How America's Obsession With Money Deadens Us.

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AlterNet / ByBruce E. Levine

 

In a society that worships "one market under God," we are forced to be somewhat money-centric in order to survive. At what cost?

 

A preoccupation with money is nothing new in our culture, but have Americans become even more “money-centric,” and does this deaden us, making us incapable of resisting injustices?


A money-centric society is one in which money is at the center of virtually all thoughts, decisions and activities. While capitalism certainly gives rise to money-centrism, any society in which individuals have little know-how and lack supportive community—and are thus totally dependent on money for their survival—will create a money-centric society. Such a society coerces even the non-greedy to focus on money at the expense of damn near everything else in order to survive.


Have We Become More Money-Centric?
Sociologist Robert Putnam reported in Bowling Alone (2000) that when American adults were asked in 1975 to identify the elements of "the good life,” 38 percent chose “a lot of money,” compared to 63 percent who chose “a lot of money” in 1996. Since then, from my experience, this focus on money has only increased. Both greed and fear make one more money-centric, and in recent years, it has become more socially acceptable to be greedy and increasingly commonplace to be financially insecure.


When I began my clinical psychology private practice nearly three decades ago, my clients who worked for major Cincinnati corporations such as Procter and Gamble felt secure in their employment, but that security began disappearing two decades ago. Nowadays, nearly everybody, even teachers and postal workers, lacks job security. Today, I see money worries, more than anything else, triggering panic attacks, depression, and alcohol abuse. Money discussions have even come to dominate family counseling sessions, where high school students increasingly talk about their fear of becoming financial losers, and parents fear their children will ruin their lives by accumulating student-loan debt while pursuing fields where there are few decent-paying jobs. Between my clients and my own money preoccupations, the dead shit of money routinely deadens me, especially when I lose my sense of humor about it.


It is difficult to maintain a sense of humor about all of this, so for most of us, having a stash of money feels increasingly important—and money accumulation has increasingly become the center of our lives.


In 1900, only 1 percent of Americans was in the stock market; by 1950, this had increased to only 4 percent; but by 2000, more than 50 percent of Americans were in the stock market. While some of these people merely have pensions that own shares on their behalf, many Americans have in fact chosen to invest in the stock market. How many of those people are investing their money in companies whose products they believe in? Almost none.


For those Americans not in the stock market and who are living from paycheck to paycheck or on public assistance, they also are assured by the state that it is quite okay to gamble where the odds are more stacked against them than in the stock market. Many state governments not only offer lotteries but advertise them heavily on television, radio, billboards, and with mass mailing coupons—and this today is socially acceptable.


Younger generations are increasingly told they won’t have job security in their working years or Social Security later on. So, while many young people would rather be gaining life experiences, they feel pressure early on to accumulate a large pile of cash.


When Did Greed Become Respectable?
Money has always been a big deal in America, but through much of history, the money-centrism of the greedy has not had the social acceptability that it has recently gained. For the non-elite, greed was seen as the practice of villains such as Charles Dickens’ money-obsessed Scrooge, a psychologically and spiritually sick man in need of conversion. As late as 1936, a sitting president of the United States running for reelection knew that that it was quite popular to blast the greedy, selfish elite:

We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob. Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred. I should like to have it said of my first Administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it these forces met their master.

That was Franklin D. Roosevelt on Oct. 31, 1936. Contrast FDR’s speech with President Barack Obama’s response in an interview excerpted by Bloomberg Businessweek and the Wall Street Journal in February 2010. When asked about Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein’s $9 million bonus and JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon’s $17 million bonus, Obama responded:

First of all, I know both those guys. They’re very savvy businessmen. And I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth. That’s part of the free market system. I do think that the compensation packages that we’ve seen over the last decade at least have not matched up always to performance...Listen, $17 million is an extraordinary amount of money. Of course, there are some baseball players who are making more than that who don’t get to the World Series either.

How did greed come to be so respectable? What Paul of Tarsus, in the first century after the death of Jesus, was to the dissemination and legitimization of Christianity, Ayn Rand, in the last half of the 20th century, was to the dissemination and legitimization of money-centrism and greed. Rand ends her novel Atlas Shrugged with this image of its hero John Galt: “He raised his hand and over the desolate earth he traced in space the sign of the dollar.” Rand exhorted her followers to believe in what she called “radical capitalism,” and she lived—and even died—in radical money-centrism. At Rand’s funeral, in accordance with her specified arrangements, a six-foot floral arrangement in the shape of a dollar sign was placed near her casket.


Money-centrism, of course, has been caused by many other forces and perpetuated by many other people.


How Money-Centrism Deadens Us and Makes Us Incapable of Resistance
When one cares only about money, one neglects everything else necessary to build and maintain self-respect. Neglecting other aspects of our humanity results in destroying our integrity, and integrity is necessary for strength. And when one is willing to do whatever it takes to make money, one assumes others are acting similarly, which destroys trust and makes it impossible to create the solidarity necessary to successfully challenge illegitimate authorities.


Money-centrism is especially malevolent when it attacks societal forces that are potentially liberating. Much has been written about how spiritual revolts (such as those begun by Jesus and other rebels) eventually morph into organized religions, which are then driven by money and used by the elite as an “opiate of the masses.” The elite in religious hierarchies have routinely commercialized spirituality, and by so doing have reduced the power of spirituality as a potent force to take down the ruling elite.


But spirituality is not the only potentially rebellious force that has been destroyed by money-centrism. Commercializing any powerful idea, belief or emotion deadens its power. Even the rebellion of folk/protest music and rock-and-roll has been increasingly commercialized, resulting in a dissipation of actual rebellious energy.


In 1998, Bob Dylan and his son Jakob were paid $1 million to play for 15,000 employees of the Silicon Valley semiconductor company Applied Materials, and that’s not the only “corporate gig” on Dylan’s résumé. Next time you hear Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” how energizing will that be for you? And for quite some time, the aim of many rock-and-roll bands has been to exploit and commercialize the idea of rebellion. So, it should surprise no one that the Rolling Stones do corporate gigs, including one a decade ago in which they took in $2 million to entertain Pepsi bottlers in Hawaii.


Equally widespread and probably even more responsible for dissipating rebellious energy is when songs of perceived rebellious artists are used as background music in commercials used to propagandize listeners into associating their rebellious urges with consumer products. Dylan’s “Times They Are a-Changin’” has been used by accounting firm Coopers & Lybrand and by the Bank of Montreal; and the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up” has been used by Microsoft. Of course it is unfair to pick on only Dylan and the Rolling Stones, but it’s simply too depressing for me to go through the entire list.


To defeat the elite, the rest of us need energy. Rebellion is a powerful idea, but when rebellion is used merely to attract an audience for financial profit, the idea itself becomes less powerful. So, whether it is spirituality, folk/protest music, or rock-and-roll, when rebellious energy is commercialized, that energy dissipates.


Spirituality, music, theater, cinema, and other arts can be revolutionary forces, but the gross commercialization of these has deadened their capacity to energize rebellion. So now damn near everything—not just organized religion—has become an “opiate of the masses.”


In a radically capitalist society that worships “one market under God” (as Thomas Frank called it), we are all forced to be somewhat money-centric in order to survive. No shame here. But since money is not alive, to the extent that we become radically money-centric and money is at the center of all of our thoughts, decisions, and activities, we are dead and incapable of any resistance to injustices.
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Bruce E. Levine is a clinical psychologist and author of Get Up, Stand Up: Uniting Populists, Energizing the Defeated, and Battling the Corporate Elite (Chelsea Green, 2011).

Republican Party Is Rotted and Collapsing from Within -- And We Can Thank Super PACs for Exposing It.

AlterNet / BySteven Rosenfeld

Super PACs are an affront to the democratic process, but they are hastening the Republican Party's fall.

They are anti-democratic and turning the 2012 presidential campaign into an extreme sport for the wealthy, but they are destroying the modern Republican Party in the process. Call it the paradox of the Super PACs.

These big-money operations have made a mockery of campaign finance laws and even the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling by being shadow campaigns for candidates and giving a handful of rich people an unprecedented level of power in the presidential race. But perhaps we also should thank the multi-millionaires writing outsized checks to benefit Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum because their obstinate crusades—and Mitt Romney’s erratic replies—keep reminding anyone paying attention that today's Republican Party is not just a mess, but is collapsing from within.

It is not as if the Democrats are a model of unity—although they may have more discipline than today’s GOP. Rather, the super PAC-funded media wars among the Republicans have brought a breach into the open that the GOP establishment can no longer contain: the fight between the Republican Party's hardened right (religious conservatives and Tea Partiers) and the party's business-first corporatists.

It used to be the GOP establishment could appease the right, by giving them planks in the party platform and letting the likes of Pat Buchanan speak at their convention, and then mostly ignore them after Election Day.

But that script no longer holds in 2012 and we can thank the super PACs for uncorking this festering schism. Anyone with enough cash can propel their candidate into yet another primary contest and the GOP establishment cannot do anything about it because it can't control its right wing.

This rebellion from within has been driven by super PACs, which have gotten a majority of their funds in six- and seven-figure donations.

According to a Huffington Post analysis, nearly $100 million has been spent by super PACS through the end of February with two-thirds coming from people who have given $500,000 or more—mostly to support various Republican candidacies. Until a series of federal court rulings in 2010 created the super PAC loophole, individual donations to official presidential candidate campaigns were capped at $2,500. Super PACs get around that by pretending to operate independent of the candidates, even though Romney, Gingrich and Santorum know the super PAC staffers and have met with major donors.

Critics have bemoaned how a handful of wealthy individuals have not just flouted what remains of the nation’s campaign finance laws, but have had the effect of monopolizing the airwaves in GOP primaries and caucuses, preventing more moderate candidates and viewpoints from gaining traction. (Donors to Democratic super PACs, in contrast, mostly have not seen their money spent yet.)

It is true—the super PAC loophole is terribly anti-democratic. But perversely, they may be doing the nation a great service by putting the collapse of modern Republican Party before voters in state after state.

The hard right, now led by Santorum and Gingrich, would rather go down fighting and lose on principle, taking their party—or what remains of it—with them, rather than compromise and see their ideals wither under the big tent of "pragmatism." That is the message Santorum and Gingrich keep driving home. And according to astute observers, this fight is going to continue for weeks. Washington Post political reporter Dan Balz put it this way on PBS this weekend:

“Rick Santorum has not won any contest where evangelicals make up less than 50 percent of the electorate of the state. And Mitt Romney has not won a state in which evangelicals make up more than 50 percent. But if you go down through the rest of the states, you can see Romney winning a whole series of races in April. And then if Santorum is somewhat alive, Santorum going on a winning streak in May.”

Does anyone remember the last time there was similar open warfare between the GOP’s hard right and the party's pro-business mainstream—and who came out ahead?

It was almost four years ago—on the eve of the Republican National Convention—and the response by the hard right, including the GOP bloviator-in-chief, Rush Limbaugh, led to the selection of Sarah Palin as the vice-presidential nominee.

Going into the convention, John McCain and his staff were all but set on picking Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman—a pro-war Democrat turned Independent—as the vice presidential nominee. There was one problem: Lieberman was pro-choice. McCain’s staff knew it would split the party, but thought a unity ticket would have appeal. As word leaked, they underestimated the vehemence behind the hard right’s response. Limbaugh said a pro-choice VP would, “put the conservative movement in the bleachers.”

Instead a panicked McCain campaign picked Palin from a long list of Republican elected officials. And ideological conservatives have not kept to the bleachers since. In 2010, the Tea Partiers changed the face of the U.S. House and many state legislatures. In 2012, neither Gingrich nor Santorum care if the likely GOP nominee, Romney, is battered for months.

Who can we thank for the intraparty warfare that is showing the electorate that no Republican is fit to occupy the White House in 2013? The answer is the party’s millionaires and their super PACs. They may be undermining and distorting the Democratic process in deeply disturbing ways, but they also are hastening the demise of the modern Republican Party.

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Steven Rosenfeld covers democracy issues for AlterNet and is the author of "Count My Vote: A Citizen's Guide to Voting" (AlterNet Books, 2008).

Koch Brothers Behind Efforts to Overturn Health Reform.

By Robert Greenwald and Jesse Lava | Sourced from AlterNet

Do all roads lead to Koch?

Conservative activists will rally at the Supreme Court tomorrow to encourage the overturn of the Affordable Care Act. The “Hands Off My Health Care” protest—which will feature the likes of Rep. Michelle Bachmann and Sens. Jim DeMint and Rand Paul—is being organized by Americans for Prosperity, a right-wing group financed by industrialists Charles and David Koch. The billionaire brothers provided the seed money to get this organization off the ground and have donated at least $5 million overall (possibly a lot more) to its operations. David Koch still serves as the group’s chairman.

These facts belie the image that Americans for Prosperity would like to present as a humble grassroots organization. The stories we see today about regular Americans coming to D.C. to protest evil health reform are directly attributable to the corporate interests that the Koch brothers represent.

Yet the Kochs’ impact on the current court battle doesn’t end there. Group after group participating in the lawsuit to destroy the Affordable Care Act is a beneficiary of the Koch brothers’ largess—reflecting the outsized influence that these guys wield in our political debate. Indeed, one wonders whether this effort would be happening at all if not for these two billionaires with a direct interest in avoiding government regulation.

One of the most important groups in this case is the National Federation of Independent Business, which is bringing one of the lawsuits now before the Supreme Court. This group has received $88,000 from the Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation, which is controlled by none other than Charles Koch.

Several organizations that have filed amicus briefs with the Supreme Court have received substantial donations from the Koch family as well. These groups include:

• Competitive Enterprise Institute: $666,420
• Pacific Research Institute: $270,000
• Texas Public Policy Foundation: $74,500
• Freedom Works: $5 million
• Cato Institute: approximately $30 million.
• Family Research Council: brief co-authored by attorney Nelson Lund, a professor at George Mason University, which has received $29,604,354.
• Galen Institute: “partner organization” of the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation; extent of donations unknown.
• Landmark Legal Foundation: $5000

In addition, a Court-appointed attorney used a study by the Rand Corporation to show the impact of the individual mandate in the health care bill—even though Rand has received $100,000 from none other than the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation.

Given this set of facts, the sheer reach of the Koch brothers in the movement to overturn health care reform is staggering. They have seeded and cultivated the very network of organizations that’s now threatening to undo the most significant progressive reform in a generation. As shown in Brave New Foundation’s new film, Koch Brothers Exposed, Charles and David Koch are, in effect, holding up the conservative sky.

So this week as we watch the rallies and press conferences and legal wrangling—not to mention the media pundits lavishing attention to the hubbub—let’s remember that this spectacle is not the result of some organic, grassroots outpouring of opposition to the idea that all Americans should have health insurance. It’s rooted in concentrated wealth belonging to men aiming to bend our democracy to their will.

Is the Media Ready to Stop Letting Politicians Lie?

Photo Credit: AFP

 

 

 

 

AlterNet / BySarah Jaffe

 

In a new revision of the news organization's 2003 code of ethics, NPR commits itself not just to finding “balance” in its stories, but to prioritizing truth.

 

In a recent story on Mitt Romney and the auto bailouts, a National Public Radio reporter did something unusual—she called out the candidate's blatant lie. Reporter Tracy Samilton, from Michigan Radio, followed up a soundbite of Romney's stump speech, characterizing the bailout of GM as a handout to the United Auto Workers, with this corrective:

MITT ROMNEY: Instead of going through the normal managed bankruptcy process, he made sure the bankruptcy process ended up with the UAW taking the lion's share of the equity in the business.

SAMILTON: Actually, the U.S. Treasury got most of GM's equity.

That might not seem like much, but it was a change for NPR, noted Jay Rosen, NYU journalism professor and media critic who has consistently called out the tendency of media outlets to rely on “he-said, she-said” journalism. It was a step away from allowing politicians and others who regularly appear on the public airwaves to lie with impunity, a step away from a model that considers a lie worth exposing only if someone else with power challenges it. It was a step toward being “fair to the truth.”

In a new revision of the news organization's 2003 code of ethics, NPR commits itself not just to finding “balance” in its stories, but to prioritizing truth, making sure to actually inform listeners when one “side” of a story is upheld by the facts. “Among the central principles is that the new guidelines focus on standards of fairness and impartiality, as opposed to balance and objectivity,” wrote NPR's ombudsman, Edward Schumacher-Matos.

Rosen said of the move, “What is legitimate, and what is not, has shifted ground” and commented, “Bravo, NPR.” And Trudy Lieberman at Columbia Journalism Review wrote that she was “delighted” by the decision.

“Balance” is usually represented in a news story by quoting sources who represent both sides of an issue. Which might be fine, if most complex issues actually had two equal sides. But when two sides dispute a story, one of them is often actually wrong. Take Romney's claim—it's not simply a statement that President Obama favors the UAW over non-union workers. It's a statement of (false) fact: that the UAW profited from the bailout of GM. Had NPR not pointed out the truth and instead perhaps quoted a UAW representative saying they didn't get much from the bailout, the listener would be left wondering who to believe. Because the reporter stepped in and pointed out Romney's lie, the listener is better informed than if the issue had been presented of one as warring sides.

In 2009, Rosen explained why false balance is so popular among reporters : “Besides being easy to operate, and requiring the fewest imports of knowledge, it’s a way of reporting the news that advertises the producer’s even handedness. The ad counts as much as the info. We report, you decide.”
Objectivity is the ideal that many in the mainstream press cling to, even while often acknowledging that true objectivity is impossible. False balance, he-said / she-said reporting provided perfect cover for reporters claiming objectivity—hey, we gave you both sides, what are you complaining about?

But Glenn Greenwald, Salon blogger and fierce press critic, pointed out recently that this sort of coverage isn't extended to everyone. “This stenographic treatment by journalists — of simply amplifying what someone claims without any skepticism or examination — is not available to everyone. Only those who wield power within America’s political and financial systems are entitled to receive this treatment.”

Media theorists have long pointed out that one of the problems with such false balance is that the powerful are only challenged in the media when someone equally powerful challenges them. In the run-up to the war in Afghanistan, for instance, when no prominent Democrats questioned the need to bomb, the media simply accepted the premise without question. On the way into Iraq, there were a few politicians who opposed the invasion, but the millions around the world who protested it were rarely invited to give their thoughts to the nightly news. And even now, no one goes down to Occupy Wall Street to get a protester's counterpoint to the claims of Jamie Dimon (JP Morgan Chase) or Lloyd Blankfein (Goldman Sachs). No one asks Jatiek Reed to rebut New York police commissioner Ray Kelly's statements.

Reporters, though, are in a unique position to challenge the statements of those they cover. And perhaps now, we'll see more of them doing just that.

NPR's decision to change policy is being painted by the network as an evolution of its previous system, not a wholesale change, but Schumacher-Matos admitted to Lieberman that they were aware that false balance was a problem. Telling Lieberman that the new handbook provided guidelines instead of rules, he noted that it was possible to produce problematic journalism while adhering to a set of rules. “[S]o long as you didn’t violate the rules it was okay. You got it down, right. It was accurate but not fair. He said/she said is a perfect example.”

If we're lucky, NPR's move could spark a shift in thinking not just among public radio workers, but in all parts of the media that trade in “objectivity” as a selling point. It wasn't that long ago that the public editor of the New York Times, Arthur Brisbane, unwittingly drew down the rage of his readers by asking if the Times should be a “truth vigilante,” writing, “I’m looking for reader input on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge 'facts' that are asserted by newsmakers they write about.”

The response from readers and press critics alike was fast and furious—of course the Times should fact-check statements made in its pages, right? Clay Shirky responded “[Brisbane] is evidently so steeped in newsroom culture that he does not understand – literally, does not understand, as we know from his subsequent clarifications – that this is not a hard question at all, considered from the readers’ perspective.”

And Rosen pointed out:

Something happened in our press over the last 40 years or so that never got acknowledged and to this day would be denied by a majority of newsroom professionals. Somewhere along the way, truthtelling was surpassed by other priorities the mainstream press felt a stronger duty to. These include such things as “maintaining objectivity,” “not imposing a judgment,” “refusing to take sides” and sticking to what I have called the View from Nowhere.

The long tradition of the Right's “working the refs”--screaming about nonexistent bias—has in part led to a system where reporters are afraid of the slightest hint of bias. After all, as media theorist Robert McChesney pointed out in his book The Political Economy of Media, the Right has long had a goal of dismantling NPR and PBS. “The Right is obsessed with what it regards as the liberal bias of U.S. journalism and it believes this liberal bias is most apparent on PBS and NPR,” he wrote.

If NPR becomes the leader in restoring truth-telling to the priority-number-one spot it should have, will other media outlets follow suit? Or, because NPR is public media with a specific mandate to provide journalism in the public good, will it remain somewhat marginalized in the media landscape? Given right-wingers' tendency to play fast and loose with the truth, will it wind up the object of even more attacks from the Right?

NPR's decision comes in the wake of scandals where several high-profile officials resigned, one over comments about conservatives. Are they losing their fear—or perhaps realizing that no matter what they do, Right-wingers will squawk?

We can't be sure. But as campaign season wears on, candidates make ever-more-ridiculous assertions on the campaign trail, and there's more and more need for journalists to fact-check them. Witness a report in the Wall Street Journal this week, which dedicated nearly 900 words discussing Mitt Romney's claims that Obama is responsible for high gas prices and government regulations that he says would've “stopped the work of Thomas Edison and the Wright Brothers”—and none of them pointing out that they're false.

When politicians are allowed to lie to the public and journalists don't bother to correct them, we all know that bad things happen. We remember the run-up to the wars, when major media outlets uncritically reported the Bush administration's assertions as truth. As Greenwald pointed out, “The most damaging sin of this stenographic model isn’t laziness — the failure to subject false statements to critical, investigative scrutiny — although that is part of it. The most damaging sin is that it’s propagandistic: it converts official assertions and claims from the most powerful into Truth, even when those assertions and claims are baseless or false.”

Now, maybe NPR's move toward checking the facts of politicians and others with power won't swing an election or prevent another war. But it is a very important start toward putting the focus of journalism, especially public service journalism, back where it belongs—telling the truth, and calling those in power on their lies.
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Sarah Jaffe is an associate editor at AlterNet, a rabblerouser and frequent Twitterer.

The Horrors of an Ayn Rand World: Why We Must Fight for America's Soul.

St. Martin's Press / ByGary Weiss

An Objectivist America would be a dark age of unhindered free enterprise, far more primitive and Darwinian than anything seen before.

Editor's note: The following is an excerpt from Ayn Rand Nation: the Hidden Struggle for America's Soul, by Gary Weiss. Click here for a copy of the book.

The whole damned history of the world is a story of the struggle between the selfish and the unselfish! . . . All the bad around us is bred by selfishness. Sometimes selfishness even gets to be a cause, an organized force, even a government. Then it’s called Fascism.
—Garson Kanin, Born Yesterday


There is no real doubt what an Objectivist America would mean. We may not be around to see it, but it’s likely we’ll be here for its earliest manifestations. They may have already arrived.

The shape of a future Objectivist world has been a matter of public record for the past half century, since Ayn Rand, the Brandens, Alan Greenspan, and other Objectivist theoreticians began to set down their views in Objectivist newsletters. When he casually defended repeal of child labor laws in the debate with Miles Rapoport, Yaron Brook [President of the Ayn Rand Institute] was merely repeating long- established Objectivist doctrine, summarized by Leonard Peikoff as “Government is inherently negative.” It is a worldview that has been static through the decades, its tenets reiterated endlessly by Rand and her apostles:

No government except the police, courts of law, and the armed services.

No regulation of anything by any government.

No Medicare or Medicaid.

No Social Security.

No public schools.

No public hospitals.

No public anything, in fact. Just individuals, each looking out for himself, not asking for help or giving help to anyone.

An Objectivist America would be a dark age of unhindered free enterprise, far more primitive and Darwinian than anything seen before. Objectivists know this. What perhaps they do not always appreciate, given their less than fanatical approach to reality, is what turning back the clock would mean. Or perhaps they do not care.

When Alan Greenspan spoke out against building codes, he knew perfectly well what a lack of adequate building and fire codes would mean. Fifteen years before his birth, 146 people, mostly young women, were burned alive or leaped to their death from the fire at the Triangle Waist Factory just east of Washington Square Park in New York City. There was no requirement for employers to provide a safe workplace, so none was provided. Triangle’s owners crammed their employees into crowded workspaces without proper exits, and inadequate fire codes meant that the fire stairways were insufficient. The result was that dozens of workers’ corpses piled on the sidewalk on March 25, 1911. Anywhere in the world where building codes are inadequate or absent, the result is always the same: Dead people.

In an Objectivist world, the reset button would be pushed on government services that we take for granted. They would not be cut back, not reduced -- they would vanish. In an Objectivist world, roads would go unplowed in the snows of winter, and bridges would fall as the government withdrew from the business of maintaining them -- unless some private citizen would find it in his rational self-interest to voluntarily take up the slack by scraping off the rust and replacing frayed cables. Public parks and land, from the tiniest vest-pocket patch of green to vast expanses of the West, would be sold off to the newly liberated megacorporations. Airplane traffic would be grounded unless a profit-making capitalist found it in his own selfish interests to fund the air traffic control system. If it could be made profitable, fine. If not, tough luck. The market had spoken. The Coast Guard would stay in port while storm- tossed mariners drown lustily as they did in days of yore. Fires would rage in the remnants of silent forests, vegetation and wildlife no longer protected by rangers and coercive environmental laws, swept clean of timber, their streams polluted in a rational, self-interested manner by bold, imaginative entrepreneurs.

With industry no longer restrained by carbon-emission standards, the earth would bake in self-generated heat, ice cap melting would accelerate, extreme weather would become even more commonplace, and seacoasts would sink beneath the waves. Communities ravaged by hurricanes, floods and tornadoes would be left to fend for themselves, no longer burdening the conscience of a selfish, guilt-free world.

The poor and elderly, freed from dependence on character-destroying, government-subsidized medical care, would die as bravely and in as generous quantities as in the romantic novels of a bygone era.


Minimum wage laws would come to an end, providing factory owners and high- tech startups alike with a pool of cheap labor competitive with any fourth-world kleptocracy.

All laws protecting consumers would be erased from the statute books.

Mass transit would grind to a halt in the big cities as municipal subsidies come to an end.

Corporations would no longer be enslaved by antitrust laws, so monopolies and globe-spanning, price-fixing cartels would flourish. The number of publicly held corporations would be reduced to a manageable, noncompetitive few. Big Pharma would manufacture drugs without adequate testing for safety and efficacy—deterred only by concern for their reputation, as described by Greenspan in 1963. Except that with competition reduced by mergers and legal price-fixing, the market would be a feeble substitute for even the FDA.

Securities laws and stock market regulations would be eliminated.

Corporations would operate in secret if they so desired, or with only selective, cursory disclosures to their investors and customers. Only outright fraud would be prosecuted; otherwise the public— a concept no longer recognized as valid— would be on its own.

Insider trading, now legal, would become the norm. Wall Street now would truly be a sucker’s game. “Let the buyer beware” would replace the fifty state regulators and the SEC.

Income taxes would end, so the lowest-paid, ten-cent-an-hour, non-OSHA-supervised factory workers would enjoy wages taxed at the same rate—zero—as their billionaire bosses in distant cities and foreign lands. Dynasties of American royalty would arise, as fortunes pass from generation to generation, untaxed.

Nonprofit organizations, apart from those serving the egos and social calendars of the self-indulging rich, would see their funding dry up as government support vanished. The super-wealthy, having repudiated their “giving pledge,” would now enjoy their riches without guilt, no longer motivated to share their billions with the poor. Philanthropy would be an obsolete relic of discarded moral codes and forgotten history.

Such is the Ayn Rand vision of paradise: an America that would resemble the lands from which our ancestors emigrated, altruism confined to ignored, fringe texts, grinding poverty and starvation coexisting alongside the opulence of the wealthy. Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York would become like Cairo and Calcutta, with walled enclaves protecting the wealthy from the malnourished, uneducated masses outside.

Yaron Brook was right. What’s at stake is not a political issue, but a moral, philosophical issue. In large numbers, Americans have, sometimes unwittingly, abandoned the moral code upon which they were raised. They have done so because of a master storyteller.

Ayn Rand’s stories of noble steel barons, fierce railroad magnates and sniveling government bureaucrats formed the basis of her ideology. It is a compelling narrative, and Oliver Stone’s abortive approach to The Fountainhead suggests a remedy to the Rand narrative: a counternarrative—one that celebrates a creator with a conscience; government not as a Soviet gun but as a builder, a benefactor. It is an optimistic vision, born in an America of hope and not a Russia of despair and privation. This counter-narrative can recognize the merit of individuality and self- interest, while rejecting her celebration of the darker impulses— greed and selfishness.

That kind of thinking is required to meet the challenge presented by Rand and her ideas, as they spread from libertarian and Objectivist think tanks to the Tea Party to Congress and, perhaps, the White House.

Those of us who oppose Rand’s vision of radical capitalism need to read Rand and understand the flaws in her assumptions and illogic of her vision, just as people during the Cold War studied Communism so as to more effectively oppose it. Having read and understood her books and essays, one is in a better position to identify and then to respond to the right’s extremist agenda, and to recognize her ideology when it becomes manifest in society.

We need to understand the basis of her morality, not just its origins but where it doesn’t originate—the three great monotheistic religions, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the other writings and actions of the Founding Fathers. The words “capitalism,” “markets,” and “free enterprise” appear in none of the founding documents of America. The natural enemies of Ayn Rand are not only Lenin and Roosevelt but Jefferson, Rousseau, and Paine. The Founders were not defenders of oligarchy and selfishness. They sacrificed. They were altruists, and proud of it.

My Objectivist friends are right that morality needs to become part of the national dialogue. However we feel about Rand, we need to ponder her views and think more philosophically. We need to evaluate our own core values, and understand the moral foundations of the social programs and government agencies that are targeted by the right. Why do we pay for medical care of the poor and elderly? Why do we regulate business? Why do we pave roads and maintain parks and build public schools? Why do we subsidize public radio, mass transit, family planning clinics, and a host of other programs that don’t always benefit ourselves? We may conclude that we shouldn’t do any of those things. Or we may conclude that we cherish those institutions and will sustain them, not because of the clout of special interest groups and the senior vote, not because we can do it if the Democrats control both houses of Congress, but because it’s the right thing to do. It’s right if we hold a different concept of right and wrong than Objectivists and their allies on the right. It’s a question of fundamental moral values, as defined by our national and religious traditions—or by Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, The Virtue of Selfishness, and Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.

We need to choose—our heritage or Ayn Rand.

Click here for a copy of Ayn Rand Nation: The Hidden Struggle for America's Soul
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Gary Weiss is an investigative journalist and the author of "Ayn Rand Nation: The Hidden Struggle for America's Soul," published by St. Martin's Press in February 2012.

Bill Maher - "The Great Thing About Having Been Poor".

By Bill Maher

If you grow up in America, it's pretty rare if you don't love money. One of the first things I ever remember being punished for was stealing money. Five dollars, off my father's dresser. I was so little, I don't think I even knew it was wrong to take something that wasn't specifically mine -- I recall this being my introduction to the concept of "larceny is bad." But somehow, I knew it was good to have cash.

After I left my middle class household at 18, standard of living took a real tumble for a while. At Cornell, I had no money, and boy did I look it. They called where I lived the last three years Collegetown, but Collegetown was really slums in a rural setting. Landlords did not have to work that hard in Ithaca, N.Y. -- every year, there was fresh supply of eager tenants among the students who didn't want to live in a sorority or fraternity. It was a sweet market for a slumlord.

But even that looked good compared to what was waiting for me as I began my illustrious career as a standup comedian in New York City in 1979. First year I lived on 99th Street in Spanish Harlem, a five-floor walk up, toilet down the hall. No shower -- a tub that sat in the kitchen with a snake-like attachment that hooked up to the kitchen sink. Walked home every night from the comedy clubs on the tony Upper East Side, watching the neighborhoods become poorer and scarier as I made my way north, and I'm sure the only reason I was never robbed was, they took one look at me and knew it wasn't worth the trouble. Sometimes, freedom really is just another word for nothing left to lose.


And yet, in a short 33 years, things had turned around enough so that I was able to give a million dollars to the super PAC of a certain mixed-race president who, I would like to remind all my overconfident progressive friends, does NOT have this election in the bag. And a lot of people this last week have said the same thing to me: "You're not picking up the drinks tonight?"

The great thing about having been poor is how liberated it makes you if you eventually become rich. There's nothing like the knowledge that you don't need money to survive. That the money cushion you lie on every night doesn't have to be three feet thick, and you can still get to sleep.

Other people seemed surprised I had a million dollars, which amused me. I've had a television show since 1993; television pays well -- I may even have another million lying around somewhere. Every year when I visit my accountant in December to see how the year went, he always says I'm the best saver of all his clients, which amazes me, because I feel like I deprive myself of absolutely nothing. I once asked him, what do your other clients spend their money on? Because I know who some of his other clients are, and I know they make WAY more than I do. He said that what they spend their money on is always changing, and that's not even the point -- the point is, however much money they make that year, they always spend all of it! That's how they think: have money, spend it, because the real tragedy would be to die and have money left over.

Me? I just don't have expensive tastes I guess -- I don't collect cars or paintings or jewelry, and I gave up my heroin habit years ago. But I also know that, as I said when I presented that giant check to Priorities USA Action last Thursday at the end of my stand up special on Yahoo!, "This hurts!" I was trying to make the point that if I could do it, a lot of other people could do it a lot more easily than me. You know, the only place in America where the millionaires and billionaires are predominantly liberal is here in Hollywood -- with the possible exception of Silicon Valley and Ben & Jerry's ice cream.

There's a reason that of the 16 billionaires that have contributed to super PACs this year, 14 have given to Republicans. It is generally the party of the rich. And in a post-Citizens United world, the party of the rich has an advantage like they've never had before. In 2008, the most you could give to a candidate was $2,300. Now it's Infinity. No, the election is not in the bag.

The Court Battle Over Health Care Is a Struggle For a Future Vision for America: 6 Things You Need to Know.

 

 

 

AlterNet / BySteven Rosenfeld

The upcoming legal battle could decide the role and scope of government for years to come.

 

On Monday, March 26, when the U.S. Supreme Court begins three days of hearings on the centerpiece of President Obama’s new federal healthcare law, the requirement that all U.S. citizens and residents have health insurance, it is not just the fate of a historic reform affecting one-sixth of the nation’s economy and everyone’s access to care that will be at stake, but the role and scope of government for years to come.

The Affordable Care Act, called Obamacare, is a vast effort to redistribute how Americans receive and pay for healthcare. It starts by ending barriers that have kept tens of millions of Americans uninsured by forcing private insurance companies, businesses, states and individuals to play a more communitarian role in improving access to care and controlling costs. Opponents—Republican political leaders, "free market" and religious conservatives and business lobbyists—see the law as a terrible example of government overreach, increased spending and liberal policy, even if it would cover an additional 32 million Americans by 2019, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates. (Universal coverage is not on the table.)

 

 

In other words, the Obamacare battle that will come before the Supreme Court in the longest hearings in nearly a half-century is a proxy fight between the seemingly irreconcilable differences in American politics. On one side are centrist Democrats, who, like Obama, believe that the social safety net needs mending and that the private sector and all citizens have obligations to support that effort. On the other side are Republican opponents who do not want to see federal government do much beyond waging wars, and who do not even want their states to pay for current obligations—whether as health programs, pensions or education—and amazingly, do not even offer an alternative but instead posture behind their survival-of-the-fittest, let-the-market-fix-it ideology.

 

While it is anyone’s guess what the Court will do, there are a range of options, including the possibility that it is premature for the Court to rule on the individual mandate because it has not yet taken effect. On the other extreme is concern the Court could throw out the entire law over a drafting omission—because the law does not contain a severability clause, meaning that even if parts of the law are found unconstitutional than the rest of it remains.

 

 

What follows is a breakdown of the policy and legal issues that will emerge.

 

1. American healthcare is as amazing as it is dysfunctional. As a noted economist told NPR this week, nobody in America would want to pay what they paid for healthcare three decades ago if that meant only getting the treatments that were available in 1982. Americans want the best possible care, want access to the doctors they need, but don’t want to lose their life savings if hospitalized, or see any increase in their wages eaten up by much larger hikes in insurance premiums.

 

According to the federal government’s filings before the Court, healthcare spending accounted for 17.6 percent of the national economy in 2009, with 156.2 million non-elderly people (59 percent) covered through their employers and 13.8 million (5 percent) through non-group policies. In 2009, 50 million people were uninsured. Their unpaid medical bills totaled $43 billion, which insurers recaptured by adding $1,000 to every family’s yearly policy, based on hospitals overcharging for everything from aspirin to high-tech diagnoses.

 

2. Obamacare: Rearrange the health care chessboard. The Affordable Care Act took a multi-year approach to rearranging the way healthcare is accessed and paid for. It did not seek to remake the patient-doctor relationship, although its critics are quick to say it does anytime you meddle with how they are paid. It did not, as progressives wanted, eliminate the insurance industry and create a singular national system. Instead, it seeks to expand and shrink key sectors of the present system, including expanding coverage to young adults soon after its passage in 2010 to phasing out the so-called donut hole in Medicare, which vastly increased prescription costs.

 

Politically, most of the reforms do not kick in until 2014, giving opponents an opening to distort and negatively frame it because most people actually have yet to see its impact.

 

The law does scores of things. Its highlights include expanding access for low-income people by opening up eligibility to Medicaid (a state-run program) to anyone earning less than 133 percent of the federal poverty line—including single adults with no children. It creates state-based health insurance exchanges where working- and middle-class adults can buy into group policies, starting in 2014, and offers tax breaks for anyone buying insurance through the exchanges whose income are up to four times the poverty level. The law also gives tax credits for small businesses to offer coverage at rates given to much larger companies.

 

The law also regulates insurers. It bans insurers from rejecting people if they have pre-existing health conditions (as everyone in middle age does), but does not regulate what insurers charge. It also regulates what share of premiums must be spent on patient care. However, the overall approach is still primarily market-driven. For low-income people, government programs are expanded. For the middle class, it expands access and lowers costs by creating the efficiencies of large groups negotiating prices with providers.

 

 

Perhaps the most overtly controversial aspect of the law—and one of the issues to come before the Supreme Court next week—is that it requires that every adult, starting in 2014 buy a health insurance policy (like many European countries) or pay an annual penalty on his or her federal income tax forms. That penalty is $695 per year up to a maximum of three times that amount or 2.5 percent of household income, to be phased in starting in 2014. The rationale behind the insurance mandate and penalty is to stop shifting costs from emergency room visits of uninsured people to everyone else’s premiums, and to prompt sick people to go to doctors sooner, which should lower medical costs.

 

These presumptions—that Congress can impose a mandate to force individuals to buy insurance, that it can penalize those who do not act and impose a fine assessed on their taxes, and that Congress has the authority to do so because the law will affect interstate commerce—are the broad contours of the contested legal issues appearing before the Supreme Court next week.

 

3. The opening legal issues before the Court are not complex. Pushing aside the politics, this case is just like any other before an appellate court. On the first day, the Court will hear arguments on whether it is too soon to review the contested issues, because the key provisions that critics say are unconstitutional—the coverage mandate and tax penalty—have not taken effect.

 

The opponents—and the Obama administration—want the Supreme Court to hear the case, because otherwise it may be years before legal challenges work their way back to the Court. That delay creates tremendous uncertainties surrounding its implementation. The Court will take up the ripeness issue by hearing arguments on an 1867 law called the Anti-Injunction Act, which essentially says a person has to pay the tax before they can sue. For such a significant case, this is not a legal fireworks beginning.

 

Then the Court will hear arguments about two constitutional issues. The first concerns the Constitution’s Commerce Clause, which says Congress can regulate interstate business. The second concerns the Constitution’s Necessary and Proper Clause, which says that Congress can enact laws to achieve federal policy goals. The opponents do not contest Congress’ authority to regulate healthcare financing; they contend that the minimum insurance requirement and penalty for not complying go beyond its legal authority.

 

4. The opposition is ideological, not pragmatic. The Cato Institute’s brief, signed by 333 state legislators from 17 states, calls the law “the federal government’s most egregious attempt to exceed constitutional authority since at least the Second World War.”

 

Echoing other opponents’ briefs, Cato attacks the federal basis for the reform law, saying the “individual mandate exceeds Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce under existing doctrine… Nor can Congress compel someone to engage in commerce… It is not a blank check permitting Congress to ignore constitutional limits by manufacturing necessities and commandeering citizens to do its bidding.”

 

 

The opponents, including 14 red states that have passed so-called “healthcare freedom laws” saying their residents do not have to follow the insurance mandate, say it violates state sovereignty and regulatory authority. As Cato says, the issue “is not really about our healthcare system at all. It is principally about our federalist system and it raises very important issues regarding the Constitutional role of the federal government.”

 

Another opponent, the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council, claims the coverage mandate “will disrupt or displace an array of… market-based, cost-effective solutions.” And the states of Virginia and Utah say it will force them to spend millions on expanding Medicaid (even though the federal government will pay 100 percent of the new recipient costs in 2014 and that will fall to 90 percent after 2020).

 

 

Finally, opponents argue that the tax penalty for not complying does not fall under the Commerce Clause because doing nothing is not an activity, and therefore there is nothing to penalize—rendering that part of the law unconstitutional.

 

5. The just-say-no politics are nothing new. Each of these assertions is remarkable and shows how out of touch GOP ideologues are with ordinary Americans. To suggest that the reform is “manufacturing necessities and commandeering citizens” is essentially saying that there is no problem associated with 50 million uninsured people, and out-of-control costs for the remaining 170 million other Americans or businesses who pay monthly premiums—including a $1,000 annual surcharge to cover the costs of emergency care for the uninsured.

 

To suggest that this is a problem best left to state-based solutions and that it does not affect interstate commerce when it involves 17 percent of the economy is absurd. Further, to say that Congress does not have the power to tax healthcare spending—when employers and employees now do not pay income taxes on health benefits—also stretches credulity.

 

At least the Republican leadership in states like Virginia and Utah were honest in saying that they do not want to spend more on Medicaid, as the reform would require. However, what is most notable in the opponents' briefs is they care more about federalism—the separation and distribution of power between state and federal government—than about helping their states' residents get better healthcare.

 

Drew Altman, president and CEO of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, one of the nation’s leading health policy institutes, recently wrote that the Supreme Court review of Obamacare comes at a precarious time for America’s healthcare system. Many states are cutting their Medicaid budgets even as Obamacare is directing them to plan to expand it by 2014. Meanwhile, the biggest factor driving people into poverty “was their out-of-pocket health costs.” To Altman, the biggest impact of the Supreme Court’s impending ruling may be its impact on the law’s momentum in the states.

 

“What’s unusual about 2012 is how many programs, issues, and changes are in play all at once,” he said. Indeed, this chart—look at slide 7—shows there are 18 states where about half the uninsured adults are below 133 percent of the poverty line. The Affordable Care Act would extend coverage to these people—a sizeable portion of the 32 million people that the Congressional Budget Office estimates would be newly covered by 2019. These states include many of the red states where Republicans in the majority have rewritten state constitutions guaranteeing, as ALEC’s brief says, the “fundamental freedom not to be commandeered into purchasing a private insurance product known as a ‘health plan.’”

 

 

In other words, GOP ideologues are trying to prevent their own states’ most medically at-risk populations from being part of a framework to help them get care at a cheaper cost—and slow the growth of insurance costs for everyone else. The law does not cap what any private insurer can charge—a major, pro-market, pro-corporate concession by Obama. One wonders if a Republican president shepherded the same law if there would be a constitutional challenge at all.

 

There is also a gender-based element to the GOP criticism, as most of the good-paying jobs in delivering healthcare are held by women with advanced training; just as most of the jobs in the yesteryear’s American manufacturing sector were held by men. Needless to say, many of those jobs are also unionized.

 

6. Nobody knows what the Supreme Court will do. Predicting what the Supreme Court will do has been a cottage industry in Washington and legal circles for decades. But nobody other than the justices themselves and their clerks, who are bound by confidentiality, have any idea what will emerge this June, when the Court is expected to issue a decision. There are nine justices on the court; four are liberals. That means one of the typically conservative justices has to be swayed to support the law.

 

Legal reporters look for clues in past Supreme Court decisions or unexpected rulings in the lower court rulings that come before the high Court. For example, in a 2005 case, Gonzales v. Raich, which concerned whether a California women who grew pot for her own use could be regulated under the Commerce Clause, Justice Scalia said yes, she could, because the pot “is never more than an instant from the interstate market.”

 

Analysts have said Obamacare’s opponents can argue that their state’s residents have the right not to buy health insurance; however once those uninsured people get sick they are "never more than an instant" from going to an emergency room, contributing to the cost spiral everyone else absorbs in their premiums and medical bills. They suggest the Commerce Clause objections will be overcome.

 

Another optimistic guess is based on the recent opinion of Judge Jeffrey Sutton, a former Scalia clerk who now sits on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit. He upheld the law’s individual insurance mandate in June 2011, writing that Congress had the power to regulate healthcare finances this way. That ruling is seen as telling because Sutton is well-regarded in conservative circles. Indeed, some briefs opposing the law urged the high court to disregard Sutton’s reasoning.

 

On the other hand, this report suggests that in the hasty drafting of the bill, Congress omitted a key feature, known as a severability clause, which allows part of a law to be struck down and the rest to remain standing. That omission theoretically could let the Court invalidate the entire law in one swipe.

 

However, it is equally likely that the Court could simply decide it is too early to hear the constitutional challenges, because those features of the law have not yet taken effect. That issue will first be heard Monday in several hours of hearings, suggesting that it matters to the justices.

 

That outcome would not be what either the Obama administration or its critics want, but it could give the court “a way to lower its profile,” ScotusBlog’s Lyle Denniston wrote, offering “an entirely respectable way to put off the searing constitutional controversy over the individual mandate.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Steven Rosenfeld covers democracy issues for AlterNet and is the author of "Count My Vote: A Citizen's Guide to Voting" (AlterNet Books, 2008).

Why President Obama Can't Say "I Support Gay Marriage" -- Yet.

 

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

Author and Political Analyst

 

President Obama has been called on the carpet yet again by some gay activists for not forcefully and unequivocally saying "I support gay marriage." This doesn't mean simply his backing full equality, civil rights, and civil unions for gays, or support for gays in the military, calls on UN to end discrimination against gays, making supportive speeches to gay rights groups, or strongly opposing the seemingly never-ending ballot initiatives and legislative efforts to outlaw gay marriage. He's done all of that. No, he must say the words, "I support gay marriage" to fully satisfy some gay rights activists. The "some" is a crucial qualifier. Many gay rights activists understand that a GOP White House would be beyond a horror. GOP Presidential contender Mitt Romney would subtly, and GOP Presidential contender Rick Santorum would openly, back any and every anti-gay rights initiative measure, and piece of legislation any and everywhere in the country. But the president is different. He is clearly a friend of the gay rights movement, and an African American so therefore more, much more, is expected of him.

However, the 2012 election will be, as it was in 2008, a numbers, not a percentage game. This means that Obama must not just get a majority of gay votes which he's assured of. It means he must stir passion, excitement, and enthusiasm among gay voters as he did in 2008. This translates directly into numbers, and in the key battleground states of Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida with a large number of gay voters and an even larger number of conservative Christian evangelical voters, any slack off in the number of gay voters that turn out in November would be a hard blow to the president.

But President Obama would have to totally reverse his cautious approach to politically loaded issues to say once and for all: "I support gay marriage." It would also be the final test of his fundamental and personal beliefs. He's made those beliefs clear on several occasions when he flatly said he wouldn't sign on to same sex marriage because of his "understandings" of what traditional marriage should be. He later softened that to the equally cautious note that he's "evolving" on the issue.

Obama is no different than many other moderate, tolerant and broad minded African Americans on diversity issues. But he, like many others, still can draw the line on gay marriage and that's fueled by deeply ingrained notions of family, church, and community, and the need to defend the terribly frayed and fragmented black family structure. This mix of fear, belief, and traditional family protectionism has long been a staple among many blacks and virtually every time the issue of legalizing gay marriage has been put to the ballot, or initiative, or a legal challenge, or just simply the topic of public debate there has been no shortage of black ministers and public figures willing to rush to the defense of traditional marriage.

At the same time, polls have shown that anti-gay attitudes among blacks have softened at least publicly among many blacks. But the line continues to be just as firmly drawn among many blacks on same sex marriage. The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press and the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life (in polls in 2009 and 2010) found that blacks opposed same sex marriage by gaping margins over whites or Hispanics. The finding was even more striking in that Pew also found that for the first time in the decade and half that it had been polling Americans on attitudes toward gay rights, and that includes gay marriage, that less than half of Americans opposed same sex marriage.
The Pew poll is in line with other polls that show that the number of Americans that either outright back gay marriage, are or tolerant or indifferent toward it, is inching toward a majority nationally. The number that supports gay marriage has topped a majority in the states that have legalized it. But those states are still in the numbers minority, and the public acceptance of it is hardly evenly widespread. In the Deep South, parts of the West, and in the Midwest, gay marriage still stirs anger and loathing among many. Presidents, like other elected officials, take keen note of the polarizing impact of gay marriage.

President Obama, though, has not taken the final step and said, "I support gay marriage," solely because of narrow religious beliefs, conservative family upbringing, or a racial herd mentality that is unyielding on the traditional defense of family values. However, these are factors that have made for pause and caution by him. Still, Obama still has gotten it mostly right on gay rights, and given the grim GOP presidential alternative and the near certainty that he'll eventually get it right to the total satisfaction of gay activists in full support of gay marriage, to hold his refusal to utter the final words and endorse gay marriage now is worse than dumb and silly; it is politically suicidal.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is the author of How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour heard weekly on the nationally network broadcast Hutchinson Newsmaker Network.

Why Do 20 Million Americans a Year Visit the Amish?

 

 

Salon / ByRoger Catlin

 

Why the big obsession with a community based on religious zealotry?

How do Americans deal with religious zealots?

In the case of the Amish, many take bus tours through their compounds, buy their goods, take snapshots of their kids from afar and make a weekend trip out of watching their spiritual direction.
There are 250,000 Amish in America in hundreds of different communities, the beautifully made and instructive film “The Amish” pointed out on PBS’ “American Experience.” But they are visited by nearly 20 million Americans annually.

Some of the Amish wonder if this is particularly good idea, since they have to rub shoulders so much with “the English” — as they call the outside world — with their excess weight, leisure time and unusual questions.

Surrounded by the supercharged evils of modern America, they live in rural settings of hard work and simplicity that must not be so different from life 200 years ago. But it’s different enough to make some striking images: Bands of one-room school-bound kids in bonnets and straw hats but carrying matching new red mini-coolers lunchboxes; a scene of potato pickers at dawn that seems right out of a Corot painting; kids playing outdoors in their old-fashioned clothes but on a new-fangled trampoline.

It may be true that Puritans fled England for religious freedom, but only to a place where they could practice their beliefs and prevent others from practicing theirs. So in the early days of the Amish, according to the film by David Belton, thousands were killed for the outlawed behavior of adult baptism.

That led to these tight-knit communities in outposts that allowed such behavior, and the survival of it today depends on shunning outside temptations, especially for the young people.

Because of a belief not to be photographed, no Amish speak on camera in the documentary; they sit in shadows or more often speak off camera as remarkable, mesmerizing, slow-paced agricultural footage unspools before us. One speaks of the daily schedule as we see a group of young Amish women from afar walking up a road. It seems we see them go about a quarter mile. The voices of the elders explain their thinking, augmented by sociologists and anthropologists (whose faces we do see), speaking with some insight and little condescension.

The Amish have successfully shunned the mainstream all these years, with general success. There are compromises: They’ve had to put those orange triangles indicating a slow vehicle on their buggies (and they generally hate bright colors like pink and red).

There have been local skirmishes about obtaining building permits before a barn-raising or adhering to smoke detector requirements. But they famously won a 1971 Supreme Court case that defended their practice of educating until the eighth grade and that’s it. (Though at the time the sect was so little known that Walter Cronkite, reporting the news, called them AIM-ish).

The key to understanding the rules of the Amish is to understand that each of the communities make their own set of rules and revise them regularly. One community may ride bikes while the next one down the road bans them.

There is a brutality to the choice given to young people: Join forever or forever be shunned, and a couple of people who decided against the Amish lifestyle speak of their experiences.

The Amish have had to adjust, too, to national economic realities. It’s not practical for so much of the community to rely on agriculture as their sole income. So some have enlisted at local factories and a shot of Amish men scrambling at a factory building trailers is the most fast-paced moment in the film.