just saying he's imposing his values on the church, and I think that's wrong," he said, adding that he did not believe Mr. Obama was less of a Christian for doing so.

On CBS News' "Face the Nation" the next day, Santorum said he was talking specifically about the president's environmental policy and, no, he didn't mean to suggest that Obama is a Muslim or anything like that. (Actually, he was suggesting that the president is an earth-worshipping pagan whose earth-worship is a path to growing the size of government.) Transcript from ThinkProgress:

When you have a worldview that elevates the Earth above man and says that we can't take those resources because we're going to harm the Earth; by things that frankly are just not scientifically proven, for example, the politicization of the whole global warming debate — this is all an attempt to, you know, to centralize power and to give more power to the government.

5. Bomb Iran Because its Shi'ite Theology Is Scary; Salem, NH (Jan. 10, 2012). Speaking to New Hampshire primary voters gathered at an Elks Lodge, Santorum suggested that the reason Iran deserves to be bombed is that its nuclear program is based on some mighty scary Shi'ite end-times theology (that sounds suspiciously like pre-millennialist evangelical Christian end-times theology). From my own report:

They've located the facility in a little town called Qom [which he pronounced Kwome]. Qom happens to be a rather significant city in Iran. It's outside of Tehran, and their savior, if you will, from the Shi'a, the Shi'ite -- that's, the ruling class, the ruling government of Iran is Shi'ite, which is a minority among the Muslim world, but is a majority in Iran and in Iraq. But the Shi'ites have one of their holiest sites -- in the Shi'a religion, not as Muslims generally, but as Shi'ites -- is in Qom, because there's a well there called the Jamkaran well -- which is a well where their, they call it the the Mahdi -- the equivalent of, in some respects, of a Jesus figure -- who is gonna come back at the end of times and lead Shi'a Islam in the ruling of the world in peace and justice. That's what their end-of-times scenario is. Well, he comes back at a time of great chaos. And so there are many who speculate that there are folks over in Iran who wouldn't mind creating a time of great chaos, for religious reasons. And the fact that they built this nuclear program in this city, next to where this man is supposed to return, leads one to think that there may be more to it, since they could pick any other place in the state, in the country, to do so -- that there may be other reasons than to develop domestic nuclear power.

6. Satan Is Taking Over the US; Naples, FL (Aug. 29, 2008). Santorum knows what's wrong with America: Satan has taken possession of our once-great nation by inhabiting the bodies of liberals. That's the essence of the message he delivered at Ave Maria University more than three years ago, a message in which he says that the "father of lies" has run rampant in the academy and even through the mainline Protestant denominations (which are largely run by Christians with a progressive point of view). Right-Wing Watch dug up this speech, which despite its incendiary rhetoric, failed to merit a single question at the most recent debate, which was hosted by CNN. The video is here; part of RWW's transcript appears below:

This is not a political war at all. This is not a cultural war. This is a spiritual war. And the Father of Lies has his sights on what you would think the Father of Lies would have his sights on: a good, decent, powerful, influential country -- the United States of America. If you were Satan, who would you attack in this day and age. There is no one else to go after other than the United States and that has been the case now for almost two hundred years, once America's preeminence was sown by our great Founding Fathers.

He didn't have much success in the early days. Our foundation was very strong, in fact, is very strong. But over time, that great, acidic quality of time corrodes even the strongest foundations. And Satan has done so by attacking the great institutions of America, using those great vices of pride, vanity, and sensuality as the root to attack all of the strong plants that has so deeply rooted in the American tradition.

He was successful. He attacks all of us and he attacks all of our institutions. The place where he was, in my mind, the most successful and first successful was in academia. He understood pride of smart people. He attacked them at their weakest, that they were, in fact, smarter than everybody else and could come up with something new and different. Pursue new truths, deny the existence of truth, play with it because they're smart. And so academia, a long time ago, fell.

[...]

We all know that this country was founded on a Judeo-Christian ethic but the Judeo-Christian ethic was a Protestant Judeo-Christian ethic, sure the Catholics had some influence, but this was a Protestant country and the Protestant ethic, mainstream, mainline Protestantism, and of course we look at the shape of mainline Protestantism in this country and it is in shambles, it is gone from the world of Christianity as I see it.
[...]

...now I know you're going to challenge me on this one, but politics and government was the next to fall.

7. Wasting Energy Makes a Nation Great; Washington, DC (Feb. 10, 2012). There was much in Santorum's speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference speech to give one the bends: the standard smear of Obama as an enemy of religion (because of his administration's mandate that even women who work for businesses affiliated with the Roman Catholic Church should enjoy the same access to birth control as those who don't), and the derision of climate change science, which Santorum contends is a lie. But the kicker wasn't even his assertion that government attempts to make the nation more energy-efficient are a conspiracy for greater control over the lives of individuals; it was his contention that the more energy the nation wastes, the greater it will be:

One of the favorite tricks of the left is to use your sentimentality, is to use your proper understanding that we are stewards of this earth, and that we have a responsibility to hand off a beautiful earth to the next generation. And so they use that, and they've used it in the past to try to scare you into supporting radical ideas on the environment. They tried it with this idea, this politicization of science called manmade global warming.
You look at any country in the world...the higher the energy consumption, the higher their standard of living.

8. Democrats Are Just Like Nazi Invaders; Washington, DC (May 19, 2005). During the fight over President George W. Bush's nomination of Priscilla Owen to the federal bench, Democrats sought to delay the nomination by using a filibuster. Owens was known to have taken campaign cash from Enron executives, and Democrats fought her nomination because they alleged she was ethically unsuitable. Santorum, then the junior senator from Pennsylvania, stepped out on the senate floor to declare his opponents the moral equivalent of the Nazi army. ThinkProgress has the video; transcript from The Raw Story:

Some are suggesting we're trying to change the law, we're trying to break the rules. Remarkable. Remarkable hubris. I mean, imagine, the rule has been in place for 214 years that this is the way we confirm judges. Broken by the other side two years ago, and the audacity of some members to stand up and say, "How dare you break this rule?" It's the equivalent of Adolf Hitler in 1942: "I'm here in Paris. How dare you invade me? How dare you bomb my city? It's mine." This is no more the rule of the Senate than it was the rule of the Senate before not to filibuster. It was an understanding and agreement, and it has been abused..."

9. Not Really Comparing Obama to Hitler While Comparing Obama to Hitler; Cumming, GA (Feb. 19, 2012). Visiting one of the most conservative states on the March 6 Super Tuesday roster of primaries, Santorum turned to Hitler again, this time as a "metaphor" for the allegedly misplaced trust the American people have placed in Obama. Transcript via The Raw Story. CBS News has the video:

"Why? Because we're a hopeful people. We think, 'You know it will get better. Yeah, I mean, he's a nice guy. It won't be near as bad as what we think. You know, this will be OK. You know, maybe he's not the best guy.' After a while, you found out some things about this guy over in Europe and maybe he's not so good of a guy after all. But you know what? 'Why do we need to be involved? We'll just take care of our own problems, just get our families off to work and our kids off to school and we'll be okay.'"

Santorum later denied he was comparing Obama to Hitler, but it's hard to come away with any other conclusion. Pass the Pepto, please.
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Adele M. Stan is AlterNet's Washington correspondent.

Does Dry Cleaning Cause Cancer?

A shuttered dry cleaner. Daquella manera/Flickr

 

—By Kiera Butler

Rarely do I darken the doorstep of a dry cleaner. That's mainly because I am too cheap and lazy; I admit to having inflicted some verboten wash cycles on my few dry-clean-only dresses, followed by a sheepish line dry. The result is usually wrinkly but passable. I'm lucky: As you probably could have guessed, freshly-pressed suits are not the prevailing style at MoJo HQ. But I know plenty of people, especially men, who have to haul their collared shirts to the dry cleaner every week.

Unfortunately, all that dry cleaning takes a toll on the environment. The main reason is the chemical solvent that the vast majority of the nation's 34,000 dry cleaners use: tetrachloroethylene, or "perc" (short for another one of its names, perchloroethylene), which has found its way into soil, streams, and even drinking water. This month, in its first update on perc since 1988, the EPA officially identified it as a "likely human carcinogen." It also changed the chemical's reference dose—the amount of a substance considered to safe to ingest every day—from 0.01 miligrams per kilogram of body mass a day to 0.006 mg/kg, a decrease of 40 percent.

So are dry-cleaned clothes a health risk? The EPA focuses on the environmental effects of perc, emphasizing that it "does not believe that wearing clothes dry cleaned with perc will result in exposures which pose a risk of concern." But David Andrews, a senior scientist with the Environmental Working Group, still sees the practice as potentially risky. "We would still view that as an unnecessary exposure to a probable human carcinogen," he wrote in an email. "So to be cautious, we recommend avoiding conventional dry cleaners (not just for personal exposures, but for the environmental exposures that result from commercial use)."

The good news is that nontoxic dry cleaners are becoming easier to find. Most of them aren't technically "dry" at all; rather, they use liquids. A method called "wet cleaning" involves different water-based soaps and machine settings for various fabric types, while another uses liquid pressurized carbon dioxide. (Bonus: The CO₂ used in dry cleaning is typically captured as a byproduct from factories and plants, so it doesn't contribute to greenhouse gas emissions.) A third involves hydrocarbon-based solutions. Andrews considers wet cleaning and liquid CO₂ the most environmentally friendly options. Hydrocarbon solutions, he says, are "a step in the right direction"; a drawback, though, is that they are derived from petroleum.



I've found that my local green dry cleaners are a little more expensive than conventional cleaners, but this EPA report (PDF) says they shouldn't have to be: It found that wet cleaning can be economically competitive with dry cleaning, especially if the business doesn't try to do both. It's much more economical, according to the report, to specialize in wet-cleaning. The Federal Trade Commission is currently considering updating its requirements for garment care labels to include a "professional wet cleaning" option, which would be a major boon to the green cleaning industry.

Unfortunately, there's no widespread green-cleaning certification program yet, so your best bet as a consumer is to ask your local cleaners about their processes. You can also check out NRDC's handy and comprehensive guide to dry-cleaning alternatives here. Also take "dry clean only" labels with a grain of salt; Ecosalon has some tips on which fabrics are safe to wash at home.

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Kiera Butler is the articles editor at Mother Jones.

5 Great Moments in History That Could Teach Christian Zealots Important Lessons.

Photo Credit: C-SPAN

AlterNet / ByRob Boston

These important moments helped establish and maintain the separation of church and state in America.  

Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum says John F. Kennedy’s strong defense of church-state separation makes him want to “throw up.” His rival on the campaign trail, Newt Gingrich, frequently knocks “secular elites” who supposedly yearn to tear down America’s great Christian heritage. Meanwhile, Mitt Romney, a Mormon whose faith is not well understood by many Americans, would seem likely to benefit from an embrace of church-state separation, but fear of angering Religious Right voters keeps him from doing it.

It seems these days that a lot of public figures are wary of endorsing the separation of church and state. They shouldn’t be: The principle is as American as apple pie and has long roots in our nation. Of course, church-state separation and the religious and philosophical freedom it gives us didn’t just happen in America. It was all part of a long process, an evolution of attitudes over many years. There were plenty of bumps along the way, and lots of people weren’t convinced that dividing religion and government was the way to go – and some still aren’t today.

There have been many crucial moments in America’s church-state history, some of which took place before we were officially a nation. Here are five of the most significant.

1. The Flushing Remonstrance (1657): Back in the day when New York was New Amsterdam, it was a good idea to belong to the state-established Dutch Reformed Church. In fact, other religions were banned in the colony, and failing to show the proper degree of government-approved piety could land you behind bars. Everyone had to pay church taxes, and the law mandated that all children be baptized in the Reformed Church.

New Amsterdam’s leaders had a special antipathy toward Quakers. Members of that faith were barred from even entering the colony, and anyone who came across a Quaker was expected to turn him over to the authorities. Steep fines were levied on those who harbored Quakers.

In light of these strict laws, what happened in 1657 is nothing short of remarkable. Thirty residents of the village of Flushing (now part of Queens) sent a letter to Peter Stuyvesant, director of the colony, telling him to let up on the Quakers.

The signers argued that religious persecution wasn’t in keeping with Christian theology, and they boldly closed their letter by vowing to protect Quakers. Wrote the signers, “Therefore if any of these said persons come in love unto us, we cannot in conscience lay violent hands upon them, but give them free egresse and regresse unto our Town, and houses, as God shall persuade our consciences, for we are bounde by the law of God and man to doe good unto all men and evil to noe man.”

It should be noted that none of the signers were themselves Quakers. They were arguing for the rights of others. Not surprisingly, this didn’t go down too well. Some of the signers were thrown into jail and ordered to recant. Locked in filthy, vermin-ridden cells, they did so – at least on paper. Who knows what was really in their hearts?

The Remonstrance proved to be ahead of its time, but the signers were vindicated when religious liberty was ensured in the Bill of Rights in 1791.

2. James Madison’s Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments (1785): Patrick Henry was a fiery patriot famous for uttering the line, “Give me liberty or give me death!” But there was one area where Henry could not break with the British: All of his life, he argued in favor of church-state union.

James Madison disagreed. And when Henry proposed a bill in 1785 to require all Virginians to pay a tax to support “teachers of the Christian religion,” Madison swung into action. The diminutive Virginian penned the “Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments,” one of the greatest documents in American church-state history.

Madison’s Memorial and Remonstrance is essentially a list of 15 reasons why no one should be forced to pay taxes to support religion. The broadside circulated throughout the state, and petitions flooded the Virginia legislature demanding the defeat of the Henry bill. It was rejected.

What’s amazing about Madison’s document is that its arguments remain so relevant today, in this age of “faith-based” initiatives and demands for vouchers to fund religious schools.

Consider Point 5:

“[T]he Bill implies either that the Civil Magistrate is a competent Judge of Religious Truth; or that he may employ Religion as an engine of Civil policy. The first is an arrogant pretension falsified by the contradictory opinions of Rulers in all ages, and throughout the world: the second an unhallowed perversion of the means of salvation.”

Point 7 is also powerful:

“[E]xperience witnesseth that ecclesiastical establishments, instead of maintaining the purity and efficacy of Religion, have had a contrary operation. During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution.”

After the defeat of the Henry bill, Madison used the momentum he gained to push Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom through the legislature in 1786. The bill disestablished the Anglican Church in Virginia and ensured that no resident “shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinion in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.”


Historians agree that the Virginia struggle reverberated nationally. Five years later, Madison helped draft the First Amendment, writing church-state separation into the federal constitution.

3. George Washington’s Letter to Touro Synagogue (1790): Jews were uncertain of their status in the new nation of the United States of America. Even after the revolution, many states retained established Christian churches, and some states even barred non-Christians from holding public office.
In 1790, one year before the Bill of Rights was adopted, members of Touro Synagogue in Newport, RI, wrote to President George Washington to express their support for complete religious freedom.


Washington’s reply is a classic of religious liberty. He didn’t say that America was a “Christian nation.” He didn’t tell the Jews that they could expect toleration but little else. Instead, Washington assured the members of the synagogue that they need have no fears, and he assured them that they were valued members in the American experiment of freedom of conscience. Washington wrote:

“The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.”

Religious Right activists who believe that Washington favored an officially Christian America must find this letter vexing. Their vision was of a nation that favored Christianity by law but that might deign to extend toleration to other faiths. The father of our country explicitly rejected this vision in his missive.

4. Thomas Jefferson’s Letter to the Danbury Baptists (1802): Although the Bill of Rights was adopted in 1791, it wasn’t made binding on the states until Congress passed the 14th Amendment after the Civil War. After the Revolution, Connecticut retained its established church, Congregationalism. Members of other religions were compelled to support the church through taxation and were harassed in other ways.

Members of the Danbury Baptist Association were aware that Thomas Jefferson was a champion of religious liberty; they also knew Jefferson wrote the law that ended Virginia’s state-established church. In 1801, the Baptists wrote to Jefferson to thank him and express their hope that his view of religious freedom would someday come to Connecticut.

Jefferson knew his reply would become public and decided to use it to make a pronouncement on his views about church-state relations. He consulted with two members of his cabinet before sending the letter, revising and editing as he went along.

Jefferson’s response, dated Jan. 1, 1802, is rightly famous for this passage:

“Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between Church & State. Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties.”

Our third president’s “wall” metaphor has infuriated the Religious Right over the years, and they have labored in vain to dismiss the letter as a mere courtesy reply. The history of the document shows that the opposite was true: In a cover memo to Attorney General Levi Lincoln, Jefferson said he hoped his reply would assist in “sowing useful truths and principles among the people, which might germinate and become rooted among their political tenets.”

5. John F. Kennedy’s Address to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association (1960): This is the speech that makes Rick Santorum nauseous. It wouldn’t if he had a real appreciation for religious tolerance in America.

John F. Kennedy had to deal with a great deal of anti-Catholic prejudice during the 1960 presidential campaign. Rumors circulated that a Catholic president could not put loyalty to America above Rome, and some feared JFK would seek to impose Catholic doctrine on a nation that was still culturally Protestant.

With polls showing Kennedy running neck and neck with Richard M. Nixon, the Massachusetts senator decided to tackle the matter head on. He entered the lions’ den and arranged to deliver a major address on religion to a collection of Protestant ministers in Houston.

The Sept. 12, 1960 speech, strongly worded and deftly delivered, is today remembered as both a turning point in the 1960 campaign and a powerful affirmation of tolerance and church-state separation.

Asserted Kennedy, “I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute – where no Catholic prelate would tell the President, should he be Catholic, how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote – where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference – and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the President who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.

He continued, “I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish – where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source – where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials – and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.”


During his presidency, Kennedy put those words into action. He rejected demands from the Catholic hierarchy to extend tax aid to Catholic schools, and when the Supreme Court struck down mandatory school prayer in 1962, Kennedy reminded people that they could pray at home. Kennedy’s full-throttle endorsement of church-state separation and his vow to put the interests of the people ahead of church dogma still infuriates today’s budding theocrats.

Separation of church and state isn’t always respected today. Plenty of Religious Right activists, TV preachers and even politicians blast it. They should know that when they assail a principle that has given our nation a greater degree of religious liberty than any other people, they’re at odds with our history.

The current flock of GOP candidates might understand that if they spent less time pandering to religious zealots on the campaign trail and more time reading documents like these.
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Rob Boston is senior policy analyst at Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

Making Sustainability Legal: 9 Zombie Laws That Keep Cities From Going Green.

Photo Credit: Peter Blanchard

 

 

 

 

AlterNet / BySara Robinson

 

These outdated laws forbid sustainable choices -- and here's what you can do to change them.

 

You’ve done your part, you good greenie, you. You’ve changed out the light bulbs, bought energy-saving appliances, learned to recycle, tuned up your bike, joined a co-op, and bought a transit pass and/or a fuel-efficient car. Now you’re looking around, wondering what to do next. With spring around the corner, maybe you’d like to hang out the wash on a sunny day. Or perhaps you could build an apartment in your basement to increase both your income and your neighborhood’s density….


Not so fast. Because this is the point at which your city government is very likely to swoop down in a flurry of paperwork and citations, telling you in no uncertain terms: No. You can’t do that. We don’t care how green it is, it’s also against the law.

The Sightline Institute in Seattle is compiling a list of zombie laws — outdated city ordinances and homeowners’ association policies that may once have served a purpose, but now mostly just get in the way of people’s desire to live more sustainably. Sightline's Making Sustainability Legal Web site offers a couple of dozen examples — some obvious, some off-the-wall — and they’re looking to add to the list. Sightline executive director Alan Durning hopes this project will give inspiration to activists looking for easy battles that will result in big sustainability wins.

Here are nine examples of local laws that stand in the way of change, and need to be pulled off the books:

1. Clotheslines. Consider the facts. The clothes dryer is one of the biggest energy hogs in the average American home. There’s nothing like the sweet smell of sheets and towels that have been freshly dried out in the air and sunshine. Nineteen states have already put in place laws that allow home solar installations of all kinds. So why do over half the homeowners’ associations in the US — including some in those 19 states — explicitly ban clotheslines in their neighborhoods?

A gathering “right-to-dry” movement is rising up to challenge these rules, asserting that laws permitting solar hot water heaters and PV electrical cells must also permit solar-powered clothes drying technologies (that is, clotheslines). Model legislation is being proposed, and legal challenges are being launched. Take up your clothespins, America! You have nothing to lose but your big electricity bills.

2. Granny flats in suburban houses. The first step in making suburbs more sustainable is to increase their density. Those big lots usually have plenty of room to tuck a small apartment into the basement or over the garage; and allowing people to build them has all kinds of salutary effects. The extra rental income can help families afford their homes. The units increase the share of low-cost housing, thus expanding the economic and age diversity of the neighborhood. They allow families more flexibility in terms of elder care and launching young-adult kids; and also provide a new option to public employees like teachers or cops who may not be able to afford to live in the affluent neighborhoods they serve. They also enhance property values, increasing the tax base. And as the density goes up, so does the argument for building new amenities closer by, and increasing transit service to the area.
But most homeowners know how hard it is to get a legal permit to build such suites. City and county governments are still clinging to the same 1950s ordinances that created suburban sprawl in the first place. If we want to update our suburban infrastructure, simply letting people build infill housing that raises density is the first and most obvious step to take.

3. White Pages. When was the last time you used the White Pages? I know -- me neither. In an era of online 411, that big paper brick that arrives at your door once a year is mostly useful as an emergency booster-seat for visiting toddlers. Yet most states have laws mandating that this volume must be delivered to every residence, every year. Most of these laws also allow people to opt out, but almost nobody knows about this, so few people do.

Some states are beginning to reconsider this, though. In a warming world, we need those millions of trees a lot more than we need the White Pages. it makes more sense to change the laws so people will only get these volumes if they specifically ask for them. An opt-in policy will allow people who like and use their White Pages to have them — and the rest of us can do something else with the drawer or shelf we used to keep it on.

4. Strollers on buses. It sounds ridiculous. But it’s far from silly if you’re a mom who’s struggling to get around on transit with a stroller. In many cities, parents are required to unpack their kid and all their purchases out of the stroller, then fold up the stroller and pick it all up — stroller, bags and squirming baby — in two hands, then somehow get it all up onto the bus, then pay the fare, and then find a seat and not fall over while everybody else stands there, getting increasingly annoyed.
It’s no surprise that this routine is forcing the nation’s transit-loving urban parents off the buses and into minivans. They don’t really have any other choice if they want to get the shopping done. Some cities are starting to allow babies to stay in the strollers, and letting strollers park in the same seat-free open areas reserved for wheelchairs. Others, like Portland, OR, are raising curbs and buying buses with extra-low floors, creating a level path for anybody on wheels to drive right onto the bus.

5. Couchsurfing. In these more constrained times, a lot of intrepid travelers are discovering the joys of sites like couchsurfing.com and airbnb.com. Rather than pay for an expensive hotel room, you crash in someone’s spare bedroom. The traveler saves money and gets a local guide, and the homeowner makes money and maybe a new friend. And best of all, the ecological footprint of travel is dramatically reduced.

This is legal in much of the country. But in some big cities where hotel competition is already intense, hotel owners are goading cities into cracking down. New York, for example, is notoriously rigid about telling people who they can and can’t let stay in their houses, for how long, and under what terms. This is an emerging new travel option (or, more accurately, the modern revival of a cherished old custom of taking in lodgers and boarders), and Sightline warns that it needs to be aggressively guarded from a rising wave of ill-considered and protectionist regulation.

6. Toxic couches. While we’re on the subject of couches, don’t look now, but is yours toxic? Sightline’s Web site explains why you might have reason to worry:

California’s 12-second rule, a state flammability standard for foam-containing furniture, induces manufacturers to load their products with chemical flame retardants. It’s a stupid rule: it contaminates tens of millions of homes across North America with toxic substances — compounds that spread, harming people and animals. Of all the toxic industrial compounds in your body right now, a substantial share are flame retardants that came from foam furnishings — probably a larger share than any other category of industrial compounds....But the rule has no compensating benefit for fire safety. The 12-second rule does not save lives in fires. It is useless. That’s what the scientific evidence says. This rule is all pain, no gain.

This is one of those places where California’s outsized population footprint effectively imposes that state’s standards on the whole nation. Usually, that’s a good thing from a progressive standpoint; but on this issue, it’s putting us all in serious danger. In this case, it’s a big national problem that will entirely go away if just one state legislature decides to end it.

7. Food cart regulations. One of the most savory benefits of increasing density in a city is the rise of street food. Food carts and trucks are a cardinal sign of healthy urbanism, providing expanded food options on the fly wherever crowds are gathering right now. And they’re important new business incubators for upwardly mobile families as well.

However, wherever you see a thriving new street food scene, you’ll almost certainly hear the grumbling of nearby restaurant owners complaining about smell, crowds, mess, and hygiene. All of this, of course, is code for “our profits.” And critics naturally take their concerns to City Hall, where they get ordinances passed that stop the food trucks and carts in their tracks.

But these low-impact, small-footprint, flexible businesses deserve a place in our cities, and need to be protected. If the restaurant owners are smart, they’ll join the movement instead of fighting it, and start launching trucks of their own. There’s plenty of room for everybody — but only if we insist that there should be.

8. Person-to-person car-sharing. “The Pacific Northwest’s rolling stock of cars and trucks constitutes a mind-boggling amount of underutilized capital,” writes Sightline's Alan Durning. “The region has substantially more motor vehicles than licensed drivers. Everyone in the region could climb into a vehicle and no one would have to sit in the backseat. What’s more, the typical car is parked 23 hours a day. Most of us have more money tied up in our cars than in any other physical assets aside from our homes, and all that wealth is just sitting there in the driveway depreciating.”

The answer to this? Car-sharing. “Imagine leaving town for a week and coming back to learn that your vehicle had earned you $300 on the rental market. Or imagine that your car-sharing membership gave you access, on a moment’s notice, to thousands of private cars and trucks sprinkled around your city. Why endure the expense and hassle of car ownership when you can drive any make or model you choose and only pay for what you use?” Car-sharing not only makes far more effective use of the cars we have; paying for driving by the trip also incentivizes us to drive much, much less (up to 44 percent less, according to a UC Berkeley study) than we do.

Once again, the only thing standing in the way of implementing this idea is a thick wall of state laws. Some make it impossible to assign insurance liability to the person actually driving, leaving it all on the owner. Others try to apply stiff car rental taxes to car-sharing companies. Fortunately, California has led the way: in 2011, the state legislature cleared away the legal obstacles, and now car-sharing is thriving in the state. Other states are watching and following suit.

9. Pay-as-you-drive insurance. Auto insurers and sustainability experts agree: The most sensible way to buy auto insurance is by the mile. The less you drive, the more you save. Recent advances in technology make tracking car mileage easy; and consumers like it, because you don’t have to buy an expensive policy for a car you don’t drive very often. You pay for exactly what you use — no more, no less.

But most states still have insurance laws on the books that assume that people buy insurance by the year, not by the mile. There are old laws covering cancellation notifications and oversight regimes that simply aren’t compatible with the idea of buying and using insurance in blocks of 100 or 1,000 miles at time. A few states are starting to revise these laws, but there’s still a very long way to go before this will be legal.

Sightline’s Making Sustainability Legal project is actively on the lookout for more zombie laws that are ready to be changed. You're invited to email yours to editor@sightline.org.
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Sara Robinson is a trained social futurist and the editor of AlterNet's Vision page.

New Study Finds that Rich People are More Likely to Lie and Cheat.

 

By Sarah Jaffe | Sourced from AlterNet

Bloomberg (yes, the same Bloomberg news outlet owned by multibillionaire New York City mayor, because you can't make this stuff up) reports that a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that the "upper class"--their words--are more likely to behave unethically than those of us with less money.

Elizabeth Lopatto at Bloomberg wrote:

The “upper class,” as defined by the study, were more likely to break the law while driving, take candy from children, lie in negotiation, cheat to increase their odds of winning a prize and endorse unethical behavior at work, researchers reported today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Taken together, the experiments suggest at least some wealthier people “perceive greed as positive and beneficial,” probably as a result of education, personal independence and the resources they have to deal with potentially negative consequences, the authors wrote.

Take candy from children? Really now, guys, shouldn't there be limits?

The tests used in the study ranged from studying video to see whether people obeyed traffic laws--those with more expensive cars were less likely to do so--to having people interview a potential job candidate for a short-term job. In the job-seeking case, the participants were told that the job would shortly be eliminated, but the wealthier participants were less likely to tell the candidate that the job wouldn't last.

One more test had participants playing a game in which a computer rolled dice for them, for a chance to win a $50 gift certificate. The wealthier participants once again were more likely to lie about their score, even though the prize was comparatively less to them.

“A $50 prize is a measly sum to people who make $250,000 a year,” one of the study authors told Bloomberg. “So why are they more inclined to cheat? For a person with lower socioeconomic status, that $50 would get you more, and the risks are small.”

If the rich are more likely to lie and cheat for a tiny prize, why do so many still have a hard time believing that the Wall Streeters who helped crash the economy knew that they were doing something wrong?

7 Dangerous Lies About Plastic.

Photo Credit: NOAA Photo Library: fish1968 by LCDR Eric Johnson, NOAA Corps.

 

 

 

AlterNet / ByStiv Wilson

 

Big Plastic is big money and survives regulatory scrutiny by creating big spin. Here's what you need to know.

 

To receive a Ph.D in industrial chemistry in the United States, no American university requires candidates to take even a single toxicology class as part of their course work. We churn out new chemists with the divine power to manipulate the very structure of nature itself, without teaching them the divine wisdom of how to wield that power.


Nearly everything we consume or even interact with these days is made of plastic. The industry that produces plastic, largely represented by the American Chemistry Council (ACC), has an annual budget of over $120 million to protect its interests. But as the plague of plastic that wreaks havoc on our environment slowly gains the attention of policymakers, concerned citizens and the media, the makers of plastic resins and the companies that package their products have become increasingly aggressive about defending their respective bottom lines.


Taking tactics from Big Tobacco's playbook, the industry engages in bully tactics, politician buys and wide-scale misinformation campaigns meant to confuse the public and turn truth to speculation. Big Plastic is big money and survives regulatory scrutiny by creating big spin.


Because of slashed budgets to regulatory agencies, little private-sector money for watchdogging industry, and a lazy mainstream press that simply regurgitates its claims, the petrochemical industry goes largely unchecked. Here are some of the biggest whoppers.


Lie #1: Plastics are safe.
To date, we use over 248,000 chemicals in commerce and we don't know which ones are harmful or safe. Why? Because the vast amount of research on plastics we use in our lives comes from the plastic industry.


Much of the plastic we see on a daily basis we know by its designated recycling numbers 1 through 7. These plastics are not pure; rather, they're a proprietary formulation of additives, some of which have been shown to be endocrine disrupters, carcinogenic and pose countless other health concerns, but very, very little data exists on additives, toxicologically speaking. In the United States, chemicals that make plastics are innocent until proven guilty, leaving the burden of proof of toxicity to the vastly underfunded and under-staffed Environmental Protection Agency. With 248,000 chemicals on the market, don't expect any light shed here anytime soon.


Perhaps the best-known additive is bisphenol-A, or BPA. Though it's gained media traction having been shown to cause sexual mutations, cardiovascular disorders, obesity, and diabetes, the $6 billion annual industry makes the plastics industry protect it fiercely, even though Centers for Disease Control studies have shown that 93 percent of the adult population has BPA present in their urine. BPA has been on the radar of environmentalists for years but few policy victories have been won because industry-funded studies repeatedly don't show adverse effects, though all the independent studies do.


Lie #2: The so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch does not exist.
In a 25-page report for the Save the Bag Coalition, meant to refute claims made by the media and environmentalists about the presence of plastic in the ocean, attorney Stephen Joseph wrote that the "so-called 'Great Pacific Garbage Patch,' which is alleged to be twice the size of Texas, does not exist." To keep the speculation on the table, industry hammers on a single point; in early 2011, Oregon State University issued a press release titled, "Oceanic "Garbage Patch' Not Nearly As Big As Portrayed By Media" and a huge media storm ensued calling out environmentalists as a result.
Why this press release was so widely distributed is strange, because the woman who issued it isn't even a relevant name in the plastics research world. But seeing an opportunity to pound environmentalists, the plastic industry created a PR blitz sending press releases to media and form letters to lawmakers. What's interesting is that no one can attribute who first made the Texas-sized analogy, and no primary source for the quote exists, though it certainly went viral.


The researcher from OSU, Angelique White, is correct in her assessment from the best available data, but the data available isn't enough by several degrees of scale to accurately predict spatial distribution of plastics in the gyres (which any scientist who works on the issue will tell you, explicitly), or the ocean in general. To do so would mean that 70 percent of the surface of the earth surface had been sampled.


Well, that's not going to happen anytime soon, as research vessels cost about $30,000 a day and funding is very limited in this field, because so many corporate interests that might sponsor such research depend on plastic to deliver their products. What scientists do know is that 200 billion pounds of plastic are produced each year, and that number is on the rise, and mitigation strategies for keeping plastics out of the ocean are failing, horribly. Greenpeace estimates that of the 200 billion pounds produced annually, 10 percent makes it into the ocean.


To date, the best estimate of how much plastic is in the gyres comes from Columbia University. Researchers took all the major data sets (of which there are very, very few) that exist and calculated 73,878,000 pounds of plastic in the area of the gyres, which accounts for just 16 million of the earth's 315 million square kilometers of ocean surface.


Another problem with determining the scale of plastic pollution is that half of the plastics that are made sink and to date no data exists on how much plastic lies beneath the surface of the water. But when speaking only of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) water bottles, a type of plastic that sinks, we know that Americans alone discard 22 billion a year. Scientists who work on plastic in the ocean often refer to it as, "the world's largest dump." But without "conclusive" data, industry can stay on the offensive.


Lie #3: Plastics don't kill sea life or pose a threat to people eating fish.
While occasionally industry will acknowledge that marine animals do eat plastics from time to time, they make a point of stating that they don't know if the plastics are definitively responsible for the animal's death. To date, 177 species of marine life have been shown to ingest plastics and the number is likely to get much higher as more research is done. Recently published evidence has shown that shards of plastic eroded from synthetic clothing in the washing machine is so small that it can enter an animal at the cellular level.


But determining death, or eventual death of an animal based on a necropsy (autopsy for animals) is notoriously difficult in some cases. What's at issue is that again, industry takes advantage of the "unknowns" to make the assertion that their products don't cause morbidity. Scientists can't absolutely know what causes an animal's death unless it lives and dies in a controlled environment. But opening up a turtle stomach and finding pounds of plastic in it might give them a clue. How long would a turtle have survived with this much plastic garbage in his guts?


We know that most types of plastic aren't passed by a turtle and that it wreaks havoc on their digestive systems. We also know that carrying around a stomach full of plastic is going to slow him down and change his natural buoyancy. Sharper plastics, cause gut impaction and the potential for stomach wall and intestinal perforation. In the wild, everything about an animal's health and agility matters in determining his survival quotient.


In December, a study was published in Science Of The Total Environment that looked to see if the digestive juices of turtles could make plastic bags decay. Three common types of shopping bags (including bioplastic) were subjected to the gastrointestinal fluids of Green and Loggerheads turtles. Without exception, the ubiquitous High Density Polyethylene (HDPE) bag showed "negligible" biodegradability -- which means if a turtle can't pass it, he's stuck with it forever.


Beyond turtles, 9 percent of base food chain fish (which represents as much as 50 percent of the biomass of fish in the entire ocean) sampled in the North Pacific have been shown to ingest plastics, and along with it a toxic soup of PAHs, flame retardants, DDE (a persistent form of the outlawed DDT) and PCBs. Concentrations of these chemicals in ocean-borne plastics have been shown to be up to a million times higher than the ambient sea water around it.


Bigger fish eat the fish that eat these toxic bombs and so do humans at the top of the food chain. All humans have levels of these toxins in their blood and men can't get rid of them. Women can only pass the chemicals through the umbilical chord and through breast milk, and thus, a higher and higher chemical burden in the human body will result from generation to generation.


Lie #4: It shouldn't be called "plastic pollution" but rather "marine debris."
What's the most common type of plastic found on the surface of the ocean? According to the Ocean Conservancy's annual report, 11 percent of beach litter is plastic bags. But what happens when a plastic bag enters the ocean? Plastic doesn't biodegrade in any meaningful timeframe, but it photo-degrades. Thin, flimsy plastic like HDPE with a lot of surface area (like the common bag from grocery stores) photo-degrades faster than thicker plastic. Ultraviolet rays from the sun break the polymer chains of hydrocarbon molecules into smaller pieces and what you end up with is small fragments. So, you might not find a plastic bag in the "garbage patch" but you surely will find the remnants of them. Plastic bags are of the class of plastics recyclers refer to as "blow trash" as they tend to be picked up by the wind and blown out to sea. They're huge offenders of plastic pollution as Americans consume more than 100 billion a year.


Keith Christman, managing director for plastics markets at the ACC, maintained that "marine debris" is a better phrase than "plastic pollution" for describing the trash in the ocean even though 90 percent of the contents of the gyres is plastic. Christman, understanding the negative implications of his product's association with the word "pollution," mentioned that it's not just plastic, but derelict fishing gear as well. All modern fishing gear is made of polypropylene, i.e. plastic. This is a sore spot for the ACC, and marine plastics research and education groups that receive funding from the ACC are typically "mandated" to refer to oceanic trash as marine debris to keep the burden of guilt from resting squarely on their shoulders.


Lie #5: "Plastic retail carry-out bags are 100-percent recyclable and made from clean natural gas."
This is a direct statement issued by the American Progressive Bag Alliance to the city of Dana Point, California in a letter regarding a proposed bag ban. That plastic bags are 100 percent recyclable isn't the issue; it's that by and large, they are not recycled. Plastic bag recycling is governed by supply and demand. People assume that if they place a bag in a recycling receptacle this means the bag will in fact be recycled. That's not necessarily true. In order to show (very) modest positive trending in recycling, industry lops all polyethylene (PE) films, wraps and bags all into one category. But for bags discretely, which are high-density polyethylene, the numbers are atrocious. In 2009, the rate for recycling is 6.1 percent; in 2010, the rate is 4.3 percent.


Thus one of the main targets legislatively, is plastic shopping bags. The biggest player in the bag market, Hilex Poly, has become a master of spin tactics to attempt to paint a rosy picture of its business. Hilex, the largest recycler in the US, writes posts on its Web site patting itself on the back for increased recycling rates claiming that PE rates are up from 2009 to 2010. What it fails to mention is the distinction between the different types of PE, and that EPA itself doesn't independently audit the recycling industry, it just compiles industry's reporting.


There's another problem with plastic bag recyclability. According to Mark Daniels of Hilex Poly, only 30-percent post-consumer HDPE can be used to make a new bag, which means 70 percent of a "recycled" plastic bag comes from virgin sources (natural gas). Sometimes, recycled HDPE gets down-cycled into other products like decking materials. The problem here is that plastic decking materials have a lifespan as well, and no strategy for reclaiming them at the end of their lifespan has been introduced to the recycling markets.


When speaking of plastics in general (including plastic bags), even when there is a modest gain in recycling rates, those rates are far outpaced by higher consumption. From 2009 to 2010, plastics generated in the municipal waste stream jumped from 59,660,000 to 62,080,000 pounds. This is an increase of 2,420,000 pounds. In terms of recycling gains, the EPA reports 440,000 more pounds of all plastics recovered from 2009 to 2010.


So, if we subtract the increase in gains in recovery from the increase in generation we still get an increase of plastic generation of 1,980,000 pounds. This is the central conspiracy of the plastics industry tactically. If industry can convince the public that the environmental consequences of their consumption habits are offset by the industry-backed solution of recycling, industry is guaranteed that its bottom line will grow by hoodwinking the public into believing the myth of recycling.


What about natural gas, the stock for plastic bags? It is becoming scarcer and dirtier to get. According to the US Energy Information Administration, 35 percent of domestic natural gas drilling comes from fracking, and will reach 47 percent by 2035. Though natural gas burns cleaner than other fossil fuels, getting it out of the ground by fracking creates potent greenhouse gas emissions of methane and other undesired consequences. According to a congressional report released in April, the 14 biggest fracking companies released 3 billion liters of fracking fluid into the environment, including 29 chemicals known or suspected to be carcinogenic to humans. This is where your plastic bag comes from -- or at least 70 pecent of it.


Lie #6: Reusable bags are dangerous.
The American Chemistry Council is worried that Americans might not understand the danger of things when they get dirty. Like your underwear, if you don't wash your reusable bag, bacteria might grow in it. So, rather than issue a press release telling people to wash their bags, they funded a study looking at bacterial contamination of reusable bags.


Bacteria are myriad on everything we touch, but the presence of bacteria is natural and the microbe kingdom has a pretty good system of checks and balances. The study found that 12 percent of its 84-bag sample size found E. coli, and all samples but one contained bacteria. This finding spawned scary headlines in newspapers such as the Washington Post that read "Reusable Bags Found To Be Full Of Bacteria." But here's the problem: None of the bacteria (salmonella and listeria were not found), or the strains of E. coli present in reusable bags are harmful to humans.


The ACC, though absolutely knowing this, still went ahead on a PR blitz trying to scare the hell out of people about bacterial exposure. Thankfully, the study was officially debunked by Consumer Reports. My favorite bit from the article comes from a senior staff scientist at Consumer Reports, who said, "A person eating an average bag of salad greens gets more exposure to these bacteria than if they had licked the insides of the dirtiest bag from this study."


Lie #7: We care about polar bears and recycling.
Coca-Cola is one the world's largest producers of plastic waste. Coke creates cause marketing campaigns with corporate-aligned NGOs like World Wildlife Fund which is working with the Canadian government to to find an area of ice that can withstand climate change to create a sort of polar bear refuge, hoping to save the white bears from drowning because Artic ice is melting.
In total, Coke has pledged $2 million and another $1 million matching funds to consumer donations. What's ironic is that Coke uses a plastic bottle for much of its product's packaging and one-third of the volume of a plastic Coke bottle is what it takes to produce it from oil, and another third is what it takes to transport it to market. That's a lot of fossil fuel burning. Fossil fuel burning that melts polar ice that kills polar bears.


But perhaps the most egregious offense is that Coke vehemently opposes the only program proven to reduce its bottles' impact on the environment: bottle bills. Statistically, for states that have bottle deposits, the recovery rates for recycling are off the charts compared to those that don't. In California, recovery rates top 70 percent for PET bottles.


So what's a citizen to do? Unfortunately, cutting through the spin is a difficult task, but as always, when there is a lot of money to be had, injecting oneself with a healthy does of skepticism about the intentions of chemical companies that manipulate nature for profit is a good start. What's the best solution? Remember this: if you don't consume it in the first place, it can't damage you or the environment.


Avoiding plastics is not just a personal responsibility, it's an environmental mandate and should be as common in our global society as turning off the lights when you leave the room. There is no silver bullet solution to plastic pollution, more like a silver buckshot, but it all starts with you saying two words: "No Plastic."
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Stiv Wilson is a freelance journalist and communications and policy director for the 5 Gyres Institute, a global NGO working on plastic and chemical pollution in the world's oceans and watersheds.

The Right-Wing Plot to Undermine Science in Public Schools.

Photo Credit: Szasz-Fabian Ilka Erika via Shutterstock.com

Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com

AlterNet / ByKatherine Stewart

 

Leaked documents reveal a right-wing think-tank's plans to undermine the teaching of climate science -- and defund public education in the process.

|

Last week, climate science watchers confirmed what they already knew about the climate science “skepticism” of the Heartland Institute – a “free-market” think-tank previously known for taking money from tobacco companies to question the health risks of second-hand smoke.

As leaked documents now make clear, some of the Institute’s most prominent donors have a strong financial interest in sowing doubts about climate science. These documents also show that providing critical insight on humanity’s scientific knowledge matters far less to the group than running a lobbying and communications business aimed at undermining public confidence in science. (Although the details concerning the circumstances of the leak are the subject of much ongoing debate, the substance of the information revealed is not in dispute.)

Yet the most interesting revelation from the leaks may actually be the Heartland Institute’s intention to inflict its views on America’s public school students. According to the same internal documents, the Institute is currently investing in developing a curriculum for public school students beginning in Grade 6 – the principal aim of which is to create the illusion that “there is major controversy over whether or not humans are changing the weather.”

The Heartland Institute’s methods will be familiar to anyone acquainted with the ongoing efforts to burden the teaching of biology with creationism (or what is now called intelligent design). In both cases, the phrases “teach the controversy,” and “encourage critical thinking” serve as cover for initiatives whose real purpose is to discredit the science in favor of a “theory” that has nothing to do with science.

As a matter of principle, of course, there is no necessary or logical connection between promoting creationism in public schools and doing the same for climate science skepticism. As a matter of practice, however, it turns out that the two projects have much more in common than their rhetoric.

Right now, in the first two months of 2012, there are seven bills before state legislatures aimed at undermining the teaching of science in public schools: two each in Missouri and New Hampshire, and one each in Oklahoma, Tennessee and Indiana. Three of these bills are just as keen to sow doubts about “global warming” as they are about “biological evolution,” and one does not bother to specify which “scientific controversies” it wishes to teach. In addition, there is also one law already on the books (the Louisiana Science Education Act), which, although sophisticated enough to avoid endorsing creationism or climate science denial, opens the door to “critical thinking” on both topics.

There is no mystery to why creationism and global warming skepticism keep appearing on the same pieces of legislation across this country. It happens because, as it turns out, the same powerful people are keen to pursue both ends.

So who, aside from the Heartland Institute and its petroleum-friendly sponsors, is so keen to disinform America’s students? A good place to start would be with the signers of the so-called “Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation,” whose “Declaration on Environmental Stewardship” includes a theological pronouncement that “there is no convincing scientific evidence that human contribution to greenhouse gases is causing dangerous global warming.”

The signers of this declaration are nothing short of a Who’s Who of the religious right: Tony Perkins (president of the Family Research Council), David Barton (pseudo-historian and Wallbuilders founder and president), talk radio host Dennis Prager, Marvin Olasky (editor-in-chief of World magazine), and Charles W. Colson (chairman of Prison Fellowship Ministries), among many others. And tellingly, the founder and national spokesman of the Cornwall Alliance, E. Calvin Beisner, is not just “convinced that policies meant to reduce alleged carbon dioxide-induced global warming will be destructive,” he is also convinced that court rulings prohibiting the teaching of creationism—such as the federal court decision that took intelligent design out of the classrooms of the Dover (PA) Area School District in 2005—represent an “aggressive extreme secularism that would reject all reference in biology studies to intelligent design.”

The Cornwall Alliance is, of course, just an organization of words and pronouncements, but a close inspection of its list of supporters shows that it packs substantial legal firepower. Among the most powerful signers are the individuals behind the Alliance Defense Fund, the Liberty Counsel, and other legal advocacy groups of the Christian right. The declared aim of these groups is to advance “religious liberty,” and it so happens that their idea of religious liberty includes both the teaching of creationism and the teaching of global warming skepticism to public school students. (For example, they have been instrumental in lobbying for and threatening litigation on behalf of the Louisiana Science Education Act and other legislation intended to make the classrooms friendly for the kind of programs that the Heartland Institute would like to offer.)

Still, one might ask, why the focus on public schools? Of course the climate skeptics want to change the culture—but wouldn’t it make sense to start with policy makers and voters? Once you understand that the Heartland Institute is part of a program that extends beyond climate science, however, it becomes clear that the Institute and its allies have one other critical thing in common – a belief summed up by Calvin Beisner of the Cornwall Alliance with the following words: “Public schools are the enemy.”

 

 

 

As it turns out, like many of its allies, the Heartland Institute has a wing aimed at education “reform.” The Discovery Institute—a center for the promotion of the theory of intelligent design, which also happens to share at least one of its contributors with Heartland—also boasts a “reform” arm, as do the Alliance Defense Fund and their fellow legal groups. Though the various “reform” proposals these groups support typically involve rhetoric about “choice” and “markets” and “accountability,” when you boil off the vapors what you are left with is nothing more than a plan to take money away from public schools and hand it over to religious academies in the form of vouchers.

The Heartland Institute will continue to claim that its efforts are motivated by a desire to bring critical thinking to the schools. But the real problem it has with public schools is the fear that those schools will provide the kind of education that enables children to distinguish science from propaganda.

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Katherine Stewart is the author of "The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children" (Public Affairs).

Why Right-Wingers (and Media Hacks) Are Totally Wrong About What Americans Believe -- We're Becoming Less, Not More, Conservative.

 

 

 

 

 

AlterNet / BySarah Jaffe

 

 

Americans' views on the most pressing issues of the day are actually solidly progressive, so why do the media keep getting the story wrong?

 

 

Despite some misguided triumphalism on the Right, America is not getting more conservative. In fact, if you look at lots of public opinion polls, you'll find that just the opposite is true—Americans' views on the most pressing issues of the day are actually solidly progressive, with strong support for the social safety net and growing support for once-controversial social issues like marriage equality.
Nevertheless right-wing and center-contrarian media outlets love to jump on polls that identify Americans as conservative, without ever asking what the difference is between what your average Ohioan means by that word and what Marco Rubio means when he announces at CPAC that “the majority of Americans are conservatives.”

(Rubio's inaccurate comments sparked a controversy and prompted a vehement reaction from Rachel Maddow this week, as Politifact debunked his statement—but then rated it “mostly true” anyway, proving the pervasiveness of the myth of conservative America.)

An article by the Atlantic's Richard Florida titled, “Why America Keeps Getting More Conservative,” is an excellent example of the problem of relying on nebulously defined, self-identified “conservatism” as a measure of ideology. Florida cites new Gallup poll numbers (the same ones Rubio and Politifact cited) that the polling outlet itself said provided little evidence that America is “track[ing] right.” Gallup offered the far more innocuous headline, “Mississippi Most Conservative State, D.C. Most Liberal,” with the subhead: “State patterns in ideology largely stable compared with previous years.”

But “nothing has changed” doesn't make a good headline, and so Florida hooked an entire story on a false premise that belies the conclusions drawn by the pollsters he cites. Gallup goes on to point out, “Unlike political party identification, which has shifted significantly over the last four years, the state-by-state patterns in ideology have remained remarkably stable this year compared with previous years.”

And Ed Kilgore at the Washington Monthly noted:

If you look at the Gallup data on which Florida’s entire “analysis” (mainly just a charting of ideological self-identification by state) rests, it certainly doesn’t show any dramatic recent rightward trend. The percentage of Americans self-identifying as “conservative” since 1992 has varied from a low of 36% to a high of 40% (a high it reached in 2004, before dropping to 37% in 2008). As it happens, the percentage of Americans (again, according to Gallup) self-identifying as “liberal” has also gone up 4% since 1992 (from 17% to 21%). The percentage self-identifying as “moderates” has, accordingly, drifted down from 43% in 1992 to 35% in 2011, though the number was only two points higher in 2007 and 2008.

So this is a non-story given a clickworthy headline. Yet the willingness of writers and editors to greenlight stories on the myth of “conservative” or “center-right” America – and the willingness of supposed fact-checkers to support the idea – shows that this is a myth with incredible staying power in the American imagination. Why is that?

What Is a “Conservative,” Anyway?
When politicians speak to the Conservative Political Action Conference, as AlterNet's Adele Stan reported this week, they consider “conservatism” to be rigid opposition to abortion (and this year we're throwing birth control into that category as well), a deep aversion to taxes (for the rich, anyway) and a hatred of immigrants. Some years conservatism also includes a willingness to bomb whichever majority-Muslim country looked at us funny. If Rick Santorum is right, conservatives think the more energy they waste, the better they are, and if Newt Gingrich is to be believed, there's nothing they hate more than unemployment insurance.

But when Americans tell a pollster how they identify, most of them show their true colors, and it's not a deep red. As Paul Waldman of Media Matters for America noted back in 2008, “People who know a lot about politics -- like journalists -- assume that ordinary people have the same interpretation of those terms as political junkies have. But the truth, as nearly a half-century of political science research has made clear, is that a significant portion of the public has little or no idea of what these terms mean in the political world. A third of the public can't even tell you which of the two major parties is the 'conservative' one."

And Ezra Klein pointed out in 2010, even noted right-leaning pollsters have found for decades that more Americans self-identify with the Democratic party. So clearly, there's some space between what the GOP thinks “conservative” means and what the general public does.

The fact is that most Americans don't identify their political positions on a left-to-right spectrum the way journalists and political scientists do. As veteran organizers know, people vote with their guts, and their reaction to issues is both visceral and complicated. Thomas Ferguson, professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Boston and senior fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, told AlterNet, “On specific concrete issues the population often likes a lot policies that are belied even by the labels they sometimes choose.”

Choosing three words like “conservative,” “moderate” and “liberal” as the only options to describe one's politics is, as Kilgore noted, a flawed methodology that tells us literally nothing about what those people actually support.

Polls are not always a reliable way to judge public opinion in the first place, Ferguson, who previously worked with the New York Times' pollster, pointed out. “If you do really careful samples and ask really careful questions you can usually learn a lot about true opinion. But that's difficult and expensive and most polls don't do this.”

Florida's story, for instance, doesn't describe the questions actually asked of responders. Ferguson explained that when it comes to issues on which people have conflicted opinions—like abortion—the way in which the question is asked or even the order in which questions are asked can change the response significantly. This phenomenon is called “priming” and happens subconsciously, but can still complicate or invalidate results.

A 2009 study from the Center for American Progress tried a more specific calculation of Americans' views, based not on which words they chose but their actual political positions:

Based on an innovative categorization of ideology, calculated from Americans’ responses to 40 statements about government and society split evenly between progressive and conservative beliefs, the American electorate as a whole records a mean ideological score of 209.5 in the Progressive Studies Program measure of composite ideology—solidly progressive in orientation. This figure is based on a composite scale of “0” to “400” with “0” being the most conservative position on the continuum and “400” being the most progressive. Americans are most progressive about the role of government and least progressive on cultural and social values. Ideas about economics and international affairs fall in-between.

And a new paper presented last month at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology found that political polarization in the U.S. has hardly changed at all in the last 40 years—but that Americans vastly overestimate how polarized we are. In a separate study presented at the same conference, another psychology professor looked at the reasons behind that perceived polarization, examining why people who are extremely partisan assume that others are as well, and found that projection, unsurprisingly, plays a role—those with strong views project their strong views onto others.

Which may explain part of the problem when it comes to the media and politicians. Marco Rubio, a right-wing Republican, obviously believes that when people identify as conservatives, they're just like him. And PolitiFact's team and Richard Florida, as well as other reporters, are steeped in a culture of conventional wisdom and stock narratives into which they fit information they receive. The problem, though, is that those narratives and conventional wisdom are often based on little in the way of hard evidence—and are often counter to reality.

Where Are We Really?
If most Americans don't really identify themselves on a left-right scale, and often hold complex and conflicted opinions on subjects that don't line up politically with the labels they choose, how do we figure out what people really think?

In a 2011 paper (PDF) on the polarization of Congress, Ferguson pointed out that it may well be a mistake to assume that people vote based on “hot-button” issues like abortion or gay rights. “Huge numbers of people holding hot-button attitudes continue to affiliate with the 'wrong' political party,” he noted. (This played out in California, when the referendum banning same-sex marriage passed at the same time Obama swept the state's presidential vote.)

In the same paper, Ferguson also noted, “To the extent any ideological change at all shows, it is as often as not slightly leftward. On some issues, such as same sex marriage, public opinion has moved sharply in that direction.”

But while we caution anyone not to read too much into polls, there are several issues on which the American public has been fairly well surveyed, and those polls show that the progressive position is not just popular, but extremely popular. People's view of Social Security, for instance, remains overwhelmingly positive—79 percent think it is “good for the country"--despite repeated right-wing attempts to cut benefits and convince Americans that private accounts are the solution. Eighty-eight percent of Americans like Medicare, the single-payer health insurance program for those over the age of 65, and 77 percent of them are fans of Medicaid, the healthcare program for the poor.

In September, Americans favored taxing the rich and eliminating tax deductions for corporations, according to another Gallup poll—and by big margins, too, with 70 percent in favor of tossing the loopholes and 66 percent in favor of taxing those who make over $200,000 more ($250,000 for families). And a poll last April found that even 54 percent of Republicans favored higher taxes on the wealthy.

(One piece of Florida's report that was interesting was that so-called conservative political affiliation strongly correlated with a large percentage of blue-collar workers in a state, but those self-identified conservatives “appear to be split along class and income lines when it comes to the issue of whether government should provide help for the poor.” He cited a survey by the Pew Research Center, which found that 57 percent of Republicans with family incomes of less than $30,000 said that government does not do enough for the poor. Unsurprisingly, the rich Republicans think the government is giving too much of their money away. Of course, Florida doesn't bother extrapolating this information to the idea that maybe conservatism as defined by Republican politicians simply isn't as popular as its reputation, but that would be complicated.)

The Republicans, at the moment realizing that they won't beat Obama on the economy with a plan that includes cutting taxes on the rich, seem to have pivoted to the classic “culture war” issues, presuming that they can win there. But they might want to take note of some polling data taking stock of the latest ridiculous right-wing non-controversy—Americans seem to like their birth control (99 percent of women who have had sex have used some form of it) and at least 56 percent of them think that health insurance should cover it. (And just for the sake of argument—Catholics haven't abandoned Obama en masse over birth control, either, with 46 percent of them approving of the president during the week in which we saw a very public temper tantrum from the Catholic bishops over contraception coverage in health insurance, down only three points from the week before. And churchgoing and nonchurchgoing Catholics feel about the same about the president.)

Gay marriage, as Ferguson pointed out above, is an issue on which the public has largely swung more progressive—for the first time, in 2011, a majority of 51 percent favor same-sex couples being allowed marriage rights (from an average of four polls conducted by different organizations). And what polls even better than marriage equality? Protection from workplace discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. Indeed, this is so popular that nearly three-fourths of Americans believe it should be a law, and 9 out of 10 of them think it already is.

In his Atlantic story, Florida provides graphs mapping demographic characteristics that correlate with the more self-identified “conservative” parts of the country. While many of his points seem pretty obvious (more diverse areas of the country are less conservative! College graduates are more liberal!) they also, if he chose to dig any deeper, would spell disaster for his conservative-creep theory.
As Ruy Teixeira pointed out in a Center for American Progress report in 2009, the demographics aren't on the conservatives' side. Younger voters are trending progressive, and voters of color will be a greater and greater percentage of the population as time passes. “By the election of 2016, it is likely that the United States will no longer be a majority white Christian nation,” Teixeira wrote.

And perhaps reflecting that shift in demographics, a recent Pew Research Center poll found that most Americans consider the conflict between the rich and the poor to be the greatest source of tension in American society—two-thirds of us, up about 50 percent from a 2009 survey. Richard Morin, a senior editor at Pew, credited Occupy Wall Street, among other things, for pushing the shift in national opinion. “The story for me was the consistency of the change,” he told the New York Times.

“Everyone sees more conflict.” (In 2009, by contrast, immigration was seen as the largest source of conflict.)

Media outlets report on these polls individually all the time, but rarely bother to refer back to earlier studies when new ones come out—particularly one, like the Gallup poll, which seems to offer a sweeping conclusion easily demagogued by politicians like Marco Rubio. Politics these days is all about the campaign, and the media is all about the sound bite. Calculating where the American public actually stands on an issue, rather than sweeping them into a category called “conservative” or “liberal” is a complex affair, and reporters and pundits prefer simple answers.

The fact is, though, as Rachel Maddow pointed out, the simple answer in this case is very simply wrong. Americans aren't getting more conservative, a majority of the country is not Republican or Republican-leaning, and if anything, we're swinging the other way—which should make all of us who don't subscribe to Rubio and Newt Gingrich's version of America sleep better at night.
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Sarah Jaffe is an associate editor at AlterNet, a rabblerouser and frequent Twitterer. You can follow her at @seasonothebitch.