This Was the Week That Was

Sing, it Dinah! Sing, "See the U.S.A. . . . ."

See the offshore drilling platform catch fire, blow up, sink, killing 11 workers and creating the worst oil spill we've ever had. See them call in the Navy, the Coast Guard, the robot subs, the shrimp boats; see them actually set the ocean afire. How's that make you feel about more offshore drilling on the Atlantic Coast, and up in Alaska? Swell idea, eh? Gotta keep those Hummers humming.


"America is asking you to call. . ."

Call on Arizona -- if your skin is very white, and you've got a passport, a driver's license and six other forms of picture ID to verify that you are, by God, a red white and blue-blooded citizen of the Yew-Nited-States of Murrica. If you look the slightest bit Mexican, Guatamalan, Haitian, Dominican, Puerto Rican, Chinese, West Indian or such -- maybe even if you look sort of like the President himself -- you'd better be ready for a set of pink drawers and some hard time in Shurf Joe Arpaio's canvas jail, where dawgs get better treatment than prisoners.

"See the U.S.A. . . ."

See the Goldman Sachs guys in the thousand-dollar suits try to explain why Wall Street's "heads I win, tails you lose" way of doing business is really just good old American free enterprise. See the Senate Republicans refuse to allow a vote on legislation that would regulate Goldman and the other banks that are too big to fail, because Republicans believe in free enterprise. See some of the country's richest men struggle to spell F-R-A-U-D.

See two even richer men -- Pete Peterson and Bob Rubin, both former financial policy-makers for the federal government -- tell pensioners that they have to learn to sacrifice more. Everybody's got to pitch in, you know, so the economy can recover from the mistakes of the financial policy-makers for the federal government. At your age, Mort, you don't really need three meals a day.

"America's the greatest land of all . . ."

Yes, the greatest -- if you're Exxon Mobil, the most profitable company in the history of profit, whose first quarter earnings were up 38 per cent over the year before. Drill, baby, drill!

The greatest -- unless you work in a coal mine. Thirty-one miners in West Virginia and Kentucky are dead in mines with long records of safety violations. Even Rush Limbaugh decried unsafe conditions. "Where was the union," he demanded after the West Virginia tragedy that killed 29. "Why didn't their union do something about those conditions?" But there was no union. Workers tried three times to get a certification election, but the mine owners managed to stiff them every time. Legally.

The greatest -- provided you speak English. Tim James, an Alabama gubernatorial candidate vows to put an end to driver’s license tests being conducted in any language but English. “This is Alabama. We speak English,” he tells voters in a campaign ad. (Have you ever tried to translate a pure Alabamian dialect into English?)

The greatest -- unless you're a woman in Oklahoma. The Oklahoma Legislature this week overrode Gov. Brad Henry’s veto of two anti-choice bills, one of which gives doctors immunity from being sued if they conceal information about a fetus’s possible birth defects from a pregnant patient.

The greatest -- unless you're one of the six in every ten Americans who live in places where the air you breathe is dangerous to your health, according to new report from the American Lung Association.

All of this in a single week. Sing it again, Dinah!

"America's the greatest land of all . . ."

Spare Me the Details

The Jack Kevorkian movie on HBO has triggered another spate of maudlin first-person stories about loved ones snatched from the jaws of doom who would have been dispatched to the hereafter if they'd fallen into the clutches of a Dr. Death.

Spare me.

I have first-person stories of my own, the sort that impelled me to send a modest contribution to Dr. Kevorkian's defense fund for the trial that put him in prison. I almost wish I hadn't, because rather than hiring a good lawyer he chose to defend himself, with predictable consequences.

I presume the people who are posting their macabre tales on internet sites are the same ones who prodded the political slime into making a public issue of the Schiavo family's very private grief a few years ago. The decision to terminate artificial life support for a loved one is difficult enough without the obscene circus those people created.

Their narratives can't even be left to speak for themselves. They've got to be tarted up with purple. Hence, in one recent post, the representative of The Hemlock Society was "an overweight man in a black suit and a bolo tie." (Boo, hiss.) He didn't speak, he "drawled," droppin' the final "g" of his gerunds, the way , y'know, villains talk. He "pulled out what looked like a dirty white headband" as he prepared to help Momma die.

Spare me.

I haven't seen "You Don't Know Jack," the HBO movie on Kevorkian, but I'm told that it treats him fairly, neither varnishing over his personal flaws nor tarring him as a heinous killer. His facial resemblance to Boris Karloff alone would have made him an easy target for hate.

All I ever knew about Dr. Kevorkian is what I read. Despite the undertones of moral outrage in the media coverage, I concluded that he was doing important work. The suffering of the terminally ill can be unspeakably cruel. Three states have passed more enlightened laws regarding assisted death since Jack came on the scene. That can't be entirely coincidental.

How striking is the difference between how we treat dying pets and dying humans! Our beloved cocker spaniel, Sandy, died with dignity and compassion in the care of a kindly animal doctor. My cancer-ridden mother suffered the torments of hell before she died.

What sort of society permits animals to die with dignity but requires people to endure agony before dying "naturally?"

Surely it is time to recognize that rational human beings have an absolute right to determine for themselves when their quality of life has become so dismal that extraordinary efforts to sustain it should be terminated.

The right, if you will, to be treated like dogs.

How Now This Honorable Man?

McClatchey newspapers, in a series of articles beginning last November, exposed the machinations of Goldman Sachs in packaging worthless mortgages as investments which it sold to clients even while taking a short position on them -- that is, betting that they would fail.

Fail they did. But Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of the investment bank that almost caused the entire U.S. economy to collapse, insists he and his cohorts did nothing wrong.

And Lloyd Blankfein is an honorable man.

In e-mails exchanged among executives at Goldman Sachs, the bankers crowed over their financial successes from betting against the housing market.

But Lloyd Blankfein will testify to Congress tomorrow (according to reports today based on his prepared remarks) that, "We didn't have a massive short against the housing market, and we certainly did not bet against our clients. Rather, we believe that we managed our risk as our shareholders and our regulators would expect."

And Lloyd Blankfein is an honorable man.

Earlier this month, the Securities and Exchange Commission filed a civil fraud case against Goldman, saying it misled investors about securities tied to home mortgages. Regardless of the outcome of the SEC's case, "Goldman Sachs has lost," said James Cox, a Duke University law professor and securities law expert. "It's lost in the arena of public opinion."

And Lloyd Blankfein is an honorable man.

Politicians in the U.K. and Germany are starting to call on their governments to cut ties with Goldman, which has long been one of the top financial advisers to European policy makers. In the United Kingdom, Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg, who leads the opinion polls less than three weeks before national elections, said on Tuesday that Goldman "should now be suspended in its role as one of the advisers to the government until these allegations are properly looked into." His comments follow Prime Minister Gordon Brown's recent characterization of Goldman's alleged behavior as "morally bankrupt."

And Lloyd Blankfein is an honorable man.

In Rolling Stone magazine, mild-mannered reporter Matt Taibbi characterized Goldman Sachs as "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money."

And Lloyd Blankfein is an honorable man.

When he goes before the Senate Permanent Committee on Investigations tomorrow, Blankfein will say that the young trader charged with securities fraud for failing to disclose alleged conflicts of interest when he sold a portfolio of toxic mortgages to investors “showed poor judgment,” but also that the company didn’t fire him because he did nothing illegal. The trader, Fabrice Tourre, is accused of misleading customers into buying a pool of collateralized debt obligations — complex mortgage bonds that many consider the root cause of the economy's great collapse — by not revealing that the pool was largely assembled by a short seller betting that the investment would decline in value.

But Lloyd Blankfein is an honorable man.

Would that some modern-day Caesar cry Havoc, and loose the dogs of war upon this honorable man, and his honorable friends at Citibank, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and WellsFargo.

Goldman and the four Big Banks have assets of $8.1 trillion, equal to 59.7% of our entire gross domestic product.

No wonder the bastards own Congress and the rest of government. The purchase price was chump change for them.

But Lloyd Blankfein is an honorable man.

A Stroll Down Easy Street, USA

Wall Street? Main Street? No, Easy Street is the American Way. Americans prefer slogans to thinking. They want SUVs, air conditioners and golf courses; let future generations worry about environmental damage, fossil fuel dependency and potable drinking water. It's easier to paste a ribbon on the pickup truck than to actually think about whether what we've accomplished in Iraq and Afghanistan in the last 8 years is worth a single young American's life -- let alone thousands. We have made a collective, national decision not to try to answer the hard questions that confront us.

As a people we have been brainwashed by the millions of dollars worth of propaganda corporate America rains down upon us. Every branch of government continues to cede more power to corporations, edging the American people farther and farther away from reality.

The global warming "debate" is an example. It isn't a debate and global warming is only part of a related series of hard questions we have to answer about the envelope of life around the planet on which we live. We have been carefully taught to ignore such hard questions. Corporate America, led by Exxon, the most profitable corporation in the history of man, has persuaded us to stroll down Easy Street shouting slogans and listening to the elevator music of phony science.

The debates we ought to be having haven't even started; the white noise of corporate bovine excrement has shut them down. Everyone gives lip service to "green energy" -- sort of like pasting those "support our troops" ribbons on the SUV -- but having blinded us to the real motivations for it, corporate America won't invest seriously in it.

The area in which I live in New Mexico could be an enormous source of renewable energy from wind and sun. But the extraction industries that hold political power here have coached the people in NIMBY.

Another potential treasure trove of renewable energy is the Mojave Desert in southeastern California. Not only does it have 360 days of sunshine a year, but it also has some fierce wind that could be harnessed. There's a small wind farm development not far from the city of Mojave; now, there's interest in developing solar power there as well.

The Mojave is also home to a great many rare plants and animals, a precious and fragile ecosystem that some environmentalists want to protect from development of any kind even as other environmentalists promote renewable energy development.

The hard question is:Shall we have clean energy if it destroys sand dunes, endangered animals and plants, ancient lava flows, fossil beds, cactus forests and the pictorial record of native American culture? The answer is not to be found on Easy Street, USA.

The feds at one point authorized solar energy development on a million-acre tract of Mojave desert land that was donated to Uncle Sam. "Whoa," said the donor, the Wildlands Conservancy, which gave the land to the feds for conservation. Sen. Diane Feinstein of California is moving to protect the area by having it designated a national monument. The solar developers have backed off.

The Center for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Technologies hasn't given up.V. John White, its executive director, says the Mojave is a very big place that should have room for everybody. "There's 4.5 million acres set aside for the desert tortoise, there's 3.5 million acres for the military reservations, there's 1.5 million acres for state-protected species, and the monument will take another million acres off the table," White told NPR radio. "Right now we have more land available for off-road vehicle parks than we do for solar, and that's crazy."

Maybe it's not so crazy on Easy Street, USA, where the corporate wealth of the ATV industry speaks loud. "Public land is for everybody," is their slogan.

Don't bother thinking about it.

A Bad Idea, Properly Stifled

The rule of law is a quaint notion that a bunch of starry-eyed dreamers once thought might apply to a republic aborning in a hall in Philadelphia.  This was back in the 18th Century.

By the dawn of the 21st Century the crazy idea had long since been laid to rest in the republic, whose name is the United States of America.

It still has a national legislature, called Congress, that occasionally passes laws.  It has a chief executive who frequently signs them.  And it has a Supreme Court that, well, sort of pontificates about them, feigning homage to a document called the Constitution.

All of this is an elaborate game because, except for really unimportant little people, called citizens, the laws don't apply to anyone.

Laws that prohibit bribery, fraud and vote-stealing, for example, do not apply to members of Congress, especially in states south of the Mason-Dixon line.   No law whatsoever applies  to the chief executive, as long as he remembers to utter his magic incantation, "national security."  The Supreme Court pretty much ignores the laws passed by Congress and signed by the chief executive because, on any given day, the law is what five justices say it is.

That's how it came to be that people called corporations are above the law, too.  The more profit they make, the higher above the law they are.  Some corporations don't even have to make a profit to be far above the law.  They are called banks and they have names like Goldman Sachs or  CitiGroup.  Being a bank is a license to steal from citizens, who are powerless to do anything, and use their money for a really big time game of roulette called investing.  When the banks lose the citizens' money by investing huge sums in absolutely worthless things, called derivatives,  the government gives them more money to invest.  The highest executives of corporations, especially banks, are so far above the law that when they violate it, they are rewarded with immense amounts of money, called bonuses.

The major role of the federal government in this republic is to give money to corporations that fail.  Its other duties are to  fight wars that Congress never declared and to collect something called taxes from citizens who have any money left over after being robbed by the banks.

Well, there is one more job the federal government has to do, and it is probably the very most important thing.  The federal government must shrink.  It must get smaller and smaller and smaller until it disappears entirely.  When the federal government has finally disappeared entirely, the republic will be exactly what those starry-eyed dreamers back in the 18th Century wanted it to be.

People will be truly free.  That's  because everyone will have guns, lots of guns, big guns, little guns, long guns, short guns, howitzer guns, machine guns; guns guns guns.  If the silly notion about rule of law had been allowed to remain, some socialist fascist dictator would have passed a law prohibiting people from having guns.  Then nobody would be free.

Well, say some terribly ignorant people, called liberals, if there's no federal government there won't be anyone to give money to the failed corporations; to raise an army to fight the wars that were not declared by Congress; to spy on citizens, even in their bedrooms, and make certain they aren't really terrorists; to torture, assassinate and imprison people who aren't like us; to keep the republic Christian, as those starry-eyed 18th Century guys, called Founding Fathers, intended it to be; and to encourage corporations to drive the cost of health care so high that mere citizens won't clutter up hospitals and clinics because they can't afford to be there anyway.

Best of all, there would  be nobody to collect taxes either.  It will be party time!  Somebody brew the tea.

The Sour Notes We Do Not Hear

Lee Hills was not a physically imposing man, but if you were a 28-year-old, newly-minted assistant city editor summoned to his office, you were staring at a giant.  Hills, editor and publisher of the Detroit Free Press, had risen from humble, small-town beginnings to become Jack Knight's right-hand man in editorial matters for the Knight family's excellent chain of newspapers.  He was smart, fair and he oozed dignity.

"Do you stand by this story?" he asked.  I knew that if I said "yes" the meeting would be over and he'd back me to the hilt till the story's flaws were laid bare.  If I said "no" I knew that he would rightly demand why in the hell I should remain in an editor's post on a newspaper whose integrity ultimately was his responsibility.

"There are no serious factual errors in it," I said, "but there are two minor ones.  I believe they require a standard correction notice.  They should not have escaped my notice.  Deadline pressure is the reason they slipped by -- but not an excuse. "

"Is that all?" he asked.

I hope my hesitation was not as long as it seemed to me.  "No," I said.  "Two minor errors of fact are not the problem with the story.  The problem is that everyone who handled it -- especially me -- was tone deaf."

"Interesting choice of words -- tone deaf," he said.

"The overall tone of the story is wrong," I said.  "Too often when we're writing or editing a piece, especially on deadline, our inner ear fails us, we go tone-deaf.  In this story, the sequence of thought in some of the paragraphs, the language, the choice of words,  all add up to a tone that isn't right.  We weren't hearing the same music that the readers of the story would hear.  And that's a failing on our part."

"As you no doubt have guessed," he said, "I have received a complaint about the story."

I waited for a shoe to drop.  It was a most terrible moment.

"I will tell the complainant that we are publishing a correction of the two facts we got wrong. Please see to it that I get a copy of the correction."

With a sigh of relief I accepted his gesture of dismissal and went back to work.  But I wasn't off the hook.

Some time later Jack Knight himself was in town for an editors' meeting.  He'd just been the subject of a Time magazine cover story that called him "crusty" and a "curmudgeon" and the owner of a chain of newspapers producing some of the best journalism in America. "Crusty," he said.  "I wonder if they meant that I'm tough on the outside -- or hollow on the inside?" It was all he had to say about the magazine story.

How privileged I am, I told myself, to labor in the shadow of such great journalists.  Whereupon I heard Lee Hills utter my name, and call upon me to repeat what I'd said to him about deafness because he thought Mr. Knight and the other editors here assembled might find it interesting.

An even more terrible moment.

I think I managed to say pretty much the same things I had said to Hills in our  meeting, but to tell the truth, my memory is a blur.  Jack Knight seemed to give my words a slight nod of approval -- perhaps I simply hoped that -- and Lee Hills said, "Thanks, Tom," and moved on.

The movie in my mind replayed those scenes from yesteryear just the other day when a major newspaper published a story about a young man whom I know and an important matter in which he was involved.  There were few serious factual errors in it but the tone was entirely wrong.

It was a grave injustice to a good man who does good work, of that I am certain.

I am almost as certain that neither the writer nor his editors heard the sour notes when the piece went into print.

Sad.  Being made to hear them would make them better journalists.

Government, and Justice, by Crap Shoot

Supreme Court appointees sometimes surprise everyone, even the Presidents who nominated them, with the work they do after they've been seated.  Earl Warren's record as Chief Justice surprised and did not always please Dwight Eisenhower.  Byron (Whizzer) White surprised and did not always please John F. Kennedy.  John Paul Stevens surprised and did not always please Gerald Ford.

Then again,  Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia, John Roberts and Samuel A. Alito have produced exactly the kind of ultra-conservative, law-bending jurisprudence their conservative nominators expected of them.

President Obama is about to make his second Supreme Court nomination, to replace Justice Stevens.  Already the Republicans are blowing Force Twelve hot air without even knowing who the nominee will be.

Whomever Mr. Obama chooses, we can only hope that he or she will serve in the distinguished tradition of Justice Felix Frankfurter, who memorably wrote in a 1943 dissent, "As a member of this Court, I am not justified in writing my private notions of policy into the Constitution, no matter how deeply I may cherish them or how mischievous I may deem their disregard."

The nation desperately needs another such judicial philosophy on its highest court, as counterweight of sorts to the Four Horsemen of the Far Right who routinely write private notions of policy into the Constitution from their narrow point of view as doctrinaire Roman Catholics with an inbred loathing of federal government.

Whether such a nominee will in fact be offered depends largely upon which Mr. Obama makes the appointment.  Will it be the Obama who boldy threw down the gauntlet to the Four Horsemen and their collaborator in perfidy, Anthony M. Kennedy, for the dreadful Citizens United decision?  Or will it be the Dr. Kidglove who caved in to the minority party in Congress on the economy, the wars, human rights and medical care for our citizens?

Even if Kidglove seizes the day and nominates a milk sop to the right-wing Republicans and Democrats of the Senate, we can cling to the hope that somehow he or she, once confirmed and seated, will evolve into another Warren or Stevens.

That would be a monumental piece of good luck for the country.  But when the leaders of the nation lack the spunk do do what's right simply because it is right, there's nothing left for citizens to trust but luck.

Do the deed, Mr. President, whether as Iron Glove or Kidglove.  Everything's a crap shoot now.

Linguistics, Social Research and Tax Protests

One of the running little quarrels in our household is over the use, and misuse, of tools.   In my opinion, kitchen knives are for preparing and consuming food -- not opening packages from UPS.  In my opinion, Phillips-head screwdrivers are for use on Phillips-head screws -- not as awls or paper punches.  Lois, on the other hand, believes that handiness trumps original purpose.  So be it; ne'er these twains shall meet, but thankfully a marriage is made of firmer stuff.

Democratic government, alas, is a more fragile thing.  Its price is not just eternal vigilance, but careful maintenance.  Misusing any of its many tools of maintenance is dangerous.

Take social research -- polls, focus groups, data analysis.  Think of such research as a handy digital camera to be used for capturing, with fair accuracy, what the public is thinking at any given moment about certain questions.  Properly used, that camera takes good pictures, sharp, in focus, capturing even subtle details.  It's a top-of-the line model, with complicated settings for various situations, not a generic point-and-shoot.  Its best pictures emerge when it's used by trained professionals.  Then you can study them and draw some conclusions beyond the obvious, such as that they were taken on a sunny day, or in mountains, a city, whatever.  But if the photographer has used a filter, or run the image through Photoshop before showing it to you, the image you see will be false. Nevertheless, the social research "camera" can be a useful tool in politics and in government.

But there are polls, and there are polls. George Lakoff, an expert in linguistics and social research, has written a paper about two California polls on the same issue whose results differ enormously.  This was the situation: The California constitution requires that certain legislation must have a two-thirds majority in the state legislature in order to pass.  Thus -- as has been the case recently when the state struggled for solutions to a grave financial crisis -- 37% of the legislators have been able to block remedial legislation supported by 63%.  A referendum has been proposed to amend the constitution so that only a simple majority -- one vote more than half -- would be needed.  As is usual these days, people on both sides decided that the issue should be poll-tested.

Depending upon how the questions were phrased -- whether filters were placed on the camera lens, and if so, which filters -- the polls disclosed that 72% of voters favored the idea; that 63% favored it; that 58% favored it, and that  56% opposed it.  Same question; different words; same polling methods, dramatically different results.

How could this be?  An important part of the answer is that the legislation that now requires a two-third majority for passage covers all bills affecting state revenue by taxation. Opponents of the amendment -- essentially the 37% minority in the legislature, and their supporters --  know from experience that tax is a powerfully negative word.  And so their pollster phrased the questions in ways that seemed to ask. would you be willing to pay more taxes  if the legislature were able to impose them with only a simple majority rather than the two-thirds vote required now? 

The proponents' pollster, on the other hand, simply asked if they favored or opposed a constitutional amendment that said: "All legislative actions on revenue and budget must be determined by a majority vote."

That's the one that got 72% support.

Lakoff's paper provides a key to understanding the phenomenon of yesterday's Tax Day protests.  A TV journalist -- a real journalist, not a performer -- asked a guest expert why these people were protesting when in fact, if they were typically middle class, their income had increased in the last year, the percentage they paid in taxes had decreased, and the dollar total of their tax bill had decreased?

The answer lay not in tax law, but in the Lakoff lesson.  The right wing has learned how to control the vocabulary of the debate, the phrasing of the questions, the filters on the lenses, and used that control to turn on hot-buttons of racial hatred, class envy and self-deceit. That's what took to the streets yesterday.  "Taxes" is just another bad word for what really ticks them off.

With that influence bubbling up from below, and corporate wealth percolating down, elections are wrongly won and lost. American democracy, or what's left of it, declines the more.

Answer to Another Blogger's Questions

Rob Kall, a liberal radio host and commentator, raises provocative questions on his Op-Ed News website.  They are questions liberal Americans must answer if they are to remain relevant and especially if they advocate, as I do, the establishment of a new, independent Progressive political party.

Here is what Kall wrote:

"At this time, when the House's progressive caucus completely folded in the face of Obama's health care sell-out, after promising to hew to the public option, I have to ask... who are the progressive leaders?

"Who are the leaders who are doing what leaders do...
    •    Organizing and Planning Actions
    •    Defining Vision and Mission
    •    Identifying issues
    •    Creating the Core, Important Conversations
    •    Fund raising
    •    Building the base
    •    Influencing politics?"

Despite the widespread liberal anger at Rep. Dennis Kucinich, the last of the House hold-outs on health care, I still consider him to be a national leader of the Progressive platform.

Any number of prominent intellectuals, beginning with Noam Chomsky, would surely lend their voices to the cause. 

But who are the leaders who could fulfill all of Kall's bullet points? Some of the points themselves rule out present-day office holders. Intellectuals tend to lack the organizational skills to lead big social movements.  Who, then? Howard Dean stands at the top of my list of candidates.

Here's why:

He already has an organization (Democracy for America) with well-planned actions under way on behalf of progressive candidates challenging centrist or right-wing Democrats in party primaries.

As Democratic national chairman, he crafted a 50-state strategy in the 2006 Congressional elections -- opposed and sneered at by the Republican Lite element of the party -- that had unprecedented success in taking away "safe" Republican seats in both houses.  More than vision: mission accomplished.

He has been liberally correct on most of the issues, from Bush's wars to public option as a necessary first step on the way to single payer health care for all.

He's adept at fund-raising.

He can be a hell-raiser and that can inspire the leftward base to be as passionate, in a more constructive way, as the angry mass of Tea Partiers.

He has demonstrated a capacity to "influence politics."

Could he be persuaded to take on this role?  To re-craft his Democracy for America organization as  the Progressive Party of America?  To bring his rogue-left list of candidates with him?  To bring Kucinich and most of the Progressive Caucus into the tent?  To enlist the likes of Chomsky and Chris Hedges and disaffected Democratic liberals?  To mobilize a zealous infantry in all 50 states as he did in 2006? 

"They" said it wouldn't work then.  Screw "them."  Let's do it now!

Howard?  Dr. Dean? Are you with us?

Problem-Solving: 1) Take TV Set and . . .

The open desert of the southwest has become one vast public dumping ground for trash.  The latest fad in desert trash is TV sets.  My guess is that lots of folks are buying the new, flat-screen, HDTV sets and tossing their old ones into the back of the pickup, driving out into the nearest patch of desert, and dumping them.  I've counted six such additions to favorite pieces of desert landscape I've visited lately.

The next step in the existence of these unwanted television machines is that they become targets for the illegal desert shooters.  Just about everyone out here totes heat.  Rather than using the fine, fancy, tax-supported municipal shooting range just outside of town, the Yahoos prefer to go onto land that's used for hiking, grazing and quiet recreation, there to bang away at whatever suits their fancy.  Today I went back to where I spotted the first of the serially dumped TVs.  I counted 23 bullet holes.

Eventually, we'll have a big, gully-washing monsoon rain.  It will flood the arroyos where these things have been dumped and sweep them downstream toward the river.   Perhaps they'll lodge against rocks or other debris along the way.  Perhaps some will reach the river.  There perhaps they'll sink into the soft-sand bottom, or float lazily toward the Mexican border.  Duty-free.  NAFTA for trash.

In a wishful moment, out there in the desert, I thought that perhaps, in a fit of wisdom, my fellow southwesterners were making a comment on the quality of TV programming by casting these devices into the wasteland.  But I know better; they're simply improving the pictures they get while soaking up the bilge that television dispenses. Wisdom is not a widely respected or widely distributed commodity in these parts. Fox programming is a big favorite.

If,  by trashing our desert with TV sets, we are in fact ultimately dumping them on Mexico, some quid pro quo is called for.  Mexico should send it back.  Drug cartels run Mexico.  They ought to half-fill every truckload of dope with trashed American TVs before they drive them across the bridge from Juarez to El Paso.

The drug cartels in Mexico are forever killing people.  Members of rival cartels, civic officials, innocent women and children.  The killers could be employed, instead, finding, collecting and loading American trash for reshipment to the Gringos.  Probably they'd need more people to do this job right than there are killers in their employ.  So the drug cartels, which are so profitable that money is no object, would have to add employees.  Over time, this would lift the Mexican economy.  Wetbacks wouldn't have to flock across the border for Yankee dollars to live on.  They could work at home and save commuting costs.

With the flow of illegal workers into the United States diminishing and eventually stopping, we wouldn't need that border wall.  We could tear it down, Reagan style, and use the material to build shelter for our homeless.  Money already budgeted for further construction could be diverted to the bail-out funds for banks that are too big to fail.

See there? I set out simply to rant about people who throw trash into the desert.  I've wound up solving The Immigration Problem and assuring the health and welfare of our banking system for at least the immediate future.

And it isn't even lunch time.  I'll be able to get a start on finding the cure for cancer.

A Very Special Pulitzer Prize

Here's to the old journalism, the newspaper kind, the kind we thought was dead.  Here's to the determined reporter, idealistic and underpaid, slogging through lies and obfuscation, red tape and blue smoke, smelling a good story and not giving up until it's in print.

Here's to Dan Gilbert and the Bristol Herald Courier, winner of American journalism's biggest prize, the Pulitzer for Public Service, for reporting on the mismanagement of natural gas royalties owed to thousands of landowners in Virginia.

There were all of five people in the newsroom today when the word came down that the Herald Courier (circ. 33,000) had won the award. 

The Bristol paper covers the area of southwestern Virginia that is home to clans of Sutherland and Tiller.  My wife, Lois, is part of those clans and still deeply attached to the place they call home.  She's one of innumerable heirs to the mineral rights on a plot of ground with natural gas wells.

When she received a royalty check for 18 cents for her share of the gas production, she took an interest in the Byzantine ways of the Virginia Gas and Oil Board and all of the shenanigans associated with it.  She asked her cousins to alert her to any stories the local paper might publish about the board and its functions while she began her own little long-distance investigation into whether any of her kin were being short-changed in this whole business. 

Last June, Dan Gilbert wrote a story about an attorney general's ruling on the legality of the gas board's practice of "pooling" gas-well mineral rights.  Lois e-mailed a comment on the story to the paper's web site.  "The issue is not whether the forced pooling is legal," she wrote, "the issue is whether it's fair.  What's needed is a true investigation. . . ."

It turned out that Gilbert had already started one.  "It's a story that cries out for sunlight," he wrote back, "but a hard one to get at. The threads are in far-flung rural courthouses, the records are not always accessible or well-kept, and the complexity is often staggering. I am beginning to wrap my mind around it. . ."

When Lois went back to Dickinson County, Va., for her family reunion in July, she met with Gilbert and shared with him the information she had dug up on behalf of her own family. (Her research led to a $23,000 payment of back royalties to an elderly aunt.)

For the next seven months, Lois, who edited several Pulitzer Prize winning stories during her own newspaper career,  encouraged Gilbert's work from afar.  By December she and I were both convinced that his work merited consideration for a Pulitzer.

Dan Gilbert had already won two other major journalism prizes when his Pulitzer was announced. Just four years after graduating with honors from the University of Chicago with a degree in international studies, he was being recognized for doing the kind of enterprise journalism that had almost vanished from American newspapers. Corporate ownership of mass media, putting profit before public service, is bankrupting American newspapers not just financially but morally as well.

How encouraging it is to see a small paper's management commit the time and resources needed to develop Gilbert's series of stories, which included a reader-accessible online data base that land-owners could check to determine if they were owed royalties from the escrow fund.  Yes, the project was  staggeringly complex, and Mr. Gilbert did indeed "wrap his mind around it," explaining it with a clarity and depth that has triggered cries for and official efforts toward reform.  And more than a million dollars in back royalties have been paid out as a result of his reporting.

Here's to that old time journalism, and a young man who's not only committed to it, but does it superbly.

A "Free" People: The Biggest Lie of All

What sort of future looms for a nation whose government and social fabric is woven out of lies, hatred, distrust, distortion, bullying and mass hysteria?

The very fact that these fuel the national engine militates against any hope of massive public awakening, much less significant movement for reform.

Such is the state of these United States.  Our elected leader proposes to deal with these things incrementally, working within the sadly broken framework, through pragmatism and compromise.  This serves only to further empower and embolden the dark forces manufacturing the lies and profiting from public delusion.

In these United States, it does no good to have exposed the lies, to have been right all along.  The damage is done, the last act of the farce is history, the curtain has been drawn on the next, and the next, and the next.

We must make war, we were told, because a bad man has weapons of mass destruction and our national security is at risk.  "Not true," some shouted, and were spat upon, and we went to war.  We are still at war.  It is as senseless, as unjustifiable, as much based on lies and deceit now as it was then.  No matter.  It's a fact of life now. Let the blood flow and the debt accrue; the lies worked.  The truth didn't matter.

We must not enact the laws necessary to assure decent health care for all Americans, we were told, because it would create death panels to kill grandma, government control of our lives and health, and bankrupt the nation.  A few saw these arguments for what they were -- utter, fear-mongering nonsense -- but they carried the day.  The truth didn't matter.

Mistreatment of captives is as old as tribal humanity, as old as conquest, as old as the Inquisition, and as new as Guantanamo, secret rendition, Abu Ghraib and this week's horrifying presidential authorization of the assassination of an American citizen.  A few remind us of these terrible truths and are scorned.  "We do not torture," our government assures us, but the fact is that we do and most of the public condones it, along with the killing of unarmed civilians, even women and children.   The truth doesn't matter.

A former President rebukes us: "When a radical fringe element of demonstrators and others begin to attack the president of the United States as an animal or as a reincarnation of Adolf Hitler or when they wave signs in the air that said we should have buried Obama with Kennedy, those kinds of things are beyond the bounds."  Kill the messenger!, the apostles of hate shriek from their richly-endowed thrones of mass communication.  And the millions titter, and applaud, and the signs and derogations become more racist, more hostile, more outrageous.  The truth doesn't matter.

Anything that rises from the very bottom of such a society to attempt to empower the powerless has to be crushed by the rich and powerful; that's what keeps the system working.  A clumsily edited tape purporting to expose criminality on the part of such an organization, known by the acronym ACORN, succeeded in killing it.  Now that the governor and attorney general of California have revealed the entire, unedited tape,  exposing the lies and deceptions underlying it, nobody cares.  That act is over.  The truth doesn't matter.

Carefully edited and filtered versions of purloined e-mails circulated among scientists engaged in the ongoing study of the planetary climate roared out of the lie machine and created what its handmaidens in media dubbed "climategate."  Voices of serious science sought to expose the deceit but went largely unheard.  Efforts to curb the human activity that is altering the envelope of life around the planet have been blunted.  In England, where the theft occurred, a parliamentary commission has vindicated both climate science and the climate scientists -- but nobody cares.  That act is over; the lies succeeded.  The truth doesn't matter.

The Supreme Court has endowed corporations and their spin-offs with personhood and free speech. All of our subsequent elections will be controlled by the United States Chamber of Commerce and a handful of enormously profitable corporations.  Already the Chamber has amassed a war chest of more than $150 million for lobbying, influence buying and creation of a new lie machine to control the outcome of the next elections in 22 states.  The truth doesn't matter.

The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia has  ruled that the Federal Communications Commission lacks the authority to require broadband providers to give equal treatment to all internet traffic flowing over their networks. It is not a coincidence that the ruling came just as the FCC was attempting to make broadband more accessible and affordable for rural communities and other under-served populations.  Now, if Comcast doesn't like what I write, it can refuse to allow this blog to move over its broadband.  Truth doesn't matter.

A new Wisconsin law requires schools to teach students age appropriate and medically accurate information on  birth control, the prevention of sexually transmitted diseases, signs of abuse and how the use of alcohol can affect decision-making. Juneau County District Attorney Scott Southworth issued a letter to the five school districts within his jurisdiction threatening to bring criminal charges against any teacher who complies with this new state law. He said it promotes the sexual assault of minors and that he will file charges against teachers who comply with the law. Sentences on conviction would range from nine months in jail to six years of prison time.  If the law doesn't matter, truth doesn't matter.

Rupert Murdoch, who owns a global lie factory of immense wealth, reach and power, insists that his sewers spew only facts; it's everyone else who's biased.  Truth doesn't matter.

We are a people indifferent to the suffering of our fellow citizens, hateful of otherness, fearful of myths and driven to frenzy by falsehoods.  And we call ourselves "free."

Truth doesn't matter.

Parrots Flying Out of the Cuckoo's Nest

The billion dollar climate change denial industry, funded by some of the richest corporations and individuals in the world, has a remarkably efficient network of parrots and enablers.

Here's an example:

The author, educator and environmentalist, Bill McKibben, spoke recently about climate change at New Mexico State University.  In a trice, one of the parrots had posted a Letter to the Editor in the local newspaper, the Las Cruces Sun News, whose author purported to"rebut" McKibben's key points.

The letter writer asserted, for example, that a single "plot" on the website of the International Arctic Research Center showed "today's Arctic sea ice to be more than any other year except 2003."  We were expected to infer that this not only rebutted McKibben's statement that Arctic ice was melting, but also that the IARC was on the side of the climate change deniers.

Nothing, of course, could be farther from the truth.  First of all the "plot" -- actually a graph supplied by the National Snow and Ice Data Center --  shows that the Arctic Sea Ice Extent for the period Dec. 2009-Feb. 2010 was significantly below the 1979-2000 average.  Moreover, the IARC site also contains reports entitled, "Greenland Ice Sheet Melting Faster than Expected," and "Arctic Meltdown Is a Threat to Humanity."  More recently the IARC has focused on studies of the release into the atmosphere of methane, a greenhouse gas 30 times more potent that carbon dioxide.  "The permafrost under the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, long thought to be an impermeable barrier sealing in methane, is perforated and is leaking large amounts of methane into the atmosphere," according to one such study. "Release of even a fraction of the methane stored in the shelf could trigger abrupt climate warming."

The letter-writer disputes McKibben's statement that "the age of easily-extracted fossil fuels is over"  by quoting Ambrose Evans-Pritchard's claim that gas reserves are "rising fast."  Evans-Pritchard is a business journalist in the U.K. where he's known as a vocal opponent of the European Union and evangelist of conspiracy theories, particularly the old right-wing myth that Vince Foster was murdered in a byzantine Clinton Administration intrigue, and that the Oklahoma City bombing was the result of an FBI plot.

The letter writer asserted: "McKibben cited alarm that sea level is rising fast with the Maldives at risk. Sea level is rising merely 7 inches per century.  Swedish scientist Nils Axel Morner made Maldives sea level measurements showing no appreciable sea level rise."

The fact is that sea levels have been rising at a rate of about 3/4 inch per year for the last century.  New, more accurate satellite measurements show a faster rate of rise in recent decades.  Even under the more conservative estimate, the Maldives -- whose highest point  is less than eight feet above present sea level --  would be inundated by an ocean level almost 20 inches higher in the next 25 years.  

As for the Swede, Morner, his opinions are disdained by the science mainstream.  He is a retired professor with ties to industry lobby groups and he endorses  non-scientific beliefs like dowsing.

The letter writer disputes McKIbben's statement that global warming induced by human activity can cause droughts.  He writes that "catastrophic droughts" have occurred in the past -- which of course is true -- but chooses as his authority on drought Dr. Robert  Balling of Arizona State University.  Dr. Balling is part of the billion dollar anti-climate change industry.  He has received $408,000 in research funding from the fossil fuel industry. He also works with the infamous Heartland Institute, funded by the biggest climate science fraud in the world, the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, as well as the far right-wing Scaife Foundation.

Typically, funding from the denial industry supports "research" that begins with a conclusion and asks the scientist to find data to support it.  Rich funding for this conclusion-first, research-later pseudoscience became available when the obscenely profitable extraction industry realized it had to attempt to discredit the climate science of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change after it issued its first global climate assessment in 1990.

Real climate science, by contrast, began a long time ago. As early as 1912, Antarctic explorers recorded observations of unusual veil-type clouds in the polar stratosphere. In 1956, the British Antarctic Survey set up the Halley Bay Observatory on Antarctica in preparation for the International Geophysical Year (IGY) of 1957. In that year, ozone measurements using a Dobson Spectrophotometer began. These measurements provided the first hint of trouble in the ozone layer.  In 1985, a group of scientists observed springtime losses of ozone over Antarctica. In 1986, NASA scientists demonstrated that the ozone hole is a regional-scale Antarctic phenomenon.

Soon, scientists all over the world were examining these phenomena, and modern climate science was born  It asks questions and seeks answers through experiment, technology and logic.  We ignore their answers at our peril.